For those of us who believed history was more or less a straight line from the Magna Carta to Thomas Jefferson to William F. Buckley Jr. or Milton Friedman, the passing of William Buckley is quite a sad blow. There is comfort in all the kind words, most of which seem to say that Buckley's main contribution was to save conservatism for America starting in about 1955 with the publication of his magazine. They might have pointed out too that even the billions in Europe, Asia, and India would have thanked him for much of the freedom and prosperity they are enjoying now if they understood that the track of history ran along side Mr. Buckley.
Interestingly, the kind and knowing words have almost unanimously claimed that a large part of what Buckley did was purge conservatism of racism, anti-Semitism, and the John Birch Society, but they utterly failed to say what was left after the purge? It is certainly true that he did cleanse the philosophy of its errant elements, but far, far more importantly, he revitalized Jefferson's thinking about the freedom that had completely defined and dominated American intellectual life prior to The Great Depression and WW 2. It is no exaggeration to say that without Buckley, we would not have been able to reach back into our history, through those two usually cataclysmic events, to the Jeffersonian America that had been the greatest country on earth. This was because many simply didn't want to reach back to see what they had come to think of as the foundation for depression and world war.
Until Buckley came along, conservatism was widely considered, dead; having been discomposed by Karl Marx's recycled theory of a benevolent state despotism - a theory which still enjoys widespread acceptance; especially in academia - the Depression, and World War 2, all of which involved very liberal gov't involvement in our lives to an extent never imagined by our ingenious, freedom-loving, founders. Lionel Trilling, an obviously disaffected American, proudly announced after WW 2 that there was "no important conservative voice anywhere in America". What he meant was that Jeffersonian anti-Federalism, and the conservative social values that naturally attached to it, were thoroughly beaten, and the door to a brave new American socialism was wide open. It is no wonder that in such an extreme environment people like Joe McCarthy went to extreme lengths to protect the conservative American values that eventually triumphed over socialism to save the world.
Much of pre-war history is left out of the Buckley saga, I think, in large part because Buckley wanted us to properly appreciate that modern American intellectual history was to start with him. And that was fine with us, ......for the most part; notwithstanding Jefferson and his disciples who always had waged a very ferocious and principled Republican opposition that clearly existed and asserted itself all the way to and throughout the New Deal. Also, Buckley had a dream that he could make his Roman Catholicism an integral part of modern American history, and so to that extent too he was content to leave the all-mighty Jefferson mostly out his heroic account of history. And too, out of reverence for all the warring founding fathers, Buckley, and many others, seemed to think it somewhat unseemly to claim Jefferson for partisan purposes. This, despite the fact that Jefferson went to war against big gov't and for freedom the second Washington appointed him, and never took a breath until he defeated the Federalists once and for all, years later, in the real American Revolution of 1800. We will never know what was lost or gained because the simple narrative of American history that features a straight line from Jefferson to Buckley will probably never be drawn. But, perhaps this did not happen fortuitously as Buckley reasoned correctly that Jeffersonian ideas needed a fresh modern face for the fresh new challenges that emerged out of Marxism, the Depression, and WW 2? We'll never know.
Or perhaps, Jefferson had suffered in Buckley's mind as nearly everyone had conceded that Hamilton had seen America's economic future far more clearly than Jefferson, and when Hamilton's particular actions, like Washington's, were seen to have been obviously necessary to our founding.
All this, of course, patriotically excludes Hamilton's desire to have a King rather than a President, the "Newburgh Crisis," during which Hamilton sought to overthrow our gov't for the benefit of the military and upper class, and the Whiskey Rebellion, during which Hamilton personally - despite being Secretary of the Treasury - led an army to crush small farmers in Western PA. who objected to the nation's first onerous and very regressive tax. But did any of that really make Hamilton equal to or superior to Jefferson in his long term understanding of the American Revolution's meaning?
In the fullness of time it is apparent that American History and World History is a battle between freedom and gov't. This, Jefferson understood above all else, while Hamilton, and sadly, most historians, did and do not; or at least will not acknowledge because of their own naive and partisan preference for Hamilton's big gov't schemes, or out of a collective respect for both men who, perhaps, can be seen as heroic prisoners of their time.
The situation is so bad that Democrats - the party that is about to nominate an ever lovin big gov't socialist - are now allowed to claim Jefferson as one of their own merely because the party's name changed over the years from Republican (under Jefferson), to Democratic - Republican, and then to Democratic? The whole world, and to some extent Buckley too, allowed them to get away with this and thus deprived us of the most basic, continuous, powerful, and educational thread in all of World and American History.
But who can argue with Buckley? To all the world it seemed he had prevailed when Reagan was elected. The conservative Joe Sobran captured the spirit of that time when he said, "we've got a world to run now". In the end it was a huge illusion. Reagan was a charismatic fluke who happened along at the right time, and who happened to like Buckley. Now, even with dozens of new Buckley disciples all around - like Rush Limbaugh who alone reaches 15-20 million per week - Republicans are in the minority. So what did Jefferson and Buckley accomplish in the end - just 200 years of relative freedom? Is it all gone now that Jefferson, Reagan, and Buckley are gone?
Perhaps; at least, they taught us that in an age of universal suffrage, chance and charisma matter far more than history or ideas? Buckley oozed a rare intellectual charisma to great affect, but Obama too, for example, oozes a tremendous populist charisma, and a quotidian, brain dead, cookie cutter, Harvard socialism that may propel him to the White House. If you assume charisma is equally likely to appear on either side of the political equation then you have to assume too that the magic of algebra will cancel it out - right? Perhaps so, but does that then mean that only good ideas matter in the end? No, of course not. A cursory look through world history will disabuse anyone of that notion; and quickly.
In the end it would seem that many variables matter: charisma, money, ideas, chance, hard work, and persistence. Buckley employed them all in an heroic effort to buy us time, but the grim reaper Democrat (if that's too harsh just ask yourself what they will socialize after medicine) is still at freedom's door exactly where it has been throughout all of human history.
Buckley's unprecedented success may indicate that intellect is the one variables that Democrats can't consistently match. In the end, freedom is a better idea or it is not! All the other variables may ultimately cancel each other out, but canceling out the idea of freedom, intellectually at least, is nearly impossible one would hope. That is the slight edge modern Republicans will always have to keep them in the game. After all, America is, in the end, an idea; an idea about freedom that became the greatest country in history. How can it be defeated? Jefferson, Reagan, and Buckley showed us that, more than anything, ideas, or an idea, matter. At least that is what we must pray is true now that Mr. Buckley is no longer here, reassuringly, to fight our battle for us. All of us can try to promote freedom, and should, but who can be sure our meager efforts will be sufficient to save America the way Thomas Jefferson and William F. Buckley Jr. once did? Buckley, as always, had an answer for us about the seeming inevitability of gov't: "despair is not allowed", but who can really escape it now that our greatest champion has left us all alone.
Ted Baiamonte
TheDumbDemocrat
The Intellectual Republican
www. thedumbdemocrat
2.20.2008
Five Quick Shots; All On Target
1) Michelle Obama Proud Of America For The First Time?
Michelle said, "I am proud of America for the first time in my life, because you want change". Translation: "I've been embarrassed my entire life about America; what it is; what it represents, but now, now that you're showing a real interest in my socialist husband who is the most leftist Senator in Washington and votes that way with the inanimate, uncompromising consistency of robot, I am finally proud of America. I am proud of you for being fooled into supporting the socialist destruction of the greatest country in world history by completely empty and deceptive rhetoric from my wonderful, wonderful, anti-American husband. And, I know you can have faith and trust in my exact words about "pride" because, as my husband said yesterday when defending his campaign based on a just a few well chosen words, "just words" matter".
Barak Obama's ultra simplistic rhetoric, and largely anti-American soul, make him a far more focused target than Hillary, for what is sure to be effective and withering Republican fire in the fall, and so Republicans must hold off until then; so as not to encourage Obama to remake himself into a more complex, nuanced, and difficult target. Let him enjoy what Bill Clinton called "the fairy tale" until after the convention. Let his memeticist genius grow till then at which point it will be too late to remake himself, as McCain demonstrated is quite possible given time and favorable circumstances.
2)Eating Hillary
So why are the Democrats eating Hillary, a woman who had been their champion and standard bearer for years? It's simple really: they got very confused, something not uncommon for a people who lack the wherewithal to understand freedom despite living in America, the land of freedom.
It seems that what they say is true: many Democrats are suffering or confused by what is often called "Bush Derangement Syndrome". Accordingly, they want change, from Bush, and they want it very very badly. In their exuberance for change they are turning out to vote at almost double the rate of Republicans this primary season, even though in general elections the voter turnout is about equal between Democrats and Republicans.
What's happening, apparently, is that in their exuberance for change, Democrats, along with independents and disaffected Republicans, have confused the party primaries, with the general election that follows. In the primaries the only change available to them is from Hillary, the long time front runner, to Obama; not from Bush to Hillary, and so they are making the only change that is now available rather than maturely waiting to make the change they really want. Perhaps there should be a new election law to protect ill feeling Democrats from such stressful choices when those choices are clearly beyond their abilities? It is as if we are asking a child to pick between a tiny piece of candy today and a pound of candy tomorrow. Their behavior is very childish , or perhaps insane even. What else can explain the huge Democratic turnout that has eaten Hillary for no apparent reason?
Michelle said, "I am proud of America for the first time in my life, because you want change". Translation: "I've been embarrassed my entire life about America; what it is; what it represents, but now, now that you're showing a real interest in my socialist husband who is the most leftist Senator in Washington and votes that way with the inanimate, uncompromising consistency of robot, I am finally proud of America. I am proud of you for being fooled into supporting the socialist destruction of the greatest country in world history by completely empty and deceptive rhetoric from my wonderful, wonderful, anti-American husband. And, I know you can have faith and trust in my exact words about "pride" because, as my husband said yesterday when defending his campaign based on a just a few well chosen words, "just words" matter".
Barak Obama's ultra simplistic rhetoric, and largely anti-American soul, make him a far more focused target than Hillary, for what is sure to be effective and withering Republican fire in the fall, and so Republicans must hold off until then; so as not to encourage Obama to remake himself into a more complex, nuanced, and difficult target. Let him enjoy what Bill Clinton called "the fairy tale" until after the convention. Let his memeticist genius grow till then at which point it will be too late to remake himself, as McCain demonstrated is quite possible given time and favorable circumstances.
2)Eating Hillary
So why are the Democrats eating Hillary, a woman who had been their champion and standard bearer for years? It's simple really: they got very confused, something not uncommon for a people who lack the wherewithal to understand freedom despite living in America, the land of freedom.
It seems that what they say is true: many Democrats are suffering or confused by what is often called "Bush Derangement Syndrome". Accordingly, they want change, from Bush, and they want it very very badly. In their exuberance for change they are turning out to vote at almost double the rate of Republicans this primary season, even though in general elections the voter turnout is about equal between Democrats and Republicans.
What's happening, apparently, is that in their exuberance for change, Democrats, along with independents and disaffected Republicans, have confused the party primaries, with the general election that follows. In the primaries the only change available to them is from Hillary, the long time front runner, to Obama; not from Bush to Hillary, and so they are making the only change that is now available rather than maturely waiting to make the change they really want. Perhaps there should be a new election law to protect ill feeling Democrats from such stressful choices when those choices are clearly beyond their abilities? It is as if we are asking a child to pick between a tiny piece of candy today and a pound of candy tomorrow. Their behavior is very childish , or perhaps insane even. What else can explain the huge Democratic turnout that has eaten Hillary for no apparent reason?
And, lets not forget, Obama was well behind Hillary for almost a year. If he really is such a charismatic, compelling figure as one narrative would have it, why did it take almost a year for anyone to see what normally would be instantly recognizable?
And, lets not forget too, "the syndrome" was given voice only when it seemed America was going to lose a war against a Nazi-like dictator. When Bush announced, "mission accomplished" and there was great hope, the Democrats were silent, if not apologetic about their opposition to the fight for freedom. Now that there is great hope again, the Democrats are again dead and deafeningly silent, although "the syndrome" lingers. Wouldn't you be ill too, and vote erratically, if you could only cheer at your country's defeat, and creep away in sheepish silence at the first signs of victory over a Nazi-like tyrant? Americans can only hope and pray that the "syndrome" continues to make them act in irrational ways through the upcoming elections.
३)The Rich as Superheros
Quick. Tell me what the Democratic plan for economic growth is? Sadly, they have no plan for economic growth, which is quite bizarre when you consider that economic growth got us from the stone age to the modern age, and when, in theory, we want to keep it going. The only plan they have is to steal from the rich and give to the poor. This was perfectly symbolized by Hillary's Christmas commercial in which she portrayed herself as a Santa Claus putting government programs for everybody, symbolically gift wrapped in little boxes, under a Christmas tree.
She didn't mention that she wasn't making the money herself to buy the programs, or that she planned to tax the rich, even more, for the money with which to pay for the programs, despite the nation's $10 Trillion debt. The point was to make all the little children Democrats vote for her because she would provide them more presents than all the competing Democratic Santa Clauses. It represented a total subversion of our Democracy, a total inability to understand the American provenance, but it is what Democrats do, routinely.
As it turns out, the top one percent of taxpayers in America already pay 40% of all Federal taxes. If the gov't spends about $3 trillion a year that means the rich pay about $1.2 Trillion in taxes. That's enough to virtually pay for the whole country's Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. If that doesn't make the rich superhero's who can imagine what would? And, if that is not enough, they invent the products that got us from the stone age to here, and, if that still is not enough, they provide us all with the jobs we need for our very survival. So, doesn't that make them genuine superhero's, and the Democrats our enemies for painting them as evil cash cows in need of taxation and regulation? You have to suspect something is deeply corrupt about Democrats who, in this election season, have no plans for our rich superheros whatsoever except to tax them still more and thereby make them and everyone else less and less productive and responsible. Democrats are the enemy of freedom and individual liberty. They are employing the perfect strategy to undermine our country, while retaining power for themselves in the ugly process.
4)Democratic Super Delegate Fraud
Democrats exist to buy votes from special interest group sellers, and there are many sellers out there. This time the Party nomination itself has turned into a contest between special interests: women and blacks. Sadly, only one special interest can really win and so there is a dilemma for the Democrats to face: how do you buy votes from all the special interest groups when only one or a few groups can really be paid with the superior status they seek over the others?
Ultimately, we can pray, the special interest groups will see the zero sum Democratic fraud, and switch parties. It's seemingly great, for example, to give old people a $400 Billion drug program, but young people may not think it's so great to pay for it especially when they know there will be no younger generation to pay for them when they are old. It's great to let black kids into Berkeley, but not for the white kids who are then excluded. It's great to create labor unions that drive up wages, but then not so great to be a customer of expensive union products. It's great to let Mexicans in the country but not great when they take your job. It's so caring to raise the minimum wage for those who have jobs, but not so great when it leads to fewer new jobs for those who don't have them. It's great to encourage ethanol production until you have to pay the higher price for it and live with the greater pollution and cost from it. It's great to encourage women to play college sports, but not if you're a man whose team was eliminated even when it attracted 100 times more players and fans. In the Democratic end, every special interest group competes with every other special interest group for limited resources. Every aspect of life becomes political and subject to sale to a few Democratic politicians who are beholden to the highest bidder, not the highest truth, if even it is possible to know truth in such circumstances.
Super delegates are just super Democrats with super special interests. According to the NY Times, "Anthony Corrado , a professor at Colby College, and expert on delegate selection said that, "Republicans had not had the fights that the Democrats periodically have because they do not have as many constituencies to satisfy". Every aspect of Democratic politics is permeated by special interest constituencies that inevitably come into conflict with one another in what ultimately has to be a zero sum game for political power. Civil rights, union, feminist, health care, immigrant, peace, environment, social welfare, and urban/regional super delegates can't all get what they want at the expense of each other by buying politicians who themselves are beholden to particular constituencies to whom they must answer. In the end they are better off devoting their personal energy toward achieving their group's goals without being distracted or lulled to sleep by false promises from the federalist Democrats. They would be better off as Republicans, but who can take the first step when Democrats have accumulated so much power in Washington that the notion of private accomplishment can easily be overshadowed or forgotten? In the end, Republicans expect to see Democrats at war with each other as the logical outcome of their subversive belief in gov't rather than freedom.
5)A New Election Law To Regulate Obamatory (Obama oratory)
Obama has a name for blind, dead, dumb, stupid Republicans: Obamacans. He says they are people who see and appreciate the need to work together across party lines for the common good; in a united country. Isn't that just so egalitarian? But, he doesn't say how it is possible when Republicans believe in freedom and Democrats believe in Gov't? How can you give free health care and not give free health care? How can you fight for freedom in Iraq and not fight for freedom in Iraq? How can you raise taxes and not raise taxes? The only real question here is whether there is more psychopathy or simple ignorance?
Obama delights in pointing out that he shared one million votes with George Bush when he was elected to the Senate; so he knows full well that dumb Republicans are a valuable constituency for him, but is it really honest, especially for such a saintly leader, not to point out that he is simply exploiting their incredible ignorance? Is this the politics of hope or just more gutter politics? Is promising to be everything to everybody, regardless of party, ideology, or special interest group affiliation, honest or more cheap, dirty Democratic politics?
There is no working together with an ideological purest like Obama, unless of course you become as purely leftist as he is. How else would it be possible? Obama is the most ultra pure leftist Senator in America; in fact, according to the National Journal, more leftist than the only avowed socialist in the Senate: Bernie Sanders. Obama is actually, then, the least likely person in all of Washington to unite us, but with tricky lies of omission he is making it work, and making a sad spectacle of himself and our democracy in the process. It works, in part, because much of the MSM shares Obama's socialism, in part because they respect him for being such a successful liar politician, and in part because they are trained to cover the democratic process as a legitimate horse race no matter what the candidates may stand for or how they conduct themselves .
Moreover, if the ever so saintly and honest Obama, who is going to unite us around, only, his pretty perorational words, shouldn't there be a law that the rhetoric at least not be plagiarized? I mean come on, we're going to elect a guy based on the way he reads a script of about 10 words? If he gave details on his programs the way Hillary does who would care about the way he reads his lines or from where they came? But, as long as he has only a few scripted lines, and he refuses to spell out the socialist plan concealed beneath the lines, aren't we at least entitled to know who wrote the psychotropic, cult-like lines that fill stadiums and make Democrats swoon and literally faint on command? Accordingly, in the case of Obama anyway, there should be a new election law so that his speech writers, if any, come clean with their identity and with which of the lines they write. Would such a tiny touch of honesty in some aspect of the Obama campaign really be so inappropriate?
Ted Baiamonte
TheDumbDemocrat
The Intellectual Republican
www. thedumbdemocrat
TheDumbDemocrat
The Intellectual Republican
www. thedumbdemocrat
2.12.2008
Popping The Obama Bubble
Now that the Kennedy's have formally anointed Obama with the legend of Camelot we have to wonder if he deserves it, or, if "it" is really anything at all. Firstly, JKF gained mythic proportions only by being assassinated. Before that, he became President by the tiniest of margins; in fact, on the day of his assassination he was in Dallas, not as a legend, but as a struggling politician shoring up his sagging political fortunes there in anticipation of his next difficult election.
Since Kennedy's death we have learned that his personal life, and the national security implication of it, was horrendous; in fact, infinitely more horrendous than the personal life of Bill Clinton, who was, let's not forget, impeached for comparitively benign behavior! Kennedy was so bad that the press, even the opposition press, could not report it because it was deemed too injurious to the well recognized foundational values of American social life that were, apparently, held in great contempt by Kennedy. One of the Kennedy past times, for example, was to hold women under water during extramarital sex so that their panic would heighten his orgasmic pleasure. Nowadays, liberals are so apoplectic about water boarding when for Kennedy it was no big deal, even in the White House?
In the end though our President is the symbol of America, the embodiment of our highest dreams and aspirations, and a reflection of our best selves, or so we like to think. When Kennedy was killed a part of America, then, was killed with him and so to this day we are inclined to keep him as a legend or at least as a member of the family. We do this despite a short, marginal Presidency during which very little was accomplished, except perhaps for the precipitation of the Cuban missile crisis which nearly ended the world in nuclear war because Kennedy had uttered a few wimpy Obamasque statements in Austria that did not incite fear or respect in Khrushchev, in the slightest. If maintaining the legend means overlooking the amazing hypocrisy of his personal life and his political life, we do it to protect him, and at the same time, ourselves.
Additionally, and as importantly, Kennedy and his wife were Hollywood pretty. We know what awe that inexplicably inspires in many Americans. The rare combination of Washington power and Hollywood pretty proved too much for America to resist, at least when clouded over by the wake of an assassination. Will the Obama family really excite us this way in the end? It seems unlikely. We should all be thankful that the embarrassingly, anti-democratic, and Hannah Montana quality of Obama's political campaign can't possibly last. It is no wonder Europeans hold us in contempt for our extreme and odd celebrity worshipping, especially when freedom and individual liberty are supposedly such a part of our character.
When America aspired to great personal values, Kennedy's values had to be kept secret. Today, we have given up on personal values. There are no secrets to be kept. We pass out condoms in the schools knowing that we are too weak or too human to even have standards. Our new standard by default is: Que Sera Sera. We no longer melioristicially create our culture, we merely respond to contingent genetic variables over which we have no control. The obvious downside: a 50% divorce rate, 1.3 million abortions a year, 2.4 million in prison, Hip-Hop culture, failing schools, and 30% of kids in poverty does not disparage or even discourage us at all. We celebrate and embrace the new tragic realism of our lives on The Oprah Winfrey show every day. Hence, in stark contrast to JFK, we learned in real time all the sad details of the great stain maker (Bill Clinton), and of Obama's youthful indiscretions. So how can Teddy and Caroline pass on the legend of Camelot when Camelot existed only fraudulently, and in the wake of an assassination?
It was contemptuous of them to try to pass on the legend, but contempt for people and love of gov't is what Democrats naturally do. It is their stock in trade. Obama inherited a dubious legend, and hopefully, if only out of the boredom that can come with a long campaign, it will slowly become apparent that he is no JFK; primarily because the JFK we imagine now never did exist.
Another problem for Obama is that he is anti-defense while Kennedy had the good sense to run to the political right of Eisenhower and Nixon in a successful effort to trick America into believing that Democrats are not cowardly, anti-American surrender monkeys. Hillary had the good sense, and amorality, to attempt this trick too through all of her pre-Presidential years in the Senate and in the early months of her Presidential campaign, but has since been forced to give it up because the Democratic base just won't stand for defending the America they hate so much. Obama though has stood true, secretly, to his anti-Kennedy principles by offering no foreign policy ideas whatsoever despite 9/11, a urgently deteriorating situation in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and a precarious but momentarily stable situation in Iraq? The hypocrisy is nearly perfect given that their "Bush derangement syndrome" was caused by the war on terror about which they are now so perfectly silent?
If Kennedy is legendary at all it is as tax cutter, who Republicans site incessantly, while Obama has definite plans to raise taxes in every significant category. How could he pay for all the new programs if not by taxing for all the new programs? All he has to do is make the dumber people feel that gov't programs are free, and make the dumb people feel that they'll pay less than their neighbors for the new programs. If you drill down through his web site long enough you can discover all this too, but of course you'll never hear it on the campaign trail through all the anti-democratic, tribalistic "Fired Up, Yes We Can" poetic chanting.
Another problem for Obama is detailed by the renowned black author, Shelby Steele, who claims Obama can't win because he is a phony black man. He has, according to Steele, the reassuring looks and non confrontational attitudes of a house slave - i.e., someone who is content to live among white people and not create guilt or discomfort with any lingering anger he may have over a few centuries of slavery and racism. Eventually, Steele claims, Americans will see this as phony and demand to know what a future President Obama really thinks and feels before they place the levers of Presidential power in his hands.
After Carl Bernstein wrote his recent, comprehensive biography on Hillary he was asked what her biggest liability would be. He said, "her inauthenticity", and all the world agreed with what was obvious. But now that worry has all but disappeared given that Obama has given new meaning to any conceivable understanding of the word with what has to be the most utterly vacuous, vaporware campaign in modern democratic history; a campaign that has now deteriorated into a personality cult as much as anything else.
Hillary, the perfectly inauthentic and legendary triangulater has now challenged Obama to 5 debates, or at least what passes for debates in modern politics, but Obama has declined because he says. "it is time I could be spending getting to know the people." To Obama, a one second touch across a rope line offered to a few thousand adoring supplicants is far more important than telling millions in a debate what he would do as President. Maybe he figures that after a full two years in the Senate everyone ought to already know what he stands for, or that eveyone ought to remember the previous debates in previous months in previous primaries ?
But, he is a Harvard trained lawyer and lawyers are trained to live in a moral vacuum and to be fully prepared to take any side of any issue, if the money is right, aren't they? So then, perhaps Obama's campaign ought to be one of the lawyerly best ever in that sense? Indeed, it does appear to be breaking new ground in terms of shamelessness, exploitation, and contempt for the masses whom he wishes to deceive and disarm with a fleeting touch across a rope line, and then rule from his condescending socialist pulpit. Obama has the "Audacity Of Hope"(the title of his award winning book) but not the audacity to trust his postulants with the truth about what the most liberal Senator in America will do as President?
Obama presents like earnest kid running for class President, albeit with a mellifluous voice and Ted Sorensen writing his poetic lines. In point of fact, Kennedy did and Obama does rely on Sorensen, who wrote the now famous line, "ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country". The line was absurd when Kennedy, a Democrat, used it, but utterly ridiculous for Obama who has huge plans to, in effect, buy millions and million of votes by fraudulently promising to have his socialist gov't do everything on earth for people who will then be increasingly less inclined to to do anything at all for their country. Conversely, it is Republicans who use government to guarantee the freedom from gov't with which people can do things for themselves and their neighbors and, only secondarily, their country.
Even more sad and tragic is that the more upscale a Democrat is the more likely he is to be attracted to Obama's charismatic "Fired Up, Yes We can" nonsense about hope and change. If there is something positive in smart people demanding nothing but empty inspiration from a candidate, who can imagine what it is? And even worse, independents like Colin Powell, for example, who claim to be above it all, free of petty party loyalty and ideology, and therefore free to pick the best man with the best program, are also herding to Obama? If Hitler, Stalin, Jefferson, and Christ had ideologies and party affiliations that reflected those ideologies, what can it mean to be free of party and ideology anyway, if not to be free of consciousness? This is what the mighty Obama encourages?
Republicans too though are moved by charismatic figures. Just look at the way they adore Ronald Reagan. He is quite clearly the standard bearer of the party and almost worshiped within the inner circle of true believers. It should not be a mystery that people like Bob Dole or Gerald Ford who lacked Reaganesque principles and passions are not easily worshipped for standing in the middle; seemingly too feeble to pick a side. You never know with such people if they are real Americans who believe in the American democratic middle or if they would always be in a cowardly but safe middle no matter what the extremes were. After all, the middle is easy and almost deceptively sensible in 21st Century America, but it seemed easy and sensible too, for many anyway, in 1930's Germany when Nazi and Communist parameters defined the political landscape.
So then, how does a real American think about the intellectually blinding charisma of Reagan and Obama? Firstly, he must realize that Reagan and Obama are exact opposites. Reagan operated in the tradition of the West that started, roughly, with the Magna Carta Libertatum and ended with the US Constitution. Any charisma and power was to be used in that tradition to free people from the power of Kings or other charismatic despots. Reagan sought Federal power to destroy it for future generations so that they might live in freedom. Obama is the exact anti-American, anti-Western opposite. He seeks power for leverage with which to continuously expand a gov't which he and his ideological heirs will regally and charismatically control.
Underneath the charisma is, in fact, the most liberal Senator in America according to the "National Journal." This mostly explains why his campaign in America must be the emptiest in American history. It is simply too disingenuous to promote a charismatic, ever expanding gov't in a free country, even when many have already been subverted by our left wing Democratic Pied Pipers. We can only pray Obama will be exposed over the course of a long campaign; that Democrats and Independents won't see him as another Teutonic Knight, Napoleon or Hitler who they want to sheepishly follow into the promised land of another Russian winter. Tragically, that was what human beings did - before America!
Ted Baiamonte
TheDumbDemocrat
The Intellectual Republican
www. thedumbdemocrat
Since Kennedy's death we have learned that his personal life, and the national security implication of it, was horrendous; in fact, infinitely more horrendous than the personal life of Bill Clinton, who was, let's not forget, impeached for comparitively benign behavior! Kennedy was so bad that the press, even the opposition press, could not report it because it was deemed too injurious to the well recognized foundational values of American social life that were, apparently, held in great contempt by Kennedy. One of the Kennedy past times, for example, was to hold women under water during extramarital sex so that their panic would heighten his orgasmic pleasure. Nowadays, liberals are so apoplectic about water boarding when for Kennedy it was no big deal, even in the White House?
In the end though our President is the symbol of America, the embodiment of our highest dreams and aspirations, and a reflection of our best selves, or so we like to think. When Kennedy was killed a part of America, then, was killed with him and so to this day we are inclined to keep him as a legend or at least as a member of the family. We do this despite a short, marginal Presidency during which very little was accomplished, except perhaps for the precipitation of the Cuban missile crisis which nearly ended the world in nuclear war because Kennedy had uttered a few wimpy Obamasque statements in Austria that did not incite fear or respect in Khrushchev, in the slightest. If maintaining the legend means overlooking the amazing hypocrisy of his personal life and his political life, we do it to protect him, and at the same time, ourselves.
Additionally, and as importantly, Kennedy and his wife were Hollywood pretty. We know what awe that inexplicably inspires in many Americans. The rare combination of Washington power and Hollywood pretty proved too much for America to resist, at least when clouded over by the wake of an assassination. Will the Obama family really excite us this way in the end? It seems unlikely. We should all be thankful that the embarrassingly, anti-democratic, and Hannah Montana quality of Obama's political campaign can't possibly last. It is no wonder Europeans hold us in contempt for our extreme and odd celebrity worshipping, especially when freedom and individual liberty are supposedly such a part of our character.
When America aspired to great personal values, Kennedy's values had to be kept secret. Today, we have given up on personal values. There are no secrets to be kept. We pass out condoms in the schools knowing that we are too weak or too human to even have standards. Our new standard by default is: Que Sera Sera. We no longer melioristicially create our culture, we merely respond to contingent genetic variables over which we have no control. The obvious downside: a 50% divorce rate, 1.3 million abortions a year, 2.4 million in prison, Hip-Hop culture, failing schools, and 30% of kids in poverty does not disparage or even discourage us at all. We celebrate and embrace the new tragic realism of our lives on The Oprah Winfrey show every day. Hence, in stark contrast to JFK, we learned in real time all the sad details of the great stain maker (Bill Clinton), and of Obama's youthful indiscretions. So how can Teddy and Caroline pass on the legend of Camelot when Camelot existed only fraudulently, and in the wake of an assassination?
It was contemptuous of them to try to pass on the legend, but contempt for people and love of gov't is what Democrats naturally do. It is their stock in trade. Obama inherited a dubious legend, and hopefully, if only out of the boredom that can come with a long campaign, it will slowly become apparent that he is no JFK; primarily because the JFK we imagine now never did exist.
Another problem for Obama is that he is anti-defense while Kennedy had the good sense to run to the political right of Eisenhower and Nixon in a successful effort to trick America into believing that Democrats are not cowardly, anti-American surrender monkeys. Hillary had the good sense, and amorality, to attempt this trick too through all of her pre-Presidential years in the Senate and in the early months of her Presidential campaign, but has since been forced to give it up because the Democratic base just won't stand for defending the America they hate so much. Obama though has stood true, secretly, to his anti-Kennedy principles by offering no foreign policy ideas whatsoever despite 9/11, a urgently deteriorating situation in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and a precarious but momentarily stable situation in Iraq? The hypocrisy is nearly perfect given that their "Bush derangement syndrome" was caused by the war on terror about which they are now so perfectly silent?
If Kennedy is legendary at all it is as tax cutter, who Republicans site incessantly, while Obama has definite plans to raise taxes in every significant category. How could he pay for all the new programs if not by taxing for all the new programs? All he has to do is make the dumber people feel that gov't programs are free, and make the dumb people feel that they'll pay less than their neighbors for the new programs. If you drill down through his web site long enough you can discover all this too, but of course you'll never hear it on the campaign trail through all the anti-democratic, tribalistic "Fired Up, Yes We Can" poetic chanting.
Another problem for Obama is detailed by the renowned black author, Shelby Steele, who claims Obama can't win because he is a phony black man. He has, according to Steele, the reassuring looks and non confrontational attitudes of a house slave - i.e., someone who is content to live among white people and not create guilt or discomfort with any lingering anger he may have over a few centuries of slavery and racism. Eventually, Steele claims, Americans will see this as phony and demand to know what a future President Obama really thinks and feels before they place the levers of Presidential power in his hands.
After Carl Bernstein wrote his recent, comprehensive biography on Hillary he was asked what her biggest liability would be. He said, "her inauthenticity", and all the world agreed with what was obvious. But now that worry has all but disappeared given that Obama has given new meaning to any conceivable understanding of the word with what has to be the most utterly vacuous, vaporware campaign in modern democratic history; a campaign that has now deteriorated into a personality cult as much as anything else.
Hillary, the perfectly inauthentic and legendary triangulater has now challenged Obama to 5 debates, or at least what passes for debates in modern politics, but Obama has declined because he says. "it is time I could be spending getting to know the people." To Obama, a one second touch across a rope line offered to a few thousand adoring supplicants is far more important than telling millions in a debate what he would do as President. Maybe he figures that after a full two years in the Senate everyone ought to already know what he stands for, or that eveyone ought to remember the previous debates in previous months in previous primaries ?
But, he is a Harvard trained lawyer and lawyers are trained to live in a moral vacuum and to be fully prepared to take any side of any issue, if the money is right, aren't they? So then, perhaps Obama's campaign ought to be one of the lawyerly best ever in that sense? Indeed, it does appear to be breaking new ground in terms of shamelessness, exploitation, and contempt for the masses whom he wishes to deceive and disarm with a fleeting touch across a rope line, and then rule from his condescending socialist pulpit. Obama has the "Audacity Of Hope"(the title of his award winning book) but not the audacity to trust his postulants with the truth about what the most liberal Senator in America will do as President?
Obama presents like earnest kid running for class President, albeit with a mellifluous voice and Ted Sorensen writing his poetic lines. In point of fact, Kennedy did and Obama does rely on Sorensen, who wrote the now famous line, "ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country". The line was absurd when Kennedy, a Democrat, used it, but utterly ridiculous for Obama who has huge plans to, in effect, buy millions and million of votes by fraudulently promising to have his socialist gov't do everything on earth for people who will then be increasingly less inclined to to do anything at all for their country. Conversely, it is Republicans who use government to guarantee the freedom from gov't with which people can do things for themselves and their neighbors and, only secondarily, their country.
Even more sad and tragic is that the more upscale a Democrat is the more likely he is to be attracted to Obama's charismatic "Fired Up, Yes We can" nonsense about hope and change. If there is something positive in smart people demanding nothing but empty inspiration from a candidate, who can imagine what it is? And even worse, independents like Colin Powell, for example, who claim to be above it all, free of petty party loyalty and ideology, and therefore free to pick the best man with the best program, are also herding to Obama? If Hitler, Stalin, Jefferson, and Christ had ideologies and party affiliations that reflected those ideologies, what can it mean to be free of party and ideology anyway, if not to be free of consciousness? This is what the mighty Obama encourages?
Republicans too though are moved by charismatic figures. Just look at the way they adore Ronald Reagan. He is quite clearly the standard bearer of the party and almost worshiped within the inner circle of true believers. It should not be a mystery that people like Bob Dole or Gerald Ford who lacked Reaganesque principles and passions are not easily worshipped for standing in the middle; seemingly too feeble to pick a side. You never know with such people if they are real Americans who believe in the American democratic middle or if they would always be in a cowardly but safe middle no matter what the extremes were. After all, the middle is easy and almost deceptively sensible in 21st Century America, but it seemed easy and sensible too, for many anyway, in 1930's Germany when Nazi and Communist parameters defined the political landscape.
So then, how does a real American think about the intellectually blinding charisma of Reagan and Obama? Firstly, he must realize that Reagan and Obama are exact opposites. Reagan operated in the tradition of the West that started, roughly, with the Magna Carta Libertatum and ended with the US Constitution. Any charisma and power was to be used in that tradition to free people from the power of Kings or other charismatic despots. Reagan sought Federal power to destroy it for future generations so that they might live in freedom. Obama is the exact anti-American, anti-Western opposite. He seeks power for leverage with which to continuously expand a gov't which he and his ideological heirs will regally and charismatically control.
Underneath the charisma is, in fact, the most liberal Senator in America according to the "National Journal." This mostly explains why his campaign in America must be the emptiest in American history. It is simply too disingenuous to promote a charismatic, ever expanding gov't in a free country, even when many have already been subverted by our left wing Democratic Pied Pipers. We can only pray Obama will be exposed over the course of a long campaign; that Democrats and Independents won't see him as another Teutonic Knight, Napoleon or Hitler who they want to sheepishly follow into the promised land of another Russian winter. Tragically, that was what human beings did - before America!
Ted Baiamonte
TheDumbDemocrat
The Intellectual Republican
www. thedumbdemocrat
1.27.2008
Recession Vindicates Republicans, Mostly
The economic stimulus plan to avoid the impending recession is essentially nothing more than a $150 Billion tax cut. Insanely, Democrats support this tax cut without acknowledging or realizing that if they had supported Republican tax cuts all along the economy would not need the tax cut stimulation they agree it needs now. Now, push has come to shove; they finally are conceding what is obvious: their much beloved taxes are a danger to the American economy and people. So, shouldn't the Democrats disband now that they've been forced, once again, to admit to their tax and spend lunacy and become supply siders for a day? At the very least shouldn't they abandon their plan to again damage the economy with more taxes the second they regain power in the next elections?
Sadly, the Democrats won't disband and go away simply because their venal lust for power and their pure ignorance easily overcomes their modest interest in doing the right thing. The ultimate irony here is not that Democrats haven't got a clue about economics, but that Republicans know that tax cuts alone do more harm than good. Still, they are going along with them though out of a cynical, political expediency.
It seems obvious that the money the stimulation plan gives back to tax payers came from tax payers in the first place, since the gov't generally can't magically create money out of thin air. So, giving taxpayers back their money to do with it what they would have done with it in the first place is just plain goofy, isn't it?
Firstly, the tax and rebate process itself is a huge waste of money, but more importantly, the rebate money will have to be re taxed immediately, and secretly, by the Democrats since they can't cut spending by the amount of the rebate, because they always need more and more money for the ever expanding social programs with which they buy votes at election time. If they could not subvert our democracy by selling social programs for votes they would, quite simply, not exist. So what exactly is the benefit of taxing, rebating, and taxing again, if not to help politicians get elected? The on going source of our current financial blight is the mortgage market; so why isn't all of the stimulation directed there? If sending money is legitimate why don't they spend it immediately through the Social Security system, military procurement, food stamps, welfare, WIC, or simple reductions in quarterly tax filings, rather than waiting 6 months at which time the economic environment might be totally different?
Some clever and sneaky Democrats will argue that tax rebates now or in 6 months, exactly when we are or will enter into a recession, will at least prevent the worst of it, blunt the worst of it, or speed our way out of it. This is extreme nonsense too; both intellectually and empirically. Milton Friedman became the most important economist in human history if not the most important human being in history by studying the monetary history of the United States. What he discovered was that whenever the Democrats added money to the economy in a preposterous effort to stimulate it, they often did it at exactly the wrong time, and with a disproportionate amount of money. It turns out that gov't bureaucrats, most of whom have never had a real job in the real economy, have no crystal ball and no idea whatsoever about the course or length of a possible downturn or recession. So, they pumped money in when they thought things were turning down, but , it turned out , weren't, and they took money out when they thought the economy was over heating (as in the case of a housing bubble), but wasn't.
If gov't bureaucrats could predict the future we'd all turn to them for stock market advice, among many other things, all the time but of course we don't and of course they know better than to even attempt to sell their wisdom to us in any measurable way for which they would be held accountable. The famous economist J.K.Galbraith once said, "economists don't predict the future because they know it, they do it because they are asked." To add insult to the Democratic fantasy about omniscient soviet-like bureaucrats controlling our money supply in a knowing, rational way, Friedman also discovered that taking money out of, or putting it into the economy, not only can't stimulate it, but can do nothing more that inflate or deflate prices needlessly. He concluded that Federal monetary policy can do nothing whatsoever to encourage real economic growth which comes, essentially, only when engineers make new or better products. It turns out that Democrats in Washington and apparatchiks in Soviet Moscow didn't do a thing except needlessly whip saw or churn their economies with their pompous guesses about how much money to print, burn, tax or rebate.
The best recent beneficiary of this sad phenomena is Bill Clinton. He beat George Bush(41) to become President, by a very slight margin, because the experts were telling us that Bush's policies were causing a recession. To complete the liberal media's image of Bush he was painted as being out of touch with the supposedly declining economy when he didn't know the price of milk or how a supermarket scanner worked. Clinton then won by a tiny margin, but then it turned out there had been no recession at all during the last year of the Bush(41) presidency. As a result, we're looking at 16 years of Clintons in the White House. How absurd, and tragic for America!
Similarly, in the Carter years we had 15% inflation, unemployment, and interest rates. And of course, there was no real growth. It happened because of Fed Chairman temerities that had dramatically expanded the money supply believing, megalomaniacally, that they could create real economic stimulation by throwing some real money into the economy. Arthur Burns, the next timorous chairman was afraid to extract the excess money and so the situation only worsened. It wasn't until Paul Volker, a Republican who understood how money worked, had nerves of steel, and had no social or megalomaniacal weaknesses, took over that the funny Democratic money was extracted, and the economy got back on a slow but steady growth track that continues largely uninterrupted to this day.
Ironically, no human being on earth was more aware of all this and understood it more than Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, nevertheless, in the wake of the tech bust and 9/11 he pumped money into what seemed to be a slowing economy, over and over again, even as he saw the housing bubble grow and grow. When the bubble finally burst, with the consequences we're enduring now, Greenspan (the most Republican of Republicans; in fact a Libertarian, no less) may go down in history as just another party going, social climbing, star struck, Washington bureaucrat, would-be hero, money maestro, who guessed wrong about the future when he had no crystal ball with which to hazard a guess about the American economy's future in the first place.
The current Fed chairman is now on the same hot seat. The Greenspan housing bubble has burst; the economy appears to be slowing significantly, and so he's pumping money into the economy while knowing, thanks to Friedman, that there may be no recession looming at all, and that it can't help in any meaningful way. At best, the Fed action will drive prices back up (consumer prices already closed last year up 5%) at which point he'll have to guess yet again about when to slam on the brakes to reverse or stop the price inflation he has caused. All the while he'll be praying not to make matters worse rather than better with his inherently reckless prognostications. Worse, he's so panicked by the gathering hoards that he's even gone to Congress to lend his support to the tax rebate idea, which is none of his business as a central banker, and something he knows, intellectually at least, doesn't have a prayer of working.
The pressure from unemployed little old ladies, Democrats, Wall Street, and the vast liberal media to play God is great; to roll the dice, hit the numbers, to believe the Soviet idea was right: gov't bureaucrats can rule the world better than the free market. If the current Fed Chairman did succeed in managing the current, Fed created, housing collapse it would indicate pure luck at a game he has no business playing; a game that can at best create great inefficiency by whipsawing or churning the economy, but that can never be won. Democrats, and their reluctant, sometime Republican allies, can tax and spend all they want, and print and burn money all they want and do it whenever they want, but none of it can do what one engineer with a new or improved product can do to stimulate real economic growth.
Real growth comes from brilliant engineers who invent new products that make our lives easier or better; not bureaucratic, paper shuffling Democrats. The lesson here is to get rid of the Democrats at all costs and by any means necessary before they cause another great depression and then get themselves elected to end it with 10 years of preposterous monetary policy guessing, and absurd tax and spend programs, following by a world war.
Empirically speaking, any lay person can wonder intelligently about the stimulative value of $150 Billion in deficit spending, i.e., new Federal spending of $150 Billion without new taxes of that amount. After all, the Federal Gov't does a lot of spending without raising taxes. If fact, it is $9.2 Trillion in debt because of doing exactly that. If the concept made sense, $9.2 Trillion in extra spending or pump priming, as liberals like to call it, should have over stimulated the economy to the point where everyone became a millionaire and then died from complete exhaustion, but oddly all it seems to have done is recess the economy? Any household that managed its' affairs the way the Federal Gov't does would suffer the same fate. A monkey knows this, but not a Democrat!
It is true, however, that if the government prints money, lowers interest rates, and cuts taxes for the housing industry, for example, they can stimulate that particular industry tremendously, as we have all recently seen, but, most importantly, it is a destructive stimulation. The easy money given to the housing industry was taxed from other industries that then are depressed by the exact amount the housing industry is stimulated. There can be no net benefit. Similarly, if they print money or lower interest rates for the housing industry, the rate of home construction will expand dramatically. But, when the printing press or tax rebate is turned off the artificial growth is exposed as such, and the industry contracts by the exact amount of false money pumped into it.
That excess easy money then circulates concentrically to the entire economy where it in turn stimulates more false growth that, similarly, suddenly ends in a painful contraction as the new money supply is exhausted. The final result is higher prices, for everyone, that absorb the expanded supply of money, and a depressed economy that must reorganize at great personal expense during and after the title wave of funny Democratic money that has swept through it in a boom and bust cycle.
All the false economic activity that must be painfully unwound reduces everyone's standard of living in the end. What the gov't should do is create a highly stable economic environment for engineers in which real growth can take place, through consistently low taxes, (no business taxation at all because it only distracts engineers and their managers), a highly restrictive Fed intervention policy, and, for God's sake, a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. That way, engineers, managers, and owners, would be free to work the magic which has caused the real economic growth that has lifted us from the stone age to the modern age. Democrats hate the notion of being so minimized by the importance of engineers and businessmen, and so we have a civic obligation to hate them too, at least in the voting booth. Republican politicians who must compromise with the dreaded Democrats, owing to an tragic error in the Constitution, or those Republicans who are temporarily corrupted by gov't power, can sometimes be forgiven.
Ted Baiamonte
bje1000@aol.com
The Intellectual Republican
th205
Sadly, the Democrats won't disband and go away simply because their venal lust for power and their pure ignorance easily overcomes their modest interest in doing the right thing. The ultimate irony here is not that Democrats haven't got a clue about economics, but that Republicans know that tax cuts alone do more harm than good. Still, they are going along with them though out of a cynical, political expediency.
It seems obvious that the money the stimulation plan gives back to tax payers came from tax payers in the first place, since the gov't generally can't magically create money out of thin air. So, giving taxpayers back their money to do with it what they would have done with it in the first place is just plain goofy, isn't it?
Firstly, the tax and rebate process itself is a huge waste of money, but more importantly, the rebate money will have to be re taxed immediately, and secretly, by the Democrats since they can't cut spending by the amount of the rebate, because they always need more and more money for the ever expanding social programs with which they buy votes at election time. If they could not subvert our democracy by selling social programs for votes they would, quite simply, not exist. So what exactly is the benefit of taxing, rebating, and taxing again, if not to help politicians get elected? The on going source of our current financial blight is the mortgage market; so why isn't all of the stimulation directed there? If sending money is legitimate why don't they spend it immediately through the Social Security system, military procurement, food stamps, welfare, WIC, or simple reductions in quarterly tax filings, rather than waiting 6 months at which time the economic environment might be totally different?
Some clever and sneaky Democrats will argue that tax rebates now or in 6 months, exactly when we are or will enter into a recession, will at least prevent the worst of it, blunt the worst of it, or speed our way out of it. This is extreme nonsense too; both intellectually and empirically. Milton Friedman became the most important economist in human history if not the most important human being in history by studying the monetary history of the United States. What he discovered was that whenever the Democrats added money to the economy in a preposterous effort to stimulate it, they often did it at exactly the wrong time, and with a disproportionate amount of money. It turns out that gov't bureaucrats, most of whom have never had a real job in the real economy, have no crystal ball and no idea whatsoever about the course or length of a possible downturn or recession. So, they pumped money in when they thought things were turning down, but , it turned out , weren't, and they took money out when they thought the economy was over heating (as in the case of a housing bubble), but wasn't.
If gov't bureaucrats could predict the future we'd all turn to them for stock market advice, among many other things, all the time but of course we don't and of course they know better than to even attempt to sell their wisdom to us in any measurable way for which they would be held accountable. The famous economist J.K.Galbraith once said, "economists don't predict the future because they know it, they do it because they are asked." To add insult to the Democratic fantasy about omniscient soviet-like bureaucrats controlling our money supply in a knowing, rational way, Friedman also discovered that taking money out of, or putting it into the economy, not only can't stimulate it, but can do nothing more that inflate or deflate prices needlessly. He concluded that Federal monetary policy can do nothing whatsoever to encourage real economic growth which comes, essentially, only when engineers make new or better products. It turns out that Democrats in Washington and apparatchiks in Soviet Moscow didn't do a thing except needlessly whip saw or churn their economies with their pompous guesses about how much money to print, burn, tax or rebate.
The best recent beneficiary of this sad phenomena is Bill Clinton. He beat George Bush(41) to become President, by a very slight margin, because the experts were telling us that Bush's policies were causing a recession. To complete the liberal media's image of Bush he was painted as being out of touch with the supposedly declining economy when he didn't know the price of milk or how a supermarket scanner worked. Clinton then won by a tiny margin, but then it turned out there had been no recession at all during the last year of the Bush(41) presidency. As a result, we're looking at 16 years of Clintons in the White House. How absurd, and tragic for America!
Similarly, in the Carter years we had 15% inflation, unemployment, and interest rates. And of course, there was no real growth. It happened because of Fed Chairman temerities that had dramatically expanded the money supply believing, megalomaniacally, that they could create real economic stimulation by throwing some real money into the economy. Arthur Burns, the next timorous chairman was afraid to extract the excess money and so the situation only worsened. It wasn't until Paul Volker, a Republican who understood how money worked, had nerves of steel, and had no social or megalomaniacal weaknesses, took over that the funny Democratic money was extracted, and the economy got back on a slow but steady growth track that continues largely uninterrupted to this day.
Ironically, no human being on earth was more aware of all this and understood it more than Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, nevertheless, in the wake of the tech bust and 9/11 he pumped money into what seemed to be a slowing economy, over and over again, even as he saw the housing bubble grow and grow. When the bubble finally burst, with the consequences we're enduring now, Greenspan (the most Republican of Republicans; in fact a Libertarian, no less) may go down in history as just another party going, social climbing, star struck, Washington bureaucrat, would-be hero, money maestro, who guessed wrong about the future when he had no crystal ball with which to hazard a guess about the American economy's future in the first place.
The current Fed chairman is now on the same hot seat. The Greenspan housing bubble has burst; the economy appears to be slowing significantly, and so he's pumping money into the economy while knowing, thanks to Friedman, that there may be no recession looming at all, and that it can't help in any meaningful way. At best, the Fed action will drive prices back up (consumer prices already closed last year up 5%) at which point he'll have to guess yet again about when to slam on the brakes to reverse or stop the price inflation he has caused. All the while he'll be praying not to make matters worse rather than better with his inherently reckless prognostications. Worse, he's so panicked by the gathering hoards that he's even gone to Congress to lend his support to the tax rebate idea, which is none of his business as a central banker, and something he knows, intellectually at least, doesn't have a prayer of working.
The pressure from unemployed little old ladies, Democrats, Wall Street, and the vast liberal media to play God is great; to roll the dice, hit the numbers, to believe the Soviet idea was right: gov't bureaucrats can rule the world better than the free market. If the current Fed Chairman did succeed in managing the current, Fed created, housing collapse it would indicate pure luck at a game he has no business playing; a game that can at best create great inefficiency by whipsawing or churning the economy, but that can never be won. Democrats, and their reluctant, sometime Republican allies, can tax and spend all they want, and print and burn money all they want and do it whenever they want, but none of it can do what one engineer with a new or improved product can do to stimulate real economic growth.
Real growth comes from brilliant engineers who invent new products that make our lives easier or better; not bureaucratic, paper shuffling Democrats. The lesson here is to get rid of the Democrats at all costs and by any means necessary before they cause another great depression and then get themselves elected to end it with 10 years of preposterous monetary policy guessing, and absurd tax and spend programs, following by a world war.
Empirically speaking, any lay person can wonder intelligently about the stimulative value of $150 Billion in deficit spending, i.e., new Federal spending of $150 Billion without new taxes of that amount. After all, the Federal Gov't does a lot of spending without raising taxes. If fact, it is $9.2 Trillion in debt because of doing exactly that. If the concept made sense, $9.2 Trillion in extra spending or pump priming, as liberals like to call it, should have over stimulated the economy to the point where everyone became a millionaire and then died from complete exhaustion, but oddly all it seems to have done is recess the economy? Any household that managed its' affairs the way the Federal Gov't does would suffer the same fate. A monkey knows this, but not a Democrat!
It is true, however, that if the government prints money, lowers interest rates, and cuts taxes for the housing industry, for example, they can stimulate that particular industry tremendously, as we have all recently seen, but, most importantly, it is a destructive stimulation. The easy money given to the housing industry was taxed from other industries that then are depressed by the exact amount the housing industry is stimulated. There can be no net benefit. Similarly, if they print money or lower interest rates for the housing industry, the rate of home construction will expand dramatically. But, when the printing press or tax rebate is turned off the artificial growth is exposed as such, and the industry contracts by the exact amount of false money pumped into it.
That excess easy money then circulates concentrically to the entire economy where it in turn stimulates more false growth that, similarly, suddenly ends in a painful contraction as the new money supply is exhausted. The final result is higher prices, for everyone, that absorb the expanded supply of money, and a depressed economy that must reorganize at great personal expense during and after the title wave of funny Democratic money that has swept through it in a boom and bust cycle.
All the false economic activity that must be painfully unwound reduces everyone's standard of living in the end. What the gov't should do is create a highly stable economic environment for engineers in which real growth can take place, through consistently low taxes, (no business taxation at all because it only distracts engineers and their managers), a highly restrictive Fed intervention policy, and, for God's sake, a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. That way, engineers, managers, and owners, would be free to work the magic which has caused the real economic growth that has lifted us from the stone age to the modern age. Democrats hate the notion of being so minimized by the importance of engineers and businessmen, and so we have a civic obligation to hate them too, at least in the voting booth. Republican politicians who must compromise with the dreaded Democrats, owing to an tragic error in the Constitution, or those Republicans who are temporarily corrupted by gov't power, can sometimes be forgiven.
Ted Baiamonte
bje1000@aol.com
The Intellectual Republican
th205
1.18.2008
Economist, Ph.D., Nobel Prize, Millions Dead
Muhammad Yunus (economist,Ph.D, Nobel Laureate) is the toast of the international, liberal, anti-poverty, jet set these days. He is primarily associated with the concept of micro financing. Micro financing or lending is very simple: you give a tiny loan with interest of 18-60% (in the case of the Yunus bank anyway), of a few dollars each to poor women (men don't pay back the loans, he says) who use it for some practical, sustainable, business related purpose. The loan is repaid, at which time another loan(s) can be made. Presto chango, in a little time everyone is a greedy, for profit capitalist, and poverty is finally vanquished after all those very sad and deadly centuries?
It does sound too good to be true, doesn't it? And, of course, money lending has been around since money was invented; so you do have to wonder what, if anything, is new about micro financing? If fact, micro lending has captured the liberal imagination for simplistic new schemes so well that there are now websites that make it possible for everyone to hookup with impoverished people all around the world to make micro to them. It seems poverty must surely be on the run now!
Yunus loves to talk about how he got the idea from greedy, evil loan sharks who came before him? He does not say why competitor loan sharks with lower rates did not emerge until profits were driven down to near zero and interest rates to competitive levels? Most likely this happened, if it did happen, because restrictive gov't banking regulations were so onerous that only illegal loan shark operations could afford to operate, and then only by gouging the desperately poor with usurious rates.
One thing is certain: Yunus will not use the word capitalism to describe micro financing. He has a better idea and he has that in common with Mussolini (hero to American Progressives before he sided with Hitler), Hitler, Stalin (another hero to American Progressives before 30 million dead bodies were discovered), and Mao. Had those fine gentleman been obsessed with capitalism (voluntary economic interactions) rather than their deadly schemes, 200 million people would not have been murdered. Not coincidentally, the self- described progressive, Hillary Clinton, has described unregulated capitalism as, "the most dangerous thing in the world".
It would seem they all hate capitalism because they hate to see free people engaged in voluntary economic exchanges to get what they think is best for themselves. Liberals prefer to control the process because free people are considered too stupid to know what they should really want and how to get it, or, perhaps it's just that people like Hillary want and need power so very badly that they will adopt any new rationale to get it? Hillary and the generally recreant Democrats want you to have what they want because they know better than you, and let's not forget, they know better because, well, they are, frankly, quite superior to you, or so they love to think.
Of course, every would-be dictator since the dawn of time needs to disambiguate a little with a good new name for what they propose so their scheme won't be confused with the last anti capitalist scheme that killed or impoverished millions. Yunus is greeted as the latest liberal hero for his new scheme: "social business". A social business (his bank for example) is a business that sells a product he likes. It may or may not make a profit. To him, and his compatriots throughout all of human history, it is obvious that people are too stupid to know what they need and so they need to be governed or led. If Yunus or other intelligent business people then provide what people actually need, they are thought to be saintly folks who are conducting a "social business." But, if a business makes and sells only what people want and can afford to buy, rather than what socially enlightened governors and owners want to make and sell, those businesses are anti-social and "for profit" businesses.
It's perfectly anti-American isn't it? It assumes freedom doesn't work and elite gov't or social power does, despite the obvious fact that world economic history amounted to virtually nothing for century after century until political freedom (Republican, constitutional democracy) and economic democracy (capitalism) were discovered, primarily, by Americans in the early 19th Century? Why bother with the obvious lessons of history that conservatives conserve so much when you have a huge ego that compels your need for personal power and a great new liberal rationale with which to achieve it?
Anyway, after the anti-capitalist, social business advocates determine what goods and services should be offered to the blind, dumb masses they then want those businesses, or gov't, to limit the ultimate evil, i.e., profits. This is a step forward, though, in that many modern would-be dictators realize that despite their genius they don't have the genius to successfully own and operate a business, let alone an entire economy. But, what their genius does allow them to do is tell the businesses what to make for the social good, and to then tax the profits with which they can then do even more social good. It sounds like communist love would be bursting out everywhere doesn't it? And, this of course all assumes they have enough time, before they are compelled to make war on their neighboring countries so those countries too can share the benefits of their social genius. Limited time is the real conundrum that all anti- capitalist dictators face, and rather quickly too it seems. Their megalomania inherently tears them between social work at home and social work for the entire world. This is the liberal egomaniac's dilemma that has shaped much of human history.
The anti-profit cancer is now deeply ingrained, tragically, even in Republican America. Just the other night a woman was telling me about the obscene profits the evil drug companies were making and the concomitant need that creates to socialize American medicine. When I told her I have owned one of the biggest drug companies for years and am losing money, she didn't respond? When I asked her why she doesn't buy stock and then give the obscene profits, to which she would then be entitled, away for social uses, she didn't seem interested? Nor did she seem to care about what any first year economics student knows, namely, that in a capitalist economy profits are ultimately "zero" because big profits attract big, lower priced, competition.
If we take the Yunus bank concept further we see that the actual value of profit is clear to both the borrower, lender, and investor. If one bank makes a profit because it loans to people who pay back the loans, they are doing a social good just as any successful commercial bank does. If another makes no profit or loses money because it makes loans to people who run failed enterprises, they are not doing a social good by making possible failed or non sustainable commercial enterprises. They are creating more poverty by wasting money and the resources the money buys by not deploying them in a profitable and sustainable way that makes paying the loan back possible so more loans can then be made.
An investor who wants to do the most real social good will invest in and enable the bank that does the most social good as determined by profit. Profit is not evil, it is the way we learn where to invest our limited supply of money in sustainable economic enterprises that improve our standard of living. If we allocate limited capital according to profits we all get richer, if we let gov't geniuses guess at where to invest our money or if we individually invest without regard to profit, we all get poorer. Profit oriented capital allocation is the key to general wealth and prosperity. But still, profit is greed and evil to Yunus, Hillary, and all the others before them, because it doesn't need them at all. Profit safely distributes power into the hands of millions of free buyers, sellers, and investors, rather than concentrates it in the totalitarian hands of liberal gov't schemers or social entrepreneurs who have decimated so much of human history.
On the positive side Yunus does express skepticism about gov't anti-poverty efforts as inefficient, ineffective, and bureaucratic compared to his bank's relatively capitalistic efforts. He's equally skeptical about ego and tax driven charities and philanthropies that don't seem to create profitable, sustainable businesses any better than gov'ts. Also, he correctly points out that a dollar given in charity is no more sustainable than a pound of food given in charity.
So while you have to give him some credit for seeing that loans, charity, gifts, welfare, and philanthropy must be paid back to keep the process of economic development going, you have to wonder why his bank depends, mostly, on many forms of charity to keep itself going, even while charging 18-60% interest and claiming a 95-98% payback rate? Also, you have to wonder why he says that his semi capitalist "new idea" bank has lifted Bangladesh out of poverty when the evidence from, for example, the 1995-2000 period is just not there. Click here: Table 2.5 Poverty. It seems that pure capitalism is still the only perfect and obvious solution to the poverty problem that kills thousands each and every day, but that Adam Smith's invisible capitalist hand is indeed invisible to all except American Republicans who then are the last best hope on earth for poor, dying human beings.
Ted Baiamonte
bje1000@aol.com th511
It does sound too good to be true, doesn't it? And, of course, money lending has been around since money was invented; so you do have to wonder what, if anything, is new about micro financing? If fact, micro lending has captured the liberal imagination for simplistic new schemes so well that there are now websites that make it possible for everyone to hookup with impoverished people all around the world to make micro to them. It seems poverty must surely be on the run now!
Yunus loves to talk about how he got the idea from greedy, evil loan sharks who came before him? He does not say why competitor loan sharks with lower rates did not emerge until profits were driven down to near zero and interest rates to competitive levels? Most likely this happened, if it did happen, because restrictive gov't banking regulations were so onerous that only illegal loan shark operations could afford to operate, and then only by gouging the desperately poor with usurious rates.
One thing is certain: Yunus will not use the word capitalism to describe micro financing. He has a better idea and he has that in common with Mussolini (hero to American Progressives before he sided with Hitler), Hitler, Stalin (another hero to American Progressives before 30 million dead bodies were discovered), and Mao. Had those fine gentleman been obsessed with capitalism (voluntary economic interactions) rather than their deadly schemes, 200 million people would not have been murdered. Not coincidentally, the self- described progressive, Hillary Clinton, has described unregulated capitalism as, "the most dangerous thing in the world".
It would seem they all hate capitalism because they hate to see free people engaged in voluntary economic exchanges to get what they think is best for themselves. Liberals prefer to control the process because free people are considered too stupid to know what they should really want and how to get it, or, perhaps it's just that people like Hillary want and need power so very badly that they will adopt any new rationale to get it? Hillary and the generally recreant Democrats want you to have what they want because they know better than you, and let's not forget, they know better because, well, they are, frankly, quite superior to you, or so they love to think.
Of course, every would-be dictator since the dawn of time needs to disambiguate a little with a good new name for what they propose so their scheme won't be confused with the last anti capitalist scheme that killed or impoverished millions. Yunus is greeted as the latest liberal hero for his new scheme: "social business". A social business (his bank for example) is a business that sells a product he likes. It may or may not make a profit. To him, and his compatriots throughout all of human history, it is obvious that people are too stupid to know what they need and so they need to be governed or led. If Yunus or other intelligent business people then provide what people actually need, they are thought to be saintly folks who are conducting a "social business." But, if a business makes and sells only what people want and can afford to buy, rather than what socially enlightened governors and owners want to make and sell, those businesses are anti-social and "for profit" businesses.
It's perfectly anti-American isn't it? It assumes freedom doesn't work and elite gov't or social power does, despite the obvious fact that world economic history amounted to virtually nothing for century after century until political freedom (Republican, constitutional democracy) and economic democracy (capitalism) were discovered, primarily, by Americans in the early 19th Century? Why bother with the obvious lessons of history that conservatives conserve so much when you have a huge ego that compels your need for personal power and a great new liberal rationale with which to achieve it?
Anyway, after the anti-capitalist, social business advocates determine what goods and services should be offered to the blind, dumb masses they then want those businesses, or gov't, to limit the ultimate evil, i.e., profits. This is a step forward, though, in that many modern would-be dictators realize that despite their genius they don't have the genius to successfully own and operate a business, let alone an entire economy. But, what their genius does allow them to do is tell the businesses what to make for the social good, and to then tax the profits with which they can then do even more social good. It sounds like communist love would be bursting out everywhere doesn't it? And, this of course all assumes they have enough time, before they are compelled to make war on their neighboring countries so those countries too can share the benefits of their social genius. Limited time is the real conundrum that all anti- capitalist dictators face, and rather quickly too it seems. Their megalomania inherently tears them between social work at home and social work for the entire world. This is the liberal egomaniac's dilemma that has shaped much of human history.
The anti-profit cancer is now deeply ingrained, tragically, even in Republican America. Just the other night a woman was telling me about the obscene profits the evil drug companies were making and the concomitant need that creates to socialize American medicine. When I told her I have owned one of the biggest drug companies for years and am losing money, she didn't respond? When I asked her why she doesn't buy stock and then give the obscene profits, to which she would then be entitled, away for social uses, she didn't seem interested? Nor did she seem to care about what any first year economics student knows, namely, that in a capitalist economy profits are ultimately "zero" because big profits attract big, lower priced, competition.
If we take the Yunus bank concept further we see that the actual value of profit is clear to both the borrower, lender, and investor. If one bank makes a profit because it loans to people who pay back the loans, they are doing a social good just as any successful commercial bank does. If another makes no profit or loses money because it makes loans to people who run failed enterprises, they are not doing a social good by making possible failed or non sustainable commercial enterprises. They are creating more poverty by wasting money and the resources the money buys by not deploying them in a profitable and sustainable way that makes paying the loan back possible so more loans can then be made.
An investor who wants to do the most real social good will invest in and enable the bank that does the most social good as determined by profit. Profit is not evil, it is the way we learn where to invest our limited supply of money in sustainable economic enterprises that improve our standard of living. If we allocate limited capital according to profits we all get richer, if we let gov't geniuses guess at where to invest our money or if we individually invest without regard to profit, we all get poorer. Profit oriented capital allocation is the key to general wealth and prosperity. But still, profit is greed and evil to Yunus, Hillary, and all the others before them, because it doesn't need them at all. Profit safely distributes power into the hands of millions of free buyers, sellers, and investors, rather than concentrates it in the totalitarian hands of liberal gov't schemers or social entrepreneurs who have decimated so much of human history.
On the positive side Yunus does express skepticism about gov't anti-poverty efforts as inefficient, ineffective, and bureaucratic compared to his bank's relatively capitalistic efforts. He's equally skeptical about ego and tax driven charities and philanthropies that don't seem to create profitable, sustainable businesses any better than gov'ts. Also, he correctly points out that a dollar given in charity is no more sustainable than a pound of food given in charity.
So while you have to give him some credit for seeing that loans, charity, gifts, welfare, and philanthropy must be paid back to keep the process of economic development going, you have to wonder why his bank depends, mostly, on many forms of charity to keep itself going, even while charging 18-60% interest and claiming a 95-98% payback rate? Also, you have to wonder why he says that his semi capitalist "new idea" bank has lifted Bangladesh out of poverty when the evidence from, for example, the 1995-2000 period is just not there. Click here: Table 2.5 Poverty. It seems that pure capitalism is still the only perfect and obvious solution to the poverty problem that kills thousands each and every day, but that Adam Smith's invisible capitalist hand is indeed invisible to all except American Republicans who then are the last best hope on earth for poor, dying human beings.
Ted Baiamonte
bje1000@aol.com th511
1.06.2008
The Problem With Obama: He's Black
The pundits have a million explanations to explain why Obama is winning (mostly centering around the notion that, in the wake of the Iraq debacle, he offers more "hope" and "change" than Hillary while being more electable than Kucinich, who offers real change, if not hope), but few can tell you the truth in our racially charged, embarrassed, and scared society. The truth is: he won because he's black. A white guy with two years experience would be a joke; this is patently, painfully, and obviously obvious to anyone with the slightest interest in reality.
But, the bumptious Obama is a very special kind of black man too. He is not like Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, or Al Sharpton. He does not rub white America's nose in its' racist past; rather he says, "if you'll accept me as a black man, with my reassuringly white facial features and speech patterns, I wont bring up your history of racism about which you feel so guilty and your heart bleeds so compassionately. It's a reasonable bargain too, but only if you're mostly concerned about healing racial wounds from other centuries that may or may not exist.
Of course, if you're mostly concerned with an economy that's heading toward recession, the loss of American business hegemony, more gov't and less freedom, skyrocketing health costs, greeting life with abortion rather than love, and, oh yes, Muslin fanatics who have vowed to kill 20 million of us, then the sweet talking, Harvard educated, black kid lawyer with two years experience seems like a very silly choice indeed.
One can't help having one's complacency and smugness disturbed by Max Rodenbeck's words: "Within a mere 15 years of the Prophet Muhammad's death his desert followers had conquered all the centers of civilization. They has erased a great and enduring regional power, Persia; reduced its brilliant rival, Byzantium, to a rump state; and carved from their territories an empire as vast as that as Rome at its height. Within 100 years, Muslim armies were harrying the frontiers of Tang dynasty China in the east, while 5,000 miles to the west, they had charged across Spain to clash with the Merovingian princes of what is now France. The triumph was not just military"
Against this backdrop you have our contumacious modern Democrats who hate America because they lack the intelligence to understand it, and who would have sold it to the Communists, had Republicans not stopped them. Now, surprise, the Democrats are weak on terrorism too, seeing it mostly as a manifestation of American cultural, economic , and military imperialism. We can only pray, hopelessly, that Obama wants to talk to modern Iran the way Muhammad wanted to talk to ancient Persia.
Republicans, those who are willing to be honest anyway, of course are hoping that Obama does win the Democratic nomination by just being black and, let's not forget, by selling the most laughably trite of political shibboleths,"hope" and "change" to the Democratic monkey masses as a cri de cœur. It seems the emotive, Democratic, liberal heart bleeds uncontrollably over past racism with much the same maturity as a child who accidentally finds an injured animal on the sidewalk while walking home from kindergarten.
If the Democrats want to take the Obama accident home to their convention, that's great for Republicans, most of whom realize that Welfare, for example, the most obvious manifestation of the Democratic bleeding heart, was ended 10 years ago because it amounted to a near genocide against the very blacks it was intended to help, starting 45 years ago, for something that largely happened in yet another previous century.
The inherent, hair trigger racism embodied in the Obama campaign presents a curious irony for Republicans. Obama, in desperation , has even implied that America's first black President ( a.k a. Bill Clinton) is racist for innocuously dismissing his candidacy as a "fairy tale", while white candidates say things a thousand times worse about each other and no one so much as bats an eyelid. Obama even went on to imply that Hillary too was racist for not being perfectly correct( impossible of course) about the relative importance of MLK and LBJ in the prelude to, and passage of, The Civil Rights Act of 1964. Republicans are praying the incestuous, racial, fratricidal, Democratic immaturity carries Obama all the way to the nomination of his very distinguished party, at which point they can gingerly expose Obama's irrelevancy in a manner that, hopefully, won't be seen as exploitative or racist.
Republicans can only hope for the self-discipline necessary to keep their powder dry until the irrelevancy of events from past centuries that is engendered by Obama's skin color becomes apparent to the general electorate, after his nomination. Obama is a Rorschach test for Democrats who evokes the worst in them, but a man for whom Republicans have a surreptitious and strategic love. Only he can beguile the Democratic bleeding heart to make it swoon so suicidally.
To make matters worse, not only does Obama shamelessly and demigocially appeal to the bleeding heart Democrat with his air headed message of "hope" and "change", he also appeals to the anti-American collectivist side of the Democratic personality. Republicans want to be free (it has something to do with the American Revolution) while Democrats hate the freedom for which America stands, and so want to be led by a powerful government led by a powerful leader. Accordingly, you have the wave of pre-pubescent Hanna Montana hysteria ushering Obama through Iowa and New Hampshire. This aspect of Obama's appeal is absolutely fine, except that it too is profoundly anti- American.
Ted Baiamonte
bje1000@aol.com
m416
But, the bumptious Obama is a very special kind of black man too. He is not like Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, or Al Sharpton. He does not rub white America's nose in its' racist past; rather he says, "if you'll accept me as a black man, with my reassuringly white facial features and speech patterns, I wont bring up your history of racism about which you feel so guilty and your heart bleeds so compassionately. It's a reasonable bargain too, but only if you're mostly concerned about healing racial wounds from other centuries that may or may not exist.
Of course, if you're mostly concerned with an economy that's heading toward recession, the loss of American business hegemony, more gov't and less freedom, skyrocketing health costs, greeting life with abortion rather than love, and, oh yes, Muslin fanatics who have vowed to kill 20 million of us, then the sweet talking, Harvard educated, black kid lawyer with two years experience seems like a very silly choice indeed.
One can't help having one's complacency and smugness disturbed by Max Rodenbeck's words: "Within a mere 15 years of the Prophet Muhammad's death his desert followers had conquered all the centers of civilization. They has erased a great and enduring regional power, Persia; reduced its brilliant rival, Byzantium, to a rump state; and carved from their territories an empire as vast as that as Rome at its height. Within 100 years, Muslim armies were harrying the frontiers of Tang dynasty China in the east, while 5,000 miles to the west, they had charged across Spain to clash with the Merovingian princes of what is now France. The triumph was not just military"
Against this backdrop you have our contumacious modern Democrats who hate America because they lack the intelligence to understand it, and who would have sold it to the Communists, had Republicans not stopped them. Now, surprise, the Democrats are weak on terrorism too, seeing it mostly as a manifestation of American cultural, economic , and military imperialism. We can only pray, hopelessly, that Obama wants to talk to modern Iran the way Muhammad wanted to talk to ancient Persia.
Republicans, those who are willing to be honest anyway, of course are hoping that Obama does win the Democratic nomination by just being black and, let's not forget, by selling the most laughably trite of political shibboleths,"hope" and "change" to the Democratic monkey masses as a cri de cœur. It seems the emotive, Democratic, liberal heart bleeds uncontrollably over past racism with much the same maturity as a child who accidentally finds an injured animal on the sidewalk while walking home from kindergarten.
If the Democrats want to take the Obama accident home to their convention, that's great for Republicans, most of whom realize that Welfare, for example, the most obvious manifestation of the Democratic bleeding heart, was ended 10 years ago because it amounted to a near genocide against the very blacks it was intended to help, starting 45 years ago, for something that largely happened in yet another previous century.
The inherent, hair trigger racism embodied in the Obama campaign presents a curious irony for Republicans. Obama, in desperation , has even implied that America's first black President ( a.k a. Bill Clinton) is racist for innocuously dismissing his candidacy as a "fairy tale", while white candidates say things a thousand times worse about each other and no one so much as bats an eyelid. Obama even went on to imply that Hillary too was racist for not being perfectly correct( impossible of course) about the relative importance of MLK and LBJ in the prelude to, and passage of, The Civil Rights Act of 1964. Republicans are praying the incestuous, racial, fratricidal, Democratic immaturity carries Obama all the way to the nomination of his very distinguished party, at which point they can gingerly expose Obama's irrelevancy in a manner that, hopefully, won't be seen as exploitative or racist.
Republicans can only hope for the self-discipline necessary to keep their powder dry until the irrelevancy of events from past centuries that is engendered by Obama's skin color becomes apparent to the general electorate, after his nomination. Obama is a Rorschach test for Democrats who evokes the worst in them, but a man for whom Republicans have a surreptitious and strategic love. Only he can beguile the Democratic bleeding heart to make it swoon so suicidally.
To make matters worse, not only does Obama shamelessly and demigocially appeal to the bleeding heart Democrat with his air headed message of "hope" and "change", he also appeals to the anti-American collectivist side of the Democratic personality. Republicans want to be free (it has something to do with the American Revolution) while Democrats hate the freedom for which America stands, and so want to be led by a powerful government led by a powerful leader. Accordingly, you have the wave of pre-pubescent Hanna Montana hysteria ushering Obama through Iowa and New Hampshire. This aspect of Obama's appeal is absolutely fine, except that it too is profoundly anti- American.
Ted Baiamonte
bje1000@aol.com
m416
12.05.2007
The Democrats Have A Great Point Too?
To be honest, you never really hear the Democrats' side of the story much because there really isn't much of one. You do, though, learn a lot from looking for what should be there, but clearly is not. At best, Democrats seem to congeal around the notion of a Santa Claus gov't that can provide wonderful presents for everyone, or at least to those anointed ones who receive them. You don't hear them discuss the rationale for this much, in large part, because it quickly becomes intuitively obvious, even to them, that everyone will eventually want to receive rather than give the presents. And worse, their approach encourages electoral larceny, i.e., voting to get in the group that receives the presents. It does not encourage voting for the common good. Failing that, outright civil war may erupt, again, over who gets or gives the presents.
The Republican theory is the exact opposite, of course. In their capitalist, and coercion free system you are not entitled to a present worth even one penny until you first produce a good or service that a saintly consumer is freely willing to buy, before he buys any other product available in the entire world with his limited funds. Every human being, then, is required as a matter of basic culture to give, long before he or she has the ability to receive. We learn that giving comes first; that it alone is the cherished, primary value on which cultural life depends.
If you doubt what business is, then start a business. You will give and give long before you ever receive. If you haven't got a competitive world class present to offer, then quickly get down on your knees to thank and reward those who do. The products of Republican businesses sustain, improve, and define your standard of living, make possible and support your gov't and to a large extent, your entire life, whether you know it or not. What they give and teach is love and prosperity rather than the class warfare and poverty Democratic Santa Claus gov't inevitably has wrought.
Nevertheless, a particularly odd but thoughtful Democrat will sometimes see the need to rationalize his Santa Claus theory of gov't rather than confront the idea that his mere feelings alone may not be an adequate thing on which to base gov't. Marcos Moulitas is such a queer Democrat. He is a lawyer (seven years of education after high school) and publisher of the Daily Kos which is reportedly read or contributed to by 500,000 lost souls every week. He gets book contracts from NYC publishers, writes for national MSM magazines, and holds a yearly convention at which Democratic Presidential hopefuls appear. By any standards he should be among the best qualified to explain the so called, "Democratic philosophy". But of course a man who, bizarrely, describes himself as a libertarian Democrat can not.
Democrats don't think; they don't debate, and they don't come by their girly man Santa Claus feelings through any dialectical process. They merely feel your pain, and they feel really really good about feeling your pain. In fact, they feel so morally superior you might call them morality bigots or feelings bigots.
Witness how they are often violent toward Republican speakers, want to eliminate Republican talk radio, rely on personal smears, and hate Fox News. The Fox prime time line up , for example, starts with a full hour of news (versus 30 minutes for the MSM) which liberals hate viscerally on purely anti intellectual grounds. The Fox News ends with 20 minutes of commentary that features at least one liberal. Bill O'Reilly is next. His most common line occurs when he turns to a liberal and says, "where am I going wrong". Next is Hannity and Combs which features one liberal and one conservative host. Democrats hate Fox because it is Socratic and intellectual. It relies on organized thinking and a debate process, as does our very conservative legal system, at least the part of it organized to decipher the truth. Democrats hate Fox with extreme prejudice because the very idea of ideas and thinking suggests to them that their mere Santa Claus feeling are inadequate or even stupid. Instead, they love the MSM which has always presented a soothing drumbeat of Santa Claus news which the electorate has blindly followed over the long term.
Anyway, here's what the angry, child like, net roots superhero, Marcos Moulitas, said in a very odd article that easily passed through the hands of increasingly America hating left wing editors at Newsweek magazine: "In his first Inaugural Address, Ronald Reagan remarked that, 'government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.' While the quip has provided Republicans with a cheap slogan for two decades, the philosophy behind it is beginning to box them in."
Notice how he pretended or lied that the Republican, Jeffersonian philosophy of freedom from gov't had been around for only two decades, when a little education, integrity, or intelligence would have required that he point out freedom from gov't had been the basis on which the American Revolution was fought, and the country governed for the last 200 years! Pretending that his treasonous, big gov't, socialist, Santa Claus theory is not anti-American, and that the issue about gov't size is just a parochial squabble of the last 20 years, is completely disingenuous, to say the very least. Actually it's a Joseph Goebbels, propagandistic lie designed to hide American History from Americans. But wait, it can't be that either because you have to know American history before you can lie about it.
Tragically, the Democrats run the gov't schools which most Americans attend these days; so here is a brief refresher course on what Jefferson, our most significant framer, actually and piquantly said about the battle between freedom and gov't that has always defined human history, and about freedom from the very limited gov't he created and entrusted to us:
-That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.
-The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
-The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
-A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor (read-taxes) and bread it has earned -- this is the sum of good government.
-Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
-History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.
-I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.
-I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
-My reading of history convinces me that bad government results from too much government.
-Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.
-Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
-The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.
-Most bad government has grown out of too much government.
-Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.
-Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
-I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.
-The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.
-Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.
-Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.
-I do verily believe that a single, consolidated government would become the most corrupt government on the earth.
Isn't it incredible that without seeing the 100 million gov't murders in the 20th Century, the gov't induced Great Depression and New Deal, and the Welfare hip-hop near genocide begun in 1960s, that Jefferson knew to abjure gov't, but despite having seen all that death and destruction, Moulitas would still not have the ability to understand freedom, Jefferson or America? But then again, despite all the endless Daily Kos garrulity, that's still the very definition of a Democrat isn't it? That's why we wish they'd all go to Cuba where they could have all the gov't, injustice, and poverty they want.
Ted Baiamonte
bje1000@aol.com
s510
The Republican theory is the exact opposite, of course. In their capitalist, and coercion free system you are not entitled to a present worth even one penny until you first produce a good or service that a saintly consumer is freely willing to buy, before he buys any other product available in the entire world with his limited funds. Every human being, then, is required as a matter of basic culture to give, long before he or she has the ability to receive. We learn that giving comes first; that it alone is the cherished, primary value on which cultural life depends.
If you doubt what business is, then start a business. You will give and give long before you ever receive. If you haven't got a competitive world class present to offer, then quickly get down on your knees to thank and reward those who do. The products of Republican businesses sustain, improve, and define your standard of living, make possible and support your gov't and to a large extent, your entire life, whether you know it or not. What they give and teach is love and prosperity rather than the class warfare and poverty Democratic Santa Claus gov't inevitably has wrought.
Nevertheless, a particularly odd but thoughtful Democrat will sometimes see the need to rationalize his Santa Claus theory of gov't rather than confront the idea that his mere feelings alone may not be an adequate thing on which to base gov't. Marcos Moulitas is such a queer Democrat. He is a lawyer (seven years of education after high school) and publisher of the Daily Kos which is reportedly read or contributed to by 500,000 lost souls every week. He gets book contracts from NYC publishers, writes for national MSM magazines, and holds a yearly convention at which Democratic Presidential hopefuls appear. By any standards he should be among the best qualified to explain the so called, "Democratic philosophy". But of course a man who, bizarrely, describes himself as a libertarian Democrat can not.
Democrats don't think; they don't debate, and they don't come by their girly man Santa Claus feelings through any dialectical process. They merely feel your pain, and they feel really really good about feeling your pain. In fact, they feel so morally superior you might call them morality bigots or feelings bigots.
Witness how they are often violent toward Republican speakers, want to eliminate Republican talk radio, rely on personal smears, and hate Fox News. The Fox prime time line up , for example, starts with a full hour of news (versus 30 minutes for the MSM) which liberals hate viscerally on purely anti intellectual grounds. The Fox News ends with 20 minutes of commentary that features at least one liberal. Bill O'Reilly is next. His most common line occurs when he turns to a liberal and says, "where am I going wrong". Next is Hannity and Combs which features one liberal and one conservative host. Democrats hate Fox because it is Socratic and intellectual. It relies on organized thinking and a debate process, as does our very conservative legal system, at least the part of it organized to decipher the truth. Democrats hate Fox with extreme prejudice because the very idea of ideas and thinking suggests to them that their mere Santa Claus feeling are inadequate or even stupid. Instead, they love the MSM which has always presented a soothing drumbeat of Santa Claus news which the electorate has blindly followed over the long term.
Anyway, here's what the angry, child like, net roots superhero, Marcos Moulitas, said in a very odd article that easily passed through the hands of increasingly America hating left wing editors at Newsweek magazine: "In his first Inaugural Address, Ronald Reagan remarked that, 'government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.' While the quip has provided Republicans with a cheap slogan for two decades, the philosophy behind it is beginning to box them in."
Notice how he pretended or lied that the Republican, Jeffersonian philosophy of freedom from gov't had been around for only two decades, when a little education, integrity, or intelligence would have required that he point out freedom from gov't had been the basis on which the American Revolution was fought, and the country governed for the last 200 years! Pretending that his treasonous, big gov't, socialist, Santa Claus theory is not anti-American, and that the issue about gov't size is just a parochial squabble of the last 20 years, is completely disingenuous, to say the very least. Actually it's a Joseph Goebbels, propagandistic lie designed to hide American History from Americans. But wait, it can't be that either because you have to know American history before you can lie about it.
Tragically, the Democrats run the gov't schools which most Americans attend these days; so here is a brief refresher course on what Jefferson, our most significant framer, actually and piquantly said about the battle between freedom and gov't that has always defined human history, and about freedom from the very limited gov't he created and entrusted to us:
-That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.
-The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
-The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
-A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor (read-taxes) and bread it has earned -- this is the sum of good government.
-Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
-History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.
-I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.
-I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
-My reading of history convinces me that bad government results from too much government.
-Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.
-Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
-The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.
-Most bad government has grown out of too much government.
-Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.
-Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
-I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.
-The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.
-Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.
-Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.
-I do verily believe that a single, consolidated government would become the most corrupt government on the earth.
Isn't it incredible that without seeing the 100 million gov't murders in the 20th Century, the gov't induced Great Depression and New Deal, and the Welfare hip-hop near genocide begun in 1960s, that Jefferson knew to abjure gov't, but despite having seen all that death and destruction, Moulitas would still not have the ability to understand freedom, Jefferson or America? But then again, despite all the endless Daily Kos garrulity, that's still the very definition of a Democrat isn't it? That's why we wish they'd all go to Cuba where they could have all the gov't, injustice, and poverty they want.
Ted Baiamonte
bje1000@aol.com
s510
11.27.2007
Hillary as Communist
Sadly, it is considered impolite and even ignorant to call Hillary and the Democrats, communists, but, sadly, if not tragically, it makes good sense. You might say too, if you like to split hairs a little, that she is a socialist since she is openly supporting what is commonly referred to as socialized medicine. Neither she nor the MSN (main stream media) will dispute the label, or explain why, if the arguments apply to medicine, they don't apply equally to socializing the entire economy. In fact, it's not mentioned at all for one simple reason: the Democrats and the MSM have done an excellent job of undermining the basic American value of freedom, from gov't.
Also, then, what can't be mentioned is that Marx conceived of socialism as a prelude to communism. Marx did not conceive of socialism in isolation, but rather as a state evolving or maturing into Communism, and Hillary can not conceive of one tax and spend gov't program not growing into the next one with no end or goal in sight, short of Marxism, though it has to be unstated in America, the land of the free. Even if Hillary were not technically an ideological communist, her political party and the electoral demands derived thereof would inevitably draw her in that direction. It seems failed tax and spend programs, in the Democratic nether world anyway, apparently create the need for more, rather than less, tax and spend programs with no end ever in sight. This has gone on through 200 years of winning elections and dreaming up a constant stream of new programs, and presumably will go on until a Democratic gov't controls absolutely everything, which would be, coincidentally, a lot like, surprise, communism.
Western Civilization, from ancient Greek democracy on, was about the growth of freedom or liberty from gov't. American Republicans represented the culmination of that process which began in ancient Greece, inched forward to the divine right of kings as redefined in the Magna Carta Libertatum, and was culminated by the Jeffersonian Republicans in the second American revolution of 1800. From 1800, all the way forward to the Great Depression the trend continued toward freedom continued, at which point FDR, who ran as a conservative, adopted Marxists solutions out of desperation and ignorance that, to be fair, was shared by some Republicans of that era.
FDR's friends went to Stalinist Russia and came back to pronounce: "I have seen the future and it works" and they have gone down in Democratic history as heroes despite extending Great Depression for 10 years (leading to world war) with insane communist-like programs. FDR called Stalin(communist killer of 40 million ) Uncle Joe, and said ,"I wish I had his powers". Democrats spied for Communists; some gave nuclear secrets to them, and were condignly hung. Communists in America voted for Democrats when there were no explicit communists to vote for. The KGB recruited among the liberals in Washington when it wanted spies. A look at the Socialist party Platform of the 1920's tells you that they have long since gotten everything they dreamed of then. And still, we now have Hillary who still openly loves gov't, and still wants far more tax and spend gov't than the socialists of the 1920's? She hides it all, in the land of the free, by calling herself a progressive (code word for communist last used in Presidential politics by Henry Wallace, a secret communist ). Despite being American, she seemingly could care less about freedom from Kings, Queens, Communists, or progressive gov't in general.
Hillary seemingly is as devoted to herself and as megalomaniacal as the Kings, Queens, and Communists, before her. The latest biography shows Sister Frigidaire (her nick name in High School) helping husband Bill, the day after his confession, write a speech to explain his life long adultery to the American people. The continuous affairs didn't matter much to Hillary it seemed. Her first icy response, according to the latest biographies, reportedly was, "how are you going to explain this to them" as if to say, "what is all important here is that you explain away our family values to the stupid American people so I can impart our communist "values" to them when I'm their President.
Hillary went to college as a Goldwater Republican in the 60's. As if to show her great scholarly and independent mind, she came out as a standard hippie flower child. There was no intellectual record or rationale, rather it seemed she had a very high IQ, a youthful sense that change was wonderful, (sort of the sentiments echoed in the Monkey's theme song of that era: "hey hey hey we're the Monkey's; we're the new generation and we've got something to say") and a megalomaniacal sense that she ought to be the one leading the latest political parade going by. By law school her horn rimmed glasses, hippie reputation had been locked in by a college commencement speech during which she said nothing more daring and intellectual than that Edward Brooke (a black Republican Senator) was not black enough for the changing times, and that the war against communism was wrong. Her exuberant coming of age metamorphosis precluded the suspicion that the Civil Rights/Welfare culture then would lead to today's liberal hip hop culture, or that state sponsored communism had produced far more genocide and poverty than justice and prosperity.
She followed up her trendy college metamorphosis in law school by editing the Yale Review of Law which was very supportive of the communist Black Panthers. She worked with the ACLU and, despite her denials, spent a summer getting close to the people while working for a communist law firm. The owner of that firms, Robert Treuhaft, has said about it, "anyone who went to college or law school would have known that our law firm was a communist law firm".
And now it seems little has changed. Not wizened the tiniest little bit by age or experience, she has, nevertheless, pulled off the ultimate sneak attack on America. She is the odds on favorite to become the next President; a President who will start by socializing 14% of the entire American economy, at which point no Republican paregoric may be retroactively effective. The only real question is, how far will she push America away from being America?
comments welcome: bje1000@aol.com
Ted Baiamonte
wed122
Also, then, what can't be mentioned is that Marx conceived of socialism as a prelude to communism. Marx did not conceive of socialism in isolation, but rather as a state evolving or maturing into Communism, and Hillary can not conceive of one tax and spend gov't program not growing into the next one with no end or goal in sight, short of Marxism, though it has to be unstated in America, the land of the free. Even if Hillary were not technically an ideological communist, her political party and the electoral demands derived thereof would inevitably draw her in that direction. It seems failed tax and spend programs, in the Democratic nether world anyway, apparently create the need for more, rather than less, tax and spend programs with no end ever in sight. This has gone on through 200 years of winning elections and dreaming up a constant stream of new programs, and presumably will go on until a Democratic gov't controls absolutely everything, which would be, coincidentally, a lot like, surprise, communism.
Western Civilization, from ancient Greek democracy on, was about the growth of freedom or liberty from gov't. American Republicans represented the culmination of that process which began in ancient Greece, inched forward to the divine right of kings as redefined in the Magna Carta Libertatum, and was culminated by the Jeffersonian Republicans in the second American revolution of 1800. From 1800, all the way forward to the Great Depression the trend continued toward freedom continued, at which point FDR, who ran as a conservative, adopted Marxists solutions out of desperation and ignorance that, to be fair, was shared by some Republicans of that era.
FDR's friends went to Stalinist Russia and came back to pronounce: "I have seen the future and it works" and they have gone down in Democratic history as heroes despite extending Great Depression for 10 years (leading to world war) with insane communist-like programs. FDR called Stalin(communist killer of 40 million ) Uncle Joe, and said ,"I wish I had his powers". Democrats spied for Communists; some gave nuclear secrets to them, and were condignly hung. Communists in America voted for Democrats when there were no explicit communists to vote for. The KGB recruited among the liberals in Washington when it wanted spies. A look at the Socialist party Platform of the 1920's tells you that they have long since gotten everything they dreamed of then. And still, we now have Hillary who still openly loves gov't, and still wants far more tax and spend gov't than the socialists of the 1920's? She hides it all, in the land of the free, by calling herself a progressive (code word for communist last used in Presidential politics by Henry Wallace, a secret communist ). Despite being American, she seemingly could care less about freedom from Kings, Queens, Communists, or progressive gov't in general.
Hillary seemingly is as devoted to herself and as megalomaniacal as the Kings, Queens, and Communists, before her. The latest biography shows Sister Frigidaire (her nick name in High School) helping husband Bill, the day after his confession, write a speech to explain his life long adultery to the American people. The continuous affairs didn't matter much to Hillary it seemed. Her first icy response, according to the latest biographies, reportedly was, "how are you going to explain this to them" as if to say, "what is all important here is that you explain away our family values to the stupid American people so I can impart our communist "values" to them when I'm their President.
Hillary went to college as a Goldwater Republican in the 60's. As if to show her great scholarly and independent mind, she came out as a standard hippie flower child. There was no intellectual record or rationale, rather it seemed she had a very high IQ, a youthful sense that change was wonderful, (sort of the sentiments echoed in the Monkey's theme song of that era: "hey hey hey we're the Monkey's; we're the new generation and we've got something to say") and a megalomaniacal sense that she ought to be the one leading the latest political parade going by. By law school her horn rimmed glasses, hippie reputation had been locked in by a college commencement speech during which she said nothing more daring and intellectual than that Edward Brooke (a black Republican Senator) was not black enough for the changing times, and that the war against communism was wrong. Her exuberant coming of age metamorphosis precluded the suspicion that the Civil Rights/Welfare culture then would lead to today's liberal hip hop culture, or that state sponsored communism had produced far more genocide and poverty than justice and prosperity.
She followed up her trendy college metamorphosis in law school by editing the Yale Review of Law which was very supportive of the communist Black Panthers. She worked with the ACLU and, despite her denials, spent a summer getting close to the people while working for a communist law firm. The owner of that firms, Robert Treuhaft, has said about it, "anyone who went to college or law school would have known that our law firm was a communist law firm".
And now it seems little has changed. Not wizened the tiniest little bit by age or experience, she has, nevertheless, pulled off the ultimate sneak attack on America. She is the odds on favorite to become the next President; a President who will start by socializing 14% of the entire American economy, at which point no Republican paregoric may be retroactively effective. The only real question is, how far will she push America away from being America?
comments welcome: bje1000@aol.com
Ted Baiamonte
wed122
11.07.2007
Democrats As Murderers
What does a responsible person do when the Zeitgeist has gotten to a point where it is rude or politically incorrect to suggest that Democrats are, in effect, murderers? Well, he could stop worrying about murder (and lesser but related criminal activities that have clogged our jails with 2.4 million Americans and created 20 times that many victims), reproach them but in a gentle way so as not to be offensive, or he could simply tell the truth. I think I'll.......tell the truth, and pray a Democrat will contact me to explain exactly why I am wrong. Sadly, though, the truth seems simple and inescapable: the murder rate in California was 345 in 1954 and today it is 3400 because of Democratic changes that Democrats have proudly introduced.
They say trendy California leads the nation, and this is apparently so. Since 1954 that makes 150,000 extra murders in California in the bold new progressive Democratic era, and that's just California. Nationwide, it's about 1.5 million extra American murders since the 1950's. Doesn't it make you wonder why the Democrats are so angry about 4000 dead Americans in Iraq?
But, perhaps it was really chance, the tooth fairy, or even the Girl Scouts, and not the purblind Democrats who have introduced us to the progressive murder era in which we now live so comfortably? One has to suspect it was the Democrats though, because they have largely gotten their way with the county on all the major social issues since the 50's. Here is the Democratic agenda for murder (murder, remember, being just one obvious consequence of long term Democratic rule) that began to take hold of Republican America in the 50's: welfare, feminism, liberal criminal justice, divorce, socialism, abortion, homosexuality, tolerance/multi- culturalism, and atheism.
1) Welfare - given to the woman so the husband was far less needed in the family. Relieved of his primary purpose in life, the husband left or was thrown out whereupon murder became a far more likely activity of choice. It should be no surprise that murderers are usually not married bread winners supporting a wife and children, rather, they are males disconnected from any evolutionary sense of meaning. Margaret Mead may have gotten one thing right, at least, when she said, "the main problem of civilization is what to do with men". It seems the anthropologically
disinclined Democrats had their own answer.
2) Feminism - worked perfectly with welfare to encourage or justify women who threw their husbands and lovers out or to encourage men to leave on their own. Perhaps the most quintessential feminist line from the most quintessential feminist was, " a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle". Poverty, gangs, broken homes, the death of romantic love, and murder, was one result .
3) Divorce- like welfare and feminism, divorce shot up out of nowhere, and not coincidentally dove tailed perfectly with the obvious exigencies of feminism and welfare. Divorce as a matter of legal formality became common, and "no fault," and so was thereby encouraged by the Democrats. No fault meant that society, after a one second Democratic disquisition, now considered a marriage contract null and void regardless of how one performed his or her marital duties under that contract. Life was about personal happiness rather than duty to family as the marital contract implied, and besides, children actually benefited from happy, rather than responsible parents, or so the trenchant Democratic argument went.
It would have been unseemly to list feminism and welfare as grounds for divorce, so they invented "irreconcilable differences", as if to say, "I just want to be happy and to hell with my duties to my children". Not surprisingly, women were plaintiffs in about 80% of divorces. Again, the family was attacked even though very few married men are murderers.
Second marriages (the triumph of hope over experience) are shorter than first marriages so it's by no means clear what was accomplished, by the divorce, feminism, welfare revolution, that balanced out the sky rocketing murder rate. What is clear is that Republicans run stronger among married people. ("The Second Civil War"-Brownstein)
4)Criminal Justice- With welfare, feminism and divorce helping to create murderers, the Democrats threw gasoline on the fire with a soft on crime legislative philosophy. The softer Democrats were on criminals, out of a mistaken belief that American capitalist, male chauvinist culture made them criminals, the more it seemed that we were obligated to tolerate crime. The obvious example is the death penalty. Democrats would have us believe that is not a deterrent, but rather that it encourages murder? They don't actually have the nerve to say it like that; so instead they merely insist that it does not work when, of course, it's impossible that the death penalty would have no impact or that it would encourage murder.
This psychotic bi-polarity in contradictory Democratic policies is seen in their hysterical anger at the gentle abuse of a few prisoners at Abu Ghraib and their abject indifference to the torture and prostitution that seem very prevalent among the 2.4 million prisoners in grizzly American prisons. Norman Mailer once famously asked on behalf of the Democrats, "what is about America that produces so many criminals", without realizing that it was Democrats who were producing so many of the criminals about whom he was so ashamed.
5) Socialism- this is, essentially, the belief that Democrats can run things from Washington in a more caring and sensitive way than if things are left to responsible individuals on the local or individual level. However, the reason that socialist countries never perform well is that when gov't takes responsibility, the individuals lose or give up responsibility; so fewer people are productively engaged. Individuals feel less responsible about working hard and less responsible for their own lives and their family's lives and, concomitantly, less responsible about regulating the violent hunting inclinations that all men are bred to have. Again, on the margins, this contributes to the murder rate.
6) Abortion: welfare, divorce, feminism, and socialism may have synergistically killed love, family and 10,000 years of human cultural evolution, but they couldn't solve the problem of what to do with the protoplasmic results of the new, cheap, loveless, feminist sex that became so common in the Democratic era. As luck would have it, the Democrats promptly invented abortion and the rate of abortion shot up from near 0 to 1.2 million per year, again freeing men from meaningful, romantic, traditional, familial responsibilities. Some became murders, as did some of the unloved or barely loved babies who happened to survive the abortionist's axe. But never ever forget, it is simply impolite to even notice, let alone point out that Pat Boone is considerably more romantic, civilized, and responsible than, say, Snoop Dog.
7) Homosexuality- not coincidentally, at the very time Democrats declared war on the traditional family that had organized, disciplined, and served humanity so well for centuries, they have supported homosexuality and homosexual marriage. This encouraged bisexual men to leave their families, many of whom to this day still resist, and so, often, impoverished and alienated children, rendered them, and the rest of us who witness such carnage, less capable of anticipating, finding, and accepting long term familial love, and, at the margins, contributed to the murder rate acclivity.
8) Tolerance/Multiculturalism- This has been another central shibboleth of modern liberalism designed to signal that the self discipline of the failed capitalist, Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian American melting pot was dead, and that any lifestyle, language, or behavior was ok with the Democrats. It became common, for example, for immigrants to say, "I work here but my country is there". Again, in many ways, the Democrats created an alienation from traditional families and values that left people free of traditional loyalties, when often they were not capable of exercising that freedom, to invent their own values, and, at the margins, murder became a value or right of passage in modern Democratic America.
9) Atheism- It's a fact that Republicans are more religious than Democrats, and that if you look at convicted murderers you quickly see that not many of them are model Jews or Christians. This is not so surprising when you consider that religion is often thought of as the key source of morality on earth while, not coincidentally, murder is just not thought of as a moral act.
Our framers built little if anything about morality and criminality into the Constitution in part because both had always been handled on the local level, but also in large part because they had been handled so thoroughly and effectively by religion that they took it for granted, almost as if the high moral standards of their day were a given. Today, the Democrats, primarily, have worked to kill off old fashioned religion; murder is but one consequence, and so Republicans, in their saintly way, have inherited the work our framers would have done had they anticipated modern Democrats.
It is an interesting irony that Democrats rally so easily around Al Gore's book called, "Earth In The balance" about how profoundly delicate and sensitive our planet is to environmental impacts, but how completely they miss the critical balance of forces that shape the human soul as they chaotically reshape our culturein such dramatic ways. Our soul had slowly been engineered over thousands of years of cultural evolution by conservative Republicans with an appreciation of the slowly accumulating wisdom, and not by an ego maniacal faith in popular fads, the importance of their own bleeding heart feelings, or what was easiest at the moment.
But maybe Republicans are wrong? Perhaps it really could be that the tooth fairy, or simple chance, and not the Democrats intervened to cause the dramatic acclivity in the American murder rate from near 0 to 1.5 million? If so I'm sure someone will fill me in. What's really scary though is that the day will soon come when no one in America will be old enough to remember a time when you could go to bed in Republican America and not need to lock your door. At that point we will have learned to live, however precariously, with the ever so sensitive and caring Democrats.
Ted Baiamonte
comments welcome: bje1000@aol.com
f305
They say trendy California leads the nation, and this is apparently so. Since 1954 that makes 150,000 extra murders in California in the bold new progressive Democratic era, and that's just California. Nationwide, it's about 1.5 million extra American murders since the 1950's. Doesn't it make you wonder why the Democrats are so angry about 4000 dead Americans in Iraq?
But, perhaps it was really chance, the tooth fairy, or even the Girl Scouts, and not the purblind Democrats who have introduced us to the progressive murder era in which we now live so comfortably? One has to suspect it was the Democrats though, because they have largely gotten their way with the county on all the major social issues since the 50's. Here is the Democratic agenda for murder (murder, remember, being just one obvious consequence of long term Democratic rule) that began to take hold of Republican America in the 50's: welfare, feminism, liberal criminal justice, divorce, socialism, abortion, homosexuality, tolerance/multi- culturalism, and atheism.
1) Welfare - given to the woman so the husband was far less needed in the family. Relieved of his primary purpose in life, the husband left or was thrown out whereupon murder became a far more likely activity of choice. It should be no surprise that murderers are usually not married bread winners supporting a wife and children, rather, they are males disconnected from any evolutionary sense of meaning. Margaret Mead may have gotten one thing right, at least, when she said, "the main problem of civilization is what to do with men". It seems the anthropologically
disinclined Democrats had their own answer.
2) Feminism - worked perfectly with welfare to encourage or justify women who threw their husbands and lovers out or to encourage men to leave on their own. Perhaps the most quintessential feminist line from the most quintessential feminist was, " a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle". Poverty, gangs, broken homes, the death of romantic love, and murder, was one result .
3) Divorce- like welfare and feminism, divorce shot up out of nowhere, and not coincidentally dove tailed perfectly with the obvious exigencies of feminism and welfare. Divorce as a matter of legal formality became common, and "no fault," and so was thereby encouraged by the Democrats. No fault meant that society, after a one second Democratic disquisition, now considered a marriage contract null and void regardless of how one performed his or her marital duties under that contract. Life was about personal happiness rather than duty to family as the marital contract implied, and besides, children actually benefited from happy, rather than responsible parents, or so the trenchant Democratic argument went.
It would have been unseemly to list feminism and welfare as grounds for divorce, so they invented "irreconcilable differences", as if to say, "I just want to be happy and to hell with my duties to my children". Not surprisingly, women were plaintiffs in about 80% of divorces. Again, the family was attacked even though very few married men are murderers.
Second marriages (the triumph of hope over experience) are shorter than first marriages so it's by no means clear what was accomplished, by the divorce, feminism, welfare revolution, that balanced out the sky rocketing murder rate. What is clear is that Republicans run stronger among married people. ("The Second Civil War"-Brownstein)
4)Criminal Justice- With welfare, feminism and divorce helping to create murderers, the Democrats threw gasoline on the fire with a soft on crime legislative philosophy. The softer Democrats were on criminals, out of a mistaken belief that American capitalist, male chauvinist culture made them criminals, the more it seemed that we were obligated to tolerate crime. The obvious example is the death penalty. Democrats would have us believe that is not a deterrent, but rather that it encourages murder? They don't actually have the nerve to say it like that; so instead they merely insist that it does not work when, of course, it's impossible that the death penalty would have no impact or that it would encourage murder.
This psychotic bi-polarity in contradictory Democratic policies is seen in their hysterical anger at the gentle abuse of a few prisoners at Abu Ghraib and their abject indifference to the torture and prostitution that seem very prevalent among the 2.4 million prisoners in grizzly American prisons. Norman Mailer once famously asked on behalf of the Democrats, "what is about America that produces so many criminals", without realizing that it was Democrats who were producing so many of the criminals about whom he was so ashamed.
5) Socialism- this is, essentially, the belief that Democrats can run things from Washington in a more caring and sensitive way than if things are left to responsible individuals on the local or individual level. However, the reason that socialist countries never perform well is that when gov't takes responsibility, the individuals lose or give up responsibility; so fewer people are productively engaged. Individuals feel less responsible about working hard and less responsible for their own lives and their family's lives and, concomitantly, less responsible about regulating the violent hunting inclinations that all men are bred to have. Again, on the margins, this contributes to the murder rate.
6) Abortion: welfare, divorce, feminism, and socialism may have synergistically killed love, family and 10,000 years of human cultural evolution, but they couldn't solve the problem of what to do with the protoplasmic results of the new, cheap, loveless, feminist sex that became so common in the Democratic era. As luck would have it, the Democrats promptly invented abortion and the rate of abortion shot up from near 0 to 1.2 million per year, again freeing men from meaningful, romantic, traditional, familial responsibilities. Some became murders, as did some of the unloved or barely loved babies who happened to survive the abortionist's axe. But never ever forget, it is simply impolite to even notice, let alone point out that Pat Boone is considerably more romantic, civilized, and responsible than, say, Snoop Dog.
7) Homosexuality- not coincidentally, at the very time Democrats declared war on the traditional family that had organized, disciplined, and served humanity so well for centuries, they have supported homosexuality and homosexual marriage. This encouraged bisexual men to leave their families, many of whom to this day still resist, and so, often, impoverished and alienated children, rendered them, and the rest of us who witness such carnage, less capable of anticipating, finding, and accepting long term familial love, and, at the margins, contributed to the murder rate acclivity.
8) Tolerance/Multiculturalism- This has been another central shibboleth of modern liberalism designed to signal that the self discipline of the failed capitalist, Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian American melting pot was dead, and that any lifestyle, language, or behavior was ok with the Democrats. It became common, for example, for immigrants to say, "I work here but my country is there". Again, in many ways, the Democrats created an alienation from traditional families and values that left people free of traditional loyalties, when often they were not capable of exercising that freedom, to invent their own values, and, at the margins, murder became a value or right of passage in modern Democratic America.
9) Atheism- It's a fact that Republicans are more religious than Democrats, and that if you look at convicted murderers you quickly see that not many of them are model Jews or Christians. This is not so surprising when you consider that religion is often thought of as the key source of morality on earth while, not coincidentally, murder is just not thought of as a moral act.
Our framers built little if anything about morality and criminality into the Constitution in part because both had always been handled on the local level, but also in large part because they had been handled so thoroughly and effectively by religion that they took it for granted, almost as if the high moral standards of their day were a given. Today, the Democrats, primarily, have worked to kill off old fashioned religion; murder is but one consequence, and so Republicans, in their saintly way, have inherited the work our framers would have done had they anticipated modern Democrats.
It is an interesting irony that Democrats rally so easily around Al Gore's book called, "Earth In The balance" about how profoundly delicate and sensitive our planet is to environmental impacts, but how completely they miss the critical balance of forces that shape the human soul as they chaotically reshape our culturein such dramatic ways. Our soul had slowly been engineered over thousands of years of cultural evolution by conservative Republicans with an appreciation of the slowly accumulating wisdom, and not by an ego maniacal faith in popular fads, the importance of their own bleeding heart feelings, or what was easiest at the moment.
But maybe Republicans are wrong? Perhaps it really could be that the tooth fairy, or simple chance, and not the Democrats intervened to cause the dramatic acclivity in the American murder rate from near 0 to 1.5 million? If so I'm sure someone will fill me in. What's really scary though is that the day will soon come when no one in America will be old enough to remember a time when you could go to bed in Republican America and not need to lock your door. At that point we will have learned to live, however precariously, with the ever so sensitive and caring Democrats.
Ted Baiamonte
comments welcome: bje1000@aol.com
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