The Washington Post’s Charles Lane describes Barack Obama’s rejection of Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln’s plea to move to the center in order to avoid an electoral catastrophe in November. Obama told Lincoln he was going forward — a strategy Lane ascribes to Obama’s political consultant David Plouffe. “Obama’s reply, in a nutshell: Sorry, Blanche. … But the president is not only against a centrist shift on policy grounds; he also thinks it is a political loser:” The President told Lincoln that the best way to win was product differentiation.
If our response ends up being, you know, because we don’t want to — we don’t want to stir things up here, we’re just going to do the same thing that was being done before, then I don’t know what differentiates us from the other guys. And I don’t know why people would say, boy, we really want to make sure that those Democrats are in Washington fighting for us.
Of course he was referring to winning within his context and not necessarily Lincoln’s. Lane writes “The … striking thing was how easily he appeared to write off Lincoln politically. Conceding nothing, he implied that her defeat was not only a foregone conclusion, but also an acceptable price to pay for staying the course on policy”. Obama can do this because of the asymmetry in terms of office. The Democrats who are running scared of 2010 see the President’s policies as their death warrant. But Obama sees them them as his Forlorn Hopes, their death secures his long term victories. They are the wave of those expected to sacrifice themselves in order to establish a permanent lodgement from from a long term Democratic control will be extended. So it’s ‘shut up and advance’. By taking over the health industry and amassing a huge amount of pork barrel, the President may calculate that he can hold what he can when the Republicans swing back. The Republicans may gain back some ground, but he may figure that over a six or eight year horizon the Democrats would have made a net ideological advance. They would have taken more than they would have to give up.
The problem with Obama’s strategy is that with the world economic crisis in full swing the long term trends are against him. Like Admiral Yamamoto in 1941 all his surprise attack gains are bound to be wasting assets as the opposition launches one political Essex carrier after the other upon the seas of unemployment and deficit. In the end they will outbuild him and overwhelm him politically. Unless President Obama truly believes that his policies will turn the economy around then nothing he wins will be permanent.
What may be working in Obama’s favor is the relative ineptness of his opposition. The Republicans have no political Ernest J. King to set against him and they have not solved the basic strategic dilemma he has laid before them. That problem is the reverse of Blanche Lincoln’s. Should the Republican’s imitate Obama’s strategy and sharpen the contradictions between themselves and the President? Or should they “reach across the aisle” and run to the center, which in this case means across the line to the Left from which Obama refuses to move? If keeping Left is a good strategy for Obama, why should keeping Right not be good for the conservatives?
Liberals would answer that adopting a symmetrical strategy would be irresponsible — an unpatriotic besides. Obama has hammered home the accusation that anything bad that happens henceforth will be the fault of obstructionist, extremist conservatives. He will stay Left. It is the conservatives who are morally obligated, if they love their country, to come to the middle and beyond. By this means he hopes to turn the energy of the coming hard times against the conservatives. Not only is Obama playing seize and hold in the power sphere, he is also employing the same defense in the ideological sphere.
The strategic danger posed by the Tea Parties to Obama’s scheme is that it changes the game. It alters the battlefield itself. No longer is his problem one of co-opting a few Republicans with pork barrel and intimidation, it is one of neutralizing a fairly large demographic of the voting population who he cannot do a back-room deal with. Ironically many of the “weapons” he has amassed will be ineffective against the Tea Partiers. Government jobs will not be very appealing to small businessmen and workers who must pay higher taxes for programs they have no desire to see anyway.
Whether Plouffe’s calculations prove correct will be shown over the coming months. If the President rises in the polls and regains his footing with his ‘run to the Left’ strategy then Plouffe will be vindicated. My guess is that Plouffe’s strategy will fail dismally. If the economic crisis deepens and as Obama’s foreign policy mistakes come home to roost with moderately bad consequences the incumbent is likely to be blamed the most, with the entire Washington establishment a close second scapegoat.
But this rule may vanish at the extremes. In a national emergency people may pull together for a while. But even this has its limits. The Fall of France demonstrated how support for a political leader can evaporate after initially rising once it is clear he is inept. Will Obama’s gambit work? I don’t think so, but we shall see.
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I think Obama confuses strategy with tactics. Does Plouffe really have a strategy? Or is he just employing tactics that have worked for him in the past. I don’t think the administration has objectively analyzed the situation they find themselves in. “When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” I expect we will see a lot of inappropriate hammering in the near future.
Mein Fuhrer, poor Blanche Lincoln cried
I do not like to shout
But I can’t leave without I’ve tried
To make you turn about
Your policies are driving us
To ruin and defeat
You lefties are depriving us
Of any chance to beat
Opponents who will run on your
Large debts and broken promises
You’ve turned our solid base in four
Short months to doubting Thomases
Obama slowly paced the floor
Not looking at Ms Lincoln
Then silently he closed the door
And said, with cool eyes blinkin’
It matters not that others lose
That’s not what I’m about
And call me Fuhrer if you choose
But please use an umlaut
Maybe Obama is on to something. The Republicans, the Compassionate Conservatives threw out its constituency with the wash and departed from the very planks of the platform with the monumental growth of government, no child left behind, Medicare supplemented medicine, Mexicans live for free and a bunch of other deviations from core beliefs. At least the Kos Marxists have someone who they can rely on. The Republican constituency has no one.
Obama forgets the basic principle behind boiling a live frog – raise the temperature slowly; otherwise the frog realizes what is happening and jumps out.
But all of this inside-Washington politics is soon going to be rendered irrelevant by external events. The question is – from which direction are those external events going to come? And how will a President who has squandered his initial popularity react to non-negotiable external events?
At some point Obama will ‘inherit’ the effects of his own policies.
Who does he blame then?
Actually the Republicans have not been as inept as I expected them to be. For one thing, they avoided the “bipartisan trap.” A year ago a friend complained to me that the Republicans were being the “party of no.” That was, of course, what the MSM was calling them when they did not support the stimulus. Agreeing to the stimulus then would have saddled them with the economy now — but they may well have expected the economy to improve faster than it has. So with 70 percent of the voters calling you “The party of No” the temptation to submit and get reelected must have been huge.
One disadvantage the opposition has — in the US system, at least — is that it doesn’t speak with one voice. The President speaks with one melodious voice, even when he is contradicting himself. Of course he may become a liability for the Democrats if he becomes a political Corpse Man Walking — and keeps on talking.
The Republicans will get new leaders. And defining yourself as opposing the President’s agenda might become so popular most Democrats will do it. Then we will have the Party of No and The Party of Hell No!
Sirius_Sir: At some point Obama will ‘inherit’ the effects of his own policies. Who does he blame then?
He will blame the American people, of course, for being too stupid to see that Obama has the superior vision and too fickle to stick with the enlightened Democratic Party strategy through these problems which he inherited from the misguided policies of the preceding eight years.
Hitler blamed the German people for his defeat in the war. Hillary blamed the vast right-wing conspiracy for the defeat of universal health care in 1994. Arabs blame the Jews for everything.
Obama is just following Alinsky, polarizing etc. It’s great, for a community organizer who doesn’t even think in terms of actually making anything work. Hasn’t the foggiest idea what keeps a country together in the first place, and it’s not really his country anyway, at least culturally. Break a few eggs, why don’t we? Plenty of chickens coming home to roost, lots of eggs all over the place.
Arabs blame the Jews for everything.
Reminds of the guy who hit his own thumb with a hammer and reflexively cursed, “Damn Jews!”
FTA: … we don’t tinker with health care, let the insurance companies do what they want, we don’t put in place any insurance reforms, we don’t mess with the banks, let them keep on doing what they’re doing now because we don’t want to stir up Wall Street …
These are not the words or phrases of a man who has the first conception of what a capitalist market economy does, indeed, of how a free country works, what the constitution is all about.
Any advance of the Republicans to the “center” will be meet by BO et. al. going further left.
Contrary to the Democrat spin, the Republicans have been out in the cold since January ’09. As BO put it to them in his first meeting with GOP House members: “I won”.
Sometimes it is better to be lucky than smart.
He’s not trying to fix anything that relates to his oath.
Economic collapse? Seedbed of revolution.
Destruction of the public faith in institutions? Seedbed of revolution.
Blatant lies, contradictions, and shameless trotting out of hamhanded agitprop tropes? Seedbed of revolution.
It’s not incompetence, bad faith, and corruption toward a higher purpose, folks.
It’s an attempt to bring down the Republic. He has arrived on stage after almost a century of progressive meddling with what was once a moral society. He faces the shallowest intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual pool any pretender to be the American Lenin could ever dream of facing.
The polity is largely ignorant of the basic principles of their republic. The organs of pop culture, academia, and legacy media are committed to Hope and Change from reasons varying from career anxiety to mere nihilism.
But The Won smiles and continues to read his script.
It’s about destruction. Period. Trying to shove this administration into any other framework is an exercise in fantasy.
Please, it is like asking Hitler or Stalin to “move to the center” at the very moments that they mounted to power.
In a very real sense Obama’s faction has more power and more control of institutions than the Nazi in 1933. Certainly, the Democrats are much more adept at consolidating power and manipulating institutions than the Nazi’s ever were. It is doubtful that the Obama crew will “”move to the center” at this juncture.
He is a hard core Marxist-Leninist. He is a sociopathic narcissist. He can not do it, but even if he could some how manage it, it would be painful to behold. Not enough would buy it. It was one thing to pose as a moderate as a candidate before he had real power. It is quite another matter to do this now. He must go down the path of a Chavez; Clinton’s tack is not for him. Obama is a true believer.
What we have to watch are third party con-games, vote fraud and a literal reign of terror coming out of the MSM aimed at the GOP and the Tea Party folks. We may well see some rather scary manufactured crises too.
It is fairly clear that the BDS is being replaced by demonizing the GOP in general; we will see much vilification of the Tea Party folks as well. Will we have riots in the street of our larger cities?
It will be interesting to see if the public as a whole finally catches on to the game. The MSM still is firmly entrenched and wields much influence and power. They will push like never before. It is going to be a rough year.
Oh, and the GOP should stick to principles.
Right now they look pretty good for reject most of Obama’s agenda. Moving to the center will hurt the GOP in the end. Enough of the “strategies” and the “positionings”. Stand up for the nation. Save the Republic. Do the right thing and stop trying to second guess the electorate or play them for suckers.
What they need to do is call out all the Marxism, all the corruption and all the destructive anti-americanism, and clearly spell out just what it all really means, over and over again each and every day. Get outside the beltway and just keep slugging and slugging. Talk over the MSM’s head directly to the people.
Stand up for what is right and say the truth. Do it day and night.
Call them out as the traitorous tyrant that they are.
If we cannot face the truth with cut-throats like these, we will never save ourselves.
Actually I think Obama is playing a different game.
The key is that he knows that the Tea Partiers are potentially every bit as much a lethal threat to the Republicans as they are to the Democrats. The key reason is that the Republican Party has shown over recent decades that (and I say this as a supporter) the one thing it is not equipped to do is reduce the size or the cost of the state.
As soon as Republicans regain a share of governmental control and therefore responsibility this is going to start to become obvious, as the Tea Partiers will increasingly become unhappy with the performance of both parties.
It will then become clear that the basic Tea Party conflict pits the nation’s political elites in both parties against the populists, and from that moment Obama will then be able to count on the active cooperation of a significant portion of the Republican party.
Elites love to cooperate with a doomed populist movement they think they can co-opt and control, but faced with one that looks like it may be capable of a real, lasting success the established (and supposedly mutually opposed) political elites will always coalesce to exclude the insurgents.
This is why the Tea Partiers’ road to real, lasting impact is much more difficult than it looks at present.
Obama to centrist Dems: Drop dead
Here is one Republican that is standing in the way (a little) of Obama.
Full Statement From Shelby’s Office On The Blanket Hold
Maybe this is the start of a trend?
Papa Ray
Always the question right now is how do you get the wrong people to do the right thing.
The two great killers in O’s agenda were health care and cap n trade. both look dead. the moment brown was elected in massachusetts –O’s people stopped their hourly arm twisting of congressional democrats.
Obama’s public statements about health care since brown’s election have been window dressing.
Now even obama’s appointments are not going through.
Obama’s plan is the same as clinton’s after the republican takeover in 1994. Obama figures he can get good legislation out of the republicans that will reflect well on him as he demonizes the republicans and take the credit–and thereby get re elected in 2012 as clinton did in 96.
I don’t think it will work. This evening I saw student demonstrators being water cannoned in Venezuela as they demonstrated against Chavez.
Then I saw Oreilly run a tape I posted here two blogs ago (I got it over at freerepublic) of Obama at the national prayer breakfast complaining that people questioning his faith and even his citizenship. O’reilly then opined that the admin was always bringing up the question of O’s citizenship. and then he mentioned that Obama had not (in fact)presented a real birth certificate but rather a “facimilie”
unlike bill clinton I don’t think that obama can triangulate from one center to another especially when the republican center has such profound doubts about who O is…
3. A. Mouse – you are behind the times or have not been looking in the right places to see what is going on in the conservative side of the GOP.
There are many young conservative GOP leaders coming up. Ryan of Wisc, Cantor of PA, and Pence of Indiana come to mind.
I have written here before of the Club for Growth. http://www.clubforgrowth.org/
For a number of election cycles this group has been very successful in providing key financial support leading to the election of conservative Republican candidates. They are major supporters of Rubio in Florida and Toomey in PA, both of whom are showing winning poll numbers in their primary and general elections.
Also the Tea Party Express group is being effectively guided by former conservative GOP congressman, Dick Army. They worked closely with Scott Brown in Mass.
http://www.teapartyexpress.org/
I am happy to see Army channeling Tea Party energy toward constructive ends.
From my perspective of nearly 50 years of political observation and occasional participation, the tide is turning against the marxists (Dems) in DC and the tea party / conservative wave is building. However, if the energy of that wave is not channeled toward the election of conservatives this fall the marxist onslaught will continue unabated.
My long post on “Until Tomorrow” got lost in moderation but it is on my blog.
sirius_sir,
Obama will ‘inherit’ the effects of his own policies
Why then he will Inherit the Wind.
Listen to Tracey as a fictional Darrow telling off a brilliant Gene Kelly as Mencken.
Teresita,
Hitler blamed the German people … Arabs blame the Jews
It’s National Brotherhood Week.
…
Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the muslems,
And everybody hates the Jews.
But during national brotherhood week, national brotherhood week,
It’s national everyone-smile-at-one-another-hood week.
Be nice to people who
Are inferior to you.
It’s only for a week, so have no fear.
Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year!
H/T lyricsmode.com
Alternatives are easy for even the less gifted of us to crank out.
For the English hate the Irish,
and the Russians hate the Poles.
The Chinese hate the Japanese
and everybody hates the Jews.
For it’s National …
What the opposition, effectively the Republicans even if some with there was another vessel, need to do is unpeel Obama’s veneer of credibility. That is best done by repeatedly hammering home where he has personally vouched for and invested the authority of his office and the word of the United States on issues where he was demonstrably wrong. Examples include Global Warming and the economics behind Health Care and the effects of the Stimulus. Once those errors are made clear then we can say, “Since you have been proven either inaccurate or dishonest on these issues why should we take your word on anything else?”
The Republicans will have to move to the center, and the best way to pick off Obama voters is to embrace gay marriage. Many homosexuals are becoming increasingly disenchanted with the President for not fulfilling any of the grandiose promises he made the gay community that garnered him the lion’s share of their votes. It would be a great way to get younger voters.
Stephanie,
Why do you think that?
Gay marriage has been defeated in the US every single time it has been put up for the popular vote.
The political energy today is with the Tea Party movement. It would be a mistake for Republicans to take this movement as theirs. It is ultimately a revolt of the common people against a self-selected elite. However, that elite includes not only Democrats, but overpaid business leaders, and any Republican who goes down the wrong path.
The ultimate issue for the Republicans is not how to deal with Obama, but how to deal with this grass-roots revolt – how to be part of it instead of another of its targets.
It will be like riding a tiger. I hope we Republicans can succeed at it.
“The key is that he knows that the Tea Partiers are potentially every bit as much a lethal threat to the Republicans as they are to the Democrats.”
That’s the line the MSM is trying to peddle – let them believe it, but don’t you believe it. There’s not going to be any third party, and they’re not stupid – they want to win, not just split the vote and keep bammy in power.
“Unless President Obama truly believes that his policies will turn the economy around then nothing he wins will be permanent.”
His belief doesn’t matter anymore – and that’s his biggest problem. They have to work in the *real* world, and the real world is very unforgiving.
So, Wretchard synthesizes from his reading:
“The Democrats who are running scared of 2010 see the President’s policies as their death warrant. But Obama sees them them as his Forlorn Hopes, their death secures his long term victories. They are the wave of those expected to sacrifice themselves in order to establish a permanent lodgement from from a long term Democratic control will be extended. So it’s ’shut up and advance’.”
This is the political equivalent of the Ayutollah Khomenei’s tactic of sending the barefoot 12-year-olds in pyjamas padding through the Iraqi minefields to detonate the mines with their tender little toes and thus clear lanes for the Iranian MEN with guns bravely following behind.
Who says that Obama can’t learn?
Here is the video clip from HotAirPundit of this evening chat between Beck and O’reily–in which O’reily plays the clip of Obama complaining about people questioning his citizenship.
It takes them awhile to get around to the subject but the cross talk on Jon Stewart is entertaining.
Running home to the Left may be viscerally comfortable for Obama, but I can’t see it pulling the electorate back to his side. America has been and remains a center-right country (for now at least), and the main issue of course is the economy.
Going to the mat for ideas like Cap n, Tax and Obamacare simply cannot win as a strategy, as the bulk of the electorate clearly senses (correctly) they will do nothing but drag the economy further into the toilet.
Nomenklatura @15: While I’m not sure I agree that the Tea Party represents the same threat to Republicans that it does to Democrats (their still-forming “platform” is clearly center-right; they want Republicans to start acting like Republicans, they want Leftist Democrats gone), I find your premonition of our enitre political class at odds with it’s electorate disturbingly plausible.
Go back in time if you will to the Summer of ’07. Remember the “Shamnesty” bill? Remember how the entire political class was chomping at the bit to pass it? Remember how it went over like flatulence in church with you, me, our friends and everyone else? If there’s a clearer example of The People vs. the Politicians I can’t think of it. And it really wasn’t that long ago.
If Republicans can regain the trust of the Tea Partiers and the independants, I think they’ll be in good shape.
And there are still tens of millions of Americans who can still recall how the candidacy of third party candidate H. Ross Perot siphoned away from George Herbert Walker Bush the votes that could have kept William Jefferson “slave-to-his-own-Willie” Clinton from leaving unsightly stains on the Oval Office.
The GOP sure hasn’t suffered much politically so far under Obama. This is really a shock. Remember this time last year? The GOP was written off, considered a toxic brand. Obama and his team of rival superheroes could say with confidence that America was ready for a new leftward tack. Newsweek was running a cover that said, “We Are All Socialists Now.” Nationalization of GM and Chrysler had just happened, that of our health care system was a foregone conclusion, and they were already measuring the drapes for Cap N’ Trade.
Virginia was being written about as a bellweather state that captured the spirit of the times. Nobody saw a Republican winning a statewide race there in the foreseeable future in this once solidly conservative state. The Democratic primary for governor was supposed to the whole election, and carpetbagging opportunists like Terry McAuliffe were lining up for it with deep pockets.
But not only did the Virginia race break hard for the GOP, the same happened in New Jersey, and then, incredibly, Massachusetts.
The only closely watched race the Democrats carried (NY-23) was the only that did not feature an appearance of our popular prez.
The GOP was cooked last year at this time, but Obama’s raised them from the dead like Lazarus.
Much as been written about how the Tea Party has beefs with both parties. That may well be true. But, there are two things to consider. First, Republicans never called the Tea Party members “teabaggers” (who among polite society would? — it is a shockingly offensive ephithet that should not be used around children), meanwhile the Democrats and their operatives have hurled it with glee and even rolled around in charges of racism first. What that tells you is the relative distances between the mindsets of the parties. The Tea Party is really not so removed from large swaths of the GOP, culturally. Tea Party speakers do sound very much like the Gingrich Revoltion guys who also handed out copies of the Constitution and the Federalist Papers and made the same appeals to our founding philosophies. Meanwhile, Democrats hurling the invective are showing that instinctively they know they have a enemy here.
Secondly, the GOP national leadership really cannot be found. For a long while last year the MSM had fun mis-identifying Rush Limbaugh as the head of the GOP. That’s somewhat natural for a party out of power, but this time it’s acute. McCain, the last GOP nominee, inpsired contempt from a great many GOP grassroots conservatives, the “base” of the party. Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levine, two of conservativism’s biggest voices, openly lamented McCain’s nomination. Their followers are mostly Tea Partiers now. The Tea Party has a national party standing right beside it, a national party with an organization in place, and it’s a leaderless party. It’s ripe for takeover, in other words, and it would be natural fit.
People have been worrying about, say, the GOP “co-opting” the Tea Party. The line is that would seem cheapening and inauthentic, it would spell a credibility loss for the Tea Party phenomenon. What’s more likely to happen, however, is not that the GOP will infiltrate the Tea Party and change it around, but rather that the Tea Party will take over and rennovate the GOP.
The One has already shown what he will do: Continue to try and govern Left while talking centrist (“can’t continue this unsustainable debt!”). Hey it worked during the campaign.
Obama’s problem is three fold:
1. The GOP is not co-opting the Tea Party, rather the grass-roots Tea Partiers are taking over the GOP, from the bottom up, as precinct captains and the like. Learning their lesson from Scoffalazza.
This means that the GOP will not face a Perot like phenomena, rather it will BE THE PEROT types. In and of itself. The future being Scott Brown not John McCain. Average Joe + Military Reserve.
2. Dems who want to get re-elected will dump Obama faster than you can say “Blanche Lincoln.” Obama has started to believe his own worship, and deity, and does not care about his party followers. Who will turn on him reliably because if they are defeated … they might actually have to work, fly coach, and would not be important anymore.
Obama needs Dem votes and having the Dems in Congress as sacrificial storm troops is a guarantee of enough Dems in the Senate and House cooperating with Reps or even switching parties. [Arlen Specter gets the all-time dunce award, btw.]
3. Obama cannot spread the pork far enough. This latter needs more discussion.
Obama’s experience is spreading pork city-district wide. Not even Chicago wide. He has no idea how BIG the nation is, and how much patronage would be required for the WHITE MAJORITY MIDDLE CLASS.
Obama can spread the pork around to the existing people in the Universities, Media, political folks in the Democratic party, people who are for him already. BUT …
It requires taking MONEY/Opportunity/Choices AWAY from those who have it — the White Majority Middle Class. Obama is Stalin trying to kill the Kulaks when the Kulaks are the overwhelming majority, and make up most of the military, police, and so on, and loathe him anyway.
If all politics are patronage, Obama has failed to grasp the obvious: he has nothing to offer by way of results to the vast majority, and can only give a bit more to those who already love him. By doing so he makes the majority hate him.
—————
Can Obama turn the economy around, and create about 14 million new jobs between now and 2012? Please. He’ll be lucky to create 2 million. If that. In fact, a Republican Congress will be empowered by its Tea Party masters, who would create it, to remove him. No President has ever been convicted after impeachment (Clinton and Andrew Johnson were impeached). But there is always a first time.
This is the major problem with the Alinsky strategy. The vast majority get screwed, have nowhere else to go, and will vote against those hurting them. Not just vote, organize.
“But the president is not only against a centrist shift on policy grounds; he also thinks it is a political loser:” The President told Lincoln that the best way to win was product differentiation.
The country is irreconcilably divided over the proper role of government and, evidently, Obama is confident enough that there are by now sufficient numbers of tax-eaters, government check recipients and (what we might call) useful idiots to gamble everything. I hope and pray he’s wrong.
By this means he (Obama) hopes to turn the energy of the coming hard times against the conservatives.
I hate to think how desperate Americans would have to be for that to work.
Agree with you completely, Cowboy. You didn’t even add that the actual head of the Republican Party these days, Micheal Steele, is regarded by all as the punchline to a bad joke.
But it doesn’t matter – all it does is make him ineffective and innocuous, and ironically makes it pointless for Democrats to attack him. If they attack him, they are just agreeing with the tea partiers, so why bother?
OT: This blackfive piece is quite a read:
about a BBC interview: Bombs and beatings: Life among the Taliban
In Pakistan an account of life with the Taliban has emerged from a 13-year-old girl called Meena, who says her own family tried to turn her into a suicide bomber.
There is no independent confirmation of her account but police say they believe she is telling the truth, and her information could be valuable.
This Buchanan piece is kind of on thread: Will Obama Play the War Card?
Starting a war is Obama’s trump card. If he gets routed in the fall elections and faces loss of the ability to forward his agenda, he can always go to war.
Buchanon makes this statement: “Republican leader Mitch McConnell has made clear the Senate is seizing control of the Iran portfolio. “If the Obama administration will not take action against this regime, then Congress must.”"
This could also serve as Obama’s opportunity to reach across the aisle and prove his bi-partisanship, all the while guaranteeing his retention of power. Too me it looks the Republicans have been as outmaneuvered as they were in 1933-48.
The problem with Obama’s strategy is that with the world economic crisis in full swing the long term trends are against him… seas of unemployment and deficit.
Do most people here truly believe this? Because if you do, Obama is doomed, and that’s a good thing.
Unless President Obama truly believes that his policies will turn the economy around then nothing he wins will be permanent.
I don’t understand this sentence because, to my mind, if Obama truly believes his policies will turn the economy around, he’s not going to win anything at all.
What may be working in Obama’s favor is the relative ineptness of his opposition.
His most effective opposition these days are the American people. There is a golden flame burning in this country that’s going to turn white-hot as things worsen.
Come 2010, Barry will find himself sitting in the Oval office, moving Obama Corps action figures around a big map, as he talks to his Mao Christmas ornament and weeps while speed-dialing Bill Ayers’ super secret cell number.
The only question then is how we get back to America 1984 instead of France 1936.
The Democratic Party made its Faustian bargain with the Left at the 1968 convention when it set up the McGovern Commission to rewrite the rules, as a sop to the protest types to keep them from leaving over the HHH nomination.
That and the embrace of the incredible moral corruption of Edward Kennedy have tainted them ever since.
Then came the strange circumstances of 2008. Bt it was inevitable, as long as the Democratic Party was controlled by the Left, sooner or later they would winone with a genuine DEmocrat.
Carter was almost the real deal, but not quite, so Kennedy challenged him in 1980; Clinton less so, but they were so hungry after 12 years of Reagan and Bush-41 they settled for another Southern Governor. But they always wanted one of their own: urban, faux-academic or a media type, never dirtied their hands with actually making a payroll or even running anything large and doing a good job of it–all theory (‘All hat and no cattle’ in TX parlance).
And in 2008 they got what they had wanted since 1968-72.
Buyer’s remorse? Not just on Main Street but in the Dem Party everywhere except Bos-Wash, the West Coast, Chicago and state capitals and college towns.
Maybe, but he’s still there until at least 1-21-13 and quite likely 1-21-17. Even after the GOP landslide in 1994, it was still the Clinton Administration until 2001, and a GOP win in 2010, which may or may not happen, will still have the Big O in the White House.
Completely unfit to govern, but governing.
Salt Lick @36 : “The only question then is how we get back to America 1984 instead of France 1936.”
Actually, the problem as I see it is how do we get back to America 1956 instead of Indonesia 1965? The GOP-Democrat game was already over by 1984. Good Lord, a paranoid dwarf got 19 million votes for President in 1992 against RR’s Vice President!
The last time there was a Presidential election between two conspicuously qualified and stable men was 1956. Let’s shoot for that.
The bloody alternative will take a long time to recover from.
The Tea Party Movement is the most interesting social/political movement of the last two generations and has the potential to become the most significant movement of the last 100 years.
The overarching theme of our time is centralization vs. fragmentation. Obamacare was/is critical to Obama because it would nationalize 1/6 of the economy, add millions of members to SEIU, and provide a bottomless pit of patronage, money, and bodies to guarantee the outcome of future elections in favor of the centralists. So called stimulus spending provides the auxiliaries to the main body of Obamacare. The overwhelming majority of the spending is going to secure the continued support for the centralists of what Stephen Malanga so aptly named as the tax eaters of the metropolitan centers.
The Tea Party Movement is a mortal threat to the centralists because it takes them completely off their game. With no identifiable leader to single out and demonize, Obama and his water carriers in the MSM are left with name calling gatherings of old ladies and mothers with baby carriages Nazis and terrorists. Anybody who looks at a picture of the people is in a Tea Party crowd knows that accusation is absurd. A Tea Party crowd is the same collection of faces you see at a baseball game. Each misplaced character assault on such an amorphous and nonthreatening group does nothing but weaken the credibility of the accuser.
The Tea Party Movement demonstrated in Massachusetts that it can affect outcomes with no orders, directions or instructions. My own experience of sending a few dollars to the candidate and making phone calls to friends and family in Massachusetts was duplicated many times over.
We will all be better off if the GOP and the Tea Party Movement remain separate and distinct. When Democrat office seekers come to realize that they too can get money and help from across the country if their principles trump their party the floodgates will open for them too.
When Obama and Pelosi start losing Democrats to the Tea Party we will know that the tide has turned and the Republic is secured. Victory is not assured without our continued participation.
Marty: The Dem’s made that “bargain” long before that. Let us not forget that they were the party of the slavers. 1968 was just a renewal of that devilish bargain by yet another generation of Democrats, and, obviously, even here it was not their first generational renewal based on collectivism and betrayal.
However irksome it may be to yet again hear it and acknowledge it, the Democrats were successfully infiltrated and co-opted by professional direct political operatives straight out of Moscow and Beijing. Their program was carefully crafted to local conditions here just as it was in places like Latin America, the EU, Africa and the Middle East, and all these places are bedeviled by this legacy to this day and each region battles the same sort of traitors locally. They are all the second or third generation of closet Marxists hatched by the Soviets and the ChiComs. It is the deepest of ironies that the most fertile and fruitful soil for their designs was the USA. the weeds just took longer to bloom. This is a historical truth and it must be squarely faced.
It matters not that the USSR and the American Left’s masters and their institutions are long gone: The damage is done. To undo it requires us to acknowledge the reality behind it all.
It is this aspect of the Democrat party, this coming to bloom of the seeds planted in the interwar period and immediately after ww2 that places 1968 in such relief, and it is further highlighted by the shear size of the boomer cadre and the conditions in which they were raised, but it was not the ultimate watershed. Events were set in motion thirty some years before that.
gokart-mozart #38 — … 1956. Let’s shoot for that.
Baby steps, Wolfgang, baby steps.
Applicable anecdote — I rent an apartment next to my house to a Middle Eastern graduate student. Last night, he got his car stuck in the snow — halfway in the drive and halfway in the road. By the time I threw on my boots and coat and got to him, passersby had exited their vehicles, stopped traffic, and were working the car free. The job was done in about 2-3 minutes.
When I laughed to my student-renter about those folks fixing the problem so rapidly, he smiled and said, “Yes, it was very American.”
There are enough of us left to do this. Yes we can!
Well Obama has stated that he would rather be a “good” one term president rather than a mediocre two term president. From his actions “good” means the destruction of the Republic. After all ex-president make out pretty well these days. Legislature who aim to make their living in office have somewhat different motivations as regards the income and asset generating aspect of politics. To stay on the gray train and/or have a golden parachute they’ll shaft Obama as necessary.
LOTM #20
Your post brings to mind “The Merry Minuet” as sung a long time ago by the Kingston Trio. The lyrics are never so true as they are today.
“They’re rioting in Africa. They’re starving in Spain. There’s hurricanes in Florida and Texas needs rain.
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls. The French hate the Germans. The Germans hate the Poles.
Italians hate Yugoslavs. South Africans hate the Dutch and I don’t like anybody very much!
But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud for man’s been endowed with a mushroom shaped cloud.
And we know for certain that some lovely day someone will set the spark off and we will all be blown away.
They’re rioting in Africa. There’s strife in Iran. What nature doesn’t do to us will be done by our fellow man.
This graph from the US Chamber of Commerce clearly depicts the affect of liberal policy on the coffers(h/t dan-O at IB) Team 44 is way way liberal and everything is about Obama:
I got a letter -- I got a note today from one of my staff -- they forwarded it to me -- from a woman in St. Louis who had been part of our campaign, very active, who had passed away from breast cancer. She didn't have insurance. She couldn't afford it, so she had put off having the kind of exams that she needed. And she had fought a tough battle for four years. All through the campaign she was fighting it, but finally she succumbed to it. And she insisted she's going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt.When the only name you ref. in a story about a poor woman is your own….you have some serious “me” issues.
Mongoose/40; a few threads back, someone –one of the ladies iirc –asked to know more about yuri Besmenov, the guy in that you-tube someone, maybe it was me, had linked. I was reading your #40 and dimly recalling a Nyquist essay with ‘subversion’ in the title –went there, and there he was again, Yuri Besmenov. So for the person who had wondered, this late response –i hate to copy so much text, i know it’s rude, but i think this is worthwhile enough, and i won’t do it again, the Wall of Text, for a long long time, promise. There’s three hyperlinks in the quote, i lit all three of ‘em up.
BTW it’s at 04-17-09 “Understanding Subversion”
***
(open quote)
Yuri Bezmenov was a KGB officer who defected nearly three decades ago. In 1985 he gave an interview that can be viewed online. What he said is worth hearing. According to Bezmenonv, “Only about 15 percent of [the KGBs] time, money and manpower was spent on espionage as such. The other 85 percent was a slow process [of] … ideological subversion or active measures … or psychological warfare. What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that in spite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves….”
Bezmenov referred to “a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and is divided into four basic stages, the first one being demoralization….” Here we find a generational process, which takes from 15 to 20 years. To understand the concept of demoralization, let us turn to Robert Greene’s The 33 Strategies of War, Chapter 7: “The secret to motivating people and maintaining their morale is to get them to think less about themselves and more about the group.” In military affairs an army is demoralized the instant the individual soldier thinks only of himself. At that moment, the soldiers begin to run from the battle and the army dissolves. There is no resistance possible when each soldier looks only to his own safety.
If you want to lead a strong army or build a strong nation, you want your people to develop group cohesion or “togetherness.” According to Greene, “That is when you start thinking about morale – about finding a way to motivate your troops and forge them into a group.” In terms of warfare, motivation is not about rewards and punishments. You have to make people feel the worthiness of their cause, and you must give them a sense of belonging to the army or nation that they are defending. As Greene explains, “They soon begin to link their own success to the group’s; their own interests and the larger interests coincide. In this kind of army, people know that selfish behavior will disgrace them in the eyes of their companions. They become attuned to a kind of group conscience.” And as it happens, this conscience is contagious. It is also very powerful.
Therefore, it may be said that the “demoralization” of a country is a process of encouraging shameful behavior, of encouraging desertion and the abandonment of the national cause and the nation itself. When Yuri Bezmenov says that the first stage in “ideological subversion” is demoralization, he is talking about a very sophisticated strategy. He is talking about a program for destroying the cohesion and spirit of a nation. In basic terms, an effective program of subversion ridicules or discounts the moral ideals from which a nation draws its strength. It is also useful to promote hedonism and self-absorption; to encourage anti-war sentiments and recreational drug use; or give money to Hollywood producers through intermediaries on the condition that they put more sex and violence in American movies.
According to Bezmenov the KGB of the USSR pumped Communist ideology into three generations of American students. The universities and schools were infiltrated, the curriculum was changed, and a disguised form of enemy thinking was taught to American children. “In other words,” says Bezmenov, “Marxism-Leninism ideology [was] pumped into the soft heads of … American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism – American patriotism. The result … you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties, dropouts or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli, in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind, even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black. You still cannot change the basic perception and logic of behavior…. In other words … the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible.”
According to Bezmenov, the American educational system has indoctrinated many students with Communist ideology – under the guise of feminism, peace studies, various ethnic studies or general “social science.” To counteract this, we need a new educational program that inculcates common sense and patriotism, teaching the value of a unique American cause – in opposition to socialism.
If anyone should doubt the testimony of Bezmenov, I should like to end this article by quoting a former general of the Soviet Bloc intelligence services, Ion Pacepa. Last year Pacepa gave the following statement to interviewer Robert Buchar: “The whole foreign policy of the Soviet Bloc states, indeed its whole economic and military might, revolved around the larger Soviet objective of destroying America from within through the use of lies. The Soviets saw disinformation as a vital tool in the dialectical advance of world Communism. KGB priority number one was to damage American power, judgment, and credibility. As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of Romania, I produced the very same vitriol John Kerry repeated to the U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in leftist movements throughout Europe. KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov managed our anti-Vietnam War operation.”
(close quote)
(all i ever heard about Yuri Andropov –granted i was young and oblivous –when he ascended to Premier, was “he likes western jazz”. One heard and read that everywhere, it was almost attached to his name, “Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov, who likes western jazz, today announced…(and so forth)”.
I recall, i always thought, “ah, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, this guy is A-OK, he won’t hurt us” –and then i’d turn the page and read something else.)
Mad Fiddler @ 28: “there are still tens of millions of Americans who can still recall how the candidacy of third party candidate H. Ross Perot siphoned away from George Herbert Walker Bush the votes”
That’s not what happened, Mad Fiddler. And it is important today to remember what really did happen, not what State-Controlled Media wishes had happened.
Look at the actual votes cast, not at the percentages of a changing total of votes. First time Ross Perot ran, he got approximately 20 million votes. Second time he ran (with less enthusiasm), he got about 10 million votes.
Question – what happened to the 10 million people who voted for Ross Perot the first time but not the second time? Did they vote for the Republican candidate?
The answer is clear from the total of votes cast for each candidate. They stayed home. They did not vote for any presidential candidate.
This is the big difference between with the Democrats. In Presdential elections, the Democrat candidate always gets the Democrat vote – no matter how bad the candidate. The Republican candidate can pick up the votes of Contingent Voters, people who will vote for a solid Republican but not for a soft Big Government type. The vaunted “swing voters” are actually Contingent Voters – they swing between voting for a good Republican candidate or staying home.
The key in Presidential elections is for Republicans to present a serious candidate who can attract the Contingent Voters, not a genteel time-server like McCain.
buddy larsen @ 45: but really, *active* subversion by cultural contamination as a strategy? eh. i’m sure they encouraged our useful idiots, but we have plenty of homegrown idiocy, it’s not like that basic feature had to be induced, or even could be. my guess is that the real effects of any such explicit soviet program was marginal. probably more active in the 1930 era. what did the soviets do, train agents to sell tie-dyed t-shirts and incense in the 1960s? eh. they published turgid editorials in Pravda and translated them into English. Bad enough, but I wonder at the actual effectiveness.
The fault, dear Kerry, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves,…
PBoston@39
The Tea Party Movement is the most interesting social/political movement of the last two generations and has the potential to become the most significant movement of the last 100 years.
Significant? Of course. Just the largest number of US citizens protesting in the history of the Nation! As I understand it, it’s supposed to be about the biggest economic-political-societal turnaround in the history of mankind.
I’d say the movement is already as significant as 1775, no? If we don’t prevail beginning now, no one 100 years hence will know about it. (Footnote: Spartacus)
If we do prevail in throwing off the yoke of slavery, it’ll demand a really, really stern approach to reinvigorate the economy/nation/society, given the shape it’ll be in by the time we arrive. To the winners of the next 2 election cycles truly go the spoils.
And if we get so lucky(?) and win a majority, and are empowered and WILLING to dramatically downsize gov’t bureaucracies, revoke most laws, re-emphasizing the remainder, while deregulating entire industries, then it looks to be a 10 year effort at best…
- but only if the citizenry is working in-concert, absent labor strife – Green’s cohesion
- but only if we can collectively figure out what to actually build, fast enough to stave off widespread dispair – absent any guarantees of success in launching NEW industries needing millions of workers;
- but only if we are secure from terror.
Otherwise, it’ll be a multi-generational suffering worldwide, meaning we’re still at war and not winning. WDC delenda est.
It’s not like we can promise full employment; but the Left surely will. Instead, we’ll have to be promising lots more unemployment (removing the shackles), along with just a promise that the bad news is only temporary. And the air and water quality may improve less, and we’re gonna dig up lots of gov’t-owned pristine land, and some little fish might suffer, and yes we intend to cut short the siting processes for lots of facilities, and, and…
We need short concise rejoinders to each of these “concerns.” Verbal encapsulations of our unified POV, adoptable by all Tea-party candidates. Slogans. Eg, Drill baby drill! says it for energy policy. Sara’s “Death panels” provoked the citizenry. Back when I was protesting Sierra Club absurdities in 70′s CA, we had bumper-stickers: Save a tree! Don’t wipe! Even more frugal and eco-friendly than Cheryl Crow.
BC’rs are the most creative and rational thinkers around. Lucid avid writers. In the next few months inumerable messages must get crystal clear, across a gamut of issues. Direct and more persuasive than theirs. Let’s get to work. Behind each slogan has to be the complete and compelling argument, and the necessary documentation/links to convince anyone willing to be.
Mongoose@40,
Let us not forget that they were the party of the slavers. What’s changed?
buddy larsen @ Feb 6, 2010 – 7:16 am:
This entire poisoning of traditional liberal values did not just occur in the US, but throughout Europe and the rest of the world. Don’t forget all the protests in Germany and England when Reagan deployed the Patriot missles in the 80′s. But I think a silent reverse-coup happened when the ex-stasi informants and officers were granted amnesty after the wende (fall of the Berlin wall). These guys poisoned the values and thinking of all of Europe, and I believe Joschua Fischer’s (IMO ex-stasi) orchestration of France and Germany’s treachery during the Iraq war was just one more example.
I find that the timing between the end of WWIII (Berlin Wall) and the looming global crisis is eerily similar to timing of the 1918-38.
As a student learning Russian history I remember reading a biography/campaign hagiography of Yuri Andropov written by Zhores Medvedev. He was a biologist and his brother Roy was an established and respected historian; both were dissidents, although at least Roy remained a faithful Marxist. The book was written after Zhores received a visit from, of all people, Yuri Andropov as his brother was facing a new set of charges. By American standards the biography might have been damning but by Soviet standards it was quite benign, and the Medvedev name attached to is was not to be discounted.
Andropov is correctly associated with the KGB, which he oversaw, but as per Khrushchev’s post-Stalin (and post-Beria) reforms he was never himself a Chekist. It was Andropov who groomed for power Mikhail Gorbachev….
OT, but if you haven’t already read it you might want to look at Michael Ledeen’s latest post on PJM. Iran may already have nuclear weapons.
We may be in for some very interesting times in short order.
TC/52; Here’s the Green video “said to be having an effect” on the Mullah’s troops:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_YgagNKDJU&feature=related
English subtitles –hey, we here in the communications capitals of the world could take a lesson here. Simple, stately paced, moving language, simple sentences, no hectorinhg persuasion, just a beckoning. In fact it’s like a young woman beckoning, somehow. Guess it’s aimed at young men, duh!
Mongoose #40, I think it is wise to consider what you say. The 60′s came from somewhere. And where did all those Marxists go, those orphan Marxists who disappeared after the fall of the Soviet Union. I see them taking over the environmental movement. Academia, the Press, the Democrat Pary. And of course they and their new generation are Obama’s base. I see them in the strange actions of zombie organizations that they have taken over, like AMA and AARP. I see them behind Obamacare, which was never about medicine at all, but rather about power.
They are rather like a disease. Coming in fevers. Hard to see their true motivation as they seek righteous camouflage above all, and systematically co-opt and destroy the very media that should inform us of what is going on. It is like malaria or AIDS, deadly but always hiding, constantly changing it’s outer proteincoat.
R/54; like Nemesis.
Couple of points.
One. The assumption that blacks will vote for Obama (note constant references to “white middle/working class”)is uninformed (no, I’m not going to call it r*****). The “hey, one of us is running” factor (I’m black) is played out. The “damn, I need a job” factor now comes into play. Unlike a what seems to be a common belief – which I run across far too often on conservative sites – blacks are not “all” on welfare. In addition, I’m of the opinion that “96% of blacks voted for Obama” has more to do with media misrepresentation, selective polling, and inner city vote theft; than reality. Last I checked when the economy sucks, it sucks for everybody (well except for those government types).
Two. On the Boomers. We should remember that not only were they the ones out protesting the Vietnam War, they were also the ones fighting it(me). The idea that the were all – or even mainly – “Red Diaper Babies” is wrong. I think for the last 40 years their numbers in the media, arts and academia (oh yeah – and government) has tended to give an exaggerated picture of their numbers and importance. They and their Democrat allies have always been in the minority. One of the reasons the Tea Party Movement scares the hell out of the left, is that it shows what a small minority they are. It accounts for the media’s annoying habit of playing down every gathering of conservatives, and inflating the numbers every time to leftists get together.
The tea party movement is the personification of that line in the sand beyond which our government dare not go. It is the motley group of patriots standing firm at concord bridge before the shots heard round the world was fired. I wish them great success this weekend.
Ronald Reagan – A Time for Choosing is 27 minutes long, but made long ago, its message speaks of timeless principals and sacrifice worth the effort and worth the cost.
Charles Payne, one of the Fox business regulars, happens to be black, and is keynoting a big Tea Party convention coming up soon –i’d love to see Payne run for big office –he’s got the talent and maybe –just maybe –the desire (he goes off hard on the DC crapfest), and best of all, no lifetime in politics, no pulling a train that took pork n favor years to couple together, not needed as Payne already has the TV recognition, and the all-America story of a ‘military brat’ whose family moved to Harlem when he was in high school, from there to Air Force (i think it was), then college, then Wall Street. Married with several young children, and a great honest direct –and cheerful –manner. And the business he’s in –stockbroker & fund manager –has the plain performance metrics (he finished #1 stockpicker of the entire Fox stable in 2009) that will keep any opponent from casting him as an Affirmative Action token (like they did to Condi, whose outstanding CV was ignored).
Anyway, y’all bookmark that name –catch him on FoxBiz –yes, frankly, the Tea Party needs some color –anything wrong with saying that? Maybe, if it was for the PR, but it ain’t, black Americans as much as tea partiers need to break the Dem party lockup (for blacks esp, if for no other reason than to be not ‘assumed safe’).
Peter Boston, #39: When Obama and Pelosi start losing Democrats to the Tea Party we will know that the tide has turned and the Republic is secured.
Alternatively, I’ve heard it suggested that if the Dems become desperate enough to distance themselves from Obama, they could even start jumping on the “birther” bandwagon. That would have the added benefit of diverting attention away from the Tea Party’s message.
Josh @ 48
It worked on YOU, exactly as Bezmenov said it would.
The people who masterminded the dissolution of this country told us, in their own words, what they had done — and despite the abundant evidence all around us, you refuse to believe it.
Today a substantial majority of Americans are clueless about the principles behind the founding of their country, and do not believe it is worth defending.
We are so f*cked.
C@29: What’s more likely to happen, however, is not that the GOP will infiltrate the Tea Party and change it around, but rather that the Tea Party will take over and rennovate the GOP.
Never gonna happen. Not in my lifetime.
I posted previously on the subject of Bil Clinton’s many enemies – RM Scaife and the Arkansas mafia. It didn’t stop there. The Clinton phenomenon nearly split the Democratic Party in half between pragmatic moderates and ideological purists. AFAIK, the party remained fragmented by the unresolved Clinton-induced tension, contributing in part to Hillary’s aborted campaign (the Bush hatred cannot be overstated).
I’ll throw my hat in the ring and say that not only will renovation of the GOP not happen, but it shouldn’t happen. As noted by others, and with some frequency, the Tea Party movement is anti-incumbent. It puts a real-time face on the Washington versus Main St divide. I do not believe that the anti-incumbent focus can survive the transition into a political party.
The money locks and levers underpinning special-interest gridlock must be compromised. I doubt that can be accomplished with the existing political party-based infrastructure, which renders the process susceptible to becoming just another case of out with the old b@stards and in with the new – a Revolution in Name Only.
mariner @ 60: may I suggest we not make the Obama mistake and blame our own faults on others.
they are still faults, in any case, but they don’t get fixed when we start throwing around paranoid theories, however fun.
Blacks HAVE VOTED for Dems since 1968 in every election at rates ranging from the low of 92% to highs of 98% (Obama).
THERE IS NO CHANCE IN HELL that Obama will EVER lose Blacks. EVER. Racial identity, solidarity, and the First Black President (second if you count Clinton) will insure that Blacks support Barack Obama to the bitter end.
Blacks (as a group) don’t like Whites much, and you can see this from the nearly all Black jury acquitting OJ of murder, to spontaneous anti-White beatings (such as Damian Williams of Reginald Denny, nearly to death) during riots, to Black-on-White crime rates from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, to more than forty years of data points of block voting by Blacks for Blacks and Dems.
Heck, look at the record of Black politicians: Kwame Fitzpatrick, Marion Berry, John Conyers, David Dinkins, and William “Cold Cash” Jefferson of New Orleans suggests that Blacks will tolerate corruption to incompetence as long as the office-holder is both Black and hard Left Dem. Meanwhile the failure of Michael Steele in Maryland and Lynn Swann in PA suggests that Blacks who do not toe the Dem hard left party line but run as Republicans are attacked as “not Black enough.”
Which was the line of attack against Barack Obama when he ran against Bobby Rush for Congress. Anyone listening to Rush can often desire captioning, given Rush’s slurred, dialect-heavy speech. Rush successfully defeated Obama by openly alleging that Obama “was not Black enough” which resonated with the almost entirely Black voters of Rush’s district.
Obama’s solution was two-fold. First, embrace tightly the Farrakhan-Wright nexus in the South-Side, and secondly run in a jiggered district embracing the Bill Ayers, rich White Liberal Marxist types.
This is Obama’s strategy to this day.
However, to pretend “Race does not matter” is like saying gravity does not matter. Of course RACE particularly when dividing up government resources and policy matters, does indeed matter, a whole heck of a lot. Race matters if you want to put lots of poor Black folks with dysfunctional behaviors into “nice” suburban neighborhoods with Section 8 Housing. Race matters if you want to make the Fire Dept. of NYC 70% Black (instead of the roughly 80% White it is now). Race matters if you spend 75% of the social spending on roughly 12.5% of the population.
Of course Race MATTERS(tm) and as a Conservative, I think it is self-evident that race will ALWAYS matter. Will ALWAYS be the main aspect of how people draw lines, decide alliances, and form trust networks. If nothing else, John Conyers DEMANDING that Hillary Clinton fire the Indian-ancestry head of the Haiti Relief Effort committee because he did not bring a single Black staffer to the meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus (and replace said man with a Black person) has significant game-theory implications for me (as a White man).
As a White Man, I know (because I see it all around me, as does nearly every White man and woman) that spending, policy, appointments, decisions, are made on a racial basis by Blacks and Hispanics in racial solidarity. Again, see Conyers. I will LOSE OUT unless I respond in kind: demanding my own racial identity group has set-asides, preferences, policy decisions that are “ours” and so on.
You cannot call back the Multicultural bullet. And there are still more Whites than any other group. No majority group in history has simply willed itself into minority status without violent conquest or huge amounts of strife.
This has profound implications for folks like Blanche Lincoln.
Their only hope of surviving, since Obama has made clear that most lobbying, policy-making, and other key executive associated positions are held for Blacks (and to a lesser extent, Hispanics) is to “switch.”
To basically, the White majority side of the multicultural spoils battle, which is what the ObamaCare policy was all about.
Obama’s allies (Blacks, Hispanics, and SWPL Wealthy Marxists) don’t read Karl Marx or Gramsci or care about much of anything beyond a debased, Volk-Marxist and RACE BASED desire for division of spoils. Thats all it is. Thats all it is. Van Jones did not go to jail in the King Riots … in OAKLAND because he read Das Capital. He went to jail because he believed Black people were cheated out of their “fair deal” and that all the ills of Black communities were the result of Whites. That this is not an accurate reading of the situation in reality is beside the point.
Obama has a core, of Black and Hispanic voters, along with Wealth White marxists (who have racial attitudes roughly akin to the themes of say, Green Mile and other Spike Lee-inflected “Magical Negro”** movies). This means he will never get below say, 38% or thereabouts. But once he gets to the core only, racial politics (who gets which slices of pie) will prevent a recovery.
Blanche Lincoln’s (and those like her) route to salvation is to fight for the White majority slices of pie. Overtly. And break with Obama. Look at Scott Brown. He’s not Ronald Reagan. He’s not even GW Bush. He’s … a moderately conservative Democrat who became the Republican Nominee.
Left-Right IMHO does not capture the complexity of America. This is not a mono-ethnic state where ideology trumps racial identity. This is not Japan or Finland. There has never been since the Reconstruction era an explicit alliance between the White aristocracy and Black-other non-Whites against the broad White population. This alliance is inherently unstable, because of the reaction it provokes.
Not the Klan stringing up non-Whites. A basic (and far more dangerous) struggle over who will get the pie. Since government is not ever going to shrink down to the point where the fights over the pie is meaningless. The only way to get more pie is to take it from some other group.
A tragedy, since while Race is never going away, nor is trans-race or “national identity” politics a substitute for race, racial divisions CAN be contained in an conservative, traditional, rules-boundaries-limitations way, by broad social consensus of certain things and spending and institutions and policies that are “belonging” to racial identity groups and others that “belong” to others. This has the force of custom not law, but generally works. Examples: the NBA is almost exclusively Black, and the NHL almost exclusively White. No one complains, and everyone is relatively happy. Social peace is observed. The advantage of such a system is that is driven bottom-up by broad bargaining on the part of everyone. No group is excluded or given dictats. It can also change in evolutionary ways when society changes.
** Spike Lee’s seminal Essay, “The Magical Negro” bemoaning the fact that these movies feature “magical” Black protagonists whose entire focus is the spiritual enlightenment of White, uptight protagonists: the Green Mile, Shawshank Redemption, Radio, Legend of Bagger Vance, Driving Miss Daisy, etc. Lee has a point, however the narcissism and debased Calvinism of the rich White elite makes this inevitable.
C@29: What that tells you is the relative distances between the mindsets of the parties.
Agree about the “shockingly offensive epithet” (although my characterization – once I found out what it meant – was childish and unserious.)
But, just to postcript my previous statements, to the degree that there exists a real and definable distance between the party apparatus and the political candidates, one is inclined to exercise a degree of circumspection in generalizing the space occupied by the relative mindsets. Certainly this was true for Clinton.
Obama confronts a different challenge in the context of a business sector – financial services – that not only performed with marginal appreciation for the technical demands of their discipline, but full-throated contempt for the legal code. “Triangulating” within that context of overt criminal behavior (IMO) will be difficult, if not ill-advised.
15 Nomenklatura
“As soon as Republicans regain a share of governmental control and therefore responsibility this is going to start to become obvious, as the Tea Partiers will increasingly become unhappy with the performance of both parties.”
Surprise! I have been to several Tea Partys including the one in DC. And I can attest and confirm by witness that the attendees at all of those meetings were already very unhappy with both the democrats and the republicans. Many of them expressed anger and disappointment with the republicans for at least the last nine years.
23 John Moore
The political energy today is with the Tea Party movement. It would be a mistake for Republicans to take this movement as theirs. It is ultimately a revolt of the common people against a self-selected elite.
True. And in the few cases that I have heard about they were rejected by the TP.
It is one thing for a TP to pick or choose someone rather than the other way around.
cellec
“If Republicans can regain the trust of the Tea Partiers and the independants, I think they’ll be in good shape.”
For many republican Congress persons they will never be able to. These Rinos need to lose their cushy jobs and hopefully the remainder of them will get a shock to make them return to conservative thinking and actions. But I think many just won’t be able to break the spell that DC has on them and as a result they will have to be voted out also the next time around.
But if the TP organizations can weed the Republican party also…and somehow implant new leaders and usurp the ingrained failed leadership now that would be something wouldn’t it. In fact, it has already started.
49 geoffgo
“BC’rs are the most creative and rational thinkers around. Lucid avid writers. In the next few months inumerable messages must get crystal clear, across a gamut of issues. Direct and more persuasive than theirs. Let’s get to work. Behind each slogan has to be the complete and compelling argument, and the necessary documentation/links to convince anyone willing to be.”
Here is a slogan for you:
You might try variations, such as substituting Obama or Congress in the place of “Government.”
54 Robinsolana
“They are rather like a disease. Coming in fevers. Hard to see their true motivation as they seek righteous camouflage above all, and systematically co-opt and destroy the very media that should inform us of what is going on. It is like malaria or AIDS, deadly but always hiding, constantly changing it’s outer proteincoat.”
Most Excellent! Something for everybody here to repeat to our friends, family and the World.
56 Mike Giles
“The “damn, I need a job” factor now comes into play. Unlike a what seems to be a common belief – which I run across far too often on conservative sites – blacks are not “all” on welfare. In addition, I’m of the opinion that “96% of blacks voted for Obama” has more to do with media misrepresentation, selective polling, and inner city vote theft; than reality.”
I agree that the number of Blacks that voted for Obama was not near what the media said, except in areas where ACORN and their affiliates actually registered them, picked them up and carefully made sure that they voted and voted for Obama. BUT…the numbers and stats suggest that many, many blacks (and Latinos) are on the nanny tit and will not vote for anybody that will remove it. So they will be encouraged by the same community services to vote for a democrat or face having to find a job. The actual number of conservative, working blacks is not a large number if I remember the government statistics that I looked at many months ago. I may need to be corrected on that.
But there is NOW widespread dissatisfaction with Obama but don’t you know, many don’t even know who belongs to which party or anything about our government. Americans especially minorities are very ignorant when it comes to politics and our governemt.
But your dead on when you talk about the boomers, and that the RDB numbers are all wrong. In the first place it was the politicians and hollywood that ran that show and I know most of their names. I will never forget them because I was there too.
Break! Time to take a bunch of girls to the park. First day in a week where it is warmer and clear. BeBackLater.
Papa Ray
And therein lies a brilliant weapon for Republicans to use. All they need to do is declare the whole issue off the table – it’s a matter for States to decide without any Federal or judicial interference. No DOMA, but no “civil rights” rulings either (on pain of impeachment for the judge doing so).
In that world, marriage would remain largely the same as it always has. Unless gay activists can convince their fellow citizens to alter it, in which case, well okay. In the meantime gays are free to support conservative fiscal policies without feeling like they’re aiding “the enemy.” Plus, and more importantly, it’s a perfect fit with the foundation of the TEA party message – Government is your servant, not your master. “We’re politicians, who the hell are we to tell you what marraige is or isn’t? You tell us. If you even think we need to know.”
That last part is crucial. I’m not exactly in favor of gay marraige, though I think there are far bigger threats to the institution of marriage. It’s not a priority for me one way of the other – I believe our culture will rise and fall on other questions. But I am heartily sick of politicians and political activists telling me what sort of culture I must, or must not, accept. Liberal judges saying I have to accept gays, conservative legislators saying I can’t. To Hell with ‘em both, I’ll decide for myself. I’ll decide for myself if a gay couple is welcome in my home. I’ll decide for myself if a gay teacher is appropriate for my son’s classroom. I’ll decide for myself who my friends and associates will be. I’ll decide for myself where 75% of my income gets spent. I’ll decide for myself what sort of car I’ll drive and where I’ll live. I’ll decide for myself how much transfat to eat, whether I’ll smoke, and what sort of toliet I’ll have in my own damn bathroom.
Conservative candidates will win a lot of elections if they adopt a slightly modified version of the Fox News slogan: “We serve. You decide.” Whether it’s fiscal or cultural issues, conservates have the bulk of the people on their side, they don’t need to legislate their agenda. Simply returning power to the people will accomplish 80% of what any conservative could want. And the 20% it wouldn’t accomplish will be effectively impossible to secure long-term victories on anyway without moving popular opinion first. It’s liberals who have to force things on people via laws and court rulings, and who have to finance their agenda by taking other people’s money and borrowing in other people’s names. Those are the policies voters are rebelling against, and that Obama is doubling down on.
Buddy #46:
Each and every new leader of the USSR was hailed by many in the West to be a great improvement. Of course, compared to Stalin they were. But they were still all dirty rotten commies to the bone.
When Andopov died Ted Kennedy said it was a real trajedy that a leader with such potential had served his entire period while the worst, most stupid, most radical right wing ideologue that had ever been President of the U.S. – Ronald Reagan.
Tea Party Looks to Move From Fringe to Force
Getting serious about electing conservatives.
“Many of the sessions emphasized the importance of new technologies. Despite their views of Mr. Obama, Tea Party advocates do often cite his campaign as a model because of the way it built a fortune from small donations and used social networking.
But the crowd here was largely middle-aged and older, and technology may not come as easily as it did to the young adults who powered Mr. Obama’s campaign. A session on “collaboration in the cloud-applied technology” got hung up on basics like how to do an effective Google search, buy a Web domain or send mass e-mail.
Still, what delegates may lack in political savvy, they make up for in energy.”
If they are really serious, why wouldn’t they round up some high-school/college volunteer techies?
Better yet, BC members volunteer their services!
—
Pootie Poot was once rumored to have a soul,
RWE.
josh, mariner, search [ venona papers ] or [ venona files ] for some eye-popping reports –in the dozens, hundreds. A trusty source & good article is from the Claremont Institute, here’s a snip:
(open quote)
But the year 1995 was an epochal one for the study of American Communism. For in that year, thanks to the insistence of the late Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, who had long specialized in intelligence matters, some 2,900 documents collectively known as “the Venona papers” (a deliberately meaningless code phrase) were de-classified and published. These were radio messages from the top KGB agents in Washington and New York to their superiors in Moscow from approximately 1943 to 1948. They had been recorded at the time by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, but they were, of course, in code, and their decoding was an immensely arduous job carried out by a number of heroic government cryptanalysts over the period from 1945 to 1980.
A second new source of information on the American Communist Party was the archives in Moscow of the defunct Soviet Union, which began to be partially accessible to American investigators in the early 1990s, during the Yeltsin years.
The Venona papers, together with these archives, made it absolutely clear that the American Communist Party was from its beginning the willing agent of Soviet intelligence, obedient to its orders, financed by its contributions, and serving not only as a propaganda organ for Soviet policies but as a generous source for the recruitment of agents who would thereupon influence American policy and gladly commit espionage as well. It is now plain that by 1945 every important branch of the American government, from the White House itself to the State Department, the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department, the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor to the CIA), and the Office of War Information, to name only a few, was infested with Communists busily doing the work of the Soviet Union.
Moreover, it is obvious that a penetration so complete would have been impossible if the Communists had not been able to depend on the blindness or indifference of many of the far larger number of ordinary liberals who dominated the Roosevelt Administration. As early as the late 1930s, even known Communists in government were often regarded by their colleagues as merely “liberals in a hurry.” And during the war, of course, they could be excused as simply enthusiasts for America’s doughty ally, “good old Joe.”
Small wonder, then, that liberals, after the onset of the Cold War with the Soviet Union in 1946, dreaded so profoundly the disclosure of the appalling degree of governmental penetration that they now began to suspect the Communists had achieved on their watch in the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. For the Republicans, of course, the situation was reversed: revelation of the facts was in their highest political interest, and (not incidentally) in the security interest of the nation itself. The fragments of information on the subject that began to surface in the late 1940s—notably through the confessions of two Communist espionage couriers, Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley—shocked public opinion to its core, and set the stage for a genuinely titanic battle over the truth.
(close quote)
***
RWE/68
http://www.bing.com/search?q=ted+kennedy+and+yuri+andropov&form=IE8SRC&src=IE-SearchBox
***
josh, I don’t think ”paranoia” is the correct word for wondering how we got to where we are, and talking it over to that end.
Obama:
“Move to the center? I am the center. It’s the others who have moved.”
Do Demos Lack a Concience?
Well, duh!
It is not just the dichotomy of Obama’s words versus his lifestyle that bear out the hypocrisy of his character and his soul (or lack thereof). It is the arrogance on display since the day he was inaugurated that is most astounding. It is the self-entitlement, the “I won,” the belief that “the big difference here and in ’94 was you got me,” and the egocentric narcissism that is not only disgusting to watch, but has additionally resulted in policies detrimental to America.
This conceit is what is driving Obama, his staff, and the Democrats in Congress to rule as dictators rather than as democratically elected leaders. And it will be the ruination of the nation if they are not all booted out as soon as possible.
The shocking steps the Democrats took to pass health care legislation prior to Scott Brown’s election are historic. The corruption, lies, and concealment were not politics as usual; they were politics of the worst kind. To what can we attribute the number of hours dedicated to the drafting and passage of a health care bill, the secrecy under which it had been drafted, the partisanship which had closed out any Republican input, and the name-calling and vehemence that pervaded the process?
“and I believe Joschua Fischer’s (IMO ex-stasi) orchestration of France and Germany’s treachery during the Iraq war was just one more example”
not at all, France and Germany opposition to the Bush resolution to go into the 2nd Irak war was mainly caused becauz of the American interference into the EU businesses, in that sense that Americans promised to the EU eastern Republics a pass to get into EU when they would opt for a Nato Alliance, and thus benefitting indeed of this EU pass, that these eastern Republic would ow to America for their new healthy situation, that Bush exploited , when he was dragging foreign legions for his crusades, He passed over the EU rules where such a commitment should have been discussed within the EU members, and that was putting the French and German agendas to create an EU army going to the pithole, ONly for that american interference in our businesses, only 2 countries dared to oppose to Bush resolution, (BTW these 2 counties are still the biggest contributors to the EU economy)
this has nuthin to do with Fischer former past as a maoist, besides lots of France politiacians were maoist in the seventies wich was more a posture for people who wanted to look intellectually “aware” !
Re Whiskey’s thesis, several years ago a real estate agent moved a large black family into a house on my quiet middle-class street. The rent was Section 8 money. The blacks were loud at all hours, strewed garbage all over the lawn, stole from the neighbors’ cars, had a constant stream of johns or drug buyers coming and going, and when they were evicted left $20K in damage to the interior of the house. My most liberal neighbor, mother of two young girls, was the most vehement in seeking the eviction. Spoils are part of the inevitable conflict, but so are cultural values. And many moderately liberal individuals resent being called racist because they don’t want their children influenced by a dysfunctional subculture. Many Caucasians are tired of being hated for having a culture that allowed creation of a great country. The time is ripe for a reaction.
“…more a posture for people who wanted to look intellectually “aware” !
–same here, MC, then and now. They’d be satan worshippers if the tee shirts ‘caught on’. And in both your country and ours –they can VOTE! That’s cRazY! Why don’t we let brocolli vote ?
***
anyhoo –tomorrow at the crack of dawn the last shuttle flight counts down to takeoff. Hope it goes well –that jerk Obama managed to pick the very date of the Challenger disaster to kill the Moon program. Shades of the calendar finger to Poland back a few months ago. I guess they can have a giggle in the Oval, like they used to have back in the 90s.
Charles @ 18
Remember that what saved Clinton was Oklahoma City. The ground work is already being laid to blame Birthers/Tea Partiers/Oath Keepers/bitter clingers/rejectionists/obstructionists/talk radio hosts/non-compliant wreckers and saboteurs for heinous outrages that kill scores of cherubic toddlers whose portraits and wailing mothers appear on ABC/NBC/SeeBS/CNN/ even before the fires are extinguished.
Buddy, exceted that the satan worshippers can’t reevolve, as politicians can do when they access to the real life
Two tweets.
# RasmussenPoll
Bounce is gone… Obama total approval matches lowest yet at 44%… Approval Index back to pre-SOTU level… http://tinyurl.com/preztrack about 8 hours ago from web
# Scott Rasmussen RasmussenPoll
Obama: Strongly Approve 26% Strongly Disapprove 41%, Approval Index: -15… total approval 44%… http://tinyurl.com/preztrack
This may take the cake for the shortest bounce in history. It really is a spike on the chart. Prudence dictates waiting two more days to confirm the trend before throwing a party, but it is a cold night and for those who need an excuse before opening the anti-freeze this might do.
He touched -19 before the SOTU and when he crosses -20 things could get desperate. My hope is that the SECDEF and his Area and Type CINCS, contrary to popular belief command does not go through the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have lines of communication open to Congress and the VP to prevent any rash moves.
To be blogged.
But that doesn’t happen anymore, MC –they just move their offices over to K Street and start handing over money to the grabbers instead of grabbing money from the hand-overs.
***
LotM, i sometimes wonder if the joint Chiefs don’t have an informal contingency plan to sort of wander over to the White House for an informal visit, and just sort of say ‘go to your room, we’ll call you when time-out is over’.
Buddy, yes these kind of persons are dying, the new generation is all but for medias ratings (included Sarkozy)
Now, as far as Oscar Fisher, for having delt on german blogs, he is still fidel to his policies under Schröder’s government, therefore pro Germans. I’m sure that the actual involvments of Germans into the different american definitions of war fields, aren’t what the very Germans wish, cuz the objectives aren’t concret benefits for them, but if there would be one they’ll become the warriors we knew
Buddy #70:
In addition to Venona, The KGB archives were opened for a while in the early 90′s and they revealed that a US Congressman from New York in the 30′s was a paid agent for the USSR.
Buddy #75:
That is the last Shuttle launch at night, as I understand it. I think I will get up watch it. Only 4 more after that one, I guess.
And to think that when I was put in charge of a space booster program in 1978 that I was told Shuttle was coming and would put all American ELVs out of business. And it just about did. Most launches are of foreign made rockets or rockets using foreign (Soviet) engines.
I’ve been reading Belmont Club for a long time, and this is the first time I’ve really seen something posted by Wretchard that I regard as really unduly optimistic.
“Like Admiral Yamamoto in 1941 all his surprise attack gains are bound to be wasting assets as the opposition launches one political Essex carrier after the other upon the seas of unemployment and deficit. In the end they will outbuild him and overwhelm him politically.”
“The Fall of France demonstrated how support for a political leader can evaporate after initially rising once it is clear he is inept.”
It was perfectly clear long before Hitler attacked Poland that Roosevelt’s economic policies were utterly inept, but that didn’t matter. The epic scale of his administration’s failures created epic dependency, and epic growth of government. Why won’t the same thing happen today?
Obama believes that he is on the “right side of history” (for which he recently praised Sen. Reid). If the markets bring reality to bear, and unemployment doubles soon enough, he or another replacement from the Keynesian duopoly will have the means in place to lock in dependency forever. And then someday this website and the Tea Partiers will be long forgotten like the Garet Garretts and Al Smiths (remember the Liberty League?) of the 1930s. Put another way, even if Obama is Hoover, not Roosevelt, the next President will be no Andrew Jackson (the last president to strike at the root of the problem).
There are no Essex carriers to launch; inaction and purging the system have no constituency. The VAT/national sales tax, sold by a negative income tax, will have far more appeal. The long slump toward socialism can continue for many, many more years before the bottom falls out.
ol right, a guess, there will be an american cooperation with the space european program, also as well with the planes industry, sorry, some people thought it was a cheaper alternative to cooperate with these European untermenschesn !
There are no Essex carriers to launch; inaction and purging the system have no constituency. The VAT/national sales tax, sold by a negative income tax, will have far more appeal. The long slump toward socialism can continue for many, many more years before the bottom falls out.
You might be right, but in the end it will be matter of timing. In the long run any system that doesn’t work will be purged. It’s true that it may not come in time to save my mortage and whatever satisfaction I may derive from being eventually right may be from the vantage of whatever sidewalk I happen to be sleeping on, my tin cup of pencils tucked into my threadbare shirt. But the timing is up to us. The sooner we awaken, the more Essexes can be launched. If not … well there’s the pencils — and the sidewalk.
The KGB etc, etc…well in the end the Wall came down, the Soviet Union cratered and a whole bunch of agents were rolled up…others got rich selling secrets and more than a few simply changed the name of the organization and continued ….losing.
I always find it facinating that the latest KGB defector has the latest “word” on what’s what…well in intelligence no one person knows the entire picture. It’s always in the CIA and KGB, MI6 etc a house of mirrors where you really can’t trust anyone because you sign on to be used and you accept it until you can’t handle it anymore. If you sign on to “save the world” you quickly find out what an impossible job that is and you go into survival/paranoia mode.
Who killed Bill Colby? I never bought that a man of his proficiency around the water simply drown. And when did it happen? Right after he gave up the “Family Jewels”. I figure the Company did him. But of course if thats even close to the truth then you can bet those involved were gone in short order too. Intelligence work, especially in the field is about as stressful as things get because you can’t trust anyone. It’s a tough business. It sure ain’t no “Band of Brothers”
76. Cannoneer No. 4:
Yeah, you might be right. I too think that Clinton’s presidency turned on the Oklahoma Bombing in 1995. As well, Bob Dole and Ross Perot helped Clinton in 1996 to get a second term.
I may thinking in terms of the democratic narrative for 1994-2000 which was that Newt was a loser beast while Clinton balanced the budget.
I’ll post once again this congressional savings since 1955. (Notice once again that the deficits started trending bad in the 1970′s when the USA domestic oil production peaked and the USA became a oil importing nation.)
(Remember that McNamera from his perch at the world bank had US banks “recycle” arab petrodollars to third world countries that defaulted and bankrupted a big section of the US banking community.)
Remember too T Boone picken’s point that this whole thing can be turned around and relatively quickly if the USA converts about a third to a half of its transportation sector over to natural gas. This would kill half the US import bill,cap the cost of oil worldwide, raise the value of the dollar held in central banks world wide.
How do you get the wrong people to do the right thing.
Hmmm.
Adopt a billionaire.
We need an adopt a billionaire program.
These guys are homeless.
I mean really. They’re rootless gypsies. They’re the ones driving the we are the world we are the children program.
It would probably do for an american to get like an american billionaire and adopt him.
You could get some court papers or not to make him an official part of the family. Make sure he has a room in the house and he comes to supper. Make sure that he prays with everyone around the supper table. Also that he does some of the chores around the house.
Hmm. I’m not sure what this has to do with switching the USA transportation over to natural gas. Maybe its just that with the exception T Boone & the sage of omaha –most billionaire don’t seem to see the connection between US energies supplies, world capital flows and the money in their bank accounts. (and even buffet seems more interested in coal train transportation than natural gas)
Maybe it’s time to consider a constitutional fix for all this. Consider that the original 13 states had a total population under 3 million, with only VA and PA larger than 300K. We could devolve political power (i.e. budget and taxes back to localities of about this size) with the states and federal government appropriately downsized by giving the existing employees to the localities (similar to how large enterprise CEO’s in the 1970s told their headquarters staff that if they could find a job at the end-points of the business – out in the divisions, away from headquarters, they could stay working at the company, else they should leave because what they were doing at CorpHQ clearly wasn’t of use or value any longer given the rise of IT and the diminishing need for Carnegie and Sloan class command-and-control operations).
So, we disestablish most of the bureaucracy (including any and all federal obligation to their citizens), leaving at the Federal level perhaps only the departments of war, treasury and justice (the department of war can decide what state department employees and missions are worth keeping). (not original, borrowed from another comment read and misplaced a few days ago). Everything else is done closer to the citizen, and seldom in political blocks of more than 300K people (where everything means 9 of 10 dollars taxed and spent, ditto for regulation and law as affects resident citizens). Judges (if not a short and understandable software algorithm) supervise redrawing of political districts (the new states) after each census with some allowance for citizens at boundaries to choose their membership for one or two census periods. Then no interest group save the individual citizens could cover all these political entities. State capitals (and the federal capital) become largely museums. We offer statehood to other (foreign entities) on similar terms (which are mostly the civil society components of the constitution, rule-of-law by a court-system that’s (blind to status and) equal for all, quickly adjudicated contract disputes, common currency, bill of rights, and commitment to a common defense. Tax (and quality of life) competition is encouraged (transparent statistics, widely documented) between these political jurisdictions of 300K citizens that are nearly autonomous save for uniform trade and travel rules. Where the 300K citizen jurisdictions have very few rules going in, including the form of government they choose (save their citizens have freedom to travel so they are competing with all the other states forms of government, regulation and taxing). The one hard requirement is a tithe of 10% of a state’s tax receipts, 8% going to a larger community of jurisdictions (say a self-selected grouping of 100 300K “states”), and 2% to the Federal government for its essential functions.
And of course, Wretchard, I applaud your efforts to wake up your fellow citizens, and launch Essexes. There are few places on the Internet as illuminating as your pages.
I’d be more worried about any retirement accounts and savings that you have than your mortgage, though. Democratic excess tends to favor the debtors.
We need more of these fine young Americans in the fight.
Yet Another Military Stud For US Congress
Read his speech-on left side at his website.
An American Son and Warrior.
Papa Ray
While I may have personal objections to gay marriage, I think the matter is too superficial for conservatives and Republicans to really bother with anymore. Since gay people are already allowed to adopt children, there’s no argument that marriage is only for heterosexuals based on a family issue. If conservatives concede to gay marriage they can do so on the grounds of government keeping out of citizens’ private lives. Politically it would be the death knell for liberals. Abortion is one issue I would never give in on- it’s a matter of life or death. But conservatives/republicans have to see that gay marriage is not as serious an issue as it’s made out to be.
RWE/81; –mercy sakes –that’s a major project –i bet you were shaking your head when the stiff O rings made their appearance.
“and it just about did” –that’s one of those “they told me if i voted for McCain, the Constellation program would be finished much sooner” –and i DID, and it WAS!” jokes.
wish i could laugh.
the killer with the Moon (and Mars) cancel is not just the sunk cost gone waste, the scattering of the organization that will never be easily put back together, the Aries Rocket, and its new ‘throttlable’ solid/liquid fuel hybrid engine that pentagon counted on to modify & replace our long-in-the-tooth ICBM force, but that the reason for the kill is COST savings which are such a TINY fraction of what Obama is blowing on imaginary zip codes and padding union payrolls in one or two counties somewhere. The effect of a cold kill is enormous and durable –look at the last moon program –to interrupt is to kill, so say sayonara to escaping the global gulag and starting up elsewhere.
And what about the Stimulous Program?
Isn’t that still largely unspent and isn’t it to create or save jobs?
The thousands of F-22 and Consellation/Aries engineers –are they enemies of the Obama State or something ?
Good Gawd a Mighty –fricking STOOPID Democrats –stoopid, stoopid, stoopid.
It appears that a good portion of our population is stupid about a few things too.
Pew Research News IQ Quiz
Then there is this:
Daily Kos/Research 2000 Poll
And this:
Leaked Report Reveals Dozens of House Members Under Ethics Investigation
Papa Ray
Just a thought about gay marriage:
For more than a century some states allowed individual counties to decide whether to allow liquor sales within their jurisdictions.
Of course, marriage is s’posed to be forever, straight or gay or interspecies. And the bond between the partners is supposed to be unaffected by location. So county by county is probably unworkable. What about state by state????
Well, what about difficulties occasioned by national frontiers? Is Mexico (which does not to my knowledge recognize mono-gender marriages) obliged to extend identical legal rights to a Canadian same-sex couple as they do to male-female couples within their territories????
Seems like many of the issues over which Gay couples are most distressed can be addressed by contracts that would be recognized more or less universally by all jurisdictions.
But the issue is clearly more emotional than rational, because that solution seems only to piss off the folks who’d benefit.
Owww. My brain hurts.
I thought Obama the transcendant sainted GENIUS of the age, was supposed to SOLVE all these pesky problems…
OK we can all use a good laugh about now –
http://tinyurl.com/yjbnmr2
PR,
That is an October article on the House Ethics Committee and it is almost devoid of content. There probably is a story to follow on that subject. The implosion of the British Labour Party was launched by a stream of petty corruption charges regarding their expense accounts. IIRC we followed it closely here in the BC. It would be characteristic of the Dems to emulate the corruption and ignore the lesson of the consequences. The Republicans when caught at least affect a show of remorse.
I think the story of the last 20 years is the voters trying to take back control from D.C. and just getting more and more frustrated. Clinton was an outsider in ’92 – a “new Democrat” who was supposed to be taking his party back from the loony-left tax-n-spenders like Jim Wright. He beat the “insider” G.H.W. Bush, but then acted just like any other D.C. insider.
So the GOP took congress in ’94, largely on a promise to bust up the power structure (term limits, etc.) which they promply ignored. Then in ’96, they nominated Bob “Been there Forever” Dole and made it clear their allegiance was to the D.C. power strucutre. Dole was a decent guy, but starting with Clinton, every single presidential election has been won by the guy with less Washington D.C. time on his resume.
Papa Ray @ 92:
Not so much “stupid” as “uninformed” (or misinformed). Stupidity is another metric altogether, and my hunch is that not all the low scorers are stupid, nor are all the high scorers incandescently brilliant.
IIRC, C.S. Lewis habitually and intentionally did not read newspapers.
And Sherlock Holmes did not know that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and was promptly going to forget that fact when Watson told him. His reasoning was that that piece of information was not relevant to his work. OTOH he could identify something like, what, 300+ different types of tobacco/smokes? (Because lurking criminals in Victorian London *always* smoked, no doubt!)
People will pay attention to whatever they perceive it is in their self-interest to pay attention to. I say “perceive” because there can be a disconnect between reality and a person’s awareness of it. But there are all sorts of incentivizers in American society, which can be staggeringly different depending on one’s age, income, marital status, job, religious beliefs, etc.
Surprise surprise, but a lot of those “incentivizers” turn out to be bread and circuses designed to (or having the very practical effect of) entertaining and distracting broad swaths of the population with simulacra and foolishness. But simulacra and foolishness are the indulgences of a culture (and individuals within it) that is not able or willing to be serious. Not yet, at any rate. The necessity of sobriety, of decisiveness and sound judgment, of hyper-awareness of one’s surroundings, is something that tends to strike a person like a lightning bolt in circumstances where individual survival is at stake.
We here on BC are very well aware that the survival of the Republic is presently at stake. The missing component in the future of America is a tipping point of citizens reaching awareness that their individual survival is very much linked to that of their country.
Statistically, yes, half the population is below average (duh!) … but I don’t think that means that all these people are stupid.
BTW, nothing educates like having to do something for oneself. Liberty is an environment that encourages (some would say, even forces) individuals to consistently improve their knowledge, skill sets and characters. Dependency OTOH allows you to float along unawares. Excluding children, people whose situations are characterized by habitual dependency on someone else are (a) terribly vulnerable to exploitation and betrayal, and (b) going to have a hard time growing, because they are not as a course of daily life being forced into challenging situations that will force them to grow.
The traditional American environment of individual liberty produced a nation full of tens of millions of constant strivers — entrepreneurs, inventors, leaders, politically dissatisfied cranks and squeaky wheels, patriots and humanitarians. If you were to ask me what *used* to characterize the American spirit I would have said it was this sort of innate love of liberty, even if it was realized only on the level of “Oh yeah? Sez who?” anti-authoritarianism, an instinctive chafing at being told what to do by anyone but your pa or your preacher. The American spirit nowadays? I’m not sure. But the Tea Partiers sure do seem to capture the “you ain’t the boss of me” attitude of our forebears with respect to the relationship between citizen and government. And people getting excited about and educating themselves and their families and neighbors on the Constitution, aka that “charter of negative liberties,” is NOT something that tends to make people clamore for more & more government in their lives. Which must scare the government immensely.
“For God’s sake, whatever you do, DON’T read that document!!!”
BTW, a moonbat on another site was trying to argue for a “living Constitution” on the grounds that it wasn’t perfect as originally written as proven by the existence of Amendments … not making the connection that changing the Constitution via formal amendments is by design a protracted and debate-intensive process involving each and every state and its duly elected legislature, quite different from changing the Constitution via the fiat of 5 unelected persons on SCOTUS.
@93 Exactly- stop pissing people off by catering to what they want. Most of these gay rights activists seem pretty happy when their states make gay marriage legal. I don’t think they necessarily want to make it a federal issue. As long as their marriages are legal in the state in which they reside, they seem fine with it. It’s not like the real civil rights movement, where the federal government had to intervene to protect citizens’ constitutional rights. All this silly social/cultural clamor for “equal rights” is merely a matter of certain peoples’ emotions being validated. The GOP should realize at this point it’s no skin off our backs- we have bigger fish to fry, and we’re letting liberals set the terms of the debate by making a non-issue like gay marriage seem more important than grown up problems, like national defense, the economy, etc.
I’m just speaking as a young person, who used to have many debates with homosexual-loving friends over whether gay marriage is a civil rights issue (obviously it isn’t, but these people are too brainwashed by liberalism to see this). I decided to give up eventually because I realized if the babies have their way on this, then they might be at least willing to entertain voting for people who actually gave them the cookie. All I’m saying is the GOP is missing a grand opportunity if it fails to catch onto this- and they are letting Obama win.
While I may have personal objections to gay marriage, I think the matter is too superficial for conservatives and Republicans to really bother with anymore.
And yet it is superficial enough for SSM advocates to wage a decades-long battle in dozens of courts and legislators all over the country?
You can’t have it both ways.
Either marriage means something, or it doesn’t. SSM activists have decided it means a whole lotta something to them. But you would have conservatives to whom it also means a whole lotta something throw in the towel because you deem it “superficial”? This doesn’t make sense.
It’s a pretty visceral issue with a lot of people, which is why taking decisions about what it is and what it means out of the hands of voters and putting it into courts is, IMO, a counterproductive move for both camps.
Either marriage is purely a private arrangement between consenting individuals, with no consequences for society at large and therefore an arrangement that society has no stake in and therefore should have no voice in … OR … marriage does have a social dimension beyond the individuals entering the arrangement, and therefore society should get a say in what it is and what it means.
If the former is the case, then a whole host of legal codes need to be nullified, “public ceremonies” are unnecessary and pointless, and any and all problems arising out of the marital arrangement must be solved between the individuals involved … no running to the courts or to anyone else to have this or that provision enforced, this or that law passed, or this or that arrangement recognized (how can society “recognize” something if society has no voice in it?).
OTOH if the latter is the case, then the $64,000 question becomes whose voice is paramount in saying what marriage is and what it means — the individual or society? Which approach — giving supremacy of the power of definition — is likelier to lead to long-term social stability?
And if the definition is altered to allow for same-sex marriages, on the grounds that the invidual’s voice must be supreme, then what *are* the standards, if any, and who gets to decide? What about marriages between multiple consenting adults? 2 men and 2 women? 20 men and 38 women? Does everyone in those kinds of arrangements get equal “spousal rights”? What about the children who result from these multiple-spouse marriages? What rights or legal privileges or responsibilities does a man or woman have to the child born to another spouse of his or her wife or husband? Do all 20 of those husbands owe alimony and child support if one of the wives divorces them and takes the kids with her, even if only 2 of those men are biological fathers of the children? Does every “husband” get equal treatment under the law, or are some spouses more equal (and more responsible) than others? Or, who makes the decision to pull the plug when hubby is in hospital on life support with irreversible brain damage? What if 19 of his wives want to keep him attached to life support but 19 want to disconnect him from the machine? Do the 37 other husbands get a vote in this too? What about division of property upon divorce? Does a husband owe alimony to his ex-wife if she still has 37 other husbands?
The mind boggles.
I’m sure the lawyers would have fun with kind of marital free-for-all resulting from radical individualism. No doubt it would be a boon to their profession.
Not so much fun for everyone else, I expect.
BTW, Stephanie, since you are speaking “as a young person” … not a few people (those who advocate or are fine with same-sex marriage) feel confident in predicting that while the majority of the US population is against SSM now (30 of 30 states so far have voted for traditional marriage), the majority opinion will change when successive generations for whom this issue is a non-issue gain political majority.
This may be true. Or it may not. But the fact remains that it *is* an issue now, and that a majority of voters oppose it. Declaring it a non-issue because a non-majority of voters view it that way isn’t exactly the way to win over the majority who care about it.
If it comes to pass, it comes to pass, but (1) let the people, not the courts, decide, and (2) in the meantime, it would help to have some intellectual consistency in the debate re: individuals and society, and a LOT more discussion about what marriage is for in the first place. The heteros lost sight of that decades ago, so, no surprise we are all wandering about in a fog. A return to first principles is needed.
Well, I think you can divide gay activists into two camps. One camp are those who have been convinced that they are somehow being discriminated against (“we demand to be subjected to IRS tax penalites too! We demand to be subject to the screwed up Family Court system too!). They’re probably fine with their local state legalizing SSM (though, aside from judicial fiat, that’s actually pretty rare). But there’s another group that isn’t fine with anything other than destroying traditional culture because they think it’s oppressive and unfair.
This second group isn’t really about “gay rights” at all. A bunch of ‘em probably aren’t even gay. But they see the issue as a wedge issue that they can use to attack traditional American culture. They see legislation and court cases as means to undermine traditional culture and eventually destroy it altogether. They won’t be satisfied with a handful of states legalizing it. Because legalizing gay marriage isn’t the goal for them. It’s just another means in their larger cultural war. That’s why, as Bogie notes, they’ve spent so much energy pushing it for so long.
Now, oddly enough, Stephanie and I come to a similar policy decision, but I think for different reasons. She’s advocating giving the activists a cookie to get them on our side. I think that’s not only morally dubious, but also ineffective. The decline of the GOP over the last twenty years has been largley because of efforts to sign up mercenary political support with such cookies. The first group of gay activists, the “I just wanna be me” crowd, might be bought off by a cookie, but the second group, the America-haters, they certainly won’t because the cookie isn’t what they’re after. And since they’re generally the ones who convinced the first group there was a problem in the first place, odds are they’ll keep the first group from signing on with us anyway. Take the cookie and then bite the hand that gave it.
I think the thing to do is remove gay mariage as a subject of political debate, or at least legislative or judicial debate. Take a firm stand that cultural issues such as gay marriage are best decided outside of government, and if and when government must take a side, it should be done via direct referrendum rather than through elected officials (or even worse, appointed judges). Doing so has the powerful effect of taking away a major weapon from the Left – they can’t portray you as unfair or bigoted. Your response (as an elected official anyway) is “Me? I’m agnostic. Government’s about fixing potholes and killing terrorists. I don’t care what you do in your bedroom.” By planting the responsibility for approving or rejecting Gay Marriage squarely with the People, suddenly the gay activists have to confront their neighbors instead of their congressman. And while gay activists have elected officials outnumbered, their neighbors have them outnumbered.
If you look back at the “culture wars” of which gay marraige is simply the latest eruption, the entire cause of it has been an attempt by the Left to use government to undermine traditional society. Whether it’s abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, the homeless, drug use, it’s always Leftists who are, ahem, making a Federal case out of it.
But it’s a trap. One that conservatives have, and still do, blindly walk into, baited like so many bulls by the red flags progressives keep waving. The trap goes like this:
PROGRESIVE: Government should define marriage so as to normalize the gay lifestyle by forcing everyone to accept it.
CONSERVATIVE: No! Government should define marriage to defend traditional morality.
PROGRESIVE: So you agree government should define marriage? Thank you, I win.
Because government is the province of progressives. It is their creature, their first, last, and only hope, the only institution that can perpetuate their flawed and failed ideology. Without government, Progressivism is dead. Dead with a capital Doornob*. The more power government has, the more hope progressives have.
They have been using cultural issues for years to co-opt their political opponents into giving more and more power to the only institution that can sustain progressivism. It’s been said here before on BC that government is like The One Ring. That’s so true (perhaps Tolkein even… no, could it be?). Progressives are Sauron and Big Government is their Ring of Power. They know that even if it falls into the hands of their enemies, it will corrupt anyone who tries to use it for good. And it always tries to find its way back to its master.
Cultural issues must be fought in the hearts and minds of individuals, not in the halls of government. The saying “you can’t legisltate morality” has been obnoxiously overused, but it’s true in an important sense**. Laws that don’t have the support of an overwhelming majority are at best useless gestures, at worst oppresive and destructive fractures in society. Passing a law that is ignored by large segments of the population doesn’t make anyone more morale, just more cynical. Morality laws are either a rubber stamp for a civilized society, or a useless gesture for an uncivilized one. Best to focus on the civilized part.
I’ve alredy rambled far too long for which I apologize. The summary of my thoughts is that the great triumph of the Left has been to politicize almost all of civil society. Politics is the domain of the Left, civil society the domain of the Right. It’s not a matter of focus or talent, it’s an immutable law of human nature that we can’t change. Our failing has been to join them in growing the sphere of politics, thinking we could control it. We can’t. It’s their ring, and our doom if we don’t destroy it.
* – oh sure, it’s a zombie that will always rise again from the grave, but that doesn’t mean whe shouldn’t kill it every chance we get.
** – the converse however is not true, you most certainly can legislate immorality.
Bogie, I would just like to pick a particular nit in that strong opposition to gay marriage has not translated into electoral gains for conservative candidates. It would seem that the two issues, gay marraige and elected representatives, are considered separatly by the majority, or at least by a decisive minority, of voters.
Put another way, traditional marriage has no coat tails in the political arena. Baffling perhaps, but there it is.
Hear, hear. One of the problems of arguing cultural issues out in the politial sphere is it seems to distract resources from arguing them out in the civil sphere. That’s what I mean by rubber stamps and useless gestures. I find the idea of “defending” marriage against homosexuals a rather uesless gesture when 40% of children are born out of wedlock. It’s not gay people having those children. We’ve become shockingly uncivilized in many areas, and all this worry about what gay people are doing is, I think, just a means of avoiding more important, but more difficult work.
When I was in college, my apartment was pretty dirty. Not quite as bad as Wretchard’s friend from a few posts ago who worried what might come after the rats, but not clean either. Except during finals. When I had something I should be studying for but didn’t want to do, I’d suddenly find great interest in cleaning the apartment. It was my way of avoiding one unpleasant but important task by doing another less unpleasant task.
I think gay marriage is like that. It’s easy to pass a DOMA law. It’s hard to unseat Barney Frank or Barbara Boxer. Ultimately it’s far more important to unseat liberals though, and defeating gay marriage laws while Democrats took Congress and the White House has to be considered a major defeat for conservatives.
Likewise, I think focusing energy on gay marraige is a distraction from the problems with, y’know, marriage-marriage. It’s way more important to get the out of wedlock birth rate down. It’s way harder too though, and ultimately a more depressing problem to contemplate. DOMA is like me furiously scrubbing my kitchen countertops instead of studying for my Thermo finals.
War? What war?
stephanie: All this silly social/cultural clamor for “equal rights” is merely a matter of certain peoples’ emotions being validated.
Yeah, silly me, I’ve been with Fely since 1989. Twenty-one years. We pay our taxes, pay our mortgage, vote, and serve on juries. I have twenty-five years of service for the Dept. of Defense, both active duty and as a civilian. She has over twenty years for Marriott. But state and federal government considers us only roommates, and will not grant the 400 state-level rights and 1,000 federal level rights that accrue to married couples. But no, as you say, when I clamor for equal rights as a fellow American citizen, it’s just me seeking validation for my Love That Dares Not Speak Its Name. That’s the ticket.
Bogie, I would just like to pick a particular nit in that strong opposition to gay marriage has not translated into electoral gains for conservative candidates. It would seem that the two issues, gay marraige and elected representatives, are considered separatly by the majority, or at least by a decisive minority, of voters.
Without doing a head count of elections in which politicians ran with an explicitly strong stance one way or the other on same-sex marriage, my sense is that you are right, it doesn’t seem to propel *candidates* who are intrinsically allied to this as their primary platform.
But what’s interesting is what happens when the issue is uncoupled from candidates … when it is put before people as a stand-alone matter in a direct referendum. People do vote on it and therefore care about it. But it does seem weird somehow for it to occupy a central plank in a candidate’s policy platform.
The summary of my thoughts is that the great triumph of the Left has been to politicize almost all of civil society. Politics is the domain of the Left, civil society the domain of the Right.
Some time ago I picked up on the terms of debate in a lot of these cultural arguments. The way the debate is framed by progressives has always been “the individual vs. the state.” As in – “how dare the state pass laws about what I do in the privacy of my bedroom” … “keep your laws off my ovaries” … etc. The shell game at work is, of course, that while progressives advertise their agenda as enhancing the liberty of the individual, it is really about enhancing the power of the state. They are statists, through and through, and will crush without remorse any individual who dares challenge or even politely dissent from the statist agenda.
Conservatives, OTOH, believe (though with some it is more like a sub-conscious recognition) that there are more entities in the equation besides “the state” and “the individual.” There is “society” … and that is composed of all sorts of affiliations, formal and informal, at all sorts of levels, from the familial to the national. “Society” is neither the state nor the individual, although at times it may sometimes coalesce around certain issues with such adamantine focus that a law gets passed as a direct result of that coalesced focus. But for the most part society remains amorphous and a-legislative in its impact.
You could say, and I think conservatives do, that society is the great buffer between the individual and the state. Socialization and social taboos were devices to keep a person from causing social disruption before it ever got to the point of that person’s breaking the law. IOW social taboos were society’s way of inculcating individuals with self-control, with numerous penalties, graduating by severity, coming into play long before the cops and judges were brought into the picture. This tended to keep the role of cops and judges to a minimum, and focused on the rarer incidents of true sociopathic behavior than, say, the criminalization of (non-PC) speech or the temperature of McDonald’s coffee.
The post WWII cultural revolution in America took aim squarely at demolishing society because the progressives knew that in a scenario where only the state and the individual were left standing, the state would almost certainly win. A nation full of individuals incapable of self-control (and claiming, ironically, radical personal autonomy) becomes a nation in, first, cultural chaos, and then eventually political chaos. A nation in need of the strong hand of the state to restore order.
While I agree that too many conservatives have fallen for the state bait (“there oughtta be a law!”), I find that libertarians have also swallowed the poison pill in that their premises too often take the form of considering only the entities of the state and the individual. Society seems to be missing from the libertarian worldview, and that is the insurmountable hill of libertarianism IMO … you are NEVER going to get limited government without a strong and relatively cohesive society. People who insist on doing their own thing to the point where they hack off 4 out of 5 neighbors, and attitudinally give the middle finger to these same neighbors, are people who pretty much ensure that at some point a law WILL be passed proscribing that “thing” that they are doing.
A lot of Americans don’t seem to want to admit it, at least when it comes to morality, but what other people think matters. Yes, we are individuals (and in the American system, we are supposed to be regarded as such politically), but in our daily walking-about lives we are still part of a tribe (many tribes, in fact).
Society matters. Culture matters. A fractured society and a culture in chaos are a breeding environment for government tyranny.
101. JMH:
The saying “you can’t legisltate morality” has been obnoxiously overused, but it’s true in an important sense**
I would go one step further. All law making is essentially values laden. Moral judgements are made with every law. What to rule in. What to rule out always has a values component.
98. Stephanie:
Re: #93
Hey, tighten up girl. I know as a champion pisser-offer that is A-OK..You in fact piss me off by telling another contributor to quit pissing people off ….are you the arbiter of the NO PISS OFF now?
This is one of the datapoints that I think supports my “get the culture wars out of politics” strategy. Ask Americans if they think people ought to behave according to traditional moral values, the answer is overwhelmingly “yes.” But if you ask them if they want to elect a politician who makes requiring people to behave a central point of his platform, the answer is very often “No thanks.”
Americans just don’t like a scold, even if they agree with what the scold is carrying on about.
97 bogie wheel
“Statistically, yes, half the population is below average (duh!) … but I don’t think that means that all these people are stupid.”
I disagree wholeheartedly.
Stupid:
2 entries found.
1. 1stupid (adjective)
2. 2stupid (noun)
Main Entry: 1stu·pid
Pronunciation: ˈstü-pəd, ˈstyü-
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle French stupide, from Latin stupidus, from stupēre to be numb, be astonished — more at type
Date: 1541
1 a : slow of mind : obtuse b : given to unintelligent decisions or acts : acting in an unintelligent or careless manner c : lacking intelligence or reason : brutish
2 : dulled in feeling or sensation : torpid
3 : marked by or resulting from unreasoned thinking or acting : senseless
4 a : lacking interest or point b : vexatious, exasperating
— stu·pid·ly adverb
— stu·pid·ness noun
synonyms stupid, dull, dense, crass, dumb mean lacking in power to absorb ideas or impressions. stupid implies a slow-witted or dazed state of mind that may be either congenital or temporary . dull suggests a slow or sluggish mind such as results from disease, depression, or shock . dense implies a thickheaded imperiousness to ideas . crass suggests a grossness of mind precluding discrimination or delicacy . stupid applies to an exasperating obtuseness or lack of comprehension .
______
Regardless…Americans had better wake up and get politically smart and pay attention to current events and the actions or inaction’s of their government.
For years most of Americans have ignored the politics of this Republic. And because of that it is mostly our fault that things have turned out as they have. We have encouraged politicians to make decisions for us without our input, because we were too busy with our lives and trying to make a living to make them do the right things for not only their voters but for our Republic.
Most times we just voted for the party or voted on who had the slickest speeches or who could tell the best lies, or not voted at all.
We must turn that around and start taking charge of our future and our children’s future by managing and directing our representatives. We must not allow people who do not espouse and embrace American ideals and who love themselves more than our Republic to be in public service at any level, local, county, state or federal.
Socialism and worse will befall us if we fail.
If we don’t act now America as we know it will perish.
Papa Ray
I think you are describing perfectly the devide between Libertarians and libertarians. A true libertarian philosophy holds that you are free to choose your own behavior so long as you are willing to be responsible for the consequences. But there are those who like the first part but not the second part. Adolescents, so to speak, and like adolescents, they take perverse satisfaction in rebelling against the P’s.
Now, the “true libertarian” (oh, boy, we’re already getting into the weeds, me saying what’s true and false), the freedom = responsibility philosophy, is profoundly conservative. So I think that the bulk of small-l libertarians identify themselves as conservatives. That unfortunately leaves the Libertarian label to the perpetual adolescents who want to smoke dope all day and run a public fetish dungeon in their front yard all night. No wonder it’s a tarnished brand.
Anyway, whatever we call ‘em, or call ourselves, I think “freedom and responsibility” is the right cultural battlecry. And you’re absolutely right about this:
Yeah, it was part of the first blockquote too, but it’s important enough to repeat, and you’ve just launched me on another long-winded post -argh. Wretchard’s going to need to start charging me for bandwidth at this rate. I beleive there are two spheres of public live, which you can call Political and Civic, or maybe what you must do and what you should do. Government can demand you follow it’s rules or be shot. Civic society has to sell you on the value proposition: follow our rules and here are the benefits. That means that civic institutions have a much tighter feedback loop. If a church, for example, wanders off the path, people stop going.
That means that civic institutions are far, far better at managing behaviors at the margins than government. Civic society can ride the edge of what is and isn’t acceptable, making adjustments as needed. That’s the strength of civic society. The weakness is that it has limited powers of coercion which are insufficient for transgressions far from the edge. Murder for example, can’t be left up to civic society to handle. Shunning and lynch mobs are both unacceptable solutions. Government’s strength is to provide serious punishment for serious breeches.
So the two spheres of public life are complimentary, if done right. A strong civic society backed by a limited government is the traditional American way of life. Neither can stand without the other. We’ve seen – lived through – the damage Big Government does to civic society. But without a strong civic society, limited government is impossible too, like you said.
So, I believe we the challenge is to roll back government and revitalize civic society at the same time. Can’t do one without the other. It’ll probably be an incremental thing too, gradually replacing one overgrown government policy after another with a revitalized civic pillar, but the civic institutions will need some time to reestablish themselves.
And from a political strategy, this is why I think “the Right” should consciously adopt a two-pronged approach to reclaiming our country. Actually, we have been taking a two-pronged approach, but we’ve had things backwards. We have two main groups within our camp – call ‘em social conservatives and libertarians if you want. One group is focused on morality issues and one of government issues. Problem is, they’ve each been operating in the wrong sphere. Our social conservatives have been trying to advance in the political sphere, where they meet resistance because Americans don’t like to be told what to do. Meanwhile, our libertarians have been left to address the civic sphere, where they’re seen as “flipping the middle finger” to their neighbors and advocating a dog-eat-dog world.
We need to flip the armies around. We need our libertarian wing pushing our political agenda – shrink government, reduce taxes, increase personal freedom. And we need our social conservative wing pushing our civic agenda – reestablishing norms of public behavior and strengthening the little platoons of civic life.
@99 Heterosexual couples have “marriage” both ways, as evidenced by the 50% divorce rate in this country. Why can’t homosexuals have that ambivalence to their definition of commitment as well? There’s nothing in the Constitution regarding marriage, straight or gay. Congress had no right to pass DOMA. It’s a state issue, and states should honor each others’ laws on marriage the same way they honor driver’s licenses.
“And if the definition is altered to allow for same-sex marriages, on the grounds that the invidual’s voice must be supreme, then what *are* the standards, if any, and who gets to decide? What about marriages between multiple consenting adults? 2 men and 2 women? 20 men and 38 women? Does everyone in those kinds of arrangements get equal “spousal rights”? What about the children who result from these multiple-spouse marriages? What rights or legal privileges or responsibilities does a man or woman have to the child born to another spouse of his or her wife or husband?”
This is ridiculous because you act like once gay marriage becomes legal all these problems that NEVER existed are suddenly going to affect ALL marriages. People already have enormously complicated legal issues involving themselves, children, paramours, etc. due to divorce, infidelity, and a general disrespect for the concept of marriage=heterosexual monogamy. All I’m saying is that if Conservatives apply their limited government approach to cultural issues as well as economic ones, then they aren’t being hypocrites by defining who can call whom a spouse.
There is already a marital free-for-all in this country and lawyers are having a great time with all the divorcing going on. It’s fun for them at least, and once again, conservative hypocrisy gives them the satisfaction.
@ 107. You are misreading what I stated. I said Conservatives/Republicans need to stop pissing people off, not the commenter I was replying to- there’s a difference. I was originally commenting on Wretchard’s request for what Republicans need to do to take back the government from the Dems/Liberals. “Not pissing people off” is a great way to do so.
40. Mongoose
45. buddy larsen
Many thanks for the info & links on Marxist subversion.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away (2/11/05 to be exact), I wrestled with this theme in satirical fashion – right here on Belmont Club!
(see the bottom item “Confessions of The Idiot Master” at this site
http://theidiotmaster.blogspot.com/)
With the obvious moral & economic failure of the Soviet Union and the success of Reaganism, I just couldn’t believe that a bunch of brain dead Lefties were a serious threat to liberty & prosperity.
Bitter experience has educated me on that point.
Looking at the bright side, the American people are finally waking up to the truth. Not a moment too soon.
keep swarming
I also think Cons/Reps have to be very careful when using the term “traditional values” to differentiate what they believe to be moral. It would be more accurate and less inflammatory to simply call it Judeo-christian values; that is what they are. By “traditional” one could assume you want things to be like they were in America 300 years ago? You want slavery and indentured servitude, and woman unable to go to college and be educated? There’s a big difference between traditional “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” and “thy neighbor’s wife and mine wife should be staring at the wallpaper losing their minds because we dont want them reading books.”
I am speaking as a young person who has seen many of my friends fall under the spell of Obama and be blindly led astray for many of the reasons BC offer continuously and cogently. We are the people who will be around calling the shots in 50 years, and we are as a whole entirely too socialized at this point to not accept gay people and their values. By calling for a traditional way of life, it sounds like you want us to kill all the gay people, ignore them, or punish them by denying them their liberties.
I am not mocking you Teresita to say that this is childish. What I mean is that this issue being politicized is a mechanism by which liberals are socializing young people to focus on matters that are not civic. I don’t think the gay marriage issue has to do with rights, because when compared to the civil rights movement, we see how government can and cannot force people to do certain things. People can be forced to do jury duty, to testify at trial, to pay their taxes: this keeps a polity functioning and is necessary. However marriage has nothing to do with a functioning polity. You cannot FORCE anyone to marry anyone. (That’s why if we look at marriage “traditionally”, we see it is inherently flawed in that woman are traded like cattle for economic goods).
Marriage is a liberty two people can exercise together. We cannot elevate people civically because they choose to marry each other; then we are punishing single people who choose not to get married or aren’t “lucky enough” to fall in love. You can’t adjudicate emotions. You can only allow for them to exist, and by obtaining a marriage LICENSE, people are exercising that liberty to state to society “This is the person I love.”
Dick Cheney supports gay marriage. What else do you people want?
110. JMH
Yeah, your post is way too long. But it’s one friggin’ great political essay.
I need to cogitate a bit on your proposal for a better “2 pronged approach”, but your thoughts on government & civic society are excellent.
Damn! – now I’m gonna have to read your other too long posts.
keep swarming
jimbo’s post mentioning Reaganism reminded me that I had not left a link here that I think everyone should read.
Ronnie and Joe
Reminds me of our last President. And yes I’m afraid that many miss him now and will even more will in the coming three years.
I meant to post this last night.
Belated Happy Birthday Ronnie.
Papa Ray
Second that –in spades –Thank you Mr. Reagan for all you did, and all the lift you always gave –and still give –a sorely battered spirit.
JMH,
On an early thread a few weeks ago I went a couple of rounds with Teresita about sincere homosexual couples with a legal issue and grievance collectors seeking a wedge to deconstruct Western Civilization. If there really are 400 State and 1,000 Federal regulations where it matters then my first thought is to take a close look at that forest and start pruning. As far as I can tell Federal Regulations should only apply to a limited range of issues;
1. Immigration,
2. Armed Forces, signing for minors, alimony, inheritance, visitation and notification,
3. Family and inheritance laws in Unorganized Territories.
Note that recruitment into the Forces is a separate issue, we are talking about marriage here. For the third and some of the second set of issues binding contracts could be recognized with legislative assistance that do not touch on the word “marriage.” Immigration is already subject to political manipulation. Obama rescinded the bar on Aids patients entering the country. That gives the politically active HIV positive community a privilege over those suffering from other communicable diseases.
To be blogged under the title “More on Marriage.”
The Obamatron has BSODed
119. Dear Ignatz O’Minious
¿¿¿¿¿¿¿Blue Screen O Death???????
Wha?
@107 Habu
If you take the time to actually read what Stephanie wrote, rather than jumping at the opportunity to throw your weight around, you will see that she was not doing what you accuse her of doing. If you’re going to be the self-appointed arbiter of conversation here, you need to bone up on the old reading comprehension. Just sayin’…;)
“Who killed Bill Colby? I never bought that a man of his proficiency around the water simply drown. And when did it happen? Right after he gave up the “Family Jewels”. I figure the Company did him.”
Hasn’t there been an untoward number of accidental deaths of CIA Chiefs ?
http://archive.newsmax.com/articles/?a=1996/5/07/153650
@ 111
It is not true that half of all marriages end in divorce.
The fact is that the number of divorces in a year are 50% of the number of marriages in a year.
But, the divorces come from the entire pool of marriages at from
1 year to 50 plus years.
Another anecdote you might like,
according to the US Gov 67% of children are living with both of their biological parents.
“My guess is that Plouffe’s strategy will fail dismally.”
I sure hope you are correct.
Onesimus
HG/122; thanks for that link –that’s a helluva hair-raising angle on the Clintons. incredible number of mid-life catastrophes befell the people who came in contact with the clinton tornando. i think there must’ve been some somebodies who wanted them to stay in office as cleanly as possible. doubt they gave any orders along that line. but search a few terms, your mind will boggle, not kidding. try [ dixie mafia clinton accident suicide ].
Sorry for the super-late reply/post. Between two jobs and shoveling several hundred cubic feet of snow, it’s hard to stay on top of the postings at BC.
BTW, Wretchard, the extended deadlines are greatly appreciated. The 72-hour model was almost impossible for me to make comments if the thread went up in the middle of the week as opposed to a weekend.
And not that anyone is even reading this thread anymore but here goes.
Marriage is a liberty two people can exercise together. We cannot elevate people civically because they choose to marry each other; then we are punishing single people who choose not to get married or aren’t
“lucky enough” to fall in love. You can’t adjudicate emotions. You can only allow for them to exist, and by obtaining a marriage LICENSE, people are exercising that liberty to state to society “This is the person I love.”
Your argument rests on the assumption that the purpose of marriage is individual fulfillment, and that the only requirement is individual choice.
This assumption, that individual choice trumps all other interests (the radical but quite possible extreme of your assumption being that individual choice is the ONLY interest), is historically ill informed. Sadly, it is also quite symptomatic of younger generations of Americans, and a lot of other societies where radical autonomy, sentimentalism and hedonism have become the primary drivers of culture.
This is why I said several posts ago that a return to first principles is needed.
Our almost complete abandonment of any consciousness of first principles is exemplified by how many otherwise intelligent people can’t or won’t think outside the narrow little cultural box of “America 1965-2010” with respect to the definition and purpose of marriage.
What is marriage for? What is its purpose? Is it all about the individuals who enter into the arrangement, or are there interests of other entities at stake also?
The intensely social and public nature of marriage ceremonies throughout history and across cultures (and even you yourself had the telling phrase, “to state to SOCIETY”) suggests — or, put more strongly, is evidence of — its dimensions beyond a purely private arrangement entered into between individuals. Declaring it a private matter solely between those individuals in order to give political supremacy to individual choice is not only to contradict all of human history but to ignore the nature of current custom as well.
That marriage has also overwhelmingly across time and cultures been defined as a man-woman union also means something and was defined thus for a reason. What is that reason? What is the teleology of male-female sexual union that is different from male-male and female-female sexual unions? What does male-female give us that the others cannot? (Jeopardy theme … tick tock, tick tock.)
Here’s a wild thought: Maybe, just maybe, human experience over hundreds of generations across thousands of years imprinted upon human consciousness that perpetuating the human race via having children was a good and necessary thing.
An even wilder thought: Maybe, just maybe, human experience over hundreds of generations across thousands of years taught us that the best and most stabile process for the raising of children to functional adulthood was to have some kind of official arrangement whereby the parents of a child were bound to each other for life.
And the most wild thought of all: Maybe, just maybe, the most effective form of this social arrangement, that which allowed the most diversification of the human gene pool by allowing the broadest number of people to get married who wanted to, is monogamous marriage — one man, one woman.
This is ridiculous because you act like once gay marriage becomes legal all these problems that NEVER existed are suddenly going to affect ALL marriages.
The issue is not whether the example is ridiculous but whether it is logical. Engaging in serious argumentation means you need to consider the logical extremes of both your and your opponent’s arguments. “If this principle is applied with rigorous consistency, what are the extreme results that could possibly happen?”
If the purpose of marriage is, as you argue, confined to fulfilling the individuals entering into it; and if “their [the individuals’] definition of commitment” becomes the only prevailing standard of legal definition … then there are no logically consistent grounds on which to deny marriage to any consenting individual who wants to get married in any arrangement whatsoever.
If same-sex marriage is an undeniable right for gays under this reasoning, then, in the interest of legal and logical consistency, polygamy (including bigamy, polyandry, and group marriage) is also undeniable to anyone who wants it. Think there’s no demand for any of that? Think again. Also expect ages of consent to be challenged and defined downward. Think there’s no demand for 12-year-old brides? Think again.
Think that all of this, even if it comes to pass, will remain strictly “fringe” behavior and will not have an affect on traditional monogamous marriages or society at large? Think again.
I can assure you that there are no limits to the human sexual appetite and the ways in which people will seek to force society to accommodate their individual practices.
Starting some forty-odd years ago, the United States entered into a massive social experiment with sexuality and marriage, with not nearly enough debate and deliberation, considering the scale of the consequences that have come to pass.
And that’s just the point. Forty-odd years ago, those most ardently pushing the radical changes, and those who ended up most eagerly adopting them in their private lives, did not think the consequences would be as broad and long-ranging as they have turned out to be. It was only two generations ago that people were being scared into believing that a population bomb was about to explode and too many humans would overwhelm the planet, with massive starvation and wars resulting. In that environment, the Pill probably seemed like a good thing. NOBODY foresaw the demographic crisis of too few babies that has thrown many developed countries into downward population spirals.
Italy and Japan, non-breeding themselves out of existence? 1970 – ridiculous. 2010 – no so much.
Not to mention the host of other consequences we are reaping here in America as a result of the massive experimentation with no-fault divorces, Roe v Wade, and de-stigmatizing giving birth out of wedlock (every single one of these pushed under the banner of having “compassion” for those poor unhappy individuals in meanly limiting circumstances).
In 1970, they would have said that a 30+% out-of-wedlock birth rate would never happen. “Ridiculous.” Likewise, that 1 out of every 3 pregnancies would end in abortion. (1 out of 2 in the inner cities.) “Ridiculous.” “Never gonna happen.”
Uh huh.
I hate to pull the age card, and really I’m not that old myself … but even as a Gen Xer, I can tell you that the older you get, the broader your imagination becomes with regard to what people are capable of. And how relentless the assaults on societal restraints are.
Youth has passion and energy. But American youth since the 1960s (and Gen X was no exception) have been led to believe, mistakenly, that they are uniquely open-minded among all the homo sapiens in all of history. Sadly, what passes for open-mindedness is just naivete. That you caution us fogies not to use the phrase “traditional values” because to your generation the word signals slavery and barefoot & preggers, is itself indicative of the successful indoctrination campaign that the left has waged in our schools with regard to American history and American culture.
BTW I do agree with you that “Judeo-Christian” is a more accurate term for describing “traditional” American values. But if you think that is “less inflammatory” a term, then you are kidding yourself. “Traditional” *was* the secular fall-back word after “Judeo-Christian” was made lingua non grata thanks to the ACLU. Now you are telling us that the connotations of “traditional values” are scary-scary-negative as well.
Again, pulling the age card here … one of the things you learn the hard way is that ceding the terms of debate to progressives is a losing endeavor. They are not interested in debate. They want to shut you up altogether. When a phrase like “traditional values” automatically makes you think of things as reprehensible as slavery and dehumanized women … as opposed to, say, things like “adultery is wrong” and “people shouldn’t swear like sailors in public” … you ought to be asking yourself, “why do I make those automatically repulsive associations?” and “who has taught me to make those repulsive associations?” — rather than blindly buying into the repulsive associations.
The inverting of the meaning of words themselves is another progressive tactic. With this tactic, they steal and destroy culture, history, identity, and eventually, free thought itself.
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
I would love to have a sustained and honest cultural debate about the purpose of marriage. We are at a point where if we do not recover first principles now, they stand in danger of being lost forever. It’s just difficult to have an honest cultural debate when too many on the other side are convinced (and will never be unconvinced) that you, the conservative, are an uptight bigot, and that you should go the way of the dodo.
(*whew*) that’s some great stuff, BW –