After the Major Hasan mass murdering, we broke up yet another plot of radical Islamic American terrorists. These latest don’t seem to appreciate Barack Obama’s kinder, gentler war on terror. Why did a terrorist shoot the innocent at Ft. Hood or plot in Pakistan when we promised to close Guantanamo and will try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York?
We are in a lull before the storm, as enemies look at each other sideways to see who is going to make the first move—and what our reaction to it will be.
Nostalgia?
After only 11 months of Barack Obama, nearly half the country polls that it would prefer instead the old bogeyman George Bush. The poor media is equally confused. It has two loyalties: 1) it likes, for social reasons alone, to be liberal; 2) but it also is popularity-driven and has no real independent judgment or core belief.
The result is that it wants to keep promoting Obama, but not if his popularity sinks to 40%. Then it too will pile on, and we will see all sorts of ‘insightful’ analyses proclaiming that this pundit or that reporter saw these Obama flaws “all along.”
Obama, the media, and the public all remind me of Old Stony Phiz in Hawthorne’s short story The Great Stone Face—the supposed prophet who once again like others disappoints those who want easy salvation in someone exotic and glib rather than in their own values.
When the medicine was worse than the disease
Whom to trust? The public is angry at big finance on Wall Street, whose greed and recklessness helped to cause the panic that tore holes through retirement accounts. It is angrier at a big spending, big regulating government that started the mess with its warping of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (It is as if we asked a heroin dealer to help wean an addict off his habit.) The public was angry with Bush, and is becoming even angrier, more quickly with Obama.
The people wanted tight-fisted sobriety and smaller government as antidotes to Bush’s deficits and new entitlement programs—and got instead with Obama even more reckless spending, mega-deficits, and bigger, more inefficient government. They wanted a more articulate explanation of American foreign policy, and instead got it turned upside down.
The Decline Mantra
Decline has always seemed a psychological state. Rome had as much territory and as many people in AD 450 as it did in 30 BC. What was different was that millions no longer followed Roman protocol or felt themselves to be Roman—a fragmentation brought on a by a corrupt governing elite, and a sense that Latin, habeas corpus, transparent courts and taxation were to be no longer part and parcel of being a civis Romanus.
Too many were outside the system and too few inside to make up for them. In our age, the problem with tax-cheating, shooting up the neighborhood and then rushing to the emergency room for free health care for injured gang-bangers, moonlighting while on disability, getting an insider private tax exemption from Congress, revolving-door influence peddling, rigging something like AIG or Countrywide, and perpetuating voting fraud—is, well, that the equilibrium of the society requires millions of others in recompense to go to work, pay all their taxes on time, buy health insurance, work when sick, participate fairly in elections, and not game the system for a free anything. So decline begins when the former outnumber the latter, as they did in Rome by the late 5th century, and as we are starting to see in Europe and the United States today.
Spiraling public debt, a sinking currency, and a bankrupt popular culture are simply symptoms when the body politic no longer adheres to a time-honored protocol of proven success. Ask ourselves—are we more hard-working, more lawful, more prudent, more independent—or less—than our grandparents? Can we say that we have on average lived more upright lives, both more productive and moral, than our grandparents? If in 50% of the cases, the answer is no, then we can begin to see the problem.
When schools cannot guarantee that their graduates are literate, know basic math, and have some sense of being American—the rights and responsibilities of citizenship—then those, rich or poor, who seek government assistance and violate the protocols will grow, and those able to pay sufficient taxes for them and who follow the letter of the law will shrink.
Next Election?
I haven’t a clue who will win in 2012. But millions will never again vote for a Chicago politician and his coterie of insiders like Emanuel, Axlerod, Jarrett, etc. They will value experience at governance, not gimmicky hopey/changey bromides. The voters want a Truman/Eisenhower sort of figure to talk no-nonsense, be tough with our enemies, supportive of our allies, and one who will pay down not expand the national debt.
Some Great-Stone-Face figure is out there, but we haven’t seen him/her quite yet. A lot of Old Stony Phizzes though.
“I haven’t a clue who will win in 2012.”
I might rephrase that to read: I haven’t a clue regarding which Republican will win in 2012.
The Democrats are now perceived as the party of safe seat, blue-state politicians. Vulnerable purple and red state candidates must get away from the train wreck as quickly as possible. Self-preservation is now the name of the game. America remains a center-right nation. Obama was marketed as such a politician—and it turned out to be a con job. Democrats will now pay an awful price for their deception. They will retain nationally the loyalty of no more than 45% of America’s voters.
There is a Truman on the horizon.
It seems the media are more like congress and will go down fighting against those they should appeal to. They don’t seem to care about falling ratings and subscriptions.
Fox, talk radio, and venues like this are putting up a noble fight and are holding but the MSM continues to attack or are conspicuous adversaries in their silence. (GLSEN, ACORN, radical Islamic violence)
So a responsible legislator may win in the next election and fall prey to leftist slander as he tries to cut spending because less spending necessarily means some program has to go.
It is as you say, good professor. What then is a rational response by an ordinary citizen? You hope for the best, but plan for the worst.
*If the value of my home is likely to decline, there is no reason to support a mortgage.
*When businesses encumbered by regulation and taxation cannot create jobs, then I will find a black market niche and create my own revenue stream based on supply and demand. It bothers me not at all to traffic in contraband.
*When the rule of whim supersedes the rule of law, I’m no longer bound by the rules.
*If paper money is based on trust, I’ll put my faith in tangible assets be they ever so humble. It seems to be that a pile of hardwood is preferable to a heap of cash. Less ash, too.
*When the government can no longer guarantee my personal safety, I reckon that task defaults to me.
*If I can no longer trust the MSM, I turn them off. There’s lots of good stuff in my library waiting to be read. The added bonus is that I don’t grind my teeth when reading for pleasure.
“Going Galt” is not a an idle brag; it’s a totally rational response based on a loss of trust in government, the economy and our culture. I would rather be expelled from the race for jumping the gun than be caught flat-footed when the gun goes off prematurely.
But that’s just me. Your mileage may differ.
~Paules
Going Galt
Keep faith, outlast the opposition; take the occasional break to heal up a little, and then pick up your weapon and lurch back into the line to do it again.
As I recall, that was Tom Paine’s advice in his work, “The Crisis”; and good advice it was.
Dr. Hanson paints a grim but accurate picture. Washington has become a cesspool of corruption and the only way to fix it is to vote every single one of the crooks out of office in the next two elections. I mean ALL of them. Maybe if we flush the toilet that is Washington we can start anew. We sure as hell can’t do any worse than what we have now.
Fire them all. NO INCUMBENTS in the next two elections!
As Al Gore reads poetry and Obama lectures at an 8th grade level, the pot boils & the lid teeters. The general public is getting very angry. Will millions of Obama voters reach adulthood in time for the next election?
Here’s how I think it’ll work: The dems will probably take some sort of hit in the mid-terms, but health care and the stimulus packages will be over with by then. Obama can just bang the drum a bit in the second half, get on with implementing the changes but ‘get tough’ with some overseas pipsqueak to please the old folks – then ride the economic recovery to victory in 2012. He knew that effecting real change costs politically – that’s why it’s so rarely done (or in bush’s case, he changed stuff but he tried to make sure nobody found out about it). Obama’s doing the right thing – get it all done up-front, then recover for the next election. The economy WILL pick up again – like it or not.
Obama actually is doing what he said he’d do. People are unhappy, sure – but they won’t necessarily be unhappy about seeing the results that they (face it) actually voted for. Opinion polls a are a bit of a joke – people actually lap up these wildly-swinging figures, yet somehow fail to remember that pretty much every election is right down the line. THAT is the only poll that matters – the rest are just noise.
And how the heck did the author work declining moral standards into this winge about obama? What the?!?
And how did “skewing fannie and freddy” start the mess that was? Spell it out.
Hmm. A “great stone face”. Sorry, Sarah.
Anyone with half a brain knows we are going full-speed off a cliff.
We just don’t know yet exactly what will push us over the edge.
Electing a looney-leftist like Obama will go down in history as the most incredible blunder of the 21st Century.
~Paules
Thanks for the free lesson in rationalization. You do realize there’s a difference between that and being rational, don’t you?
I for one am not ready to abandon all the hard work and fighting your and my ancestors have done for America. There is no substitute for persistence.
Mr. Hanson, I must admit that I have felt better in the past about the prospects of the US and the West , but let’s not forget that as you have outlined yourself on several occasions that the West has a distinct culture based on values, ideas and protocols that has generated its success. Untill that does not change, and those values are in the hearts and minds of the common people, than the blue print for success remains unchanged. Let’s also not forget that even during the 1930′s the US had a higher productivity than other countries and that 6 months after Pearl Harbor the tide had already turned for a originally completely unprepared US.
The economic power of the non western countries is based on commodities and cheap labor. That is not a sustainable wealth generating business model.
Mr. Obama is a true believer in marxist ideology,he wont change course like Mr. Clinton when confronted with real opposition,he and we will all go down together. The congressional elections of 2010 may be too late to rectify our fiscal problems.
We all have to suffer for the ego of one man. Soon Obama will get his fiddle tuned to play while America (doesn’t burn) but crumbles.
Prof. Hanson,
I agree that Truman – Ike would be a significant improvement. I think I would prefer a Coolidge – Reagan combination. Rock bound fiscal conservatism and limited govt., combined with pro active agression towards enemies with a cheerful (Reagan) demeanor.
i would be willing to settle however for a Congress that had some semblance of fiscal sanity.
The deer-in-the-headlights image only goes as far as individuals choose to allow it. Some of us are working to spread useful knowledge about self-protection. If enough knowledgeable people, unafraid of being called paranoiacs or Chicken Littles, will join in, we can make a huge difference — possibly even politically.
What bothers me is that the bunch in the White House knows what they are doing, and they want to bring everything down. Then they can reconstruct everything. Why else at a time of exploding deficits would Obama welcome spending bills which increase spending way beyond the current budjets that have nothing to do with job creation? The answer is that he doesn’t care, and he wants to spend. It will ultimately bring us all down. Then he and the democrats can save us from ourseelves as it was our own greed that brought us here, and nade us slaves to the Chinese econmic engine.
Part of the problem with America and the world is this belief that Hanson is ensnared in as much as anybody else, the belief that we need a president-king like figure to tell us what to do and save us from ourselves. This is one of the central problems in the bankruptcy at every level of Western nations and the world at large, denying personal responsibility by tranferring it to some dumb schmuck presidential candidate and then moaning and complaining when nothing changes. Our whole so-called democratic process is a farce, what can one man do anyhow? Even if he isn’t a royal dhimmit twit like Obama, he can’t change a thing.
Conservatives like liberals have this religious reverence for their political
‘democracy’ that serves special interests, and perpetuates the status quo more or less no matter who is voted into power. It’s just one way people give up their freedoms, which are too terrible to bear, give up your freedoms to politicans who will sell your own best interests down the river first chance they get. It’s a sucker’s game.
Whoever the Republicans nominate in 2010 will just be another know-nothing like Obama whose economic policies will be more of the same pro-corporate, screw everybody else kind and whose foreign policy will be more dhimmitude. Know-nothings will vote for know-nothings – that’s what democracy is in the real world. Everywhere.
Obama lied, and America died. RIP
Given all of our economic problems (and there are many), none of them, NONE OF THEM, mean anything if Iran gets a nuclear bomb. Americans may not want to admit it, but Iran’s race to acquire a nuclear weapon, coupled to the fact that Iran is run by a bumch of religious fanatics who embrace death, is a deadly combination that has the potential of destabilizing the entire world. Don’t believe me? What do you think the price of oil will be if Iran is attacked by Israel or, worse, if Israel is attacked by Iran and it then retaliates with its own nuclear weapons? Do you have any idea what will happen to the world’s economies if the Straits of Hormuz is closed by Iran (a capability they already have) and virtually no oil comes out of the Persian Gulf? If you thought $4-a-gallon gas was bad, try $8 or $9-a-gallon gas. Anyone have a clue what that would do to inflation, let alone our economy? And, of course, if both Iran and Israel go at it with nuclear weapons, any guess on what effect that will have on the entire Middle East, let alone the rest of the world? No, ladies and gentlemen, all of our economic problems pale in comparison to the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. And, with the new discovery today that Iran is seeking nuclear triggers for its nuclear program: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6955351.ece
This does not look good for world peace. Mr. Obama needs to make this crisis a priority, because if he doesn’t all of his other problems will look like child’s play.
Tomorrow we descend on the Senate offices and I hope that we have the courage to occupy OUR offices and stop OUR employees from voting just as MLK did to shutdown discriminatory businesses and the citizens did in Tennessee to stop their legislature from enacting a state income tax in 1999.
Being civil and respectful has done little but slow down congress; we need to stop them and show OUR employees who is sovereign.
The People are Sovereign, not Government.
“Some Great-Stone-Face figure is out there, but we haven’t seen him/her quite yet.”
You had J Mc Cain
and
you still have
“There is a Truman on the horizon.”
Gott speichern uns. Truman the coward was the worst President EVER! His lack of moral fiber created the cold war. He gave us the UN, NATO and many other criminal organizations dedicated to the destruction of America.
Meanwhile, there is a simple solution to the corruption that is causing the worst damage to America. Do a complete and full investigation of every Congress critter AFTER they leave office. Start with the ones leaving in 2010. Sic the FBI and the IRS on them. Audit every penny of income they had while in office. Put those that have huge chunks of unexplained money on trial.
Make this post-election investigation a routine and bi-partisan part of life.
It won’t take any special laws that Congress can block, just a routine request by the Department of Justice.
Congress critters will know it’s coming, so they can either not steal, or practice their perp walk. In a couple of elction cycles, we will have the cleanest Congress draconian punishment can produce.
What ever one thinks of my plan, something has to be done. To many politicians run for office with the sole purpose of enriching themselves. Remove that possibility and see if we can attract people that want to serve, not steal.
“…millions will never again vote for a Chicago politician and his coterie of insiders like Emanuel, Axlerod, Jarrett, etc.”
You’re supposed to be an historian, Victor. All history of all peoples, but especially ous, shows that statement to be ultra Pollyanna-ish, a posture that does not suit you.
Your Truman-like White Knight can not exist in America today. Our teachers have gifted the mob from which any candidates would arise with precepts of rigid gestalts formed from unknowable fragments of images. History for them is “Like in WWII when, you know, Tom Cruise said to Jessica Simpson, you know, like something else and stuff.” Then thought control by PC and MC locked their minds
It’s over.
The Greek-Roman-Renaissance-Reason-Enlightenment-Industrialization trajectory plummets. Go Galt.
America again, for itself and for at least the whole western world, has the job of saving us all. It is the only nation still powerful enough to do so. Only a conservative government based on rocks long gone and missed (Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan) can get back the values lost from our grandparents, who paid for them with their blood. If this does not happen, our known world, as Rom, will be destroyed soon, either financially or without power. Hardliners are needed with clear views and strict regulating to get back on track and stop the all-out liberalistic and leftist destruction of values.
This says a German reader, who knows what socialism and debt do to lame the middle class.
I still have hope for an America as it once was: strong, mighty and humane.
Steve Forbes – 2012
The left is fond of the concept of “tipping point” in global warming but it is more likely to occur in public finance. The Argentina scenario becomes more probable every month.
The problem is that just as soon as the Republicans bet back into power, new versions of Abramoff, Cunningham, and their ilk will pop up like mushrooms after a rain. This is not to give the Dems a pass, it is just that I recognize that politicians will never, ever change. They are always in it for themselves and will sell out their constituents in a heartbeat if someone else gives them a better offer.
“it’s he recovery that terrifies me”
It’s the spelling that terrifies me! I think you’re missing a “t” somewhere….
David –
“I haven’t a clue regarding which Republican will win in 2012.”
Don’t be so sure. The powers that be are experts at buying off just enough people to retain their perks and privileges. They will stop at nothing, and that means NOTHING to avoid being tossed out. So don’t be too cocksure that an “R” will win in 2012.
Also, don’t be too sure that it will matter much if one does. That is primarily because I am with VDH in that the current aim of those in place in Washington is to institiutionalize as much far left federal intervention as possible RIGHT NOW, because they know that there is nothing anyone can do about it, and they know that once in place, this stuff is almost impossible to get rid of (and I am not sold that the new “R’s” that would take over following a Republican electoral victory will really WANT to get rid of much of it).
A marvelous round-up, Professor, as usual! I’m of a frame of mind that there are still many Good Americans that can restore some sense to this debacle. At what level this takes place or at what point in time, only God knows–but it will be done! It will be painful, both physically and financially, but the tree of Liberty will be fed.
The next push by the Democrats to retain power will be to push for the legalization of the 12 million or so illegals in this country, every one of whom can be presumed to vote Democrat at least at first. With the black vote sewn up, that would give a good cushion for the future. In England they are just learning that the Labour Party secretly abandoned its old working class base and flooded the country with immigrants in order to improve its election prospects. The result speaks for itself.
Truman?! While he was a major improvement over FDR, he was still a horrendous President.
We need and want a Harding / Coolidge administration. A return to adult-lead conservative government. Pay down debt, lower taxes, remove barriers to business. Let the economy recover without government intervention (or because government isn’t interfering).
I am one the hordes of (native!) Californians that has left the state and now live in a small town (12k) in the Midwest.
American values are still alive here, and I hope their resurgence nationwide will spring from ‘flyover country’ Here most folks may not be polished or sophisticated by coastal standards, but the are smart, canny and still try to do what is right.
“The public is angry at big finance on Wall Street, whose greed and recklessness helped to cause the panic that tore holes through retirement accounts.”
Well, the same altruistic public that voted to give people homes and mortgages they couldn’t afford should look in the mirror. If it wasn’t for Wall Street buying up those Fannie/Freddie mortgages, under massive Congressional regulatory mandates, they mostly wouldn’t have homes/mortgages either.
You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.
I thought we learned our lesson with Carter. With the liberal education system, I fear we will never learn. Obama’s disastrous failure will be blamed on execution rather than ideology. I know we will hear “he didn’t spend enough, quickly enough…” from the liberals.
I never dreamed I would be giving serious consideration to creating an emergency food supply. It does not seem so wacky now. Thanks Obama. you are creating a nation of survivalists and that is where we started.
#4 Paules, rather pessimistic, may one say. But what is this from a smart person like you: “If the value of my home is likely to decline, there is no reason to support a mortgage.”
Suppose the home price to you was $400K. You put money down and have paid for several years. You now still owe $225K on your mortgage. It is now valued at $330K. Do you like your home? Have you kept it up or even improved it? Do you believe it will never again be worth $400K? Do you not believe, as history so clearly shows, that some day in the not too distant future it may be worth $550K or even $675K? Was your home merely an investment in spite of the fact that you will always have to live somewhere and that there are better investments than homes widely available?
You surprise me with this line of strategic thinking. But I am certainly no expert in such matters. Honesty in commenting, my state, Florida, has a rather roller coaster RE market history.
Dr. Hanson—you remind us of the battered condition of our Ship of State, our civil culture, indeed, the sad state our whole society is in, one major factor being the decades of hammer blows by the Left and its Postmodernism that have greatly helped to destroy certain parts of the Ship, beaten others into junk, torn gaping holes in it, have deformed it, have cut it’s speed, and thrown our Ship way off course, and headed it for the rocks.
Pre-WWII Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci laid out the blueprint for a “Long March through the culture,” not using guns to destroy bourgeois culture, but by using the elites who provide and/or influence our knowledge of the world and how it works, our ideas, values and opinions—academics, the educational system, curriculums and textbook authors at all levels, popular authors, playwrights, entertainers, artists, Hollywood and films, T.V. programs, newsmen and commentators, newspaper and magazine writers, business, political, sports and religious leaders, and various cultural icons–the key people that help form people’s opinions and the prevailing culture and mores, and can subvert and radically change them–all amplified tremendously by the media and its smothering, and also concealing, blanket of propaganda; these were and are the chief instruments of bourgeois society’s subversion and destruction, and they have been lethally effective; an overwhelming success.
It seems to me that it will be an enormous task to steer our Ship away from the rocks, repair it, and get it back on the right course again. Taking back our educational system, our government and the MSM—a decade’s long process of house to house fighting—seems to me to be the only way to do it, but in the meantime, until we have some major successes, we are still heading for the rocks.
As for the elections in 2010 and 2012, you apparently assume that they will be held as usual, and that they will honestly reflect the will of the voters. I do not believe that the amoral, subversive, far Left Revolutionary army that is Obama & Co. will allow these elections to be fair and honest if that means they will be thrown out of office and their attempt at a coup d’etat, at real Revolution is thwarted, so I think it likely that, if all else fails, if they can’t rig these elections sufficiently to stay in office, they will fabricate some sort of “National Emergency” that will give them an excuse to postpone them.
One correction: this is a “job loss” recovery, not a jobless recovery.
VDH wrote:
The people wanted tight-fisted sobriety and smaller government as antidotes to Bush’s deficits and new entitlement programs—and got instead with Obama even more reckless spending, mega-deficits, and bigger, more inefficient government. They wanted a more articulate explanation of American foreign policy, and instead got it turned upside down.
—————
Really? What short memories we have. As I recall, folks were scared of a great Depression coming and were quite willing to have the government intervene in any way they could to stop it. Seems that’s why Obama won the election, right?
Sure, a year later we would like everything to be better, but it didn’t happen that way for Reagan one year in, when the economy was terrible, unemployment was over 10%, and his poll numbers were very similar to Obama’s now.
He was taking a terrible battering from the left, but he hung in there, the economy bounced back, but the deficits got bigger and bigger.
So we will have to decide whether the Reagan history or the Roman history is more relevant here, and one can make a decent case for each, but VDH is becoming sadly predictable. Surprise us sometime with something new, not leftovers of the same stuff being rehashed.
I have heard a rumor that Obama’s poll numbers went UP, at least on opinions related to his Afghanistan policy after his speech at West Point, but I don’t think that I heard a whisper of that at PJM.
Every time Obama has a choice to make that either helps America or hurts it, he makes the choice that hurts it.
Wants examples? I’ve given examples up the wazoo. Just open your mind and you can see them for yourself.
Besides refusing to address our energy dependence on foreign oil, and conducting an all out attack
on American’s free enterprise system, not to mention Barack’s contempt for the Reagan “peace through strength” belief; President
Obama has America looking like a weak sheep to countries like Russia, China and North Korea.
Worse, recently Obama said the U.S. won’t take unilateral action in a world crisis. Which means that Taiwan is there for the Chinese taking.
It’s December 2009, and Obama, as far as I’m concerned, has apologized overseas, over and over for phantom American sins; namby pamdied our image something awful, leaving the impression in many evil eyes, that America is low hanging fruit, there for the taking. Either we take back our government or our government will not only bankrupt us, devaluing our dollar, sending us into hyper-inflation, but end up making
slaves of us all.
If that fake public option wrapped in that 55 year old medicare scheme passes, my fellow Americans, the jig is up. Then the sound of
an outraged American people will really fall on deaf ears.
Harry Reid has a great job waiting for him when he’s not re-elected. So does Nancy Palosi. Moderate Democrats who vote for this pig of a medicare sub 55 trojan horse have also been promised plumb jobs should they lose
in the 2010 elections. So they no longer care. Lieberman showed his true colors when he let the conference bill go to the senate last week.
We can’t trust Lieberman. He’s now voting “no” to the senate version because the Democrats no longer need his vote. Socialized Medicine is so close I can smell it.
I don’t know what more to say to you. How in a different way to plead with you.
My fellow Americans, you have to take your country back. At this point, we have to fight fire with fire. At this point, all bets are off. Pick your Patriotic name. Patrick, Tom, Claire Ben, George, John or Paul and embrace their Valley Forge desperation. I hate to say it, but I can’t say I don’t mean every word. It’s time, if necessary, to bleed for your country.
The United States of America is at a tipping point. I know I make little sense to college students or my ad agency friends. I know I’m speaking what amounts to be another language to the 92 percent of African Americans who care less about the content of Obama’s character, than the color of his skin.
But I need you. We need you. We need you all.
The only job growth now is in government jobs (whose votes Obama can count on).The highest paid people are now becoming government workers. The biggest raises are going to government workers. Obama is playing the class warfare game. Screaming about bank bonuses. But I’m only hearing disingenuous yells coming out of his pie hole.
The fact is, Obama is as disingenuous as a professional liar can be.
Rachel Peepers is desperate. My allies can’t do this alone. I need your help. This President is nothing but a pathological, devious, money grubbing liar, whose advisers aren’t sane, well meaning, honest Americans. They’re racist, socialist, communists (van jones), nambla lovers like Kevin Jennings. God, help us.
God bless us,
Rachel Peepers
I fear it will get a lot worse before our nation of zombies wakes up, if ever. How does one reinforce values that were never taught or learned in the first place? It certainly won’t happen in our public education system.
Semper Mediocritus
If the Democrats lose the Senate next fall, expect a primary challenge to Obama, perhaps from Hoe Lieberman.
I meant Joe Lieberman.
There is literately no one to be trusted.All congressmen are not to be trusted, add to that no elected,party politition.What to do?If you lived through the 30`s you have a better chance of resonable survival;otherwise hunker down and stay aloof
Obamas administration is now in a crisis of confidence.
What is that old saying?
‘Never waste a good crisis’
Now is the time for conservative democrats-
(Yes Myrtle there are many of us left!)
The Chicago thugs don’t represent me.
Republicans, Independents and Tea party candidates need to get their ducks in a row and help us get rid of these clowns.
Congressmen/Senators in office that fought against these socialists thugs need to keep their jobs and we need to fire the rest.
Harry S. Truman
Professor,
Yes, it looks bleak. Any form of victory in 2012 anticipates “free and open” elections in 2010. Who’se going into ethnic barrios or Chicago wards to insure the integrity of the vote?
Two issues that underscore the unease people feel are Obama’s ridiculous health-care takeover and his administrations continued fealty to global-warming orthodoxy.
Both issues threaten to cripple our economy. New studies are realizing that the cheapest thing to do to health care is leave it alone. And, in the wake of the Climategate emails Obama’s people have ignored the obvious – that the warming theory promoted by Al Gore and his loyal legions is the product of fraud and deceit.
Bush was a rotten President and it was pretty much understood by people who don’t keep their heads up their butts that a good chunk of Obama’s first year or so was going to involve dealing with Bush’s “legacy”. As far as polls go, remember when about 70% of the American public thought that Hussein was directly involved with 9/11? That’s my upper range marker for the percentage of people who are gullible and fuzzy thinking. And a poll in 2007, well after all that Bush & Co-pushed Hussein-9/11 link BS was totally debunked, showed that people believing Hussein had something to do with 9/11 rose to 41% after bottoming out a couple of years earlier. That’s my marker for the percentage of people who are hopeless dumbasses. (By the way there is a recent curious study that suggests that the biggest reason for so many people persistently believing the Hussein-9/11 link was just because we went to war with them — why else would we have done that?)
As far as Obama goes, if things keep trending the way they are, you guy won’t have a hope ‘n’ prayer come 2012. Which is good — cuz you guys are the bad guys as far as I’m concerned.
In an imploding civilization, many of us can become a Rhett Butler from “Gone with the Wind.” His success was seeing that one could obtain wealth during the growing phase of a civilization but one could make money faster during the collapse.
It would seem that 2012 is still awfully far away to be speculating. I’d rather we concentrate on 2010 and installing some balance our system.
Cheer up. It seems bad but we’re America, and we’ve dealt with worse.
Excellent analysis.
I wonder what the Democrats are going to do about 2010? They are at risk for losing Congress and the power to ram through their socialist agenda.
I suspect they will program Obama, their puppet salesman, to voice more centrist policies. I wonder if that will work. They have lost ground with the Independents who are a key mass in any election. Moving to the centre might but not necessarily will regain some Independent support but it will also lose some Democrat support.
Then, there’s Obama, a narcissist who requires high maintenance in the shape of being surrounded constantly by adulating crowds. He’s also someone who gets his kicks by making people do what they don’t want to do. Without such input, Obama becomes testy and vicious and makes off-the-cuff disparaging remarks that are not easy to wipe from the instant pick-up by the Internet.
And I’ll predict that Obama won’t run in 2012. Either because the socialist infrastructure is in place and he’s bored with no need to keep the population submissive – or because the agenda has failed and he’ll run to Rule the World via some other position.
Did you not see Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi’s excoriating article on Obama’s big sellout. To quote:
“The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway.”
The cracks are appearing everywhere, and this is a big one. Taibbi spells it out in great detail, and this from one if you moved further left you would fall off the edge.
The President gives himself a “B+” for his first year.
What do we give him for a grade?
Given the uncertainity overhang regarding taxes and policy, I give him a “D.”
Complaining will not get you anywhere. If the current administration was Republican, the mess would be worse, and the state of fear would paralyze the country. We can feel the fog has been lifted and the future looks bright . . . except for you always-whining negative guys.
“The failed economic policies of the last 12 months” can replace the often sung Obama song about Bush: “The failed economic policies of the last 8 years.”
Included in those irritating and two-America songs were: The greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression; The American economy is like a house built on sand; Transparency; We won’t do business like they did before in Washington.”
After upping the borrowing limit behind closed doors on a Sunday night, look to the bond market and America’s AAA rating this spring for more extraordinary spin on the issues.
Once again Victor perpetuates the outright lie that Fannie, Freddy and liberal policies caused the economic crisis.
The numbers simply don’t support this assertion. It’s not about Left or Right here, it’s about facts. Facts which Victor should know if he’s going to talk about these things with any authority.
#7 BDS
BC is badly in need of new material. Bill Maher, please help with something new for this tired and frazzled funny man BC. Oh and, Bill, could you also help with specifics for BC and Vivo. Their attacks have become way too general to be of any use whatever. Muffington and Kos must be very disappointed in them.
20. vivo . . . Amen, brother!
I think you touched on one facet of the problem of American society when you stated “Can we say that we have on average lived more upright lives, both more productive and moral, than our grandparents?” The fact of the matter is, back in 2007, No people in the history of the world had ever been more affulent than Americans. And yet, over 70% at the time were convinced America was “on the wrong track”.
As Ibn Khaldun proved in the “Mukhadima” it’s the thiid generation which are always the snveling wankers.
America NEEDS a inept super hero like Negro Man and his less than super super powers.
As for historical parelles, well yes, prior to Julio-Cladians the Republic had out lived it purpose and they too had a Opra reading the augires on the election of counsles near the Temple of Vesta, it was’nt until Rome transformed into her Imperial form that she truly saw her glory, so may it be with America, I would hope. Yet, if you dont want to see this Republic fall, well, put in a poll tax, I would say.
Barack Obama is America’s worst nightmare.
He did not put us where we find ourselves.
Granted he’s certainly going to keep us here and make it much much worse but we are where we are because of 20 years of fiscal insanity on the part of all of us.
On top of our profligate spending we have also gone along with the NAFTA hoax AND allowed our captains of industry to become pirates in the name of capitalism.
In short we have decided, in our monstrous ignorance, to enslave ourselves.
Everybody knows there is no free lunch … but we played like there was for a long long time.
V.D.H.
What I want is for you to record yourself reading your commentary and deliver it to my mailbox. It’s just too hard to have click here, there and then after that I’m forced to read it and click, click, click just to get through your commentry. I think I’m getting a knot in my shoulder. Oh by the way, pay your taxes, I need to go to the dentist.
Apart from all the above I agree that everything is going to hell in a handbasket.
What I want to know is what are you going to do about it?
Terry at #10,
What history? By the time some possible remnant of humanity crawls out of their caves and starts civilization again there will be a new history and it won’t know much about us.
To be sure Obama inherited a financial nightmare. He will be judged on whether or not he takes the steps necessary to save our country from what was a certain destruction. And, he is almost certain to make mistakes. And what happens if he and congress fail? Well, you are correct in that they will be voted out and the Cons, or even those more conservative than the normal cons will return to power. What happens then? Two things are certain. One, they will have to come up with answers tied to policies instead of more complaining and two, they will have move quickly to the left and accept progressive ideals or they will once again, lose. Can they win? yes. Can they change their failed policies of the past and develop bi-partisan policies? No. But good luck to them.
57. Fred Beloit:
Yet another poster child for those “Recklessly indifferent to the truth”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34382454/ns/politics-more_politics/
You mistake politics for life. You’ve been brainwashed into submission.
A good concise review of conditions.
I’ve been reading the two American histories by McDougall (Freedom Just Around the Corner and Throes of Democracy). They’re quite good and put things in perspective in an honest, humorous, comprehensive and nonpartisan manner. Unfortunately the latter ends at Reconstruction and the author says they’re won’t be a third.
But, he gives us a good description of America and Americans not often known.
without a doubt many who voted for obama DID NOT realize they were supporting a criminal organization.
some are seeing it now. but there are so many enablers and co-participants that I don’t expect any justice or change of direction from this administration.
THEY WILL NOT admit that they are criminals and the media will not point it out either.
america is lost. it will not be able to put this behind them.
America is worth fighting for.
40. rachel peepers:
lol …and those are the good features.
you are too kind. the truth is even worse then that.
below is a link worth reading, it is too long for a troll to get through but I am sure the rest of you will.
http://westernrifleshooters.blogspot.com/2008/11/understanding-obama-making-of-fhrer.html
54. vivo:
Your messiah is an idiot. Everything he has tried has failed, just like we said.
He is an idiot and a failure.
Try to pronounce the word:IDIOT. Now try this out, say it out loud…”Barack Obama is a worse president than Bush.”
You’ll find its very liberating, stepping outside of that itty bitty little box.
And FYI…Bush was a TERRIBLE president, so the fact that your messiah is even WORSE speaks volumes about what a pathetic person he really is.
“it’s he recovery that terrifies me”
Reminds me of what the Germans said during recent unpleasantness…”Enjoy the war, the peace will be terrible”
“What are you going to do about it?”
A: Continue to live our schizophrenic lives where the mundane and myopic coexists with shocking and tectonic. We are all deer in the headlights in the sense that the world is careening down a twisting, unknown highway and we are caught flat-footed, not knowing whether to race ahead or to scamper back from whence we came.
It’s the end of the world as we know it. No more credit-financed GDP. Value needs to be earned by honest capital formation, hard work, and living within our means. Governments that inhibit or provide disincentives to these three truths have to be dismantled.
Something is coming that will galvanize action. This temporary insanity, this frozen state, cannot last. It’s out there. It’s coming…and it isn’t going to be pretty.
There is so much to debunk in this article it is breathtaking. So, I will just take on a couple of items and invite others to do the rest.
“Decline has always seemed a psychological state. Rome had as much territory and as many people in AD 450 as it did in 30 BC. What was different was that millions no longer followed Roman protocol or felt themselves to be Roman—a fragmentation brought on a by a corrupt governing elite, and a sense that Latin, habeas corpus, transparent courts and taxation were to be no longer part and parcel of being a civis Romanus.”
The Roman governing elite in 43 BC and through the reign of Augustus Caesar and beyond did not pay any taxes! Furthermore, the governing elite systematically seized farmland from small farmers without any remuneration and replaced all laborers with slaves. The freemen fled to Rome requiring the empire to house and feed them. Julius Caesar intended to force the elite to hire a small percentage of freemen and not use almost 100% slaves, which was probably the real reason he was assassinated.
In AD 381, the Roman Emperor Theodosius issued an edict, which was fully implemented in the empire in the 380’s, that banned all religions other than Christianity. Furthermore, everyone was required to believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost otherwise be declared a heretic. Never before had there been such a widespread imposition of a religion and suppression of free thought!
The Roman governing elite and later the Church governing elite were always corrupt and is not the main reason for the decline of the empire.
In AD 541-542, the first known bubonic plague pandemic occurred in the Roman Empire. This marked the first of many outbreaks of that plague to be combined with anthrax. These diseases cost at least 200 million lives throughout history. More than once the population of the Western and Eastern Roman empires were ravaged by plagues. The earlier Roman Republic did not have these pandemic diseases at least not on a widespread basis.
As the infrastructure broke down there was widespread starvation, etc. etc.
~ richard allbritton, Miami, http://rallbritton.blogspot.com
President Obama’s Marxist politics will be the death of his political career; his administration is already imploding from within. Furthermore, Obama is too far Left to credibly move to the center; he will become more rigid & angry when he loses Congress in 2010. He will not talk with the Republicans since in his twisted mind they are the enemy.
President Obama is the deer in the headlights. He’s flailing about & has no idea what he’s doing. However, he is still trying to implement his Marxist policies, although we the people want nothing to with them!
Will the Congressional Democrats walk the plank for a POTUS whose approval ratings continue to drop? I doubt it. He’s currently at 44% approval via Rasmussen:
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/daily_presidential_tracking_poll
I’ve posited at # 37 above, that if Obama & Co. believes they can’t rig the upcoming elections and will be voted out of power, they will likely use some supreme “National Emergency” as an excuse to postpone elections in 2010 or 2012.
Seeing how Obama & Co. have declared “Emergencies” (and the MSM has verified and amplified their declarations of various “Emergencies”) as justifications for quickly ramming their far Left agenda through Congress without Congressmen even knowing or reading their details, much less taking the time to understand, evaluate and debate them—i.e. the Economic Emergency, the Health Care Emergency, the Energy and Climate Emergencies—I have no fear that they will be unable to come up with yet another MSM verified and endorsed “Emergency” that will do the trick. This time though–to be sufficient to justify postponing elections–it will have to be a horrific, supreme, “National Emergency,” convincing to all.
Obama & Co.’s economic policies could provide such an “Emergency” if the current economic recession deepens and turns into a Depression, the dollar crashes and/or we are wracked by “hyperinflation.”
Obama & Co.’s weak and perverse foreign policies could well also provide just such a supremely dangerous “National Emergency,” say, in the form of an Iranian nuclear strike against Israel or, preemptively, by Israel against Iran and/or a general war—nuclear and conventional–in the Middle East, Iran’s closure of the Strait of Homuz, and cessation of our ability to import oil from the Middle East, or, perhaps, a major Islamic terrorist attack on U.S. soil, or some other unexpected calamity of similar importance.
Then, of course, there is always the possibility that the Obami can portray the rise in objections and internal resistance by citizens to their rule and programs (objections and resistance that Obama & Co. themselves have provoked) as “Violence”–real or manufactured, but in any case vastly amplified, that they can attribute to “Right wing or Religious extremists”–as such a grave “National Emergency.”
After all, they have already paved the way for this by the issuance—early in their Administration–of the DHS Report and Lexicon defining anyone who supports gun ownership, or supports State’s rights, is against abortion, objects to illegal aliens, or otherwise objects to the Obami as “antigovernment,” “hate-oriented,” “paranoid,” “dangerous,” and “violent,” as a “Rightwing Extremist” and a potential “domestic terrorist,” paved the way through the statements of various Democratic leaders and partisans demonizing participants in Tea Party protests and Town Hall protesters as “rednecks,” “racists,” “rabid right-wing extremists,” “angry mobs,” and “evil mongers,” and paved the way by things like the reports of the Left wing Southern Poverty Law Center—reporting a rising tide of potentially violent Right wing militias and individuals in the U.S.
Such a supreme, grave “National Emergency” may also be be justified by citing the grave impact of the combined effects of a number of such developments.
#50 PM
Cheer up. It seems bad but we’re America, and we’ve dealt with worse.
No, we have not.
This is the very first administration made up of true communists, supporters of black supremacism, supporters of compulsory mass abortions, supporters of death panels for the elderly, and other crazies who think that Christians are equally or more dangerous than the worldwide war of islam against Freedom.
They have just started to destroy America, and they are going pretty good: their main goal is to destroy the dollar and when that will be accomplished we will no longer have the might that allowed us to defend Freedom worldwide, and chaos and subversion will prevail inside the country.
What is helping the subversives more are all the “moderate” thinkers who fail to understand the danger and fail to call the American people to (peacefully and legally) fight against the demise of…America !
We haven’t seen anything yet, the subversives have large resources to use and hate to guide them.
Dr. Hanson, you deeply underestimate the power of corruption to undermine the democratic process and you especially undersestimate the talent of this congress in employing it. I don’t have the confidence in democracy to overcome these obstacles in the upcoming election. How do you feel about a constitutional convention? Professor Randy Barnett has proposed such a convention and even proposed legislation that the convention could consider. His proposed legislation includes, among several other things, term limits. Such a convention could overcome the upper hand of power and corruption held by congress. Your readers could benefit greatly from an article from you regarding a constitutional convention and the matter of term limits, particularly if you could draw on any parallels from history.
Thanks.
There is almost an end-of-the-century / ‘after me the deluge’ madness in the Congress. With rock-bottom congressional approval ratings, a President with freefalling polls, and a public angry at almost every piece of proposed legislation—from socialized health care to cap and trade—Congress’s mood seems to be “let us race to cram through this statist agenda and get it institutionalized before we all get thrown out in 2010.”
Yes, the country was doing gang-busters in January. What a difference a year can make. From solid peace and prosperity to fin de cycle in just 12 months. I wonder how that works. If only we were able to see the origins of our problems today by analyzing the last ten years. Unfortuntely, we can’t see back that far.
Call me a hysteric or a cynic, but I believe the world is headed for war. A very big war. And that will put everything else into the proper perspective. God help us.
Victor Davis Hanson, Thomas Sowell, Charles Krauthammer and many others have stepped up to articulate our current national dilemma in a continuing stream of editorials and blog posts. They are to be commended and their efforts sustain the hope that enough people will wake up soon enough to bring about necessary change before things get too bad. Ironically, all that this commentary is really offering is “hope and change” of a different sort.
Rather than continue to lament the ongoing misdeeds of our government, I think it would be more helpful to start advising people on how best to weather to coming storm. I am in my mid 50′s, and until six months ago, I had never owned (or for that matter never had any interest in owning) a firearm in my life. I now own a pistol, two rifles, and a shotgun; and I am learning how to use them. If things really do fall apart in this country, there won’t be much solace in saying “I told ya so.”
I think it just may be a whole lot simpler than all of this moral handwringing. Just maybe, it’s more a technical foulup and not a rerun of the fall of Rome.
First, Wall Street has discovered a way to get their paws on trillions of dollars, at no risk at all. This will go as it must, and has.
Second, we have been shipping jobs overseas for a generation and are now scrapping the bottom of the barrel, and that is what is delaying the recovery.
If these are correct, well, the first is probably fixable, though I see no sign that the Geithner/Bernanke/Summers axis is going to fix it. Hope everyone read Volcker’s speech the other day, he gets it. The second is the hard one, it would seem to call for a mile-high protectionist wall, which would have horrible consequences – but might be better than what we have now. I surely do not want to return to the gross inefficiences of American consumer manufacturers, 1980′s GM writ large. And yet, if it’s that or starve, well, …
“while Nancy Pelosi flies to and from San Francisco on a monstrosity . . .”
I haven’t heard of the Monstrosity. Is it even bigger than a G5?
willis at #46,
You need to rethink that sir. Just WHO would be presiding and participating in a constitutional convention? Just who would be disseminating the lion’s share of the ‘news’ regarding such? Just which uneducated, delusional and corrupt people would be begging for even more goodies from the newly configured government? God Forbid!
Whoever comes next needs to make the left howl. The parasites need to be starved my tax money.
Let’s not forget the X factor. These Leftists are cunning, in an animalistic sort of way. On the surface we see the some of the larger maneuvers (healthcare reform, EPA power grab, various stimuli etc.) but there is also a lot going on behind the scenes and away from the public eye.
One can think of the preponderance of the Democratic Party, Big Hollywood, the MSM, academia, Big Labor, Leftwing think-tanks and activist groups… as well as many large, international financiers and corporate interests – as a single unit; all working together to coordinate strategy, tactics and message. To a certain extent they have shaped the cultural battlefield, but they have forgetten a few key points. One of the main one’s is that we consume what they sell when we perceive it is in our interest to do so (entertainment, diversion, fantasy… they are good at peddling the later) and no further. Their contempt for middle America is misplaced, since in fact they are the one’s who are trapped in ideological boxes.
And so, as VDH has reminded us before, we are in a race. Do enough Americans wake-up in time? And having awakened, do they stand up, alone or in groups and say “enough” to the oligarchs now trying to consolidate their twisted dreams? I have no doubt whatsoever that the answer is yes. The Founding Fathers (in their nearly infinite wisdom) foresaw these days, and gave us the tools we need to thwart tyranny (an ever present danger in a free society.)
Political victory is only the beginning however. America has changed the world, and the human experience forever. We have created infinite new possibilities for our species, but also many new dangers, and challenges to individuals and societies (including our own) to adapt to. We need to think on this, reflect upon where we want to go, and how best to get there. In short we must learn to balance in an always increasingly unstable, dynamic and potent world, brimming with human potential. We must continue to unleash that potential but without losing our balance. And our choices should always open the doors of potential, not close them, like the Democrats are trying to do (and which is what guarantees that in the long term, their approach will always fail.)
Are we finally awake? Not the change you wanted?
I fear, Professor Hanson, that Wolla Dalbo (comment #37) has hit the nail on the head. Alinsky was a student of Gramsci, and Obama was a student of Alinsky. That means that elections, held in 2010 or 2012 will look free – but won’t be. That is if they are held at all.
Looking at all this from the mountains of Samaria, I see all the irregularities of how the law is enforced here, and am starting to see the same unfair law enforcement taking place in the States. Your leaders are adopting the same Soviet culture that our leaders adopted long ago. Our leaders in Israel are in the pay of your élites. No matter where we look, we see another American puppet. We know who to blame. We know who to get rid of here. You need to look to see who your leaders are in the pay of. Waxing eloquent on ideas and ideals are just no longer enough. Either you know for sure who dictates your downfall or you don’t.
If you don’t know who your enemies are, you are as good as road-kill with the headlights shining in your eyes.
72. Richard Allbritton, Miami:
You are a bit more interesting that a run-of the mill forum troll!
I was intrigued.
G-G-G-Google.
http://www.democracyforamerica.com/users/274278-richard-allbritton
Perhaps the other trolls have proven ineffectual and the messiah has turned out to be less than advertised… is that why you have joined us?
“You need to rethink that sir. Just WHO would be presiding and participating in a constitutional convention? Just who would be disseminating the lion’s share of the ‘news’ regarding such? Just which uneducated, delusional and corrupt people would be begging for even more goodies from the newly configured government? God Forbid!”
Scott at #81. Too late for God Forbid and no need to rethink it at all. The framers of the constitution thought it through quite nicely and provided for the constitutional convention (of the states) in the constitution. I think you can find the answers to your concerns right there in that document if you’ll just read it.
Dave wrote:A good concise review of conditions.
I’ve been reading the two American histories by McDougall (Freedom Just Around the Corner and Throes of Democracy). They’re quite good and put things in perspective in an honest, humorous, comprehensive and nonpartisan manner. Unfortunately the latter ends at Reconstruction and the author says they’re won’t be a third.
But, he gives us a good description of America and Americans not often known.
————–
Thank you for mentioning those books. I was trying to think of the name and author of the first which I have read and wanted to mention it on the Radosh-Zinn thread. I have yet to read the second, but plan to. McDougall’s interpretation of our history seems to make both righties and lefties uncomfortable, but it seems pretty realistic to me. FOLLOW THE MONEY AND THE CON MEN, is what I got out of the first book. And who are the con men? Just about everyone with a brain, eh?
Long before the American economy can melt down, the Iranians will have changed the international playing field with a nuclear ballistic missile.
#78 Tom wrote:
Rather than continue to lament the ongoing misdeeds of our government, I think it would be more helpful to start advising people on how best to weather to coming storm. I am in my mid 50’s, and until six months ago, I had never owned (or for that matter never had any interest in owning) a firearm in my life. I now own a pistol, two rifles, and a shotgun; and I am learning how to use them. If things really do fall apart in this country, there won’t be much solace in saying “I told ya so.”
————
Will ya stop it with the gun stuff. I have owned quite a few guns for many years. I bought a nice black powder (smokeless tabs, actually) rifled musket since Obama was elected, but did it to extend my hunting season. I suppose if I need any or all of the guns for self-defense against the black helicopters they are there, but why don’t you take up hunting? It’s more reality based than firing away at a range and you can reduce your carbon footprint with the venison. :-)
#83 Gylippus
the Democratic Party, Big Hollywood, the MSM, academia, Big Labor, Leftwing think-tanks and activist groups… as well as many large, international financiers and corporate interests
In a few words:
- demagoguery
- propaganda apparatus
- ignorance (that is the academia)
- strong arm
and big money
The ingredients of every fascist/socialist/communist/nazi subversion.
The unholy alliance that can poison any Free Republic.
PS The exceptions to the academic ignorance just confirm the general judgement about it.
We need a Conservative veto-proof Congress and Senate. After that, Obambi won’t matter. As a parting shot maybe we can impeach him on the last day of his reign.
It would take a French Revolution to clean out the corrupt and incompetent: Congressmen, lobbyists and their flattering toadies in the media.
I have tried very hard to get my wife to let us move out of the country. I know with taxation-by-citizenship not residency it is a Pyrrhic move, but truly the best I can think of.
Unfortunately, she is not OK with the idea. There is a part of me that hopes I will lose my job and, like Cortez burning his ships, provide my wife with no alternative but to press forward in the direction I want to go.
Mostly I took at our elites and see a Doomsday Machine (multiculturalism, anti-Americanism, Leftism in general) from a dead civilization (USSR), like an old Star Trek episode. A mindless automation destroying our current Western civilization without any thought that the Communist Utopia is hopes for after Western civilization is destroyed is not longer possible. A machine so myopic and blinkered that it refuses to comprehend that all that awaits at the end of Western civilization is Islam and/or a version of China’s Warring States period. And, the machine is so sick and perverse that when it does acknowledge these outcomes thinks the outcomes are good as long as Western Civilization is ended.
93: >> As a parting shot maybe we can impeach him on the last day of his reign.
I strongly disagree with this, but … I’ll agree that those in power now (Obama, Pelosi, Reid) are as guilty of treason as Charles I ever was.
Oh Brother. OK we throw out all at bums, then what. The Saudis did a buy in to Fox and the WSJ today. I assume that people who are thinking seriously about the good of the United States are thinking in terms of the Founding Fathers but what percent of the population read phtheoretical political philosophy? How many have read the 5000 year Leap or Mark Lavin’s Liverty and Tyrany. So much of the law and court decisions of the last century are disasters that can anythiing be done without a constitutional convention?
54. vivo
58. now…
Why do you come back here? You’ll comment and then somebody will say you’re crazy or funny or we’ll just ignore you.
We come here because we recognize the worth of the professor’s comments and how those comments are a reflection of ours or how they lead us in the path we’ve chosen.
You seem to enjoy to annoy, complain, insult, and intentionally offend. It’s just about 3 or 4 of your type that come back. Would you go to a class or a lecture just to disrupt it? If so, what does that say about your maturity, your ability to be considerate or your propensity to be troublesome?
I would never spend time at lefty sites just to tell them they’re wrong. You waste time.
Simply mind boggling, ain’t it? I admit, I’m stumped. It’s absolutely astonishing that someone who has never run anything even as complicated as a two-hole privy isn’t quite up to the toughest job on the planet. Who have thought?
Who’d have thought, that is. Spell check is useless! I wanted the ain’t. :)
#8 Matthew
I must say I’m quite disappointed to see that no one has addressed your request for someone to “spell it out”; here goes…
Congress passed laws requiring Fannie & Freddie to issue mortgage loans to persons who traditionally would not qualify. I will not go into those details here; if you really want to know the information is readily available on the internet.
Now, the intent behind the legislation was laudable, but the method was flawed. Getting lower-income people into their own homes has a great deal of upside to it and is something to be greatly desired, but only so long as they can actually pay for them and will do so.
However, Fannie & Freddie were businesses that competed in the public marketplace for loans. Congress didn’t just write laws requiring them to provide these risky loans, it geve them a competitive advantage to encourage them to do so. This was an unfair advantage and competing lenders complained. Congress, instead of recognizing they had made a mistake, changed the laws for all lenders to level the playing field. Now, if a lender wants to remain competitive, he MUST write these risky loans originally mandated by congress.
Remember, lenders are competing with each other for business, so everybody gets more and more creative in loanwriting. Whenever someone comes up with a successful idea, everyone else MUST do the same to continue to compete.
Since more people can now qualify for loans, the demand for homes increases. Greater demand results in greater prices, always, so home prices went up across the board.
Over 20 years of this kind of bad policy resulitng in billions of dollars in bad paper created the “housing bubble”.
Enter congress again, writing more laws and changing the rules. This time the laws did not apply to the mortgage industry, but applied to the entities that bought the loans issued by all thos busy lenders; big banks. A great deal of the loans were overvalued (the amount loaned was for more than the property was currently worth). The way the market was going, everyone expected the property values to exceed the loan amount in due course. This was reflected by recent history, with people purchasing and “flipping” homes sometimes within 12 months and making a profit. However, the market could not sustain this kind of growth forever. As soon as the momentum in the housing market slowed, many very large banks were left with very large holes in their portfolios.
Enter more congressional interference in the market when they arbitrarily decide to apply mark-to-market rules to the banking industry, which traditionally used different rules. Suddenly, banks are required to revalue their paper on a daily basis, just as if they’d been dabbling in the stock market! As soon as the momentum went out of the housing market, these banks were required by law to post huge paper losses, even though in the real market the actual value of the assets had not depreciated that much! An artificial banking crisis ensued, which fed an artificial housing crisis, which fed a real banking crisis, which fed a real housing crisis!
All because a bunch ov bureaucrats who have no real idea how the market works wrote a bunch of laws without regard for the possible unintended consequences. The way the laws were written encouraged profiteering at an unsustainable rate.
Some say congress is at fault; others say greedy profiteers are at fault. They’re BOTH right! But remember, congress writes the rules!
#6
The iranians may flush if for you. They will be dying to try a nuke out on the US and DC might be a tempting target. Be kinda funny, all the namby pamby crowd in DC, tolerant, understanding, forgiving of our enemies, hmm, this could result in their just rewards.
The ’08 plan is working fine. Republicans stayed home. Independents went Democrat. This, it was hoped by some, would give the Republican party reason to pause in their own mischievious games and to allow a teaching moment for those who had forgotten that the path we are on is only a continuation of the Democratic path to hell we were on in the 60′s and 70′s and somewhat into the 80′s when the Democrats had congressional majorities before.
Now the lessons are sinking in on all fronts. Not only are those of us who comment on these articles coming to dire conclusions about our nation’s future, even the syndicated authors are beginning to agitate for severe action.
Be prepared. Man up.
In the panic after Sarah Palin’s remarkable unveiling that thoroughly stole Obama’s thunder mere hours after his Denver Immaculation, the Bamster let slip the scariest thing I have ever heard in American politics: “Uh, uh, uh, they have no idea what they are up against….”
The statement pulled the veil back ever so slightly, revealing just how treacherous totalitarians can be to achieve their ends.
With the likes of government-funded ACORN, SEIU “volunteers” and club-wielding thugs at polling places, will we ever have an honest election again?
In the current crop of Democrats America has elected what I term “True Believer Democrats”, that is to say those who will strap on a “political bomb” to accomplish their greater goals. The Democrats, even of they lose power, know well that whatever they get on the books, even if it is weak, will never be repealed by the even weaker Republicans.
In time America will forget it’s current electoral blunders and re-elect Democrats to complete the goal of a “Socialist States of America” and Nancy and Harry and Barack-the-Great will live on forever in Democrat Paradise where each will receive seventy free entitlements.
Junk Bonds
Junk Journalism
Junk Science
Junk Money
Junk Politicians
Junk Government
Junk Banks
Junk Art
Junk cars
Junk Education
Junk Ideologies
Junk Value Systems
Junk Legal System
‘And you think you got problems eh Bunkie’
I worry that these people in power are working to make it impossible to ever vote them out of office. I am afraid we may have participated in the last free election ( and I have my doubts about that one) ever held in the US in 2008. These guys are playing for keeps. They aren’t acting like people who think they may lose their jobs after four years. They are acting like the Gang of Four.
Paul Anson @81: Nancy Pelosi “charters”
her own Boeing 757 instead of either flying commercial or using an executive jet which would have to refuel between DC and San Francisco.
Most folks would consider this an extravagance.
What is worse is that she has tried to order that plane to fly up a ways, pick up her friends, and then come back to DC to take all of them to the West Coast. Once there, she tried to order the plane to leave San Francisco Airport and fly up to a smaller of facility so she would not have to drive back to SFO.
Which indicates that she was—and perhaps still is—-clueless about what it takes to
support and enable a full-sized passenger liner. What she wanted done simply cannot be done with that type of aircraft. Her desires could only be satisfied with a tactical plane such as the C130—–and I can’t see her sitting in web seats, eating box lunches and using the honey bucket. Noit to mention holding on real tight for a
short-field landing.
Richard Allbritton – you may not be aware, but Dr. Hanson is a classical scholar, which you are not, and is far more knowledgeable in these areas than you are.
Your Toynbee-ist outline of the Roman Empire remains your opinion, not factual analysis. What is relevant is the socialist infrastructure of Obama/Democrats which is removing more than half of the population from fiscal responsibility for the state and relying only on a smaller and smaller ratio of the population. Such a decimation of the middle class will destroy the American economy.
The history of plague (see McNeil on this)is relevant to societal change, as it was in the European medieval era, for it suggests an infrastructure unable to support increasing populations – which are then reduced by famine and disease.
None of this is relevant to Dr. Hanson’s points or to the current situation.
The demonrat party of Truman is gone. HST would be a repub today. So would JFK. The communists in the party are anti american and anti capitalist. Nasty the bullshebitch Pelosi, The entire black congressionial caucus, and virtually every demonrat north of the Mason-dixon line and east of the missisippi is far left. So is every demonrat in commiefornicate. There are reasons a Clinton, a Gore ,Kerry and Obamao can get nominated. The far left runs the party. Meanwhile, even most republicans are not conservative. Hard to miss the Arctic Foxes popularity-mainly because shes not from the snotty elite east and northeast. There comnes a time to fight-that time is arriving before long. It wouldnt surprise me if Obamao tries to find an excuse to impose martial law-a tipping point. Keep buying the ammo folks. keep suppoting our soldiers, the majority hate this sleazebag. So do a lot of law enforcement figures. And remember, the pioneers take the arrows.
Margaret Thatcher: “The trouble with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money”
“When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both” James Davidson, National Taxpayers Union
“The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates”. Tacitus, historian.
the people with the deer in the headlights look remains the lame stream media.
They still haven’t gotten over their crush and homoreotic attraction to the voal office marxist.
But should the media finally decide to vette what the messiah is doing, his polls numbers might drop to single didgits
But that’s assuming the lame stream media gives up their support of his leftist agenda
Baal wrote: “Perhaps the other trolls have proven ineffectual and the messiah has turned out to be less than advertised… is that why you have joined us?”
Nope, I joined you because I wanted to see what the dark side was doing. Not really, I like to hear and see different perspectives; however, I’m not terribly fond of hype.
I never thought President Obama was a messiah. In fact, in spite of being very concerned about his lack of executive experience, I voted for him because I believed and still do believe that he is far better for the Country than John McCain would have been. Furthermore, I still believe that Obama has the possibility of being a great President.
BTW I like your sense of humor.
Binary logic in an analog world;
either things must continue
just as they are, or fall apart.
The US is not Argentina;
Once a tipping point of Federally
produced misery is reached, power
will devolve to the States, faster
than one can say “Tenth Amendment”.
There are plenty of leaders out there,
and an Army of Davids to follow them;
There are also plenty of ways to
produce new, real, wealth, once the
Fed can no longer enforce the illusory
intellectual property rights of TPTB,
or the Gaian anti-technology laws.
The first of many growth industries
will be the building of Refugee camps
for the NIT-wits from the NE; Texas
has plenty of land available. :)
bubblehead – Where are your facts?
The law which you are referring to is the Community Redevelopment Act. As has been pointed out numerous times, a full 2/3rds of all subprime loans simply did not apply under this criteria.
For every one subprime Freddy or Fannie loan, private banking made two. No one coerced, Countrywide Financial and many of these other mortgage companies that imploded to write loans.
Unregulated mortgage brokers would steer people with good credit to subprime loans. Mortgage companies created products that didn’t require income verification, what kind of business genius doesn’t bother to check if you have a job?
And it all rests on the repackaging of these loans and stamping them with a fraudulent AAA from the ratings agencies that were paid off millions.
The point is that anyone telling you the Community Redevelopment Act is the underlying cause of this is turning a blind eye to the facts.
“… But millions will never again vote for a Chicago politician…”
Unfortunately, not enough millions to matter. Most people vote for leaders perceived as being strong. If the health care financing plan, the cap-and-trade ripoff, and some other big economic bill (federal control over energy production and distribution is my guess) are enacted, then Obama will be perceived as a strong leader and will be re-elected. People won’t remember or care that Obama severely damaged the economy to turn us into a more socialist and fascist nation, they’ll just know that he’s in charge of a government that controls half the economy.
I used to look at the US as the leader, now I seem to look at what’s happening elsewhere to see where we *might* be headed. Helps me keep my investments and business decisions on track. It seems to me that we have an administration of followers at this point. In a way, it makes it easier because I currently have a better idea of what they will do next.
58. Now and Then.
“20. vivo . . . Amen, brother!”
“Blistering in its simplicity. Hilarious in its cadence and rhythm. Keep up the good work.”
Dec 7, 2009 – 7:45 pm
64. Now and Then:
“You mistake politics for life. You’ve been brainwashed into submission.”
Speaking of “brainwashing”, where the hell is Pee Wee moho – Anon – Shawn Ondeen Whatever? Did he get busted in Pakistan? Imagine that, a Modern Liberal running out on it’s responsibilities to you, the Handsome Mixed European – American Turkey With a Touch of Amen Black, with Turkey, to go do wannabe jihad.
So Now you’re latching on to…. Brother vivo? Is this a case of another political mistake, disguised as Turkey “submission” = love baster? It’s bad enough that Mr. President bowed to you, and them you took the Disneyland Option, instead of Mr. President’s stomach and beyond, and thus hurt him in the polls, Now your runnin’ with that vivo trash and all he wants a feather in his cap.
No wonder Mr. President is tanking in the polls. You are the cause of this.
You would have had success in claw. You would rival Octomom with all those eggs in the fridge, and since you met Mr. President, he might have just loaned you that styrofoam Greek temple that’s in mothballs, a magnificent coop until he is appointed Mr. President of the World. Then he would grant you a Park Avenue coop, and you could gobble with the best of them. Man!
But Now he is on the downslide. Can you explain this? Why isn’t Mr. President popular anymore? Why? Why? Why? It’s awful, isn’t it. Please make Mr. President popular again. Please you Handsome Mixed European – American Turkey With a Touch of Amen Black.
Please. Bless him with an LOL, or something.
You could use some inspirational words from your Anvil Johnson genes! “Amen, brother!”
Tick, tick, tick, gobble, gobble Goebbels.
You say “But banks are reluctant to lend—both afraid of shaky borrowers and loathe to get tied down with low-interest obligations if inflation roars back.”
Since these “reluctant” banks can borrow from the Fed at 0% and then invest in Treasury bills at 3%, why would they want to be bothered with lending to shaky borrowers and putting up with more Gov’t regulation when they can just sit on this 3% spread?
… and the latest Rassmunssen shows a %44 approval rate…
113. Richard Allbritton, Miami:
Welcome then!
As I keep saying my greatest fear is the thrid party crowd, they gave us Clinton and to some extent they gave this Congress. Not that I do not believe the Republican party needs to be taken to woodshed but rather I believe the Deomcrats must be absolutely humiliated. The history of third party efforts is not very good so it seems wise to stick with Republicans to do this. if enough of a blowout occurs then you can start devolving the Republican Party inot your third pary. Just remeber that the country is vast and the principle many and in the end it is numbers that count. We get to smaller government by not ignoring problems as Republicans and conservtives have been wont to do but rather by proposing non governmental solutions and seeing them through to working. We do need a dynamic leader, if there were one right now BO would be in 20% range.
Since Ronald Reagan, America has endured
George H.W. Bush-Big government Republican
Bill Clinton- Big Government Democrat
Bill Clinton- Big Government Democrat
George W Bush- Big Government Republican
George W Bush- Big Government Republican
Barak Obama-BIG-BIG-BIG GOVERNMENT LIBERAL
Fot those that attended Harvard or Yale, that is 21 years of Big Government POTUS.
The American Voter appears to be getting what they vote for. No mystery here. There will not be any big change to the voter direction in 2012.
The only confusion from the Formally Relevant Media is why we are not buying their bull and have sought other sources.
And the only time the deficit was cut consistently and protractedly was with a liberal centrist President and a Republican Congress. When you think about it, that’s the only way it will work, because a Repub Congress feels obligated to give a Repub President anything he wants and a Dem Congress will give/force spending on a President of either party. If there is a contract with America type reversal in 2010, Obama is pragmatic enough to do a Clinton. Then all we will need is the equivalent of a dot com bubble so that we can start the dance all over again.
Obama and the Democrat Party are once again attempting to transform Banks into Social Workers. By doing so, they augment the already risk averse environment, created by growing government. Shareholders are pushing back. CEO’s will soon stop taking calls from the White House. Team Obama has not a clue. Still looking for an adult in the White House.
Watch this speech. Why could he not be the next Republican candidate?
His name is Thad McCotter, I found him humble and inspiring. Oh, and all this without a teleprompter in sight. Marvelous.
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2009/12/rep-thad-mccotter-on-military-families.html
So tell me, this Mr. lucky character, is he with you guys?
For more than eleven months, Obama has been selling a lot of people a bill of goods. One replete with deceit, deception, ambiguity, disingenuousness, scapegoating (today Obama called bankers Fat Cats; very Presidential, big ears) and outright lies. And many of us bought his outrageous rhetoric hook line and sinker.
His end game had (still has two infecting objectives; first, to send America reeling left politically, transforming it fundamentally with massive government spending to the tune of 3 trillion dollars in 11 months on the one hand.
And second, neuter the military.
Discontinue research on advanced jets, go after weapons spending with a meat cleaver while destabilizing
and demoralizing our military whose rules of engagement in Afghanistan tie one hand behind our soldiers’ backs and on the other, keeping their weapons on safe when people without weapons are in the area. Unless they hear bullets whizzing past their heads within five meters, they cannot return fire. The British during the revolutionary war with their tactics of line-firing in front of line-loading while wearing red clothing had more favorable rules of engagement than do our troops do in Afghanistan thanks to Obama and his Chicago advisors, Axelrod and Rahm; two great war heroes.
Most ludicrous, Obama was just on the news giving himself, as commander in chief, a B+ grade. In the commander in chief capacity, I believe Obama deserves to be thrown out of school.
And then there’s his domestic financial performance where Obama gives himself another B+.
Is wasting Stimulus money part of the curriculum? Fact is,Democratic insiders, including the moderate Democrats recently elected, have been given control of close to a trillion dollars. And, get this. Those, who because of their yes votes on ObamaCare, expect to be
voted out of their jobs in 2010, like Hapless Harry Reid, don’t give a flying fudge. No, they’re not falling on any swords for the party.
Thanks to a team of Eric Holder lawyers using various lawyerly schemes, Obama Democrats in danger of losing the next election have been promised in writing half million dollar non-firable government jobs extending five years into the future. Those are facts. These people are feckless, sinister, pukes.
Then there’s Obama, himself.
From ballooning the deficit 3 trillion dollars in 11 short months to lying through his sparkling white teeth about ending earmarks and championing transparency, to sending Stimulus money to districts that don’t exist, and
letting it fall into donor hands who have promised to pass part on to loyal members of the Democratic senate and house should they lose
their seats, Barack has created an almost impenetrable web of people, money and payoffs. And the attorney general’s office has completed documentation that wraps it nicely with a bow of positive legal opinion that Sotomayor and four supremes have tacitly given their advance okay.
America, we’ve been hoodwinked by people who are out to bankrupt us. By people who have so perverted this government that they plan to embed gay thoughts in grade schoolers (Obama’s head of school safety, NAMBLA friendly, Kevin Jennings).
Moreover, various ponzi like schemes have been hatched that spend your tax money and spread the wealth to a lot of people who either refuse to work for it or insist on using lawyerly chicanery to pocket it. And we’re talking sums of money none of us will probably ever see in our lifetimes.
If America’s a deer in headlights with all the ponzi schemes Obama’s laid on the American people, then I, Rachel Peepers, am not surprised. Seeing our tax money go straight like a laser into big shot Democrat donor pockets or supplying huge caches of greenbacks designed to be lifelong financial cushions should members of Congressional chronies not get re-elected makes me sick.
I swear, just about everything Obama’s done since day one; virtually every decision he’s made, has hurt America. Hurt our financial standing. Hurt our standing in the world.
Let’s face it, the enemies of America now see us weak, and becoming penniless. China laughs at us as Hillary
Clinton begs them to continue investing in America. Obama has literally put us between a rock and hard place. And, in so doing, America is in no position to use the strength we once had to deal with the Iran nuke question. Are they 30 days away from delivery capability? 60 days? 90 days?
Obama has ( I believe intentionally) screwed this country royally. And I don’t think he cares a whit about his diving poll numbers. That 34 percent of Americans don’t want any part of ObamaCare I believe Obama could care less.
For, in 2012, my fellow Americans, he doesn’t just plan to leave the White House, he plans to leave the country. Does the main stream media think it’s strange that he’s negotiating to buy fifty acres in Switzerland? We’ve elected a global traveler. The most left senator in the U.S. senate. Didn’t anybody realize that before they voted for him? Not only that, the annointed one is a set in cement believer in Saul Alinsky’s free enterprise destroying system.
The brown eyed handsome man is the loosest cannon around. And he’s doing the equivalent of putting a financial noose around our necks.
Do I feel like a deer in the headlights? Maybe I do. Because, brothers and sisters, I feel like the smell of danger surrounds us. If these aren’t the times that try men’s souls, I don’t know what else to call them.
Obama people are even dictating television scripts; shows like “Law and Order”, “30 Rock” “24″, “Curb your enthusiasm.” If they can’t bump off Rush, they’ll snake their way into TV. Fox isn’t a news station? You know what that was America? It was more than a shot off the bow of an example of a free press. It was an example of the Leninist attack. Push in the bayonet until you feel resistance.
Well, I’m resisting. With every fiber of my being. I feel like war has been declared on America. By a President who’s as likely to shred the constitution as kill an annoying fly.
Talk Marxist/Obama created talking points to me these dark days and I’ll grab a piece of the truth and shove it down your throat. I’m mad. Obviously,the Democrats want a fight. Well, this girl is ready to give it to them.
You know, I think it’s time people let shall I say other people know what being an American is all about. When we’re in a war, we’re they’re to win it. When we’re faced with a pipsqueak, lying, American hating mistake for a President, we may react like a deer in the headlights initially, but just for a second or two. Because we’ve grown up to appreciate how dear freedom truly is. And if you’re hankering to take it away from us, better lace up your boots tight as can be. Because you’re in for a fight, the kind that real Americans don’t often lose.
How true it is the threat from barbarians is not of swarms invading from the edges of the empire; they are already among us, lead by, primus inter pares, our historic first Islamic apostate president.
His hostility to the virtues of our Western tradition, in part because of his fractured life, his incomplete immersion in our American experience, also because of his distorted exposure to what our legacy represents; plus his guile in having evaded the qualification of Natural Born with impunity, (“Of all his virtues, as he counted them, there was none on which [he] so prided himself as his ability to dissemble, and he was therefore the more irritated at an attempt to expose what he was hiding.”—Tacitus), such a confused, rebellious mind can only find comfort in a pact with career politicians suckling the leviathan of authoritarian power.
They have no just cause to remake our way of life. Their barbarous assault is so foreign to most Americans that our common decency will unite us in victory over them.
bubblehead:
“I must say I’m quite disappointed to see that no one has addressed your request for someone to “spell it out”; here goes…”
Thank you for providing a target.
“Now, if a lender wants to remain competitive, he MUST write these risky loans originally mandated by congress”
Rubbish. Subprime loans aren’t actually competitive, when compared with the standard product that so many borrowers should have qualified for.
“Over 20 years of this kind of bad policy resulitng in billions of dollars in bad paper created the “housing bubble””
The us did have a housing bubble, but it wasn’t a big one. The UK and australia had/have much bigger housing bubbles – at least one of which hasn’t popped yet. That’s been the case for a few years now. And like you say, the policies you’re talking about have been in place for 20-30 years. They’ve stood through several serious recessions – why was this time different?
You’ve got a great story, but it’s a load of poppycock. Get some facts into you – only a small fraction of loan defaults have been CRA-related. Overall, CRA-affected loans don’t defaulted significantly more frequently than others. Lenders weren’t writing risky loans because they had to – they were writing them because they thought assets would keep rising, offsetting the risk of default. They were specifically writing subprime loans because they were VERY profitable (and hence not actually competitive at all)
Here’s something to think about: The US faced an (arguably) worse economic blow in 2001 with 9/11, the dot-com collapse and SARS – and the banking system basically shrugged it off. That was the economy bush inherited. 7 years later and a relatively small hiccup (I’m talking about the slowdown that caused the meltdown) and a short fall in house prices broke the entire system. What happened in the intervening 7 years? Ponder that.
The usual suspects have worked extremely hard to try to pin one of the biggest oversight FUBARs in history on the people who didn’t let it happen on their watch. Trouble is, the facts (and the people who know what they’re talking about – from both sides of politics) are all against them.
Have a read:
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/12/03/feds-kroszner-defends-community-reinvestment-act/
http://www.occ.gov/ftp/release/2008-136.htm
http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/kroszner20081203a.htm
http://www.usnews.com/money/blogs/the-home-front/2008/12/17/sheila-bair-stop-blaming-the-community-reinvestment-act.html
You’ve been lied to. I wonder if you care?
#8 How did the skewing of Freddie and Fannie create this mess?
Think Community Reinvestment Act, the enabling of marginally solvent individuals on a mortgage debt binge for starters. The selling of useless bundled real estate mortgages that created a kiting scheme of securities which eventually crashed in 2008. Lack of responsible oversight by Barney Frank et. al. as enablers for Freddie and Fannie’s excesses and lack of financial responsibility. How’s that for starters.
Let’s try this again, since the last one did not make it in. ALL recent Presidents (since FDR) have been Big Government Presidents. Has the Federal Government gotten smaller under ANY of them? NO. It is what it is and the talk of smaller government is about as plausible as putting out LESS CO2. Sure we will.
As for deficits, the only combination that has yielded significant, protracted deficit reduction is a lefty President with a righty congress. The other combinations just don’t seem to work for logical reasons, when you think about it.
For the second half of the 20th century, the U.S. was the place to have your investments, growth (other than the 70′s), safety, manageable government debt and obligations. That is no longer true. Ironically, I believe the best place for my money over the next decades will be India and China. There will certainly be better growth there, the governments seem more interested in encouraging and protecting their industries and businesses than the U.S. Their populations are growing and still have a work ethic not a government owes me ethic. Further, I no longer believe such countries involve any more risk of government taking of my investments than the U.S. I am in the process of selling all my U.S. stocks and mutual funds and purchasing India and China based companies. I can’t move out of the U.S. yet, but I can certainly move a large part of my investments out of the U.S.
Surely conservatives have a white knight hidden some where????
Who ever emerges had best put on their heaviest armor against the liberals. They will spare no expense OR words to demolish this emerging person. We’ll be exposed to Black panthers, voter fraud, james carville..
We as conservatives had best learn to fight back. Just throw it at them, no matter what it is…quit trying to be “fair”. If we’re “fair” and act responsibly, we get another McCain mess.
I agree the “third” party effect can be devastating. We all need to get together and do what is right for America as a whole.
But,…we know that isn’t gonna happen. Just face it..Obama is America’s antichrist.
We seem to be stunned by what is happening to our country. Why? We allowed it to happen.
I think “Over50” has hit on something here. It did use to be the case that the U.S. was one of the, if not the best choice of a place to invest in, not the least because—in contrast to a lot of other potential countries where you might invest—there was an agreed on body of commercial law here that was adhered to that assured predictability and long term stability, and the government was not going to seize the business you invested in, abrogate contracts, and do a little economic fascism victory dance over the corpse to be.
With Obama & Co. come to power this has radically changed, and if you invest in the U.S. today, you are increasingly no more immune to the arbitrary seizure of your company, the abrogation of contracts, the seizure of shareholder’s equity and control than you are in, say, Venezuela, Zimbabwe or the U.S.S.R., no matter that the excuses given for this seizure here are, at least for now, a little more “nuanced” than the Russian mob saying, “your business is ours now.”
Combined with our current economic shambles, and the Obama & Co. legislation in the pipeline that promises infinitely worse to come—out of control government spending, deficits and debt, massive additional taxes, fines and penalties, “skyrocketing” energy costs and decreased energy supplies along with massively increased regulation, less personal freedom and much more regulation and regimentation across the board, a continued decline in the caliber, motivation and educational level of our work force and an increases in thuggish union power, higher health care costs for business that eat into or totally consume profits, a declining dollar, and possible hyperinflation—it would seem that now is the time to jump ship to get away from a country that is in the process of turning hostile to business.
On a personal note, though, I do not know where you can flee to that will give you more personal or even real economic freedom—Canada, Australia, New Zealand—highly regulated Socialists all, somewhere in Europe—soon to be Eurabia, Latin America, the target rich Middle East, or places like, say, Malaysia or Singapore, which have authoritarian governments, as does China.
As Congresswoman Michelle Bachman said the other day, “we are it, if we go down there is nowhere else to run”; maybe there is a place outside the U.S. where you can more safely stash or grow your money, but I don’t think there is one in which you can really preserve, much less expand, your personal freedom.
BillC – Could you please tell me how the Community Redevelopment Act forced the majority of these subprime loans to come into being if the legislation simply didn’t apply to over half of these loans?
Countrywide Financial $97 Billion
Ameriquest $80 Billion
New Century Financial $75 Billion
Not one of these top three subprime lenders were required by CRW to write a single loan. Nor did CRW provide for the proliferation of 0% down loans and the deterioration of loan standards among the largest subprime lenders.
As for the writing of bundled securities – the repeal of Glass Steagall and a near non-existent regulation of these Mortgage securities combined with COMPLETELY unregulated Credit Default Swaps. That’s where government should have stepped in.
But again, we’re talking about bankers gone wild here. Yet you want to turn around and blame a law from 1977 that lasted under the Reagan, Bush I administrations without incident. Doesn’t make sense to me.
Bush really was not that bad of a president. The Media attacked him in manner and degree like no other president in our history, even Ronald Reagan. The entire left establishment went after him with a venom that, to me at least, was treasonous.
Conservatives here need to separate these attacks from reality.
His errors were essentially in trying to make peace offering to the Democrats, errors of “bipartisanship”, and most particularly in spending more in the areas of medicine for seniors and throwing yet more money down that rat hole of public education. His other major blunder was his support for illegal immigrants. But from the start Bush campaigned as a moderate pragmatist. He actually campaigned for these things. Conservatives either were not listening or thought he did not mean it. He never misrepresented himself.
And famously, he did not choose to defend himself point by point to the Democrats. History will decide whether or not this was prudent, but we all should recall he had a war to fight, and America security hung in the balance. If one actually read his speeches, however, the rebuttals were there, the were in fact mostly suppressed by the media or their content distorted. It may be that Bush held the American people in a higher regard than they actually deserve to be held.
One must remember that he only had both Houses on the Hill for only four year, and then by tiny margins, and the RINO’s were constantly sandbagging him. Yet he managed to get most of his legislation through, particularly that crucial to the WOT. Try as they might to do otherwise, the Obama crowd has in the main tacitly acknowledged the wisdom of most of his policies in this area by continuing them. Where they have not done this they have made disastrous error such as in the case of Holder’s decision on KSM. These stupidities merely underline the wisdom of Bush’s approach to the aftermath of 911. He was a adroit politician. Obama has problems with the huge majorities he has. One may disagree with his policies, but one can hardly call Bush incompetent. He was a shrewd player who most always won.
The economy? Well it boomed under him. It was one of the great post war expansions, and after 922 that is a stupendous accomplishment. It only really started to go to pot when the democrats took back the Hill. It is not really his fault that the Democrats brought it down, and it was the CRA and the shennaiugans of Democrat insiders on wall street that broiught it down. Along these lines, we really must coisnsider if last year’s crash was planned, if it was in fact an “October Surprise” engineering by the American and international left, and perhaps in collusion with foreign enemies.
The only error Bush made here was to let Paulson spook him last fall, but i will point out that most of the original TARP money is being paid back, and that is after the Democrats really went far beyond the original TARP estimates. IF we would have stuck to the original TARP estimate which was around 250 billion, and give tax relief, as \Bush suggested. the whole TARP response may not now seem so ridiculous. How Obama and Democrats handle the whole business after Bush left office merely serves to highlight the differences between the Democrats and Bush.
So let us stop blaming Bush for the economic warfare perpetrated on us by the Democrats. No, the nation’s economic ills cannot be honestly pinned on Bush, not by any serious person who knows the facts. Had Democrats been in charge immediately after 911 we would have had a depression in 2001 and it would still be with us.
He got us through. He kept us safe
Iraq? A necessary war, and, no, it was not badly fought.
That is just the propaganda of the left, who fought the war effort tooth and nail and cynically politicized it, just as they did Viet Nam. Never forget that the Ba’athist were socialists. For those of us that lived through it in the ’60′s and the ’70′s, this was an almost exact replay of the Democrat betrayal during the Viet Nam era.
People that scream about the execution of the Iraq war know little about the history of war, particularly in the last two centuries. All of this wailing about Iraq was/is purely cynical and self serving. Conservatives must reject the version of it supplied by Marxist propagandists, and those who find themselves mouthing it need to do little soul searching.
What we are seeing now is the execution pof a long planned attack of the hard left on America. This moment has been worked toward for generations of the Left. The Conspiracy started before Bush was even born.
The left wing trolls here are one thing; they will never understand someone doing the riight thing, but conservatives here should stop repeating and internalizing the left’s anti-bush propganda. He was quite a fine president and accomp[lished much. He was certainly a better preseident that most of the post war presidnet, and certiabnly a much better one that Truman, or any Deomcrat of the post war period.
138. Moongoose
Congratulations. Your descent into delusion is complete. Feel free to grab a cookie on your way out.
Mongoose is right. A “Rule or Ruin” ethos cannot be led –it refuses the premise, on the basis of revolution. What we learned to cal “BDS” was this refusal, in action. It began with the Soros in the 2004 election, and only amped up in the subsequent four years. GWB could’ve been God for all the good it would’ve done him –the play was already afoot, and had been since the late-Clinton financial reforms which specifically deregulated and hid the credit default swap –which grew in amount from a few hundred million in 2000 to sixty trillion by late 2007, when the barn door was opened and the horses run out in preparation for not only winning the 2008 election but winning it with a Bush Crisis to exploit to the hilt and beyond. Perfect. In fact, could hardly have been MORE perfect.
Some’ve studied this at great length, from the role of Citibank (creator of the tool of tools, “too big to fail” starting in ’98 with Travellers merger, and ’99 with a host of aquisitions that made no sense except to get Too Big To Fail) all the way to the recent forced sale (at a signal low price by Citigroup) of Phibro to Armand Hammer’s (search his name with KGB) Occidental.
Phibro/London (oops, got off in the weeds, but i’ll be quick on this detail) is one of the handful of summer 08 oil mkt manipulators who, in concert with the Soros & Democrat foreign policy establishment-embroiled Russo-Georgia War, panicked Americans with the speed of the zoom to $4 gasoline and set them up for the September Bank Panic –itself circumstantially proveable via two dozen URLs and consideration of the three big otherwise nigh-inexplicable 2007 SEC rules changes –which, engineered atop the great subprime FrankenDodd yawning subprime cavern collapse, created TARP (“Bush started it!” right on schedule to take the heat off the real perps moving into DC –TARP the executive branch’s walking-around trillion, the new thing under the sun, and that which as has been said has changed the nature of the USA economy) –and won the 2008 election.
Think back –didn’t the GOP slate seem to drop out rather oddly quickly and with little fight? did they “know what they were up against”? Do they know now, but to spill it is to bring down the national continuity of 230 plus years (ex 1860-65 for a few states down thisaway) ?
The commie/nazi sonzabitches now in power in DC now have literally screwed our country to the wall –have for their own power ideology yanked the food out of your grandparent’s and children’s mouths –and they ain’t through yet. It’s the devil to pay now.
As has been said above, the Iran Bomb is the next tool, and the democratic party rest assured looks fondly on “Vietnam” as its finest moment, and intends a reprise in Afghanistan –if the American military leadership fails to block them in the shadow war already being fought inside the nation.
I might add that “too big to fail” is the natural –inevitable –grand coup of the Cloward-Piven Strategy, applied to the largest target of all, the free market USA. The leftist academics planning your demise may be unable to run a fish-bait drive-thru but they durn sure know the theory and how to castle the king and rook, sacrifice pawns, and go for a Jose Capablanca or Ruy Lopez quick checkmate. Of course, it began in earnest in 1998 so really only the endgame seems to be happening in the quick.
When President Bill Clinton signed “motor voter” –a main ACORN ‘enabling act’ –among the handful of luminaries standing behind him were Professors Cloward and Piven. Please, look it up.
I agree that GWB took a lot of unfair criticism, but part of the Presidential skill package is to articulate a defense. GWB was pretty good on the campaign trail, but not so good giving a focused defense of policy. Obama, at least in his Afghanistan speech seemed to know where his weak flank was and shored it up.
Both sides have absurd attack machines, fueled by the basic desire of people to shoot their mouths off and exaggerate the opposition’s weaknesses, because, well…it is what many people do.
So many of the commenters here I dismiss almost immediately because of the over-heated, over-the-top nature of their speech. To me it is the equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater. Or maybe burping or farting (as loudly as possible) in church.
Reducing things to their lowest common denominator works best for the low and the common, red neck or or some other colored neck, because there is always another whole low and common crew coming up with the opposite simplicities.
Tha…tha…that’s all folks.
98. Ron Kean:
You just don’t get it!
69. baal:
Obama is the best Republican president ever!
oops –i note my comments remain under moderation –feel free to remove the name-calling –”sonzabitches” is just an old-timey barracks syno for ”jerks” –has no ref to lineage inter nor intra specific –thanks –& apologies for excessive rhet devices –
BTW, re Citi, news this morning: The $20 bbl TARP paydown is predicated on a $38 bbl special tax treatment from IRS. Long/short, Citi up $18 for ‘doing nice for the press’, taxpayers down $18 bbl –i guess, for giving the gov’t ‘the press’ to play to.
Just to be clear, the 20bbl loan was on the asset side of the USA taxpayer’s ledger; it is now transferred off the asset side and become an 18 bbl “cost” or “expense” on the other side of the ledger. Ah, ‘permanently’. They’ll be breaking out the wodka over at ‘HQ-on-the-Volga’.
Matthew and Lefty – I will answer your challenge of the assertion that the CRA was responsible.
First, 1/2 of all banks were subject, not just 1/3. Most importantly, this portion included Fannie and Freddie.
Second, they kept upping the requirement of percentages of substandard loans required, especially of Fannie and Freddie.
Third, because Fannie and Freddie were thus willing to buy up all these junk mortgages, the banks responded by splurging. They could get all the profit (in the form of fees), and take no risks, because the risks would be transferrred to Fannie and Freddie.
Fourth, Clinton gutted the FHA lending standards in ’95 to support the CRA, and also gave the CRA real teeth. This deregulation by a Democrat was for social justice, allowing poor people to buy homes they couldn’t afford otherwise… and still couldn’t. Banks rushed to take advantage of this incentive. They found ways to fudge the numbers to qualify these loans. They pocketed the fees, and pawned them off on Fannie and Freddie.
Fifth, the Clinton FNBA put in the “mark-to-market” rule. This created the possibility, and thus the certainty, of the huge real estate bubble.
Sixth, at President Bush’s urging, the Republicans in Congress tried to rein in Fannie and Freddie, but the Dems, led by Frank and Waters, filibustered.
Seventh, AIG came up with the CDO’s and CDS’s that played on these huge numbers of bad mortgages held by Fannie and Freddie. They knew they never had any hope of paying off should the crash come. It was a huge fraud. They admitted this. They got away with it.
Too big to fail. The government bailed them out, and of course, wouldn’t punish them. This was discovered in 2008, but the Dems had both Houses of Congress, by then. Bush shared some of the blame for this. Collusion.
Eighth, the vast majority of defaulting mortgages EARLY ON (about 3/4)were the subprime mortgages, those who had been gaming the system. They were playing musical chairs, and had no seat when the music stopped. They began the collapse, and the whole rotten edifice came down.
All this can be traced back to the CRA. It all started there, in government trying to do good with someone else’s money. They put in bad regulations (CRA & mark-to-market). They gutted good regulations (FHA standards and Glass-Steagall). It was all to buy the votes of poor people. It’s “Social Justice”. It was just stupid, Liberal policy; Liberal Dems AND Liberal Pubs.
#138 Mongoose – I disagree. Bush was a fine Prez if you are a moderate Republican.
He boosted education spending, and Govern,ent power, with No Child Left Behind. It is a mess.
He increased the Medicare spending with Part D, thus accelerating the looming Medicare train wreck.
He created Homeland Security, another damned bureaucracy, rather than reorganizing the current services. Typical big government thinking: “It’s not working. Obviously, we need yet another, even nigger and more powerful, governmental entity.” He should have consolidated some of our agencies.
He DID mismanage the Iraq war. We were using failed tactics from Vietnam, patrolling rather than occupying. This made our troops into targets, having to reconquer the land every day. He ignored the generals ans listened to the suits. We didn’t declare war and mobilize. We fought a war with a peacetime army. It should all have been over in about 1-2 years, before the 2006 mid-terms.
He tried to reform SS/Medicare, but gave in quickly. When he wanted things enough, he rammed them through. Guess he didn’t want it badly enouggh.
Where were the budget vetoes; the fiscal restraint? Where was the bypassing of Congress and going to the American people to stop the real estate bubble from popping? Where was the effort to drill more oil here? That’s how we got the high oil prices that helped bring about the economic collapse. Where was the defense of his policies and the counter-attacks against the Progressive machine lies? That’s the VP’s job: to attack. He was terrible on immigration, and he didn’t pardon the border agents. The bailouts were a really bad idea.
He passed big tax cuts, which really boomed the economy, but allowed Congress to spend like crazy. He rallied the nation after 9/11. He finally got Iraq right… after 3 1/2 years. PEPFARS was admirable, but more big government do-gooding. Why wasn’t it a private charity deal?
From a Conservative point of view, he did very little right, but those were some of the Very Big Things, which is the only thing which qualified him for an average grade. To a Conservative, he mostly sucked. His failures allowed the right to be discredited, and allowed the Far-Left to be put in charge.
We are now on the brink of disaster, as a nation. 11/10 can’t get here soon enough to stop the reactionaries. The damage may be too severe to overcome after 2012. Obama is Bush’s fault, as far as I’m concerned. Bush was the leader of the Pub Party. He is responsible for their collapse in his second term.
The barbarians are inside the walls, and we are fighting a last-ditch defense in the town, hoping to drive them out. The town is burning down around our ears, whilst we fight. This IS Bush’s fault. He manned the walls, but left the inner defenses barren.
Dr. Hanson—Contemplating what has become of us here in America from the perspective of my 65 years, I have to say that we have let ourselves be twisted and diminished, and that we are, indeed, not the equal of those of our ancestors who came before us—primitive, uneducated, violent, excessively religious, and “unsophisticated” though many of us might think they were. Not only has moral clarity been lost, it no longer even appears to exist. Not only has “uprightness” largely disappeared–if it is even contemplated today–it is almost exclusively as a laughable and naïve relic of the past.
We have truly lost our way and, frankly, I do not know how we can find our way back to the correct path, or that we would even recognize it if we saw it. I am not a formally religious man, but—given the state we are in today–I am sorely tempted to believe that God had judged us, and has found us wanting.
Obamas approval rate is around a healthy 50 percent, there is no way that can be construed to mean people want GWB back, Bush was around 20 percent when he left office!
everything else is just blaming Obama for what has been going on for years with the government and in this country. the problem is not that Obama and the Dems have changed everything for the worse, the problem is that they have changed so little.
“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.”
All nations fail. All nations reach a crisis point where they change directions, or not, depending on the strength of their citizens, not their “leaders.” We are quickly reaching that point. Whether we decide, as a nation, to slip into some kind of quasi-European statist nation with Maoist tendencies, lead by an elite class, or revolt to the point where we clean the house is up to us. Sadly, the left has been dumbing down our children and the general public to the point where they don’t really remember or understand what it means to be an American- to be a man and woman of free will.
That makes the defense of our nation doubly hard and will leave it to a few. Remember the rule- Ten percent run the world while ninety percent wander around wondering what happened and who did it. WE have to be that ten percent.
Stand in the breach.
Matthew #8 – Oh, Matthew, Matthew, Matthew…you are a lost cause. After a year of this, you still don’t understand? Either you haven’t been paying close attention or you’ve been reading only MSM and Lib. sites. We won’t waste our time trying to educate you. Just go back to your easy chair and take a nap.
Marc Malone:
“Matthew and Lefty – I will answer your challenge of the assertion that the CRA was responsible”
But you didn’t make a very good argument. Go read my second post – and pay attention to the links at the bottom.
CRA-related loans make a (very) small fraction of the foreclosures behind the meltdown. Postulate all the scenarios you like, that you think should flow from various government policies – but those scenarios are not what caused the problem.
The closest that you seem to come to showing a connection is that the CRA somehow “influenced” commercial lending practices. That’s hokum. What actually happened is that the mortgage market lost the plot and quite happily wrote loans that they should not have. Their rationale was that property prices were rising fast enough to offset risk – and those subprime loans happened to be very profitable. The problem isn’t that government forced lenders to lend stupidly – the problem is that government didn’t STOP them.
From my (fairly undereducated) point of view, I agree that freddie and fannie really do need to get split up and cut loose to compete. They’re a serious problem, because they inhibit real competition and seem to be way too close to lawmakers. But that’s quite a separate thing to the wave of foreclosures FUBARed america’s financial system.
The Rabbit Hutch:
Traditionally you present some references and make an argument. Otherwise you’re just noise. Back to you.
144. Vivo
Sure.
Victor, you wrote ”
In short, I am not so worried about the recession, it’s the recovery that terrifies me, given looming energy hikes, inflation and interest sure to rise—overseen by a government intent on redistributing income.”
I was astounded to realise how apt this statement is because it sounds like the exact same position my country, South Africa, is in. In fact; you also described Zimbabwe “before the fall.”
What can I say – be afraid America; be very afraid. And sort yourself out.
72. Richard Allbritton, Miami:
“In AD 541-542, the first known bubonic plague pandemic occurred in the Roman Empire. This marked the first of many outbreaks of that plague to be combined with anthrax. These diseases cost at least 200 million lives throughout history. More than once the population of the Western and Eastern Roman empires were ravaged by plagues. The earlier Roman Republic did not have these pandemic diseases at least not on a widespread basis.”
Let me get this straight. You’re blaming the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476 on the plague outbreak in AD 541?
VDH is referring to the collapse of the Western Empire. The plague occurred in the Eastern Empire 65 years after the collapse of the West.
Vibiana:
Okay, but please ask him, this time, not to bring along his pals, Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. Also, tell him not to fire General MacArthur. If that’s not too much to ask, perhaps this time he will choose to win the war in Korea- and back the Chiang Kai Shek
crew, instead of the Commies.
If Harry had done what he should have, we wouldn’t have the problems we have today with world communism, Korea, China, or a
brown-nosed pentagon.
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