There’s a “good” train-wreck theory circulating pretty far, and among a pretty wide swath of conservative-minded voters, concerning this presidential election. My husband has been an ardent proponent of this theory, as have been a sizable number of my own readers, who’ve written to explain it to me, some going into minute detail of how this theory will play out in 2008.
The condensed version, if I’m getting it right, goes something like this:
The 2008 election is a “wake-up” for the American people. We Americans are a very busy lot, say the train-wreck seers, who are very happy minding our own business, making a living for our families, and otherwise enjoying the benefits of living in the greatest country in the world. We Americans don’t get fully on alert unless we are involved in a sizable, far-reaching, societal catastrophe that affects nearly all of us very negatively.
An Obama victory, these theorists contend, would inevitably result in one heck of a big-blast train wreck. A wrecked economy. Jihadi wrecks all over the place. Judeo-Christian values tied to the tracks throughout the country. Taxpayers ready to tear up the very tracks and start all over.
And presto.
At the end of Obama’s four years, which these theorists explain will certainly produce a “Jimmy Carter four years on steroids,” we Americans will rise to the occasion and reclaim our liberties, our government, our pocketbooks, and our values. The second Ronald Reagan reformist will emerge in the form of Bobby Jindal or Sarah Palin or one of the other rising conservative all-stars. All will be well and a second wave of conservative reforms will inevitably return America to the course set by our founders.
Having been a tough-love mom and a stalwart advocate of logical-consequence parenting, I can certainly see the feasibility of this theory. If we are stupid enough to elect a man who, as Mark Steyn has so eloquently noted, has a resume that “would fit on the back of his driver’s license,” then we deserve to suffer the consequences.
And if Barack Obama were just an old-school, misguided, but still patriotic liberal, I would be sorely tempted to sit out this election, withhold my “safety-first” McCain vote, and let the chips fall where they may.
I’m a social conservative, an economic conservative, and a small-government conservative all rolled into one. I’m an at-all-times and in-every-circumstance conservative — in the brand of the original American patriots of 1776.
But Barack Obama, as I have painstakingly discovered, is no mere liberal. He proudly claims the progressive label, and makes no bones about his intentions to progress the internationalist socialist cause in America. In every policy sphere, from the redistribution of wealth to the federal government as nanny-caretaker, from an appeasement-first-and-always foreign policy to his plan for a national civilian security force on par with our U.S. military, Barack Obama clearly plans to change America into a country we would not even recognize as the land of the free and the home of the brave.
So, in my mind, Obama would not produce a train wreck, much less a “good” train wreck.
No, a Barack Obama presidency, coupled with a filibuster-proof Senate majority and a large House domination, is more akin to a Boeing 747 crash for America.
While folks do survive train wrecks and walk away to pick up the pieces and rebuild, surviving an Obama-style change jet crash, in my opinion, may not leave enough surviving elements of our Constitution, our economy, or our defense to allow for any sort of American renewal.
Progressive plan to rewrite Constitution through courts
In their book The Shadow Party, authors David Horowitz and Richard Poe painstakingly reveal much of what progressive revolutionaries and their prominent backers, including and especially George Soros, have been up to behind the scenes of the Democratic Party. Using campaign finance reform, which was heavily funded and advocated by George Soros, powerful 527 groups such as Moveon.org have orchestrated a veritable coup within the Democratic Party, and now exercise a heretofore unthinkable amount of control, operating as a shadow party, essentially pulling the strings on what the American public sees.
In April 2005, Yale Law School was home to an important conference, called “The Constitution in 2020.” Shortly after the conference, John Hinderaker wrote up the conference implications for the Weekly Standard, noting:
The essence of the progressive constitutional project is to recognize “positive” rights, not just “negative” rights, so that citizens are not only guaranteed freedom from specified forms of government interference, but also are guaranteed the receipt of specified economic benefits. The bottom line is that Congress would no longer have the discretion to decline to enact liberal policies. The triumph of the left would be constitutionally mandated.
We have seen the liberal/secular/progressive activism from the Supreme Court already imperiously revoke centuries of jurisprudence in cases like Roe, Lawrence, and a host of others, which have had profound, unprecedented effects on American culture, all without the approval of the electorate.
Progressives recognize that they face a center-right electorate, with no desire to exchange unique American liberties for the international socialist model, and know that their only feasible course is through the courts and aggressive judicial activism.
As the Weekly Standard summarized:
The left makes no secret of its intentions where the Constitution is concerned. It wants to change it, in ways that have nothing to do with what the document actually says. It wants the Constitution to enshrine its own policy preferences — thus freeing it from the tiresome necessity of winning elections.
The next president may have the opportunity to appoint up to three members of an aging Supreme Court. With Obama in the White House, a filibuster-proof Democrat majority in the Senate, and George Soros pulling his power levers offstage, we can certainly expect justices in the model of a Ginsburg or Souter, who have amply demonstrated their utter disregard for our own Constitution, while at the same time being enamored of international law.
Progressives could well do to America through a super-majority on the Supreme Court what they could never do through elections, and produce a catastrophe for our children on the scale of a mid-air plane explosion, not the kind of train wreck from which a recognizable America could walk away.
The forward march of Islamo-fascism
Whenever I try to imagine what life in America might be like under the jackboot of Islamo-fascism and the worldwide Muslim caliphate, it’s as hard for me to picture as it was for 1930s Germans to believe that in less than one decade, their freedoms could completely disappear. Tyranny in America is as hard for me to conceive of as it was for Cubans just prior to Castro’s era of change or for free Chinese hailing the changes Mao would bring. Right now in Venezuela, a free people are learning the hard way about change, Chavez style.
Think it can’t happen here?
Perhaps it was easy to miss last month, during Congressional hearings on oil company profits, when a proud member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Maxine Waters, made the public threat to “socialize our oil companies.” Consolidating government control of the economy is the fastest way, in my opinion, to make America vulnerable to foreign enemies.
Couple this driving desire on the part of “good” progressives everywhere with a completely naïve view of human nature, such as that of Barack Obama, who honestly believes that Islamic terrorism and war are merely the natural result of poverty, oppression, and inequalities among nations. The result is not only appeasement and a continuing drain on America’s economic resources, but a capitulation to evil that, unfortunately, Barack Obama and his backers do not even recognize.
Barack Obama has a plan that would effectively disarm America in the hopes that all others would follow suit. Gutting military programs in favor of global poverty initiatives is the left’s newest delusion, and one that promises to make us more vulnerable than ever to a nuclear 9/11, which has been the stated intention of al-Qaeda and Iran.
Safe or sorry?
I’m not a big believer in attempting to foretell the future. There is no reliable way for any of us to know, beyond doubt, the precise scope of changes an Obama presidency could produce. Nor is there any way for us to know whether the Islamo-fascist forces will make sufficient progress under a unilaterally disarmed America to bring us to our knees in relatively short order.
This much we do know, however.
The changes that progressives plan to make are huge, and unless Americans choose to mount a violent revolution to overthrow our own government and its court, then we would be stuck with the socialist vision, with no recourse to our legislative and executive branches.
The Islamo-fascists aren’t going anywhere. The money we give them, ostensibly to feed people, will instead be used to make more weapons with which to murder our families. Barack Obama is firmly convinced that his silver tongue can appease them.
As for me and my vote, we will elect to stay the course with America, proudly go with McCain, a known patriot, and be safe rather than sorry.
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