Photo by James Marvin Phelps, Shutterstock.com.
“Welcome to liberal utopia,” writes Dave Carter at Ricochet:
Whatever the perceived shortcomings of Ted Cruz and his hardy band of stalwarts, they’ve performed a remarkable public service by highlighting the fate that awaits all who rub wrongly the translucently thin skin of King Barack the Petulant. The Spartans may have had their shields, Native Americans their tomahawks and arrows, the Samurai may have wielded his sword with all the deadly grace of a tiger in mid-attack, but pound for pound, nothing comes close to the audacious stupidity of “Barrycades” and people in pointy little Smokey the Bear hats, poised to protect America’s monuments from law-abiding citizens.
Welcome to liberal utopia, where barriers are not erected against terrorists or illegal aliens on our nation’s borders, but rather against citizens, and where wheelchair-bound veterans enroute to honor their comrades face tighter security than terrorists enroute to murder a US Ambassador. This is where up is down, wrong is right, illegality is celebrated as progress, and where Constitutionalism is derided as racist. No longer relegated to the fever swamps of academic fancy, utopia has acquired real estate and made known its demands.
But it’s not a new development; the iron fist has always been behind every bleeding heart — the century-old notion of socialism as the “moral equivalent of war” cuts both ways. (Hence Sir Thomas More’s original definition of Utopia as “no place.”) And speaking of a century of static, statist “Progressivism,” in the Washington Examiner, Michael Barone notes that the Obama regime “cracks down on journalists more than any since Woodrow Wilson:”
Leonard Downie, former executive editor of the Washington Post, about what he calls “the Obama administration’s war on leaks.” Journalists are being surveilled to a greater extent than before and are meeting sources secretly — a la Bob Woodward in the parking garage — rather than communicate by phone or e-mail. He provides rich details on this crackdown and on its effects on journalists. He quotes 20-year New York Times reporter David Sanger as saying, “This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.”
The legal basis for this is the Espionage Act of 1917. As I pointed out in a Washington Examiner column in May, that statute was passed during Woodrow Wilson’s administation after the United States entered World War I. It is widely considered overbroad. Wilson used this statute and others to infringe more on civil liberties than any subsequent administration. Socialist party leader Eugene Debs was jailed for writings opposing the war; Wilson’s Republican successor, former journalist Warren G. Harding, pardoned Debs and invited him to the White House. Now the Obama administration is using Wilson’s legislation to crack down more on journalists than any other president since his Democratic predecessor of 100 years ago.
“You want a more ‘progressive’ America? Careful what you wish for. Voters should remember what happened under Woodrow Wilson,” Jonah Goldberg wrote in the Christian Science Monitor in early 2008, when he was promoting Liberal Fascism. Of course, nobody did, which is why they’ve elected the second coming of Wilson himself.
Or as Mencken said during the Wilson administration, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
And the perpetually angry left derive one of their few pleasures from answering the call.
(Photo at top of page of the Joe Louis fist memorial in Detroit, placed there in 1986, during the disastrous and racist 20 year reign of Democrat Mayor Coleman Young.)
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