Obama hits a wall in Berlin
By George F WillThe question of whether Barack Obama’s second term will be a failure was answered in the affirmative before his Berlin debacle, which has recast the question, which now is: Will this term be silly, even scary in its detachment from reality?
Before Berlin, Obama set his steep downward trajectory by squandering the most precious post-election months on gun-control futilities and by a subsequent storm of scandals that have made his unvarying project — ever bigger, more expansive, more intrusive and more coercive government — more repulsive. Then came Wednesday’s pratfall in Berlin.
There he vowed energetic measures against global warming (“the global threat of our time”). The 16-year pause of this warming was not predicted by, and is not explained by, the climate models for which, in his strange understanding of respect for science, he has forsworn skepticism.
Regarding another threat, he spoke an almost meaningless sentence that is an exquisite example of why his rhetoric cannot withstand close reading: “We may strike blows against terrorist networks, but if we ignore the instability and intolerance that fuels extremism, our own freedom will eventually be endangered.” So, “instability and intolerance” are to blame for terrorism? Instability where? Intolerance of what by whom “fuels” terrorists? Terrorism is a tactic of destabilization. Intolerance is, for terrorists, a virtue.
It is axiomatic: Arms control is impossible until it is unimportant. This is because arms control is an arena of competition in which nations negotiate only those limits that advance their interests. Nevertheless, Obama trotted out another golden oldie in Berlin when he vowed to resuscitate the cadaver of nuclear arms control with Russia. As though Russia’s arsenal is a pressing problem. And as though there is reason to think President Vladimir Putin, who calls the Soviet Union’s collapse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” is interested in reducing the arsenal that is the basis of his otherwise Third World country’s claim to great-power status.
Shifting his strange focus from Russia’s nuclear weapons, Obama said “we can . . . reject the nuclear weaponization that North Korea and Iran may be seeking.” Were Obama given to saying such stuff off the cuff, this would be a good reason for handcuffing him to a teleprompter. But, amazingly, such stuff is put on his teleprompter and, even more amazing, he reads it aloud.
Neither the people who wrote those words nor he who spoke them can be taken seriously. North Korea and Iran may be seeking nuclear weapons? North Korea may have such weapons. Evidently Obama still entertains doubts that Iran is seeking them.
In Northern Ireland before going to Berlin, Obama sat next to Putin, whose demeanor and body language when he is in Obama’s presence radiate disdain. There Obama said: “With respect to Syria, we do have differing perspectives on the problem, but we share an interest in reducing the violence.” Differing perspectives?
Obama wants to reduce the violence by coaxing Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who is winning the war, to attend a conference at which he negotiates the surrender of his power. Putin wants to reduce the violence by helping — with lavish materiel assistance and by preventing diplomacy that interferes — Assad complete the destruction of his enemies.
Napoleon said: “If you start to take Vienna — take Vienna.” Douglas MacArthur said that all military disasters can be explained by two words: “Too late.” Regarding Syria, Obama is tentative and, if he insists on the folly of intervening, tardy. He is giving Putin a golden opportunity to humiliate the nation responsible for the “catastrophe.” In a contest between a dilettante and a dictator, bet on the latter.
Obama’s vanity is a wonder of the world that never loses its power to astonish, but really: Is everyone in his orbit too lost in raptures of admiration to warn him against delivering a speech soggy with banalities and bromides in a city that remembers John Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” and Ronald Reagan’s “Tear down this wall”? With German Chancellor Angela Merkel sitting nearby, Obama began his Berlin speech: “As I’ve said, Angela and I don’t exactly look like previous German and American leaders.” He has indeed said that, too, before, at least about himself. It was mildly amusing in Berlin in 2008, but hardly a Noel Coward-like witticism worth recycling.
His look is just not that interesting. And after being pointless in Berlin, neither is he, other than for the surrealism of his second term.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-obama-hits-a-wall-in-berlin/2013/06/20/bfff0426-d9df-11e2-a016-92547bf094cc_story.html
The Waste List: 66 Crazy Ways That The U.S. Government Is Wasting Your Hard-Earned Money
Why did the U.S. government spend 2.6 million dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly? Why did the U.S. government spend $175,587 "to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior"? Why did the U.S. government spend nearly a million dollars on a new soccer field for detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay? This week when I saw that the IRS was about to pay out 70 million dollars in bonuses to their employees and that the U.S. government was going to be leaving 7 billion dollars worth of military equipment behind in Afghanistan, it caused me to reflect on all of the other crazy ways that the government has been wasting our money in recent years. So I decided to go back through my previous articles and put together a list. I call it "The Waste List". Even though our politicians insist that there is very little that can still be cut out of the budget, the truth is that the federal budget is absolutely drowning in pork. The following are 66 crazy ways that the U.S. government is wasting your hard-earned money...#1 The IRS is about to pay out 70 million dollars in bonuses to employees even though discretionary bonuses are supposed to be cancelled due to the sequester.
#2 According to the Washington Post, the U.S. government is going to leave 7 billion dollars worth of military equipment behind in Afghanistan.
#3 It is being projected that the trip that the Obamas will be making to Africa will cost U.S. taxpayers $100,000,000.
#4 The NIH plans to spend $509,840 on a study that "will send text messages in 'gay lingo' to methamphetamine addicts to try to persuade them to use fewer drugs and more condoms."
#5 The National Science Foundation has given $384,949 to Yale University to do a study on “Sexual Conflict, Social Behavior and the Evolution of Waterfowl Genitalia”. Try not to laugh, but much of this research involves examining and measuring the reproductive organs of male ducks.
#6 The IRS spent $60,000 on a film parody of “Star Trek” and a film parody of “Gilligan’s Island”. Internal Revenue Service employees were the actors in the two parodies, so as you can imagine the acting was really bad.
#7 The NIH has given $1.5 million to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts to study why “three-quarters” of lesbians in the United States are overweight and why most gay males are not.
#8 The NIH has also spent $2.7 million to study why lesbians have more “vulnerability to hazardous drinking”.
#9 The U.S. government is giving sixteen F-16s and 200 Abrams tanks to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt even though the new president of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi (a member of the Muslim Brotherhood), constantly makes statements such as the following…
“Dear brothers, we must not forget to nurse our children and grandchildren on hatred towards those Zionists and Jews, and all those who support them”#10 During 2012, the salaries of Barack Obama’s three climate change advisers combined came to a grand total of more than $370,000.
#11 Overall, 139 different White House staffers were making at least $100,000 during 2012, and there were 20 staffers that made the maximum of $172,200.
#12 Amazingly, U.S. taxpayers spend more than 1.4 billion dollars a year on the Obamas. Meanwhile, British taxpayers only spend about 58 million dollars on the entire royal family.
#13 During 2012, $25,000 of federal money was spent on a promotional tour for the Alabama Watermelon Queen.
#14 The U.S. government spent $505,000 “to promote specialty hair and beauty products for cats and dogs” in 2012.
#15 NASA spends close to a million dollars a year developing a menu of food for a manned mission to Mars even though it is being projected that a manned mission to Mars is still decades away.
#16 During 2012, the federal government spent 15 million dollars to help the Russians recruit nuclear scientists.
#17 Over the past 15 years, a total of approximately $5.25 million has been spent on hair care services for the U.S. Senate.
#18 The U.S. government spent 27 million dollars to teach Moroccans how to design and make pottery in 2012.
#19 At a time when we have an epidemic of unemployment in the United States, the U.S. Department of Education is spending $1.3 million to “reduce linguistic, academic, and employment barriers for skilled and low-skilled immigrants and refugees, and to integrate them into the U.S. workforce and professions.”
#20 The federal government still sends about 20 million dollars a year to the surviving family members of veterans of World War I, even though World War I ended 94 years ago.
#21 The U.S. government is spending approximately 3.6 million dollars a year to support the lavish lifestyles of former presidents such as George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
#22 During fiscal 2012, the National Science Foundation gave researchers at Purdue University $350,000. They used part of that money to help fund a study that discovered that if golfers imagine that a hole is bigger it will help them with their putting.
#23 The U.S. government is giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the Palestinian Authority every single year.
#24 Federal agencies have purchased a total of approximately 2 billion rounds of ammunition over the past couple of years. It is claimed that all of this ammunition is needed for “training purposes”.
#25 During 2012, the National Science Foundation spent $516,000 on the creation of a video game called “Prom Week” which apparently simulates “all the social interactions of the event.”
#26 If you can believe it, $10,000 of U.S. taxpayer money was actually used to purchase talking urinal cakes up in Michigan.
#27 When Joe Biden and his staff took a trip to London, the hotel bill cost U.S. taxpayers $459,388.65.
#28 Joe Biden and his staff also stopped in Paris for one night. The hotel bill for that one night came to $585,000.50.
#29 If you can believe it, close to 15,000 retired federal employees are currently collecting federal pensions for life worth at least $100,000 annually. That list includes such names as Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Trent Lott, Dick Gephardt and Dick Cheney.
#30 The U.S. Department of Agriculture has spent $300,000 to encourage Americans to eat caviar.
#31 The National Institutes of Health recently gave $666,905 to a group of researchers that is conducting a study on the benefits of watching reruns on television.
#32 The National Science Foundation has given 1.2 million dollars to a team of “scientists” that is spending part of that money on a study that is seeking to determine whether elderly Americans would benefit from playing World of Warcraft or not.
#33 The National Institutes of Health recently gave $548,731 to a team of researchers that concluded that those that drink heavily in their thirties also tend to feel more immature.
#34 The National Science Foundation recently spent $30,000 on a study to determine if “gaydar” actually exists. This is the conclusion that the researchers reached at the end of the study….
“Gaydar is indeed real and… its accuracy is driven by sensitivity to individual facial features”#35 In 2011, the National Institutes of Health spent $592,527 on a study that sought to figure out once and for all why chimpanzees throw poop.
#36 The National Institutes of Health has spent more than 5 million dollars on a website called Sexpulse that is targeted at “men who use the Internet to seek sex with men”. According to Fox News, the website “includes pornographic images of homosexual sex as well as naked and scantily clad men” and features “a Space Invaders-style interactive game that uses a penis-shaped blaster to shoot down gay epithets.”
#37 The General Services Administration spent $822,751 on a “training conference” for 300 west coast employees at the M Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. The following is how the Washington Post described some of the wasteful expenses that happened during this “conference”…
Among the “excessive, wasteful and in some cases impermissable” spending the inspector general documented: $5,600 for three semi-private catered in-room parties and $44 per person daily breakfasts; $75,000 for a “team-building” exercise — the goal was to build a bicycle; $146,000 on catered food and drinks; and $6,325 on commemorative coins in velvet boxes to reward all participants for their work on stimulus projects. The $31,208 “networking” reception featured a $19-per-person artisanal cheese display and $7,000 of sushi. At the conference’s closing-night dinner, employees received “yearbooks” with their pictures, at a cost of $8,130.You can see some stunning pictures of GSA employees living the high life in Las Vegas right here.
#38 Do you remember when credit rating agency Egan Jones downgraded U.S. government debt from AA+ to AA? Well, someone in the federal government apparently did not like that at all. According to Zero Hedge, the SEC planned to file charges against Egan Jones for “misstatements” on a regulatory application with the SEC.
Normally, the SEC does not go after anyone. After all, when is the last time a major banker went to prison?
No, the truth is that the SEC is usually just a huge waste of taxpayer money. According to ABC News, one investigation found that 17 senior SEC officials had been regularly viewing pornography while at work. While the American people were paying their salaries, this is what senior SEC officials were busy doing…
One senior attorney at SEC headquarters in Washington spent up to eight hours a day accessing Internet porn, according to the report, which has yet to be released. When he filled all the space on his government computer with pornographic images, he downloaded more to CDs and DVDs that accumulated in boxes in his offices.#39 According to InformationWeek, the federal government is spending “millions of dollars” to train Asian call center workers.
An SEC accountant attempted to access porn websites 1,800 times in a two-week period and had 600 pornographic images on her computer hard drive.
Another SEC accountant used his SEC-issued computer to upload his own sexually explicit videos onto porn websites he joined.
And another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month.
#40 If you can believe it, the federal government has actually spent $750,000 on a new soccer field for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.
#41 The U.S. Agency for International Development spent 10 million dollars to create a version of “Sesame Street” for Pakistani television.
#42 The Obama administration has plans to spend between 16 and 20 million dollars to help students from Indonesia get master’s degrees.
#43 The National Science Foundation spent $198,000 on a University of California-Riverside study that explored “motivations, expectations and goal pursuit in social media.” One of the questions the study sought an answer to was the following: “Do unhappy people spend more time on Twitter or Facebook?”
#44 In 2011, $147,138 was given to the American Museum of Magic in Marshall, Michigan. Their best magic trick is making U.S. taxpayer dollars disappear.
#45 The federal government recently spent $74,000 to help Michigan “increase awareness about the role Michigan plays in the production of trees and poinsettias.”
#46 In 2011, the federal government gave $550,000 toward the making of a documentary about how rock and roll contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union.
#47 The National Institutes of Health has contributed $55,382 toward a study of “hookah smoking habits” in the country of Jordan.
#48 The federal government gave $606,000 to researchers at Columbia University to study how heterosexuals use the Internet to find love.
#49 A total of $133,277 was recently given to the International Center for the History of Electronic Games for video game preservation. The International Center for the History of Electronic Games says that it “collects, studies, and interprets video games, other electronic games, and related materials and the ways in which electronic games are changing how people play, learn, and connect with each other, including across boundaries of culture and geography.”
#50 The federal government has given approximately $3 million to researchers at the University of California at Irvine to fund their "research" into video games such as World of Warcraft.
#51 In 2011, the National Science Foundation gave one team of researchers $149,990 to create a video game called “RapidGuppy” for cell phones and other mobile devices.
#52 In 2011, $936,818 was spent developing an online soap opera entitled “Diary of a Single Mom”. The show “chronicles the lives and challenges of three single mothers and their families trying to get ahead despite obstacles that all single mothers face, such as childcare, healthcare, education, and finances.”
#53 Last year, the federal government spent $96,000 to buy iPads for kindergarten students in Maine.
#54 The U.S. Postal Service once spent $13,500 for a single dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.
#55 In 2011, the Air Force Academy completed work on an outdoor worship area for pagans and Wiccans. The worship area consists of “a small Stonehenge-like circle of boulders with [a] propane fire pit” and it cost $51,474 to build. The worship area is “for the handful of current or future cadets whose religions fall under the broad category of ‘Earth-based’, which includes Wiccans, druids and pagans.” At this point, that only includes 3 current students at the Air Force Academy.
#56 The National Institutes of Health once gave researchers $400,000 to study why gay men in Argentina engage in risky sexual behavior when they are drunk.
#57 The National Institutes of Health once gave researchers $442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.
#58 The National Institutes of Health once spent $800,000 in “stimulus funds” to study the impact of a “genital-washing program” on men in South Africa.
#59 The National Science Foundation recently spent $200,000 on a study that examined how voters react when politicians change their stances on climate change.
#60 The federal government recently spent $484,000 to help build a Mellow Mushroom pizzeria in Arlington, Texas.
#61 At this point, China is holding over a trillion dollars of U.S. government debt. But that didn’t stop the United States from sending 17.8 million dollars in foreign aid to China in 2011
#62 The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave the largest snack food maker in the world (PepsiCo Inc.) a total of 1.3 million dollars in corporate welfare that was used to help build "a Greek yogurt factory in New York."
#63 The National Science Foundation recently gave a whopping $697,177 to a New York City-based theater company to produce a musical about climate change.
#64 The federal government once shelled out $2.6 million to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly.
#65 The U.S. Department of Agriculture once handed researchers at the University of New Hampshire $700,000 to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows.
#66 The federal government has spent $175,587 "to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior".
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-waste-list-66-crazy-ways-that-the-u-s-government-is-wasting-your-hard-earned-money
How Liberals Twist Language
In recent history, we’ve seen the Left hijack and manipulate language to win battles. It’s time the Right wakes up to the deception. Katie Pavlich reports in the July issue of Townhall Magazine.-------------------
Throughout history, language has been used to manipulate, to help, to inspire and to control. In the political arena, language and communication are crucial to shaping a message and winning elections.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, we’ve seen the Left hijack and manipulate language to win their battles. Saul Alinsky dedicated an entire chapter in his “Rules for Radicals” to communication. He wrote about how communication is the most important tool a radical activist must possess to be successful.
“It does not matter what you know about anything if you cannot communicate to your people,” Alinsky wrote.
Alinsky taught his followers to focus on human experiences and how to twist words to achieve that focus.
“In mass organization, you can’t go outside of people’s actual experience. I’ve been asked, for example, why I never talk to a Catholic priest or a Protestant minister or a rabbi in terms of the Judeo-Christian ethic or the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. I never talk in those terms. Instead I approach them on the basis of their own self-interest, the welfare of their Church, even its physical property,” Alinsky wrote. “Communication on a general basis without being fractured into specifics of experience becomes rhetoric and it carries a very limited meaning.”
Organizers on the Left have mastered the skill not only of communication but of manipulating language and thoughts to communicate a message.
“Is this manipulation? Certainly, just as a teacher manipulates, and no less, even a Socrates,” Alinsky wrote.
There are a few powerful words the Left has distorted in recent decades which have not only changed the political landscape but, more importantly, the culture.
"Liberal"
Moving into the 20th century, the true definition of liberalism was hijacked by progressives. Hillsdale College Professor of the American Constitution Ronald Pestritto explains how the Left manipulated the term liberal for political purposes in his book “American Progressivism.”
Using the term liberal, progressives like Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were able to fundamentally change the role of government in American society by expanding it under the guise that more regulation meant more freedom. The opposite was true, and they knew it.
The same can be said today. Modernday liberals claim to be open to freedom of expression and ideas, but in practice, they are not. Liberals love speech zones, regulation, Big Government and snuffing out dissent.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/06/21/how-liberals-twist-language-n1621729
Why Liberals Kill
"Liberal institutions straightaway cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions." This quotation's author, Friedrich Nietzsche, was no traditionalist himself; in fact, he was a harsh critic of Christianity who coined the phrase "God is dead." Yet he knew that your republic would be dead the day liberals assumed enough power within it.This understanding is necessary to properly evaluate the current Obama administration scandals involving NSA surveillance and IRS abuses. Critics' main focus has been debating what power the government should have, and this is a legitimate and important discussion. But even more significant is who wields that power. After all, you can exhaustively regulate the police, but it will be largely for naught if those with the great power of a gun and badge are fundamentally corrupt.
The recently departed Buzzfeed columnist Michael Hastings touched on liberals' will to tyranny in a piece titled "Why Democrats Love to Spy on Americans." Addressing the surveillance scandal he wrote:
The very topic of Democratic two-facedness on civil liberties is one of the most important issues that [Guardian columnist Glenn] Greenwald has covered. Many of those Dems - including the sitting President Barack Obama, Senator Carl Levin, and Sec. State John Kerry - have now become the stewards and enhancers of programs that appear to dwarf any of the spying scandals that broke during the Bush years, the very same scandals they used as wedge issues to win elections in the Congressional elections [sic] 2006 and the presidential primary of 2007-2008.
Precisely. When G.W. Bush played fly-on-the-wall, he was a lawless fascist. But when liberal Democrats play 1984×Brave New World, well, as Senator Harry Reid said earlier this month, "Everyone should just calm down."
But liberals are actually being quite consistent - historically. Infamous leftist Maximilien Robespierre is best known for authoring the French Revolution's spasm of violence and using the guillotine to murder thousands. What's less well known is that prior to assuming power Robespierre was a staunch death-penalty opponent.
And the list continues. The communist Khmer Rouge promised Cambodians peace, equality and prosperity, but then proceeded to kill off a third of them between 1975 and '79. The Soviet Bolsheviks adopted the slogan "bread, peace and land," but then purposely starved to death nine million people during the "Great Famine." Mao Zedong pledged to give the Chinese a better life but only delivered a quicker death, exterminating 60+ million of his countrymen. Fidel Castro promised his nation free elections in 1959, but then became the world's longest-serving non-royal leader, reigning as Cuba's dictator for 52 years.
In our time, too, this leftist shape-shifting is evident. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) preaches an animal-liberation line and even condemns meat consumption, but kills 89 percent of its shelter animals. Barack Obama promised to have history's most transparent administration, yet it has been the most opaque, giving us scandals characterized by abuse of law and power and the trampling of Americans' rights. And this brings us to a question: Does power really corrupt liberals more absolutely than anyone else?
I remember an incident in which a very liberal colleague at a former workplace was caught in a misdeed. His response was to cavalierly brush it off, saying with a chuckle, "Situational values." Another incident at that business involved a student of mine to whom I was quite close. Alluding one day to the difference between me and his liberal parents, he said out of the blue (I'm paraphrasing), "You're the only one who's consistent, who says the same things all the time." Is this a surprise? Liberals have given us the credos "If it feels good, do it" and "Whatever works for you [addendum: 'at the moment']."
This brings us to a truth about the modern left. Generally speaking, like all relativistic people, liberals don't have principles.
They have feelings.
And feelings change with the wind.
Of course, some have learned the hard way - mostly through debating liberals, only to find they're virtually immune to reason - that the left isn't intellect-oriented but emotion-oriented. But the question is, why do liberals deify their own feelings?
The short answer is that they have little else to deify.
But a more in-depth understanding requires some philosophical exploration.
Let's face reality: it can be hard for us human beings to be consistent. Principle can sometimes bump up against our worldly desires, and this is when being "situational" can be seductive. But there are things that can influence a person's likelihood to stand on principle. One is having a world view stating that consistency actually is better than inconsistency.
I've long pointed out that the most basic difference between the people we today call liberals and traditionalists isn't the apparent ideological divide. It is that the latter tend to believe in Moral Truth whereas liberals are almost universally moral relativists.
This is nothing less than an issue of operating in two completely different universes of reality. When you believe in Truth, morality is something objectively real to you, like matter itself. And most significantly, you view it as what it is: unchanging. This means that your yardstick for morality is the same whether convenient or inconvenient, whether you're out of power - or in power. It is unbending and non-negotiable. Oh, this doesn't mean absolutists can't betray their principles; man is weak and we all falter. But in the aggregate, it serves as a "controlling power upon will and appetite," to quote Edmund Burke, and thus mitigates man's do-what-thou-wilt default.
But what happens when a person doesn't believe in Truth? What then will be his yardstick for behavior? Well, if what we call right and wrong isn't determined by anything above man, then man himself is its author. But will it ultimately be a function of his intellect? Consider that the intellect's job is to use reason, a quality that the relativistic left ostensibly values. What is reason, however? It's not an answer, but a method by which answers may be found. But there can be no answers to moral questions if there's no Truth; hence, there then is no reason for reason.
This is why following relativism out leads us to a striking conclusion: Since we can't say that anything is objectively right or wrong, better or worse, the only yardstick we have left for behavior is feelings. Truth is a tale, faith is fancy, but emotion is certainly real. We can feel it - deeply. And, oh, how seductive is that siren of anger, envy or any passion? Just think how readily emotion inspires action.
So, ultimately, relativism boils "morality" down to taste. This is why that guide "If it feels good, do it" really does make more sense in the modern liberal universe than anything else. But whose feelings should hold sway? Well, we may to an extent defer to those of the collective, but, ultimately, you're just another mortal, same as I. Why should I subordinate my feelings to yours, especially since mine are the only ones truly real to me? This is, mind you, what contributes to the deification of the self. Liberals' feelings do for them what God does for people of faith. They tell them how to behave.
And this is why liberals will often do anything for victory. When the Truth lies at the center of your world view, it will, in its immutable and infallible way, define what's right. But nature abhors a vacuum; thus, when a person's core is bereft of Truth, an emotion-derived agenda takes its place. It then defines what's "right." And that will be whatever advances that agenda at the moment, be it vote fraud, targeting opponents with the IRS or, when power is sufficiently solidified, perhaps killing 25 million "capitalists." And the lesson, dear voters, is that it really does matter what master your leaders serve.
This morality-of-the-moment madness is why, in all fairness, liberals aren't always quite as hypocritical as they seem (just almost). For hypocrisy is saying one thing while intending to do another. Robespierre might have been very sincere when inveighing against capital punishment while out of power, and also very sincere when using it liberally while in power. It's just that the decrees of his personal god, you see, had changed.
And now we have a change agent, in every sense of the term, in the White House.
World Without Boundaries
The ideas behind Obama’s new world order
The image of the barrier recurs frequently in Obama’s rhetoric. Reading his Berlin speech I was reminded of a passage in his second inaugural address, where the president spoke of “this world without boundaries” that “demands” the “qualities” of “youth and drive; diversity and openness; an endless capacity for risk and a gift for invention.” There he likened the business of leveling to an ongoing, indeed endless, quest. “Our journey is not complete,” he said, “until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm.” It’s going to be a long journey.
In Berlin, where he first proclaimed himself “a citizen of the world,” Obama suggested that the field of our never-ending journey of equalization is not confined to American borders or to the borders of any city, any nation. Afghans, Israelis and Palestinians, the Burmese—“they are who you were.” “They, too, in their own way, are citizens of Berlin.” (What about the Turks?) If everyone is a citizen of Berlin, then the concept of “citizen,” which implies rootedness, partiality, particularity, has no meaning. If we are citizens of everywhere, we are also citizens of nowhere. What is Obama saying?
So easy it would be to tune the president out, to dismiss his words as clichés, to examine his actions instead of his speeches. But that would be a mistake. Falling walls matter to Barack Obama, and it is important to know why. There is the obvious reason: as the first black chief executive, President Obama is living proof of racial advance. One of the goals of the progressive tradition always has been the dismantling of man-made obstacles that block the advance of equality. Obama aligned himself in his Wednesday speech with one of the founders of modern liberalism, Immanuel Kant, “who taught us that freedom is the ‘un-originated birthright of man, and it belongs to him by force of his humanity.’” Kant’s world, Obama’s world, the liberal world, is one of autonomous and enlightened individuals, shorn of attachment, living under republican governments in a global order of perpetual peace.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, American administrations, Republican and Democratic, have done much to build the borderless world. Trade has been liberalized, from the WTO to NAFTA, to the integration of the U.S. and Chinese economies, to the enlargement of the European Union and the institution of the Eurozone, to further tariff reductions, now being negotiated, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Migrants traverse borders. Women and ethnic and sexual minorities are empowered.
We have become detached. Global consciousness is on the rise. The will of the autonomous individual, not inherited religious or civic traditions, has come to establish the grounds of morality. The nuclear family is disintegrating. These developments intersect in the life of Julia, the unofficial mascot of President Obama’s reelection, a single woman who “chooses” to have a child that is shuffled quickly off stage, and whose most important relationship in a life of unlimited options is not with family or church or civil association but with the federal bureaucracy.
Obama is a master at conjuring shimmering images of his promised land, of casting in the noblest terms the ideals of his global Berlin. His rhetoric passes through us like elementary particles, either because we, like the mainstream media, unconsciously agree with his assumptions, or because we, like Dick Cheney, don’t pay a lot of attention to what Barack Obama says. We should pay more attention. The rhetoric is a mask that hides the real-life facts of the world in the early twenty-first century.
Obama is wrong when he says “dreams” and “spirit” and self-criticism make walls fall. What builds and destroys walls is political power. The state commands walls to be built—to keep people in, in the case of the Berlin Wall, or to keep people out, in the case of the Great Wall of China, the West Bank security fence, and the Mexican border fence. And the state tears walls down. In 1989 the East German and Soviet governments allowed the wall to fall. In today’s America it is the federal government that enforces gender or racial or sexual equality through the provision of law, and attempts to give each individual an equal chance through the redistribution of income and provision of benefits.
Historical experience has led us to believe that individual freedom expands at the state’s expense. But that is not necessarily the case. American freedom to gamble, consume marijuana, procure an abortion, and obtain a same-sex marriage has expanded alongside government. As human autonomy increases, as individuals leave the traditional sanctuaries of family and faith, they turn to government to provide economic assistance in raising a child, in nutrition, in education, in health care, in retirement. Freedom and unlimited government are not incompatible. They are eminently compatible.
Citizenship in the world without borders is defined not by affiliation with family or religion, tribe or nation, but by shared ideas. Openness, tolerance, freedom, diversity, equality, opportunity, there are the elements of the universal liberal creed to which Obama subscribes. They are all wonderful things. Just don’t get caught between a liberal and his actualization of one of these ideals. Orthodox Catholics and members of other traditional faith communities, critics of immigration, opponents of affirmative action and advocates of the color-blind Constitution, skeptics of narratives of progress, conservatives in general, all are targets for approbation and demonization, all must be repressed if men and women are to be made free.
Obama is also wrong to suggest that the only laggards in our journey toward a wall-less world are the tyrannous, the theocratic, and the ignorant. There are plenty of losers in this race to the top: the victim of late-term abortion, the child without a father, the single mother who struggles economically, the high-achiever of limited means whose race is a demerit on a college application, the low-skilled worker whose job has been outsourced to China or insourced to migrant labor, the independent contractor saddled with government regulations, taxes, and mandates, the violator of liberal speech codes and other institutes of political correctness, the gas guzzlers and gun owners, the addicted, the broken, the lonely. All these are left behind in a borderless world, handed transfer payments and told fortune-cookie aphorisms on equality and democracy, and every so often given a glimpse of the super-lux world inhabited by their rulers.
I am speaking of course about the global elite, the world-travellers and conference-goers that have benefited the most from the information revolution and the creation of what Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick call Chimerica. Right below them in this new hierarchy are the liberal upper- and upper-middle classes, the bobos and educated elites, that with the super rich make up the caste that benefits from low prices and low wage services and inhabits a shared universe of opinion unmatched in its arrogance and impenetrability.
What continues to puzzle liberals on the left and right is that the world championed by Obama is the same one plagued by income inequality and materialism, the same world divided by race and ethnicity and nation and religion. Frustrated and disappointed, clinging to illusions, these liberals double down on assertions of universality and autonomy. “We are not only citizens of America or Germany,” Obama said Wednesday. “We are also citizens of the world. And our fates and fortunes are linked like never before.” Do the Russians believe that? Do the Iranians?
Obama may be a citizen of the world, a guardian of the world without boundaries. The rest of us know some walls cannot be torn down. Some walls are there for a reason.
http://freebeacon.com/world-without-boundaries/
The Dangers of Democracy
Democracy. The word is nearly ubiquitous in American political discourse. We routinely refer to our country and those modeled after our own as democracies. We listen to speeches, read books, and profess our belief in democratic principles, democratic governments, and democratic ideals.Americans in the modern world completely fail to comprehend two important points. The first is that America -- as organized under the Constitution -- is not a democracy. The second is that democracy, in its pure form, is nothing more than mob rule.
Most of us learned, in some vague manner, from our parents and teachers that the will of the majority should hold sway. We vote on things like what to eat, what shows to watch, and whether to play kickball or dodgeball at recess. Once in while, when we find ourselves on the losing end of a vote, we feel a sense of unfairness, but we don't know how to put that feeling into words.
The elusive thought that escapes us is that there are considerations other than simply the will of half the people plus one. What if the food chosen is utterly repulsive to you and you are forced to go hungry, while another choice might allow everyone to eat something acceptable to all? What if no one in your family likes the shows you enjoy, and so you are denied the opportunity to ever watch them?
What you are sensing in these trivial frustrations of childhood, and what is never explained to you in school, is the existence of natural rights. Natural law and natural rights were the underpinning of the American founding and the reason why democracies are inherently unfair and always degenerate into despotism. The Declaration of Independence declared that all men are born with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- rights granted to them by God, or simply because they are human beings. As John Adams put it, "[y]ou have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the great legislator of the universe."
It is our instinctive, if undefined, understanding of these rights that make us feel we should be able -- at least some of the time -- to eat, watch, and play what we want even if the majority prefers something else. Unrestrained democracy provides no safeguards for the rights of the individual, leaving him defenseless against the mob. Democracy is not freedom; when your natural rights to life, liberty, and property are subject to the whims of a majority, you have no rights at all.
The founders understood this because, unlike our contemporaries, they studied and learned the lessons of history. They knew that because democracy is simply mob rule, it offered no protection for liberty and was always doomed to destroy itself. So they created a republic -- a representative form of government wherein the people democratically choose fellow citizens to represent them in government. The government, in turn, was restrained by law from doing anything to infringe upon the rights of the individual. With a federal government strictly limited to the handful of powers granted in Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution, and specifically prohibited from infringing on critical liberties such as speech and religion, freedom could be protected from the caprices of the mob.
America's federal government long ago shed the chains of the Constitution, and today, it possesses the power to dictate the amount of toilet water we can flush, what type of light bulb we use to light our homes, how we can use our land, and how much of our income we are permitted to keep. Moreover, our government has now cloaked itself with the power to decide whether we will be permitted to receive life-saving medical care.
With limitless powers, and with the number of representatives capped at 435, so that each member of the House now represents an absurd 700,000 citizens, we live in a democracy and not a true republic. With such a system, millions of Americans can live their entire lives without ever having a congressman who accurately reflects their views or values.
American presidents wield a power over us unmatched by the monarchs of antiquity. While our presidential sovereigns technically do not hold the power of life and death over each individual citizen, they now have the authority to arrest and detain indefinitely any citizen they accuse of terrorist sympathies. Barack Obama asserted his absolute right to make war on foreign nations without consultation with Congress, and his authority to order the death of American citizens abroad he designates as terrorists. Furthermore, American presidents have access to technology -- drones, computer networks, and surveillance systems -- that permit them to monitor our every movement and track every private financial transaction we make. King George might have been able to declare Samuel Adams a traitor, but he could never have dreamed of being able to tell every subject of the crown how much money he could make or what kind of food would be served in schools. And even His Majesty had to go to Parliament before starting a war -- something Presidents Truman, Johnson, and Obama have deemed beneath them.
Liberty is the value upon which this country was founded and for which the Continental Army fought and died. It is your natural rights to life, liberty, and property that you should jealously guard and which are under daily assault -- not just from Barack Obama and Congress, but from thousands of state and local tyrants as well.
Truly, there is precious little of our freedoms remaining to us. Patrick Henry warned the first generation of Americans, "... liberty ought to be the direct, the primary end of your government." And he warned his fellow Virginians, "Guard with jealous vigilance the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel."
Americans forgot that warning, and today we languish under the crushing weight of an authoritarian, paternalistic socialist state that is stealing our money as it saps our will to succeed and suffocates our best efforts under an impenetrable web of laws and regulations.
It's little wonder that democracy is the favorite refrain of the socialist; the Socialist Party USA's website uses the word sixteen times in its brief Statement of Principles. It is natural that they would promote democracy, since the productive are always vastly outnumbered by the moochers. The Communist Manifesto says that the revolution should be accomplished by establishing democratic constitutions and that democracy should be "immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property[.]" Democracy allows the lazy majority to vote itself a portion of what the productive have earned -- it is, as someone once described it, two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
And so it has gone for America. We have indeed degenerated into a democracy -- socialism is firmly established and has openly won two consecutive presidential elections. The wolves have voted, and we are being served for dinner.
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