Back to Basics

Two elections ago, the Democratic Party was on the verge of being torn to shreds. After a long series of dirty tricks and one stolen election later, there was an uncomfortable coming together.

Obama and his cronies kept most of the important positions, while the Clintonites got a few pieces of the foreign policy apparatus. The arrangement satisfied no one, but it kept ticking along until the Benghazi attacks happened.

By the time Benghazi happened, Clinton and Obama needed each other more than ever.  Obama needed the Clintons on the campaign trail to sell him to more moderate Democrats who remembered that times had been better under Bill. Hillary needed Obama to anoint her as his intended successor.

The awkward dance, complete with an injury, a congressional hearing and a 60 Minutes interview and then the real fireworks began.

Hillary Clinton had turned lemons into lemonade, getting what she could out of Obama. State had looked like a good spot for her because it would insulate her from the backlash over the economy. And she would have gotten away with it too if it hadn’t been for Benghazi. It wasn’t quite leaving on a high note, but as bad as Benghazi was, no one in their right mind would want to be associated with what is going to happen in Afghanistan. At least no one who isn’t as dumb as Hanoi John who began his career with Viet Cong and Sandinista pandering and will end it watching the Taliban take Kabul.

Benghazi hasn’t slowed Hillary Clinton down. And her target is the same old target from 2008. We’re back in that 3 A.M. phone call territory. The truce between Obama and Hillary Clinton ended on 60 Minutes. It’s not exactly war, but it is politics.

While Obama and his cronies plot out the second term, Hillary Clinton is plotting out her election campaign. These days every presidential campaign begins with the ceremonial burial of your own party’s predecessor. It wasn’t just McCain who kept a careful distance from Bush, Gore kept a careful distance from Clinton and Bush Sr. kept a careful distance from Reagan. The reinvention invariably involves the ritual jettisoning of some portions of your predecessor’s program and personality.

Hillary Clinton isn’t betting on being able to ride Obama’s coattails. Not only are the coattails short, but the same electorate of younger and minority voters whose turnout he could count on, won’t be quite as eager to come out for her. Her people are not betting on Obama’s strategy of dismissing mainstream voters and counting on making it up with a passionate base. To win, Hillary Clinton will have to win back some of the same voters that Obama alienated during his two terms.

The script is already written. You can spot it peeking through select mainstream media editorials. Watch for those instances where mainstream media pundits blame Obama’s inexperience and his failure to reach out across the aisle for his shortcomings.

In 1984, his novel about left-wing collectivist tyranny under Big Brother, George Orwell coined the term Newspeak to designate the government’s use of words and phrases to mean whatever the government wanted words to mean.  The aim was to keep Big Brother’s subjects confused and afraid to do or say anything on their own.  As in Thomas Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” the sole source of power was to be the sovereign’s sword, and the principle of political order was continual fear of sudden and violent death.

Robert Curry explains how the Democrat/Socialist Party uses Newspeak.

Liberalism
by Robert Curry

In the United States “liberal” means today a set of ideas and political postulates that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant to the preceding generations.  The American self-styled liberal aims at government omnipotence, is a resolute foe of free enterprise, and advocates all-round planning by the authorities…Every measure aiming at confiscating some of the assets of those who own more than the average or at restricting the rights of the owners of property is considered as liberal and progressive.
Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism

The term “liberal” comes from the Latin “liber” meaning “free.”  Liberalism originally referred to the philosophy of liberty, that is, the philosophy of the American Founders and their tradition, the great tradition which inspired the Founders and which they did so much to define and advance.

In fact, if Freidrich Hayek is correct, the introduction of the term in its original sense has a very close historical link to the Founders.  Hayek traces the introduction of the term “liberal” to its use by Adam Smith.  Hayek points to such characteristic passages as this one in The Wealth of Nations of 1776 where Smith wrote of “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice.”

The term “liberal” today means the precise opposite of what it once meant.  Using the original, classical meaning, Mises wrote:

“As the liberal sees it, the task of the state consists solely and exclusively in guaranteeing the protection of life, health, liberty, and private property against violent attacks…Anti-liberal policies have so far expanded the functions of the state as to leave hardly any field of human activity free of government interference.”

The policies Mises refers to here as “anti-liberal” were actually labeled as liberal by their proponents.

So, we have a familiar word with two totally opposite meanings, one meaning having been very nearly completely buried by the other.  How did this confusing state of affairs come about?

It was the result of a political master stroke by that shrewdest of politicians—FDR.

If you measure presidential success simply by the number of times a man is elected to the presidency, then FDR is the most successful American President.  Once elected, FDR was able to hold office until his death.  His claim on the office attests to his astonishing ability to dominate the game of politics.

But to understand the brilliance of his capture for his political purposes the term “liberal,” we need to understand the challenge FDR faced and the opportunity that he seized.

Progressivism

“Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Lord Acton, 1834-1902

“I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive.”
Woodrow Wilson, 1856-1924
As the noted scholar J.

In one of the curious ironies of history, the Democratic Party, in its present form, is animated solely by opposition to majority rule; an obsession that it attempts to disguise with insincere attempts at class warfare.

There is nothing that the Democratic Party fears so much as democracy, which is why it is far more comfortable ruling through judicial rulings and the unrestricted powers of an unelected bureaucracy. Obama’s two victories have given it a taste of a post-majority and post-American country ruled by a coalition of minorities, but its glee at that may be premature.

The Democratic Party has built its house of cards on locking in political and economic privileges for the different tiers of its coalition. From food stamps to government jobs, it is the old political machine gone nationwide, dispensing money and privilege to the different group of its coalition, as a remedy for the supposed privileges enjoyed by the majority.

It still talks about equality, now and then, but it has no interest in equality, because that’s too close to democracy. An equal population might start voting on economic merits, rather than the old game of special favors and privileged positions, and the Democratic Party, with its baggage train of professors who have never done anything more difficult than bore a class to death, bureaucrats who fear reform worse than death, and corporate and union bosses who expect special favors, would have nothing to offer them.

The coalition of the privileged underprivileged, united against the majority rule of the people who, unlike them, only erratically vote in their own self-interest, can achieve impressive turnouts, but that turnout is dependent on having something to gain from an election. And the closer the coalition of minorities comes to being the majority, the more unsustainable the payoffs become.

Liberalism has spent so much time working to destroy majority rule, that it has no idea what to do beyond that. Its only ideas involve suppressing majority rule through government power. It is incapable of meeting any challenge that cannot be oriented on the old familiar axis of oppressor and oppressed… and that makes it incapable of mature government.

Democrats with any economic sense turned on Obama after it was clear that he was incapable of having a serious conversation about economic reform. Those who didn’t, like Bloomberg, made it clear that they supported him for his social policies, not his economic policies. After the election, Obama justified their fears by going back to pushing tax hikes and cuts to the military as the solution for out of control spending and debt.

Cutting the military has long been a fond dream of the left and there’s plenty to cut. By the time Obama is done with the military, they really will be down to horses and bayonets. Raising taxes will bring in a little more money which will be thrown down the same old coalition hole as the money that came before it.

The Democrats are incapable of function as a majority party any longer. They have no solution to the country’s economic problems because they are unwilling to take responsibility for them.

Come right in and step right up. See the bright lights and the oddities of nature. Inside folks, for the low price of twenty-two trillion dollars, you can see Binders of Women, Team Big Bird and entire reams of green windmills and fields full of bayonets and horses. Here lies become the truth and everything is full of sugar. And the highlight of the show with be Barack, the Exotic Prince from the Wilds of Indonesia and Kenya, with a special appearance by Oprah and a hologram of JFK. Here in the Carnival of Fools, the party never stops and no one ever has to pay the bill.

“There’s a sucker born every minute,” a famous connoisseur of them once said. And suckers are big business. Very big business indeed. But don’t feel too sorry for the sucker. The sucker is a creature composed of ignorance and greed. He believes in his own specialness. He believes that he can fool other people into giving him their money, when actually he is the one being fleeced. The mark is an aspiring scammer who is too dumb to realize that nothing in life is free and the scam is on him.

If you browse through your email’s spam folder, the chances are good that you will come upon a missive from a Nigerian prince offering you the opportunity to help him cart away his fortune in exchange for a sharp cut of the profits. These scams date back to the dinosaur years of the internet, and though there are occasional elaborations on the theme, the African scammers stick to the tried and true, even though the tried and true has become a cliche that anyone should be able to see through.

Why?

Because the Nigerian Prince scam is a self-selecting group. Anyone who still falls for it after all these years is dumber than your average sucker. The scammers know this and they don’t want to waste their valuable time hooking a difficult fish with a plausible scam. They go for easy marks for the same reason that some men fish with dynamite. Because it’s easier.

America has its own Nigerian Prince. I think you know his name by now. His campaign sent out nearly as many emails as his Nigerian colleagues do, promising fame and fortune to those suckers who would help him transfer some wealth from the 1 percent to the 99 percent. And now that his second term is here, the check is in the mail. And if the government check doesn’t clear, well that’s what happens when you put your faith in Nigerian Princes.

A scam like the Democratic Party needs suckers. It needs millions and millions of the dumbest people that can be found outside of specially supervised group homes. And then it needs to appoint people to watch over them, give them the occasional food and minor check, and drive them in vans to the polls after two or four years so that the con artists can keep their manicured paws on the local treasury.

These people have to be stupid, yes, but like all marks, they have to be greedy. They have to be the kind of people who relish taking someone else’s money without working for it.

Did you follow that title? Me neither, but it was the best I could do as far as summing up Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s attempt to cover for the Obama administration’s spin on the Benghazi attack that’s still unraveling like a giant ball of yarn at a photo shoot for Cat Fancy Magazine’s clowder-mania issue. Appearing on CNN with Piers Morgan, DWS proved something that anybody who’s ever been stuck in quicksand already knows: flailing will only cause you to sink deeper:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_u7u9SB7Qc

Partial transcript from RCP:

Morgan: What?! Now wait a minute. If you put out a false statement, then it’s false, it’s wrong. It’s both of those things.

Wasserman Schultz: But you’re suggesting that it’s … Piers, what you’re suggesting is that it was somehow deliberate. It was not deliberate. What they did was it was important to get information out that they had at the time. And they did that. And as they learned more information, they corrected the original information that they put out. But there was nothing sinister here. This was simply the president of the United States and the administration making sure that we did a careful investigation, gave the American people the information that they needed at the time that we had based on our best intelligence and then as more intelligence was gathered we gave the updated information. There is nothing sinister about that.

Forget that US intelligence knew it was a terrorist attack almost immediately and the State Department is now saying they never concluded the attack was related to protest over a video, all while Susan Rice and Jay Carney spent subsequent hours and days telling the public exactly that. It took Hillary Clinton about two weeks to admit it was a planned terrorist attack.

Even if it wasn’t deliberate, is pleading sheer incompetence with just over three weeks until America heads to the polls really suppose to reassure the electorate?

(h/t Weasel Zippers)

Barack Hussein Obama considers himself above the law, as he has shown on myriad occasions during his reign of durance vile. His DeMarxist Congressional leaders certainly have not scruple one between them. We can go right on down the list of his government from top to bottom.

Hillary Clinton is culpable in what is obviously and rapidly becoming the greatest foreign policy implosion in modern history. The Justice Department, under the uber-lawless Eric Holder, has set new and ominous standards for the utter disregard of the rule of law and the US Constitution. Take your pick. From Kathleen Sebelius, who aided and abetted Planned Parenthood’s illegalities in the State of Kansas… to the activities of Janet (the mustache) Napolitano, who has fostered an entire hierarchy in her department of “like-minded” individuals who have made harassment of a sexual nature an unpleasant reality for those who have to serve under them. More on Ms. Janet later.

MaoBama’s phantasmagorical flight of fancy in which he, and he alone, would be the arbiter between a greatly weakened and diminished America and the seventh century savages that make up the world of Islam, has collapsed like a deflated balloon. Make no mistake about it… this administration, which has left our embassies and our foreign service personnel virtually defenseless in the most unstable region on the planet, is culpable as hell.

The fact that they clung to the narrative as long as they did… that a 14-minute trailer to a supposed film no one has seen and which, incidentally, was shot months ago, inflamed the whole middle east, would indicate naiveté and a disconnect with reality which is difficult for any thinking person to fathom.

Whether on the international scene, or the increasingly desperate thrashings of MaoBama and his DeMarxists here at home, there are disturbing indications that Mao may have already set the stage for an end run around our election laws and the electoral process. Needless to say, the Constitution would not present much of a barrier to Mr Mao should he decide to stage a coup. ‘Not in this country’, you say. Don’t be too sure. El Flaco Communista has shown all the propensities of a third world tyrant… Developing…..

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2012

They say that if you live long enough you see (and hear) everything, but I never expected to be called toward the light having already listened to somebody say “we would die for Debbie Wasserman Schultz” — at least not coming from anyone who doesn’t sell perm rods for a living.

Karen Harrington is challenging Schultz for Florida’s 23rd congressional district, and Harrington showed up at one of DWS’s meetings. As it turned out, Schultz’s cameraman acted like a member of The Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword expressing a willingness to lay down his life to protect the Grail. The cameraman reminded Harrington, “We love Debbie Wasserman Schultz here, we would die for Debbie Wasserman Schultz.”

Video from The Shark Tank by way of Prof. William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection (click here for a fitting musical accompaniment):

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03H3ElpCdSE

(h/t JWF via Twitter)

The DNC had already apologized after it was discovered that the ships shown at their convention in a military tribute video were actually part of the Russian navy:

As you can see, there were also fighter jets in the picture. No, it’s not what you’re thinking — the planes aren’t Russian too. Turkish, perhaps, but definitely not Russian:

That huge image, visible in the Time Warner Cable Arena during speeches by Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry and retired Admiral John B. Nathman, also depicted a synchronized formation of jet aircraft that convention-goers assumed were American fighter planes.

But the F-5 fighter planes in the photo are part of the air force of Turkey, a nation whose government is now jailing journalists and establishing Islam as a state religion.

Brad Woodhouse, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, did not respond when the The Daily Caller asked why the convention planners displayed Turkish-flown aircraft alongside Russian warships while seeking support from the American military community.

The DNC blamed a “vendor error” for the Russian ships being shown, so I imagine that will be the scapegoat again for the display of Turkish Air Force planes. Where is this “vendor” anyway? They didn’t outsource video production did they?

by Burt Prelutsky

The essential difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals could not exist without conservatives to defend their freedoms and support them economically. Conservatives, on the other hand, could live quite well without liberals. And what’s more, we are quite anxious to test this theory. Evicting Obama would be a great place to begin.

All you have to do is look around the world to discover how badly Obama has bungled America’s foreign policy. By gutting the economy and the military, he has made this country a toothless tiger, so that even such backward nations as Syria, Iran and North Korea, can give us the proverbial finger and get away with it.

Allen West, quoting Alexander the Great, sums it up very neatly: “I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.”

It seems like only yesterday that Obama and Hillary Clinton were telling us that Assad’s days were numbered in Syria, but that was actually several thousand massacred Syrians ago. It now appears that Assad’s reign will out-last Obama’s.

I almost feel sorry for all those people who thought they were earning points in heaven by electing our first black president, but the fact remains that, by any honest evaluation, Obama has been our very worst president, usurping Jimmy Carter’s hard-earned title.

In spite of four years of a terrible economy; four years spent trying to destroy the coal and oil industry for purely ideological reasons; four years of ruling by presidential edict; four years spent declaring war on the states, while turning a blind eye to the Black Panthers and concealing the facts of Operation Fast and Furious, the Democrats are asking that we give Obama time. The truth is that most of us agree that he has it coming. But instead of four more years, we think that, for his efforts to trash the Constitution, 25-to-life would be just about right.

As Dinesh D’Souza’s “2016” makes abundantly clear, Obama’s greatest influence has always been and remains his birth father, an anti-western, Islamic zealot who spent his life railing against white people. It was not mere happenstance that the church Obama attended for two decades was one overseen by Jeremiah Wright, yet another father figure who preached the exact same demagogic swill as Obama’s old man.

It wasn’t merely hyperbole when Winston Churchill observed that “Islam is as dangerous in a man as rabies in a dog.” Neither was it merely politics as usual when Obama, addressing a group of Islamists, vowed that “I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”

Perhaps that’s why after imposing what were supposed to be really severe restrictions on Iran’s oil trade, Obama gave 20 different nations waivers, allowing them to purchase that very same oil. In much the same way, after using bribery and intimidation to push ObamaCare through Congress, he immediately granted waivers to unions and those business owners who had been generous contributors to his 2008 campaign.