08.25.10
Posted in American exceptionalism, Appeasement of rogues, Barack Obama, Eye-opening developments, Human freedom, U.S. foreign policy, UN at 1:53 pm by Administrator
The Most Equal Comrade and his regime have submitted a report on the US’s performance in the human-rights realm to the UN Human Rights Council. That’s right – and it says that Arizona’s immigration law is a shortcoming in our human-rights record. Also infers that we torture detainees. Also touts affirmative action as a plus.
The Most Equal Comrade disdains freedom, dignity and common sense – that is, to the extent that he understands these things at all. He doesn’t have a patriotic bone in his body. He is a peril to Western civilization’s prospects for survival. He must go as soon as possible.
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07.05.10
Posted in American exceptionalism at 2:11 am by Administrator
It’s fairly late this year, but that’s because it’s been a busy day of fun. Hot dogs and corn on the cob for lunch. Friends over this evening. Just had some killer peach pie.
There are myriad thoughtful, well-articulated posts at various sites around the blogosphere today, and I really didn’t think I could top them.
I will say that it comes down, as it always does in any reflection on the American essence, to freedom – its nature, how to preserve it, what it does and doesn’t entail. The only think I can think of that might be more important to deeply contemplate than freedom is God.
I will also say that I don’t find much point in weighing in on the question of whether this country has seen more perilous or precarious times. I would just characterize where we are as grave in its unique way. In any other situation of existential magnitude that we’ve ever faced before, at least we had people who thought of themselves as Americans in the broadest sense at the helm. What’s different now is that we have a regime controlling the executive and legislative branches of the federal government that holds the notion of a United States of America in outright contempt. Its intent is to transform it.
So the question is more relevant than ever. It’s pointless to talk about one nation pondering this together. There’s we the people and then there’s the infection. That’s sad, but so be it.
Freedom is more important than some phantom unity we might pine for. We can survive the obscuring or diminishing of a lot of concepts important to human well- being, but not that.
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04.03.10
Posted in American exceptionalism, Human freedom, health care at 3:41 pm by Administrator
Rep. Steve King of Iowa pens a Washington Times column that is thunderous in its clarity. Complete repeal of FHer-care. Nothing less. This is about America’s soul.
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03.20.10
Posted in American exceptionalism, Human freedom at 3:35 pm by Administrator
What’s up with this?
The Fox News folks are pretty much concluding that this means the jackboots have the 216 votes.
I have delved into the matter of what happens next if that is indeed the case, but I’ve treaded lightly. There’s Mark Levin’s Landmark Legal Foundation lawsuit ready to go. There’s the I Will Not Comply Facebook group I linked to yesterday. Still, with the hours dwindling, I’m more concerned with what’s possible during those hours than the realm of what-if.
Still, since what we are dealing with is the post-American government waging war on the American people, we must begin to look at just what measures, beyond those mentioned above, and the obvious recourse of voting it out in November, may be necessary to defeat this regime. For one thing, now we know the magnitude of the regimes’ utter contempt for us and for our Constitution. There’s no guarantee we will have a fair and normal election this fall. That’s one of the primary horrors of this whole situation. It’s setting precedents. The jackbooted overlords have already strongly hinted that these tactics may be used to impose the rest of their plans on us – cap and trade, takeover of the banking industry, amnesty for illegal aliens, finalizing the transformation of our educational system into a mass indoctrination program.
So the question becomes, what are we willing to do if we have to? When our Revolution and our Civil War erupted, civilized, amiable people who had farmed, engaged in commerce, participated in politics and governance alongside those with whom they vehemently disagreed tried to reach accomodation by peacable means. A point came, however, when they had to take their defense of freedom to another level.
God forbid this should get to that stage, but we must each begin asking ourselves the question of what we’re willing to do to defeat our enemy.
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01.24.10
Posted in American exceptionalism, Barack Obama, Human freedom at 10:14 pm by Administrator
A lot of astonishing things are going on in the world right now, but none more so, it seems to me, than the jaw-droppingly swift erosion in American enthusiasm for the FHer project – the polices, the approach toward governance, the underlying premise. In the space of a year, how did numbers plummet for support of anything and anything FHer from their lofty heights?
Most people knew, even if they voted for him harboring some kind of hope against what was likely, that TCM was a socialist and a pathological narcissist. Still, for reasons ranging from his rock-star charisma, to the confluence of several streams of good fortune for him, to the dismal alternative the GOP was offering, a lot of Americans gave him the most powerful position in the world and permitted themselves to be charmed to whatever degree.
I think what has so dramatically changed about the American mindset is what we’ve seen by coming perilously close to the condition of national life that we discussed in the abstract before the TCM era got underway. We’ve had a taste of what the entire scenario would look like. We have nationalized car companies. We’ve seen deficits ratcheted to previously inconceivable levels in the name of swine odor research and bridge repair. We’ve come within a hair’s breadth of the enactment of the utterly insane idea of cap and trade. Government regulation of pay for executives of privately owned companies is being seriously discussed. We narrowly escaped socialist health care.
This was all very unnatural for Americans. Once it was up in their faces, they asked themselves, is this really going to be our future?
A major component of the American character is a robust energy. We love to invent and discover. Anybody does who enjoys sufficient freedom. I think people looked at the FHer project and said, “But what will we do?” The raod ahead looked like the narrowly fenced-in through-way from the cattle pen to the eighteen-wheeler. Americans are mustangs, not cows.
This is a powerful moment. The bloom is really and truly off TCM’s rose. We have solid, dreadful numbers to back us up.
To be sure, we can expect the kind of writhing, teeth-baring, and claw-extending one sees in mortally wounded beasts. We must remember that we hold the big stick with which we delivered the blows that already have it reeling.
There will be no fading of our light, though. (I’m mixing a feloniously large number of metaphors here, aren’t I?) I think freedom has returned from dormancy to an irreversible degree. Any sneaky attempts at repackaging the FHer project will be seen as such. We know what we almost sold for a bag of trinkets, and it won’t happen again.
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01.20.10
Posted in American exceptionalism, Human freedom, Ideology, Politics at 2:35 pm by Administrator
David Harsanyi says the Dems had better see that their problem is not leadership or message delivery, or even any coordinated effort by Pubs. They have an idea problem.
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10.13.09
Posted in American exceptionalism, Culture, Journalistic elitism at 4:04 pm by Administrator
I don’t often take the time to light into poisonously wrong-headed op-eds by effete east-coast America-haters, but occasionally I must chime in. I think the main reason I’m compelled to do so in this instance is that I’m pretty sure my next column for The Republic (the Columbus, Indiana daily newspaper) (deadline at the end of this week) is going to be on the subject of American exceptionalism. That was the subject of film critic / cultural observer Neal Gabler’s column this morning in the Boston Globe.
He makes one of my tasks – avoiding a I-can-match-your-stats-and-figures-on-this-controversy pissing match – easier by establishing at the get-go and at every turn afterward throughout his essay just what his assumptions are. He buys into the global-warming nonsense. He thinks national health care is an obviously desirable thing. He thinks our nation’s intelligence-gatherers have tortured. He bandies the term “affordable”- in the case of this column, in the context of education – as if there’s some objective definition of it. He thinks income equality is some kind of public-policy issue. And then comes the crown jewel of his foul, stinking premise: he sees Americans as “thinned-skinned and arrogant.”
I will take him on regarding what he has to say about immigration. He says that those who – well, I’m going to use my terminology here, not his – understand that America is exceptional point to the number of people who clamor to get here. The example he uses to make his point is Mexicans, and, while there are certainly a lot of them here, legally and illegally, they are far from the only foreign population seeking residency and / or citizenship inside our borders. Consider the growing number of people from India, various Pacific rim countries, Brazilians who come here, get first-rate educations and either start small businesses or make huge contributions to American corporations. He uses the example of Turks emigrating to Germany as his example of an equivalent pehenomenon elsewhere in the world. Well, yes. Germany certainly gets its share of Turks – and far less secular Muslims from far more strident lands. They are not so good at assimilating, Mr. Gabler may have noticed. Also, the United States has a history of people pouring in from various nations – even Germany – going clear back to its birth.
What Gabler doesn’t do is address the actual substance of the claim of exceptionalism. American exceptionalism is not predicated on any kind of prowess or might we have. These are by-products of what makes our country exceptional.
To go over the basics again – something you constantly have to do with leftists, since they make an art out of obscuring the main point of an argument – America is exceptional because it was founded on an idea – in and of itself a novel basis for starting a country in the 1770s – and that idea was that human beings are free because God built it into the nature of our creation. That was powerful stuff. It certainly shook up George III, and Europe generally. (Can you imagine how it blew the minds of rulers and political theorists in Asia, Africa and South America?)
That’s why all those Slavs, Germans, Brits, Poles, Italians, Indians, Mexicans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans, Brazilians, Salvadorans and Kenyans have come to our shores. That’s why they by and large experience a rise in their standard of living beyond their wildest imagining. You can do what you want here. You can create, invent, refine, observe, comment on, organize or just plain draw a paycheck from just about anything you can think of, and, at least so far, no one will stop you.
Oh, and there’s our righteousness, too. DeTouqueville saw that. Americans volunteer, make charitable contributions and get civically involved like no other people on the face of the Earth.
Oh, and what was our Civil War fought over? The notion that no human being ought to own another. That was a first.
Where did the notion that women are fully equal human beings really take hold? That’s right. Here at Uncle Sam’s place.
The likes of Gabler must be refuted as soon as they spout their garbage. Think about where his line of thinking – I use the term loosely – takes us. To a world with no moral compass. To a world in which the likes of Libya, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Norway and China – to put together a list culled from the current stars of the United Nations – assume the mantle of leadership. Not a pretty picture.
I say “the likes of Gabler.” He’s not some isolated case. We have someone exuding the same odor strutting into the Oval Office every day.
ADDENDUM: I neglected to address his “government-inspires-people-more-than-people-inspire-government” line. For one thing, it sure is in keeping with his basic contempt for the actual citizens of this country – who, by the way, confer legitimacy on the government at their pleasure. Re: his World War II example: national security is the proper purview of the federal government – in fact, its basic duty. Re: JBJ and civil-rights legislation: he comes awfully close here to insinuating that the majority of Americans were basically racist and / or bigoted right up until 1965, which, if that’s what he’s getting at, is a vicious lie.
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08.28.09
Posted in American exceptionalism, latin america at 3:26 pm by Administrator
On the heels of Eric Holder’s decision to have a special prosecutor look into W-era CIA interrogation practices comes the State Department’s decision to cut off aid to Honduras and declare Zelaya’s ouster a coup d’etat.
Beyond shameful.
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06.23.09
Posted in American exceptionalism, Diplomacy - ineffective and effective at 1:03 pm by Administrator
The TCM administration can’t find the moral fiber to unequivocally cast its solidarity with the people of Iran risking getting shot in the streets. It can’t find the cajones to stop and board the North Korean ship bound for Myanmar and loaded with a cargo of small arms. Yet it thinks it can “demand” that Israel stop natural-growth settlement in east Jerusalem.
When this nation was known as the United States of America, our allies knew we had their backs. Everybody’s on his own in the post-freedom world.
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04.05.09
Posted in American exceptionalism, Contact, Ideology, Missile defense, North Korea, Pakistan at 7:16 pm by Administrator
The challenge for all people who love freedom, dignity and common sense and who remember a world that made sense is to withstand the temptation to succumb to numbness. The reflexive reaction to the hourly turn of this world toward utter madness and the death of resolve is to embrace the incrementalism of it, to see it as just another day of shuffling papers at the UN or monitoring rocket trajectories in Tokyo. Ho-hum, more headlines, more shenanigans by those rascally rogue states.
With this missile launch, TCM’s response and the assured inertia of the Security Council given the strategic aims of China and Russia, however, we are witnessing the abnegation of any responsibility for order in the world. There are no grown-ups. Every one of us as individuals is on his own. Oh, for some time to come municipal law enforcement agencies will deal with those who would burglarize your home or bodily threaten you, but how long can local-level order be maintained when those who could prevent apocalypse will not do so?
I feel like I’m a fairly smart and insightful person, but I can’t for the life of me fathom how the phrase “six-party-talks” is still coming out of anyone’s mouth after this launch. The last session of such talks took place in November 2007.
It’s not just this launch, either. Pyongyang has cut its hot line with Seoul and expelled visiting South Korean industrial workers. It is holding two U.S. journalists as bargaining chips. It has miniaturized nuclear warheads for upfitting on missiles.
Human beings are fallible, limited, collectively and individually, in what they can do to influence their fellows, and unable to foresee all contingencies in a situation. There was a time, however, when some at least tried to address grave developments with proper urgency, vigor and vision. That time is no more. We shall see if God has mercy on us.
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Posted in American exceptionalism, Government spending, Middle East, Pakistan at 6:52 pm by Administrator
The British Foreign Ministry is going to talk to Hezbollah. After getting over its “initial alarm,” the TCM administration is interested to see how such talks go.
Iran is licking its chops, and Lebanon and especially Israel feel the chill of a world without friends.
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