04.05.10
What happens when you don’t “press for a full-scale response” to a “poison-tipped dagger aimed at the heart of the Bush presidency”
Joseph Shattan at The American Spectator on the fateful moment when Karl Rove opted to be sleepy rather than allow his entrails to blaze. The result: the Freedom-Haters got away with the “Bush lied” meme, and that got TCM elected.
This gets back to something we address at BN fairly frequently. Conservatives must be relentless in embracing both clarity and fierceness. Our enemy knows how to exploit the most infinitesimal moment of confusion or inertia.
Being clear and fierce also helps us to articulate our counter-argument to the effete little NYT columnists and those of similar odor when they make our tea parties out to be riots incited by bigots and yay-hoos.
04.04.10
No shortage of jihadists
Today’s three nearly simultaneous blasts in Baghdad (in front of an interesting selection of embassies – Iran’s, Egypt’s, and Germany’s) shows that, even in a country making a remarkable comeback from three decades of tyranny and five years of sectarian chaos to become a stable representative democracy such as Iraq, the nutters are determined to make their presence known.
Those who have for years told us that this is a worldwide, long-haul struggle were right. We’re a long way from wrapping this up in a tidy little package labeled, “dealt with once and for all.”
10.08.09
As soon as a theater in the current global conflagration gets too hot, the FHers decide it’s no longer necessary
The Washington Post, no organ of hawk policy, says in an unsigned editorial that after some of its editors met with Pakistani foreign ministry officials last week, they got a clear picture of just how distressed Pakistan is over TCM’s dithering about Afghanistan strategy.
This Joe Biden-led push for the ironically named “Pakistan First” approach fails to take into account the transnational threat the Taliban poses in that region. One must keep after al-Qaeda, but the Taliban would provide the host animal upon which the jihadist fleas would hitch a ride.
07.31.09
Seizing your money at gunpoint in order to skew the free market in the name of a problem that doesn’t exist
Dakota Voice on Cash for Clunkers.
07.21.09
Smack!
I haven’t yet mentioned, or posted a link to the video of, Black Chamber of Commerce head Harry Alford’s beautiful and glorious smackdown of California Freedom-Hater Barbara Boxer at that Senate energy hearing the other day. I would be remiss not to do so, so here it is.
07.14.09
The clearest articulation we’ve encountered of what’s awful about cap-and-trade and what a truly forward-looking energy policy would entail
Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s Washington Post op-ed on what would actually turn things around.
Two observations: She once again demonstrates her capacity to confound conventional wisdom, and TCM has no interest in turning things around. His agenda is something else entirely.
07.08.09
That lack of adequate transmission lines to cities will get you every time
T. Boone Pickens cancels his wind farm project.
06.30.09
The Aquarian Totalitarian waxes incandescent
TCM has a lot on his plate, but he’s never too busy to tell Americans what kinds of light bulbs they will use.
06.28.09
No polar bear experts welcome
There’s some kind of polar bear study group meeting in Copenhagen to draft a report that will go into the UN’s next big “climate change” report. A polar bear expert who has pointed out that the species has seen a population increase to “optimum levels” has been told to stay away.
The EPA spikes data that show the fallacy of anthropogenic global warming, now the UN.
The regime can’t have you know that it’s suppressing the truth before it rams cap-and-trade through the Senate.
06.27.09
It’s beyond something to be angry about
It’s time to be really afraid of this Stalinist regime that has siezed power in what used to be recognizable as the United States of America.
The House passed the biggest tax increase and one-stop curb on your freedom in our nation’s history this afternoon. They did so even as the EPA cover-up of evidence showing anthropogenic climate change to be a bunch of hooey was coming to public attention, thanks to the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
These – is people an appropriate word? – hate the fact that you’re free and that you don’t feel desperately dependent on them for your basic comfort and safety. It’s clear now that they will stop at nothing. They never think about the United States of America in the sense the you and I mean that term. They are after something else entirely, and they came a step closer to getting it this afternoon.
I never had any use for anything “green” before this. Now it’s a matter of where one stands in the war we’re in.
06.26.09
Our masters are in a hurry to ram this thing down our throats because word is getting out that it’s based on a lie
Pundit and Pundette has a nice roundup of links regarding the shift in consensus on global warming and the number of meteorologists and other scientists who are willing to speak up.
Today may be the death-knell for your freedom
I’m not exactly sure what a test vote is, but the America-destroyers won one today regarding the energy bill which comes up for an actual vote later today.
By this evening we should know whether totalitarianism and permanent economic decline are our future or whether the United States of America has a chance for a phoenix-like return from oblivion.
This thing is another one of those thousand-plus page behemoths that no legislator has had time to read because the commandantes say it’s urgent to pass it now. Neal Boortz made a good analogy a while ago on his radio show. He said they are in a hurry for the same reason a burglar is in a hurry while he’s in your house.
06.25.09
Trading in our freedom and prosperity for a worthless, dreamy vision
Waxman-Marky will be put to a vote in the House floor for tomorrow.
06.11.09
It’s still a fresh alternative
How I wish Mike Pence were my representative. The border between districts runs through the city where I live, and I’m saddled with Baron Hill. (A side-by-side comparison of their records on pork is telling: zero to a gazillion.) I can’t think of anything he’s not exactly right about.
He and fellow midwestern Congressmen John Shimkus and Fred Upton have put a solid alternative to Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade on the table. It’s not cleverly novel. It proposes solutions that have been proposed before: lots of new nuclear-power plants, and oil drilling in ANWR and offshore. Alas, that’s what I find great about it. It states once again what would still be the obvious and quick remedy for our nation’s energy vunerabilities. Like all true conservative principles and ideas, they’re time-honored and not rendered invalid because fads and trends have changed societal perceptions.
05.29.09
Freedom-Hater is exactly the correct term
The bit of BN terminology for which I’ve decidedly been taken most to task over the years is “Freedom Hater.” I coined it to characterize those members of the Democrat party – politicians, apparatchiks, pundits, think-tank scholars and fundraisers – who have effected a quantum leap in the party’s century-old instinct toward big government. As I’ve said before, since 1972, when the counterculturists began “working within the system,” the party’s core drive morphed into something beyond just the tax-and-spend welfare-statism of the New Deal and the Great Society. With ever-increasing momentum, the Democrat view of government’s role has come to be that of a force indispensible to continuing the very operation of the universe.
It is now in a new and unprecedented stage. The utopian vision of the mid-twentieth century counterculture has been wedded to the worst aspects of totalitarianism. The new breed of Freedom-Hater is clearly playing for keeps.
A few posts ago, I offered the example of Energy Secretary Chu’s proposal that all the world’s flat roofs be painted white. Taken by itself, this item is worthy of titters and comic derision. Alas, it’s of a piece with a couple of other exhibits of what I mean, and, when one examines them in that light, the chuckles subside and the chills set in. There is San Fran Nan’s statement that, to stave off global warming, “every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory,” (do I need to spell out who is going to conduct this inventory?) and then there is Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s determination to “coerce [us] out of our cars.” (Yes, I know, LaHood is a Republican, but that doesn’t mean a great deal these days, as we all know. He serves, after all, at the pleasure of the most fearsome Freedom Hater America has yet produced.)
Thes people play for keeps. These aren’t off-the-cuff remarks designed to have a chance of affecting the conversational climate in our country. These people are telegraphing our future. Think back to TCM’s “smart box,” whichhe wanted to see as a replacement for our current thermostats. Come forward a bit to the last few weeks and the obvious relish with which the regime is gearing up to redesign the products of the car companies it now owns.
Gun sales are up in this country, but I think the most important instrument of protection we have at our disposal right now is a finely tuned intellectual radar. As I say, these people aren’t offering casual remarks in the hopes of getting a little airtime on the dinosaur network evening news. They are letting us know what our lives will be all about. They are assuming we won’t resist. They’re assuming we’re fools, that we’re cattle that can be herded.
That’s the dark essential truth about the whole leftist impulse, going back not only to 1972, but back through 1965, 1933, the 1914 founding of The New Republic and back into the whole Progressive era. (Again, I know a major figure of that era was the Republican Theodore Roosevelt, but it’s the impulse, not the party affiliation I’m talking about when we go back that far.) It’s based on feigned pity for “the common man.” That’s actually a disguise for contempt.
Nancy Pelosi, TCM and their Freedom-Hating colleagues are counting on you to be so cowed that you’ll swallow their patently ridiculous curtailments of your dignity and liberty. Don’t oblige them.
05.21.09
When despots grin
In the pronouncements TCM made at the Rose Garden event the other day – the one in which he unveiled his coordination of fuel-efficiency standards (the goal of 39 mpg by 2016) with EPA greenhouse-gas emissions standards – we can see that a certain style of dictatiorship is taking place.
He had, as he was eager to boast, a diverse (Freedom-Haters always love that diversity) array of interested parties – executives from the two bankrupt-and-now-government-owned car companies, as well as from the one US company still nominally privately owned, union officials, and environmental zealots. He went to great lengths to stress how these groups have not customarily seen eye-to-eye on much, but here they were, because they have a common stake in the current juncture of the auto industry.
Well, yeah. A president who assumes more extra-Constitutional power by the day is about to tell the world how things are going to be for the American car business, you want to be there to get the full story. There is no other game in town. There’s not much choice but to listen up and get with the program, is there?
And then he got to the part that was really chilling and obscene: the business about how this will “make it easier” for the car companies, because they will have “clear guidelines” as to what they are to comply with. That’s the rhetoric of the side with all the power in a given situation.
We’ve taken an industry – the one that arguably has symbolized American inventiveness, confidence and freedom more than any other for the last century – that has been set back on its heels, and handed it over to a hard-core Marxist regime for final dismantling and reassembling in the service of a junk-science meme that it doesn’t even really believe in. This isn’t about any stinking “Climate change.” This is about TCM and his minions seizing power and wiping out freedom.
TCM is given to lots of smiling. The tabloids and the network-news dinosaurs go in for that. They find it appealing, a symbol of a new era of hope and fairness and empathy. Me, I want to hurl when I see it. I know what those bared incisors are all about.
04.22.09
“A terribly expensive disaster”
This is another one of those cases in which TCM holds up a European country as a model for some “green” initiative, only to have those in the know from that country say, “Not so fast. Our experience shows it’s definitley not the way to go.”
This time, it’s his touting of Denmark as an example of how to get energy from wind turbines. Turns out it hasn’t worked out so well.
