Category Archives: Democracy

UPDATED: On Refugee Reparations & Paul Ryan’s Weasel Words

Barack Obama, Bush, Constitution, Critique, Democracy, Hillary Clinton, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, Law, libertarianism

Bush, Cheney, Clinton and Obama started the wars that eventually caused entire Middle-Eastern populations to be on the move. Personally, I think these American politicians and their respective cabals (Samantha Power and the Rices, Condi and Susan) should pay reparations, out of their personal fortunes, to Iraqi, Syrian and Afghani refugees. No qualifying test required.

Libertarian justice aside, Laura Ingraham has been ahead of Ann Coulter in evolving away from establishment Republicans and their weasel words, as was noted in this space, in July of 2014. Now Ingraham is doing her listeners a service by alerting them to how “Paul Ryan is using the language of the Left to advocate a new Republican way forward”:

“By opposing a ‘religious test’ for refugees, the new House Speaker Paul Ryan is ‘using the language of the left,’ ‘the language of Obama.'”

“Nobody is talking about a religious test,” counters Ingraham, “we are talking about a test of leadership, for the American people to finally see their leaders—Obama and the Republicans—standing up for the American people.”

Not quite. A religious test is inherent in refugee legislation, as religious persecution is grounds for a request for asylum. However, and by the sound of it, Americans are sick and tired of laws passed in contravention of their rights and interests.

More materially, there is nothing in the thousands of bills dreamed up by representatives, annually, that remotely approximates the will of a self-governing people and their exclusive interests. I mean, poor, working-class whites are dying in inordinate numbers in the US. Who do these local refugees turn to for redress? The left-liberal establishment (GOP included), which finds the exotic more sympathetic?

UPDATE: As Christians die across the Muslim world, America’s leaders feel the urgency of importing more Muslims:

Jeff Sessions (R-AL), “chairmen of the Commerce, Justice, and Science Appropriations and Immigration and the National Interest subcommittees respectively, issued the following statement, 11/17. It’s a little soft, but better than most:

… Under our nation’s current policy, the President simply brings in as many refugees as he wants. Refugees are entitled to access all major welfare programs, and they can also draw benefits directly from the Medicare and Social Security disability and retirement trust funds – taking those funds straight from the pockets of American retirees who paid into these troubled funds all of their lives.

Our immigration and refugee policies must serve the interests of our nation and protect the security of the American people. After admitting 1.5 million migrants from Muslim countries on lifetime visas since 9/11, it is time to assist in relocating Muslim migrants within their home region rather than relocating large numbers to the United States. It simply cannot be our policy to encourage a mass migration of entire populations from their homelands, a strategy that will only further destabilize the region and bring threats of terrorism deep inside our shores.” …

UPDATED: Apology Rejected, Tony Blair: Go Jump In The Lake (U2 Zakaria Plagiarizer)

Britain, Colonialism, Democracy, Iraq

Tony Blair has belatedly apologized for helping launch, with buddy Bush, an aggressive, baseless war on Iraq that saw hundreds of thousands of Iraqi innocents killed, uprooted and displaced from their ancient homeland. More so than ISIS had those two war criminals guaranteed the decimation of the ancient christian communities in the region. (Don’t worry; a decade from now, y’all will have reached that realization and will apologize to us libertarians). “Blair’s apology,” notes a surprisingly mellow Justin Raimondo, “sounds more like an apologia.”

Idi Amin was considered a war criminal for lesser offenses (plus/minus 300,000 killed). Ditto Bashar Assad. “Iraq war liars,” like former British Prime Minister Blair, “knew then what we know now,” so the man’s flippant, expedient apologies are not to be accepted. People (like this writer and others, many of them in the intelligence community) who sounded the alarm were mocked, derided and worse: fired, libeled, maligned.

Prime Minister Blair addressed a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress on Thursday, July 17, 2003. Etched all over Blair’s address to Congress was the devotion to the “mystic [and, might I add, malevolent] idea of national destiny.” One particularly chilling dictate was this: “I know out there there’s a guy getting on with his life, perfectly happily, minding his own business, saying to you, the political leaders of this country, ‘Why me? And why us? And why America?’ And the only answer is, ‘Because destiny put you in this place in history, in this moment in time, and the task is yours to do.'”

The tyranny implied in Blair’s maudlin grandiosity should be obvious.

First, the little guy back home ought to be the one calling the shots, not Messrs. Messiah and Company. Second, before Blair joins Bush in rousing the “visionless” middle-class American from his uninspired slumber—The Great Redeemer thinks it’s below contempt to harbor a civilized desire to mind one’s own business and live in peace—he ought to take a look at the little guy back in England. (August 6, 2003)

Had Tony Blair even heard about his British philosophical forerunner, Gertrude Bell?

“Her writings [in the 1920s or thereabouts] about her experiences in the Middle East—particularly in Iraq—continue to be studied and referenced by policy experts in the 21st century.”

AND:

She portrays Iraqis who loathe foreign occupation yet worry about the alternative. She knows that the occupation is unsustainable and ineffective but she cannot contemplate total withdrawal. She recognizes that British colonial control is unworkable and that there must be an Arab government, but she finds the sacrifices and uncertainties hard to stomach. The situation, she concludes, is “strange and bewildering.”

In fact, the West knew in the 1920s what it knows now about Iraq and its propensity for democracy.

UPDATE: U2 Zakaria Plagiarizer. Do they ever get fired? Fareed Zakaria Serial Plagiarizer supported the war in Iraq, like most of America’s punditocracy, has never said a word worth heeding, and now he’s back to speak to the horrors of that invasion. When will the booboisie defect from Fox, CNN, MSNBC (which was not so bad on Iraq but lost the edge with Barack and Hillary’s wars)?

CNN boasts that Zakaria Serial Plagiarizer “asks tough questions of many of the key architects of America’s military intervention in Iraq over the last dozen years. Yes, 13 years after we libertarians were tearing our hair out over the war. Perhaps this useless bore (and his Republican counterparts) will get a Pulitzer.

UPDATED: Burn-The-Wealth Bernie & His Partial Enslavement System

Democracy, Hillary Clinton, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Socialism

“Burn-The-Wealth Bernie & His Partial Enslavement System” is the current column, now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

“The top one-tenth of 1 percent in this country own almost 90 percent … as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent,” roared the independent senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, at the first Democratic primary debate of 2015, in Las Vegas.

Standing for president, Sanders implies, somehow, that there exists in nature a delimited income pie from which a disproportionate amount of wealth is handed over to, or seized, by a class of evil doers: “the rich.”

Clueless Sanders omits the process by which that wealth magically materializes.

Wealth doesn’t exist pristine in nature, until individuals—deserving as much, if not more, of the pope’s love as the poor—apply their smarts, labor and savings to transform raw materials into marketable things that satisfy human desire and need.

But not if one listens to the socialist from Vermont as, sadly, too many Americans did.

You ask, why was it not just as discouraging when even more Americans tuned in to watch the first and second Republican Primary Debates, 24 and 23 million respectively?

For this reason: While Republicans are never to be equated with freedom, smaller government, or anything remotely libertarian; the voting public equates a vote for a Republican with a vote for less government and more freedom from the state.

Therefore, an interest in and a support for a Democrat is often a reliable proxy for the measure of statism in the land.

Over fifteen million viewers tuned in to watch two washed-out, walking clichés of the hard left (Hillary Clinton and Mr. Sanders) join two other political phantoms no one had heard of before (Martin O’Malley and Lincoln Chafee), to malign and bring down their betters: the “highly productive and provident one percent that provides the standard of living of a largely ignorant and ungrateful ninety-nine percent,” in the words of professor George Reisman, author of the seminal “Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics.”

Countering Sanders’ pie-in-the-sky economics, Reisman notes that, “The wealth of the 1 percent is the overwhelming source of the supply of goods that people buy and of the demand for labor that people sell.” The wealth of the rich is not to be found in a huge pile of goods from which only capitalists benefit, but in the means of production that benefit us all. …

Read the rest.“Burn-The-Wealth Bernie & His Partial Enslavement System” is the current column, now on The Unz Review.

UPDATED (1/5/2016): Bernie Sanders ‘thinks’ that at heart, ISIS terrorists are really farmers who’ve been frustrated by climate change.

UPDATE II (2/7): https://twitter.com/IlanaMercer/status/693978051172958209

It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp: A Break In The Hustle And Flow Of Political Pimping

Constitution, Democracy, Iraq, Politics, Republicans

The series of eruptions begun when Donald Trump appeared on the scene to send The System’s sycophants scattering continued in the people’s House, today. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a shoo-in for the position of speaker and status quo enforcer, is gone. McCarthy will not be vying to be speaker of the House.

Like others among the mummified media, CNN’s Dana Bash confessed to being flabbergasted. You see, Bash is used to the hustle and flow of political pimping. Yeah, it’s hard out here for a pimp.

Last night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow spun a riveting yarn. It all began with a good GOPer named Walter Jones (R). A really good GOPer, as Rachel is wont to say. North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones (R) is in the humble habit of signing off as “Walter.” But that’s not why “Walter” is a really good guy. “Walter” has also repented, as a moral man would, after voting to invade Iraq:

“I did not do what I should have done to read and find out whether Bush was telling us the truth about Saddam being responsible for 9/11 and having weapons of mass destruction,” Jones said during an interview on The Tyler Cralle Show.
“Because I did not do my job then,” Jones continued, “I helped kill 4,000 Americans, and I will go to my grave regretting that.”

Other Republicans should repent too! Said Saint Augustine: “The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.”

The latest good deed by “Walter” is to force the events aforementioned. Jones,

sent a letter to the No. 4 House Republican saying any candidate for leadership who has committed any “misdeeds” since joining Congress should “withdraw” from the contest.

Jones, a 20-year veteran of Washington, is referring to marital infidelity, and made reference to former Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.), who stepped down due to an affair before he was slated to become speaker, and Newt Gingrich.

“With all the voter distrust of Washington felt around the country, I am asking that any candidate for Speaker of the House, majority leader, and majority whip withdraw himself from the leadership election if there are any misdeeds he has committed since joining Congress that will embarrass himself, the Republican Conference and the House of Representatives if they become public,” Jones wrote in a letter to Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.).

From Hustle & Flow (an American film about a pimp who aspires to become a rapper) we move on to The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world …

Kevin is gone. This is not chaos, as the mummified media would have it; it’s creative destruction.