Category Archives: Democrats

The Good, The Bad And The Banana Republic

Barack Obama, Democrats, Government, Taxation, The State

Befitting the banana republic he is fashioning, President Camacho “thinks” (and even John Stewart disagrees) that there is not a “smidgen” of corruption in the fact that Catherine Engelbrecht was visited fifteen times by four federal agencies “in a span of two years after her [conservative] group applied for tax-exempt status with the IRS in 2010.

Reports Breitbart:

Engelbrecht’s business had never been visited by the federal government before:

The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) began a series of inquiries about her and her group; the BATF (Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms) began demanding to see her family’s firearms in surprise audits of her and her husband’s small gun dealership – which had done less than $200 in sales; OSHA (Occupational Safety Hazards Administration) began a surprise audit of their small family manufacturing business; and the EPA-affiliated TCEQ (Texas Commission on Environment Quality) did a surprise visit and audit due to “a complaint being called in.”

Of course, these agencies can be used in legally permissible ways to harass and sabotage any of us.

The vision of everything that’s good about America, Engelbrecht has also endured a personal assault from Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, the embodiment of all that is rotten about this country.

Just imagine: As a taxpayer, Catherine Engelbrecht pays Cummings’ way. Using her money, this bit of drek has embarks on a public campaign to smear her name and that of her organization.

UPDATED: Liberals Who Loathe Obama, All Two Of Them (One More…)

Barack Obama, Constitution, Democrats, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media

Mark Levin would be a powerful force for liberty were he libertarian. In one magnificent rant against the regime, Levin wanted to know why no Democrat had protested Obama’s overweening ways. This is not quite true. As this column often pointed out, the late, great, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd was driven to distraction by Big Man Obama and said as much. Byrd, RIP, was “a stern constitutional scholar who always stood up for the legislative branch in its role in checking the power of the White House.” This old Southern gentleman, whom Republicans continually berated for his past indiscretions, warned about Obama’s executive-branch power grab and the extra-constitutional creation of a number of new White-House fiefdoms: on health reform, urban affairs policy, and energy and climate change.

And in 2009, “Sen. Byrd issued this warning regarding the procedural shenanigans the Democrats tried to deploy to pass the healthscare bill”:

“I oppose using the budget reconciliation process to pass health care reform and climate change legislation…. As one of the authors of the reconciliation process, I can tell you that the ironclad parliamentary procedures it authorizes were never intended for this purpose.”

The frail senator had taken to the floor of the United States Senate on October 14, 2009, “to discuss the situation in Afghanistan and voice his concerns over the possibility of a major increase in U.S. forces into Afghanistan”:

“General McChrystal, our current military commander in Afghanistan, has requested 30,000-40,000 additional American troops to bolster the more than 65,000 American troops already there. I am not clear as to his reasons and I have many, many questions. What does General McChrystal actually aim to achieve?” “So I am compelled to ask: does it really, really take 100,000 U.S. troops to find Osama bin Laden?”

MORE.

Then there is WND columnist Nat Hentoff. I know not whether he is a Democrats, but Hentoff is something of a liberal, who has accused Obama of “an unprecedented abuse of powers,” calling him the “most un-American president in the nation’s history.”

… The journalist said he doesn’t think any other president has acted so lawlessly as a matter of habit.

“So, if this isn’t a reason for at least the start of an independent investigation that would lead to impeachment, what is?”

Hentoff is baffled that Obama should escape such scrutiny when former President Bill Clinton faced impeachment just for being “a lousy liar.”

President Bill Clinton

A big part of the problem, the journalist believes, is what he calls the utter ignorance of a huge portion of the population, which is not outraged at losing its basic right to be self-governing.

And Obama “doesn’t give a damn, because he can get away with whatever he wants.”

That’s why Hentoff called this the worst state the country has ever been in, “Even worse than Woodrow Wilson’s regime, when people could be arrested for speaking German.” …

MORE.

UPDATE: Liberal constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley has also protested the emergence of the Über-Presidency in the person of BHO. MORE.

Richard Sherman And The National, Mindless, Racial Merry-Go-Round

Celebrity, Democrats, Intelligence, libertarianism, Media, Race, Republicans, Sport

Written by a scholar of color, whose intellectual and moral authority in the culture stem not from the force of his argument, but from the concentration of melanin in his skin cells—John McWhorter’s article, “Let’s Not Make Thug the New N-Word,” exemplifies the banal, racial back-and-forth that parades as “debate” in the US.

In the wake of the manufactured Richard Sherman brouhaha, Dr. McWhorter waxes fat and fuzzy on TIME over the artificial, politically dictated linguistic laws that govern discourse in this country (and explain why “dumbassery” is the norm). This racial roundabout proceeds, always, from the premise of compliance with preordained linguistic standards or laws.

When they rabbit on about race, America’s chattering classes—blacks, whites, Democrats, Republicans and the silliest of libertarians alike—exhibit an unthinking habit of mind. These are individuals (for they are not individualists) who’ve been trained by their political and intellectual masters to respond in certain, politically pleasing ways.

To tell you the truth, I have no idea what the fuss is over what Sherman said after the Seattle Seahawks’s victory over the San Francisco 49ers. What I know about the game is dangerous, but it appears that the Seahawks cornerback was merely commenting on an aspect of the game:

“I’m the best corner in the game. When you try me with a sorry receiver like Crabtree, that’s the result you gonna get. Don’t you ever talk about me!”

The man was pumped, as men ought to be in such a testosterone-infused game. But Sherman’s boisterous bit of theatre set in motion some racial, national free-association, which for the life of me, I can’t follow. Truly.

I’ll say this much: Sherman was correct to point out that his “outburst,” following the “defensive play that sealed his team’s trip to the Super Bowl,” was an extension of “his game-time competitiveness.”

The rest is of a piece with the mindless racial merry-go-round manufactured by America’s media types.

Left And Right Bamboozling You On Benghazi

Democrats, Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, History, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Terrorism

“Left And Right Bamboozling You On Benghazi” is the current column, now on WND. A excerpt:

“Us against al Qaeda”: This has been—still is—the narrowly conceived narrative among neoconservatives. As the politically provincial neoconservative foreign-policy paradigm has it, those were the forces that played out in the Benghazi affair, in which the American mission was left undefended, resulting in the slaughter of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans (who, given the pecking order in the Empire, generally go unnamed). …

… Uncovered by The Times’ investigation, however, was a very different reality in Benghazi—”murkier than either of those story lines suggests. Benghazi,” contends Kirkpatrick, “was not infiltrated by al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs.”

In particular are neoconservatives fulminating over the findings that “turned up no evidence that al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault,” and that “the attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Col. Gadhafi.”

How can that be? Easily: The history of Libya is festooned with similar ransacking and burning of consulates by angry local mobs. Alas, in the ignorance it cultivates about the past, America is Cicero’s perpetual child. By the definition of the great Roman statesman, “Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.” …

… The facts in the Benghazi affair have likewise been unwoven and retied into two contradictory narratives to suit the respective sides.

Think of lab rats racing through a maze, as you watch the sub-intelligent, dual-panel “dialogue” conducted on the teli. Hosts Stephanie Cutter (left-wing, social-democratic rat) and S. E. Cupp (right-wing, social-democratic rat): Each rat runs with a designated, neatly bifurcated (Republican or Democratic) political orthodoxy. Each is a “maze-bright” rat, and not the possessor and giver of any truth. …

Read the complete column. “Left And Right Bamboozling You On Benghazi” is on WND.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION:

At the WND Comments Section. Scroll down and “Say it.”

On my Facebook page.

By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” this week’s “Return To Reason” column.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.