Category Archives: Government

UPDATE II: Bill Getting Brave

Barack Obama, Conservatism, Government, Healthcare, Intelligence, Private Property, Race, Racism, The State, Welfare

Black and white Americans are divided over President Obama, says Bill O’Reilly, pointing to a Gallop poll according to which 88% of Black Americans support Obama; but only 38% of whites.

“A fifty point differential.”

Whites, of course, are barred from expressing racial affinities; but not blacks. Although O’Reilly neglects the black-racism element (he knows that very many blacks are racists), he nevertheless zeroes in on another important reason blacks go with Obama. White Americans fear the expansion of government and the bankrupting of the nation. [I’m not so sure of the first.] This attitude was on display, says O’Reilly, in Missouri, where 71% of the voters rejected the individual mandate to purchase insurance that ObamaCare would have imposed on them.

O’Reilly goes on to clearly state that black America has a different view of politics, in particular, blacks want a bigger federal government for the purpose of imposing social justice and carrying out distributive policies.

Blacks want a central authority “to redistribute income from the white establishment to their precincts” is how O’Reilly, rather directly, describes what black support for “what BHO is doing” is all about.

Fifty four percent of Hispanics support Obama, down 9 points since April. Here too the social justice issue is in operation, says O’Reilly.

O’Reilly recognizes that there are two Americas. It’s hard to decipher his solution—not when he says he support “strict oversight and fair rules,” but not the imposition of entitlements. Oversight over what? To whom a private property owner rents, sells; and who he hires and fires?

And whose property is it anyway to dispense with?

And what about “Thou Shall Not Covet”?

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that [is] thy neighbor’s.” (THE 10th COMMANDMENT, Exodus 20:17)

UPDATE I (Aug. 6): We doffed a hat to Bill’s first show of whatever it was that rolled off Sarah’s word-salad producing tongue, HERE.

UPDATE II: With Bill it’s one step forward, two steps back. Why do African-Americans lag so far behind, asked one of O’Reilly’s viewers in a letter to The Factor today. Because of 100 years of slavery, replied The Sage. Pray tell, Bill, what is the reason Africa is centuries behind the West, China, Singapore, etc?

Public Prefers Obama To Bush Policies

America, Barack Obama, Bush, Economy, Government, Regulation, Socialism, The State

Yet more proof that Americans love a big government: “According to the latest Society for Human Resource Management/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, conducted with the Pew Research Center, 46 percent said Obama’s path would do more to improve economic conditions in the next few years, compared to 29 percent who said policies put in place by Bush would.”

Don’t take my statement vis-a-vis statism to mean that Bush was less one than is Obama. Not true. The two men exist on the same continuum of statism. Obama has picked up where his buddy Bush left off. My point is simply this: Americans have no aversion to the president who is perceived as more of a big government guy, and is certainly no less of a central planner than was Bush.

In a really strong column I covered the other day, Anne Applebaum encapsulated the singular statism from which Americans suffer:

“…When, through a series of flukes, a crazy person smuggled explosives onto a plane at Christmas, the public bayed for blood and held the White House responsible. When, thanks to bad luck and planning mistakes, an oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, the public bayed for blood and held the White House responsible again.

In fact, the crazy person was stopped by an alert passenger, not the federal government, and if the oil rig is ever fixed, it will be through the efforts of a private company. Nevertheless, each one of these kinds of events sets off a chain reaction: A new government program is created, experts are hired, new machines are ordered for the airports, and new monitors are sent beneath the ocean. This is how we got the Kafkaesque security network that an extraordinary Washington Post investigation this week calls, quite conservatively, ‘A hidden world, growing beyond control.'”

…this hidden world, with its 1,271 different government security and intelligence organizations and its 854,000 people with top-secret security clearance, is not the creation of a secretive totalitarian cabal; it has been set up in response to public demand. It’s true that the French want to retire early and that the British think health care should be free, but when things go wrong, Americans also write to their representatives in Congress and their commander in chief demanding action. And precisely because this is a democracy [when it was meant to be a republic], Congress and the president respond, pass a law, put up a building.”

[SNIP]

Applebaum’s position, it goes without saying, has been my own for as long as I can remember.

The Making Of An American Saint

Affirmative Action, Glenn Beck, Government, Journalism, Media, Race, Racism

ROSA PARKS REDUX. Glenn Beck was in tears (just about). Shepard Smith is being as solemn and pious as I’ve ever seen him; the White House press corps is in a collective conniption—all over the great injustice done, and corrected forthwith, to a black Agriculture Department employee who turned out to be less of a racist than was alleged.

Andrew Breitbart is alleged to have created the confusion with a misleading, incomplete report of this allegedly decades-old incident. Breitbart’s “Big this; big that,” ever-mutating websites exemplify what Lawrence Auster has termed “low-grade conservative media.” “Tease journalism,” I wrote.

Shirley Sherrod, state director for rural development (Great Journalism doesn’t say which “rurality”), said this (16 minutes into the tape), paraphrased: she began her work intending it to be for black people. G-d put things in her path that made her realize she was there for poor people. A white farmer came to her for assistance with a superior attitude. (I guess if it were a Brother, she might have described him as a proud man in humiliating circumstances.) So many black people had lost their land, and here she was faced with having to help a white man save his property. [Hallelujah; what a pure heart] “So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do,” Sherrod said. “I did enough. I took him to a white lawyer; one of Them; to his own kind.”

Paradiddle, please: (verbatim): “That’s when it was revealed to me that this was about poor vs. those who have. And not so much about white—it is about white and black—but it opened my eyes …”

A nice enough lady, Ms. Sherrod goes on to reveal how she did her job even when it came to a desperate, downtrodden white man. She may be a charming woman, but she does not deserve to be beatified, as she is, by the BHO admin and the press. She came to work preparing to work for her Race. Arguably, this is not uncommon among blacks and Hispanics who have a sense of cohesion and unity in opposition to mainstream whites.

Here Andrew Breitbart makes excuses for his shoddy excerpting:

Americans: Needy, Coddled Statists

America, Europe, Government, The State, The Zeitgeist

Americans Say They Hate Government Yet Expect More From Government Than Anyone Else.

For once, a mainstream columnist goes beyond the partisan staked-out positions to look at Americans as they truly are. As an outsider myself, I agree with “American Hypocrites” by Anne Applebaum:

“If you don’t live here all the time, and I don’t, here is what you notice when you come home: Americans—with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession, and above all their addiction to government spending programs—demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world. They don’t just want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is either prevented or fully compensated. And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the government responsible for that, too.

To put it bluntly, middle-class Americans of the right, left, and center have now come to expect a level of personal financial security that—despite the stereotypes—most people would never demand from their governments. In a review he wrote earlier this month, Brink Lindsey, the vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute—a man who knows what he is up against—pulled up some extraordinary statistics. Most Americans, it turns out, are suspicious of the free market. And most American also approve of high government spending. The majority of Americans are wary of global trade, don’t trust free markets, and also think ‘the benefits from … Social Security or Medicare are worth the costs of those programs.’ And when the sample is restricted to people who support the Tea Party movement? The number is still 62 percent.

…in Washington, these expenditures are known as ‘third rails’: If you touch them, you’re dead. President George W. Bush talked a little bit about making individuals more responsible for their retirement, and then he gave up. The ‘privatization’ of Social Security, as it was sneeringly described, was just too unpopular, particularly among his own supporters.

Read “American Hypocrites.”