Category Archives: Politics

UPDATED: Tea Party Central

Constitution, Founding Fathers, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, Politics, Race, Racism

How do you tell that a grassroots, decentralized movement has moved into mainstream politics and has been thoroughly co-opted by its forces? Here’s one sign: A movement that arose in order to address profound issues of political philosophy begins to front “spokespersons” to apologize and bend over backwards in order to pacify mainstream muckrakers and race-baters. That’s one way to know for sure that the Tea Party is being schooled and groomed for grimy politics as usual.

MSNBC:

Mark Williams, the flamethrower leading the battle against the Ground Zero mosque, was kicked out of the National Tea Party Federation Saturday for a racist blog post.
He shrugged off the diss, calling it “grandstanding” from a “minor player on the fringe.”
A California radio host and leader of the Tea Party Express, Williams had labeled the Manhattan boro president a “Jewish Uncle Tom” and President Obama an “Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug.”
But when he posted a satirical letter supposedly from “the Colored People” to President Lincoln praising slavery, that apparently crossed the line.
The federation, an umbrella organization that claims to represent 85 Tea Party groups, kicked out Williams’ group when it wouldn’t fire him. “We have expelled Tea Party Express and Mark Williams from the National Tea Party Federation because of the letter that he wrote,” federation spokesman David Webb said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

You got a hint of the forces controlling the Tea Party—the kind of people who’ve clawed their way onto establishment forums such as “Face the Nation”—when the “gritty” movement doubled up in pain and then went into defense mode over being accused of racism by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Being so accused by such people is always false and is almost always a badge of honor.

Andrew Breitbart’s “Go to hell” is a start. But even better would it have been to ignore an organization that is too stupid to debate, but is sufficiently wily to work to ensure that nothing of the old, founding liberties remains or is revived.

It was wrong to so much as dignify these contemptible efforts to silence the small segment of America that is still true to her origins. Leaders of that America should never have chomped down on the bait, which is nothing but ad hominem intended to paralyze and marginalize liberty.

“The Many Ministries of Truth,” I wrote,

“make truth telling a difficult task. In fiction, the Orwellian Ministry of Truth is a reified entity. In reality, there isn’t one concrete ministry that decides how the nation thinks—there are many such entities. They’ve evolved over time, and they issue countless subliminal edicts.
One type of aversion treatment is to call the unhappy victim a racist. It’s the contemporary version of fingering a witch during the Salem witchcraft trials. This treatment awaits any and all who fail to conform to the correct thinking, transmitted by the education system, the churches, and the intellectuals.”

UPDATE (July 19): “Is it not an absurd world we live in?” asks a fired-up Pat Buchanan, who I’ve been seeing less and less on MSNBC.

“Here is an organization whose very name, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pronounces its goal—advancement through affirmative action, quotas, contract set-asides based on race—accusing another organization of being motivated by race.”

Jealous and the NAACP are trying to change the subject from Obama’s failure to Obama’s race, and from the failures of liberals to the motivations of conservatives.
By accusing the tea party of harboring racists, the NAACP is, in effect, demanding that the party appear in a court of public opinion to prove itself innocent of an unsupported slander.
Sorry, that’s not how things work in America.

Oh, but that’s exactly how things work in America.

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being Republican

Barack Obama, Ethics, Government, Law, Morality, Politics, Republicans

The Joe Sestak “scandal” is nothing but garden-variety politics routinely practiced by both parties. Yet as Rome burns, such quid pro quo is what is consuming the Republican Party’s bobbleheads. The signal dishonor of which Obama operatives stand accused, via Sam Stein, is offering a job to “Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Penn) in exchange for him not entering the Pennsylvania Senate primary.” The act has “seasoned political observers, historians, and lawyers responding with veritable yawns”:

American presidential history is littered with quid pro quos, implicit and explicit secret job offers, and backroom deals, so much so that the Sestak offer may be more the norm than the exception to it.
“It is completely unexceptional,” said Dr. Russell Riley, associate professor and chair of the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia. “I read some place today that this is evidently illegal, which was shocking news to me. I don’t know what the statutes are that would bear on this… it just doesn’t seem to me to particularly rise to the level of being newsworthy in the first place and the fact that it’s spun out into a scandal has been surprising.”
George Edwards, a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Jordan Chair in Presidential Studies at Texas A&M University, says: “There is no question whatsoever that presidents have often offered people positions to encourage them not to do something or make it awkward for them to do it. Presidents have also offered people back-ups if they ran for an office and lost. All this is old news historically.”

The complete column is HERE.

Note, this is not to say the shenanigans of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and President Bill Clinton were legal. They could very well be illegal. They are certainly morally dubious. But politicians are by definition immoral. By blowing the scandal du jour out of proportion, an unspeakably crooked class is made to sweat the small stuff only.

I guess Republicans have a stake in perpetuating this state-of-affairs.

Brown Bastardgate

Barack Obama, Britain, Debt, Elections, IMMIGRATION, Morality, Politics

“He [Gordon Brown] was smiling when he spoke to me but he was thinking that! What else is he thinking when he smiles…” ~Gillian Duffy.

Remember when Obama was exposed in all his contempt for small-town America, depicting potential voters as clinging to their guns, god and other “bigotry”?

At least Obama was generalizing about a perceived prototype, and not badmouthing a flesh-and-blood human being; a constituent just encountered.

Trust Britain’s Gordon Brown with that bit of cruel, callous conduct.

People seem surprised that Brown would harbor contempt for the typical Briton revealed in the person of Gillian Duffy. After hearing Mrs. Duffy’s worries over deficits and immigration, the pompous, two-faced ponce retreated to his limousine, and mic on, proceeded to berate this perfectly decent lady, calling her “horrible,” “old woman,” and “bigoted.”

Poor woman; how hurt and shocked she looked when a reporter first confronted her with Brown’s wicked words.

When the real boor in this electioneering farce came calling, asking her to forgive him on camera, Mrs. Duffy refused to play along. She forgave the bastard as a kindly person would, but refused Gordon’s demand for a public display of affection.

A reminder of BHO’s disdain:

Mr Obama had, before an audience in the liberal bastion of San Francisco, tried to explain his trouble winning over white, working-class voters, the fabled “Reagan Democrats” who will be crucial in the general election.
He said: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Updated: Toyoda Vs. Torquemada

Business, Fascism, Political Economy, Politics, Regulation, Republicans, Technology

The excerpt is from “Toyoda Vs. Torquemada,” my latest WND.COM column:

“Mr. Akio Toyoda, the president of Toyota, could have achieved the brevity much-admired in his culture (and mine) had he responded thus to the invitation to appear before the congressional committee investigating the recall of eight million of his vehicles:

House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s invitation to Mr. Toyoda: ‘Dear Mr. Toyoda, we will be sitting between 11:00 AM and 5:00PM on February the 24th.’

Toyoda’s putative Reply: ‘Akio Toyoda likewise.’

To complete the one-two punch, Mr. Toyoda’s second in command, Yoshimi Inaba, president of Toyota Motors North America, ought to have sent each of his would-be Democrat and Republican inquisitors a short note, in large typeface, preferably with pop-up pictures.

In it, he ought to have reminded them that his company employs over 170,000 of their countrymen; has invested billions in capitalizing its factories, and is philanthropic at a time when Americans are desperate for charity.

… Mention the unseemly specter of a government—the owner de jure of General Motors and Chrysler—strong-arming the competition, his own Free-Market Motors.

A well-worded barb about the embarrassing, timely FBI raid on a Toyota auto parts operation in Detroit would have been apropos as well. Tell them, Mr. Toyoda, that you are doing business in a country where the competition is backed by the power of the police.

In closing, Toyoda might have reminded the overweening House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that his bosses are Toyota’s customers, and that it is to them alone that he’d be answering.

Back on terra firma, … ”

Read the complete column, “Toyoda Vs. Torquemada.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update (Feb. 27): By the by, this household has never contemplated buying an American car. Gutless gas guzzlers, mostly. If the US made cars comparable in performance and economy to those of Toyota or VW—then sure. American cars are really ugly too, except for the Corvette and mustang. The first is a good car, except that it has some old-engine style oddity that requires yearly tweaking, or so I am told. The Mustang is completely gutless compared to this pocket rocket.