Category Archives: Politics

A Message From The Founder Of The Tea-Party Revolt

BAB's A List, libertarianism, Politics, Republicans, Taxation

James Ostrowski is the founder of the latest tea-party revolt. He is an attorney, writer, political consultant and libertarian activist; a columnist for LewRockwell.com, and president and founder of Free New York. He’s also a good friend. James has issued a cri de coeur, which I echo wholeheartedly, with one, semantic, reservation: Obama is the enemy just as Bush was. Ideas or entities are not enemies; their executors are.

THE TEA PARTIES WILL FAIL IF THEY ARE A GOP FRONT OPERATION
By James Ostrowski

I helped organize the Buffalo tea party and am now planning more events and helping others do so as well.

My concern is that the some of the groups working on this may be GOP-front groups.

(Let me say for the benefit of those who don’t know me, I’m not a liberal Democrat. I’m a hardcore libertarian who happens, for reasons lost to the sands of time, to be a registered Republican. I am also a political consultant whose clients have included Republicans, Democrats and one capital L Libertarian.)

Anyway, why do I think this?

Their websites are too slick. Their people have high-level GOP ties. They focus their attack on Obama and the “Democrats.” Their own positive agenda is rather thin and focuses on Pavlovian rank and file buzz words like “pork.”

Now, I am a huge opponent of pork and have written, I don’t know, 15 articles about it. But when Republicans use the word, it’s often part of their 50-year old rap to con the rank and file by claiming they will cut “waste, fraud and abuse.”

That’s total BS as I have demonstrated ad nauseum many times including in my book.

The great Jefferson, the last President to make a meaningful cut in the federal government, taught us this: the only way to cut the size of government is to cut programs, departments, agencies.

No conservative Republican regime ever made government smaller. At least, no one has given me an example of one that did, after three years of asking. (Thatcher? It’s sad they had to go abroad but some very shrewd people on the Mises e-list disputed even her record in that regard.)

Before this post threatens the page limit of Atlas Shrugged, let me get to the point.

I will work with anyone who sincerely wants to roll big government back towards the old republic. But if this movement is simply a GOP front operation designed to return to power the same set of degenerate creeps who F’d up the country for the last eight years and set the stage for the God Obama’s final sacking of America, I will not work with them. I will expose them and fight them.

Look, I just yesterday took a swipe at the libertarian Campaign for Liberty. I have on many occasions battled my fellow libertarians if I think they have gone astray and, a fortiori, I will do the same with conservatives.

Obama is not the enemy. He’s just their latest errand boy. The enemy for all true patriots is the corporate state that came in around 1917–and killed the old republic–the Fed, the Income Tax, our strange obsession with dragging farm boys from Iowa over to Europe to die for corrupt European empires.

So the test for determining whether any group or person is a front operation is their agenda. Is their agenda restoring the republic by enacting radical structural change in the regime? Or is their agenda getting DeLay and Gingrich back into power?

Updated: Oinkbama: Anti-Occident & A Bit Of A Pig

Africa, Britain, Etiquette, History, Politics, The West

Writes Iain Martin of the London Telegraph:

“President Obama has been rudeness personified towards Britain this week. His handling of the visit of the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, to Washington was appalling. First Brown wasn’t granted a press conference with flags, then one was hastily arranged in the Oval office after the Brits had to beg. Obama looked like he would rather have been anywhere else than welcoming the British leader to his office and topped it all with his choice of present (*) for the PM. A box of 25 DVDS including ET, the Wizard of Oz and Star Wars? Oh, give me strength. We do have television and DVD stores on this side of the Atlantic. Even Gordon Brown will have seen those films too often already.”

This bout of rudeness was preceded by another, after–or some say before—the inauguration: “the White House sent back to the British Embassy a bust of Sir Winston Churchill that had occupied a cherished spot in President Bush’s Oval Office. Intended as a symbol of transatlantic solidarity, the bust was a loaner from former British prime minister Tony Blair.”

Because they dislike Churchill, the usual, libertarian suspects have applauded this bit of bad manners with the customary childish glee. Without going into Second World War revisionism, one can disagree with many of Churchill’s decisions during the offensive, while at the same time recognizing what defender of the West Diana West put so well:

“It seems that what we are seeing in the return of the Churchill bust is less a personal vendetta against Churchill the man and more an open breach in the Western continuum out of which a new orientation toward the Third World will become increasingly apparent. Having achieved a Washington-like apotheosis in the American imagination, Churchill serves not only as the preeminent symbol of resolve, courage and faith against the enemies of Western civilization. He serves as a symbol of Western civilization, period. One of President Obama’s first acts as president was to consign that symbol to a box and send it packing.” [Emphasis mine]

“Like the symbolic repudiation of Churchill, Obama’s Marxist attack on free markets plays to the same factions of the radical left he once set out to ingratiate himself with as a young man.”

“When the native hears a speech about Western culture, he pulls out his knife,” wrote Frantz Fanon, the seminal theorist of anti-Western Third Worldism Obama mentioned above. When a Marxist, Third World-tilting president of the United States sees a bust of Winston Churchill, he sends it packing. He may have proven once again to the Left that he’s no sellout, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t just alienated an awful lot of the American people.

Since the media downplayed and excused OinkBama and his Mama’s poor taste, the American people were none the wiser.

Diana furnishes the perfect postscript: “I have to hand it to the prime minister for giving Churchill-dissing Obama the perfectly targeted dig with the gift of the complete set of the official Churchill biography by Martin Gilbert.”

Update (March 6): Oinkbama’s tacky behavior when hosting a foreign dignitary–the prime minister of Britain—conjures the MTV show “Cribs.” Hip-hop gangsters show off their incredibly gaudy homes, and their CD and DVD collections. Then they send the cameraman packing.

Updated: Oinkbama: Anti-Occident & A Bit Of A Pig

Africa, Britain, Etiquette, History, Politics, The West

Writes Iain Martin of the London Telegraph:

“President Obama has been rudeness personified towards Britain this week. His handling of the visit of the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, to Washington was appalling. First Brown wasn’t granted a press conference with flags, then one was hastily arranged in the Oval office after the Brits had to beg. Obama looked like he would rather have been anywhere else than welcoming the British leader to his office and topped it all with his choice of present (*) for the PM. A box of 25 DVDS including ET, the Wizard of Oz and Star Wars? Oh, give me strength. We do have television and DVD stores on this side of the Atlantic. Even Gordon Brown will have seen those films too often already.”

This bout of rudeness was preceded by another, after–or some say before—the inauguration: “the White House sent back to the British Embassy a bust of Sir Winston Churchill that had occupied a cherished spot in President Bush’s Oval Office. Intended as a symbol of transatlantic solidarity, the bust was a loaner from former British prime minister Tony Blair.”

Because they dislike Churchill, the usual, libertarian suspects have applauded this bit of bad manners with the customary childish glee. Without going into Second World War revisionism, one can disagree with many of Churchill’s decisions during the offensive, while at the same time recognizing what defender of the West Diana West put so well:

“It seems that what we are seeing in the return of the Churchill bust is less a personal vendetta against Churchill the man and more an open breach in the Western continuum out of which a new orientation toward the Third World will become increasingly apparent. Having achieved a Washington-like apotheosis in the American imagination, Churchill serves not only as the preeminent symbol of resolve, courage and faith against the enemies of Western civilization. He serves as a symbol of Western civilization, period. One of President Obama’s first acts as president was to consign that symbol to a box and send it packing.” [Emphasis mine]

“Like the symbolic repudiation of Churchill, Obama’s Marxist attack on free markets plays to the same factions of the radical left he once set out to ingratiate himself with as a young man.”

“When the native hears a speech about Western culture, he pulls out his knife,” wrote Frantz Fanon, the seminal theorist of anti-Western Third Worldism Obama mentioned above. When a Marxist, Third World-tilting president of the United States sees a bust of Winston Churchill, he sends it packing. He may have proven once again to the Left that he’s no sellout, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t just alienated an awful lot of the American people.

Since the media downplayed and excused OinkBama and his Mama’s poor taste, the American people were none the wiser.

Diana furnishes the perfect postscript: “I have to hand it to the prime minister for giving Churchill-dissing Obama the perfectly targeted dig with the gift of the complete set of the official Churchill biography by Martin Gilbert.”

Update (March 6): Oinkbama’s tacky behavior when hosting a foreign dignitary–the prime minister of Britain—conjures the MTV show “Cribs.” Hip-hop gangsters show off their incredibly gaudy homes, and their CD and DVD collections. Then they send the cameraman packing.

Update VI: Lead Me To The Vomitorium

America, Barack Obama, Media, Politics, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-history, The Zeitgeist

A Vomitorium: “A passage situated below or behind a tier of seats in an amphitheatre, through which crowds can ‘spew out’ at the end of a performance.”

The Obama orgy in the fleshpots of Washington has not yet begun in earnest, and I’m already in gag mode.

The beaming tele-twits, their racial-pride roster of guests, the MLK montages, the hyperbolic homilies to the Messianic Man and The Historical Moment; the posturing from pious pundits, the overwrought, empty waffle—how low can a country, and a once-great culture, sink?

Hang in there. I’ll be back shortly with a few, recommended, DVD distractions to help get you through the next few days. I promise. (You’ll also need some grog; no getting around that.)

Update I: A spluttering Jonathan Alter of Newsweek to “Countdown” Keith: “The inauguration… here… in the capital built by Michelle Obama’s slave ancestors. …”

In case you get swept up in the tide of “history from below”: The people who established the political order described by Thomas Jefferson as “a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution, … derived from natural right and natural reason,” were predominantly British Christians.

Where’s the gratitude?

Update II: The Day of the Crowning (Jan. 20): MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow effused last night about the historical necessity–nay, obligation–to formulate an answer to the “Where Were You When” question.

A wonderful line from Peter Schiff resonates right now: “our country became great not because of what politicians do, but what they didn’t do.”

Send us word about how you’re coping with the Barack Bacchanalia.

Some more headlines from the intrepid press around the world (This segment is being constantly updated):

Black Washington looks to Obama (BBC)
What a black president means to me
Scientists optimistic over Obama
From segregation to inauguration
Difficult to Capture the Moment (MSNBC)
Watch Juan Williams Have A Wobbly

As to the last headline: Really? Let me take a timid bash: slushy, weak-minded sentimentality; senseless slobbering.

Update III: Even Sen. Ted Kennedy could not take it; he had a seizure mid-carnival. That is, another seizure. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Republican, also Kennedy’s official “Praise Singer,” was on hand to comment on the Kennedy conniption.

I’m surprised at Michelle Obama’s awful ensemble. It is a yellow-greenish sequined affair that makes her skin look like old cheese. Not very flattering.

To Barbara’s sartorial comment: If it’s a cold, wintry day, I say dress for the weather. Draping yourself in flimsy fabric on a bitterly frigid day makes one look like a high-school girl trying to show skin.

(Update V Jan. 21): First Lady Michelle Obama’s evening gown was only slightly better than the lime number. She should have gone with a veteran, big-name designer. The white tunic resembled a curtain with bulky tussles, and did not flatter her well-toned figure. An off-the-shoulders garment is not the best fit for a woman with such a wide, amazon-like build.

As for Rev. Joseph Lowery; I’d like to see him tarred and feathered. Here’s his coruscating attack on white folks, delivered in childish, churlish prose:

“Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around – when yellow will be mellow – when the red man can get ahead, man – and when white will embrace what is right.” …

F-ck you too, Lowery!

Update VI (Jan. 21): Jill Biden’s inaugural gown was lovely. I don’t much like red, but the lines of this frock are rather nice.