Category Archives: Politics

Guess Who’s Pooh-Poohing Tea Parties & Touting The Political Process?

Elections 2008, libertarianism, Liberty, Media, Politics, Taxation, The State

Mr. Neal Boortz is a big fan of the political process, which is why serious libertarians consider him a serious statist par excellence.

Boortz admonished irate Americans to:

“Use your tea bags to make tea and do something meaningful. Go around your workplace or neighborhood and register voters who actually produce and contribute to our society. Trust me, there are enough people out there registering the parasites, find the producers who don’t vote – convince them that their vote is needed and would count – and sign them up. Then take a copy of their voter registration, put it with the other copies you’ve already collected, and send them to your congressman.”

The palsied haters of the liberal press are not covering the Tea Party movement. When they do, it is with the toffee-nosed contempt they reserved for Sarah Palin, the Moose hunting mama.

Newsweek’s latest cover, “The Thinking Man’s Guide To Populist Outrage,” could just as well have read “Those hick rubes are at it again.”

I’ve protested the diffuse, directionless nature of the rage animating the masses. The eruption of civil society, however, is a good thing; far better than registering people to partake in a rigged charade. (Presumably, Boortz wants society’s producers to vote for a Republican.) But, right now, with the exception of a few pockets, the populist uprising is a bit of a headless chicken.

In any event, like the liberals, Boortz seems to need to show that he’s wiser than the yokels.

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.