Category Archives: Republicans

Obama Deflects The Opposition

Barack Obama, Debt, Democrats, Economy, Republicans

President Obama visited House Republicans at their annual retreat and took “public questions from members of the opposition party.” While the session was a rare gesture from a sitting president, it is nevertheless consistent with the Obama modus operandi, which entails showy displays designed to accentuate his ostensible historic uniqueness.

I completely agree with the president when he points out that “the component parts of the Recovery Act are consistent” with what many Republicans say are important.” [Although, I believe, “is important” would have been more grammatical.]

After all, “Nothing much distinguishes Republican from Democratic vulgar Keynesianism. Republicans have offered no change in paradigm. Guru Gingrich, a ‘hard core’ fiscal conservative, advised fellow Republikeynsians to offer Americans a more efficient, targeted stimulus, when no stimulus is the conservative way; when allowing markets to contract is the conservative way.” [I.O.U.S.A]

Didn’t Republicans vote for the Bush administration’s bailout bonanza, and before that for the Bush stimulus? (Someone please hunt down the relevant Republican voting record.) Did not the Republikeynsians agree with Barack’s Bill’s alleged job-creation thrust?

“How much to hand out; who to hand it to; which handout makes the best use of taxpayer money … —that’s the depth of the ‘philosophical’ to-be-or-not-to-be among Republikeynsians.”

Beck Breakthrough?

Constitution, Founding Fathers, Glenn Beck, IMMIGRATION, Just War, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Liberty, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, Republicans

In his groundbreaking series on the American Progressive Movement, Fox News personality Glenn Beck touched today on the differences between Republican and Democrat progressives vis-a-vis foreign policy. This was the closest Beck, the unambiguously pro-war, military-booster came to examining his support for the kind of state expansion (via war) the founders would have abhorred.

“The military is government. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government. Like government, it must be kept small.”

Militias are what the founders bequeathed, not mammoth standing armies.

Beck came close to articulating what readers of this space have been reading and imbibing for years. Warring for Democracy is the Republicans’ homage to Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism; nation-building abroad is how the Democrats prefer to honor his “legacy.”

Beck quotes Thomas Jefferson a lot, as he should. But ideological wars like Iraq, unequivocally backed by Beck, belong to the Jacobin—not Jeffersonian—tradition.

I thought I heard Beck quote the 1821 words of secretary of state John Quincy Adams (the 2nd part of the program is not yet on YouTube): “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher of the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

If not Adams, Beck recited another founder’s exhortation against empire.

The next step for Beck is to reject the recreational wars waged in Iraq and Afghanistan with the support of his ilk, and espouse a foreign policy compatible with limited authority and republican virtues. You can’t embrace small government at home and big government abroad. The last Republicans are in the habit of euphemizing as a “strong national defense.”

The beauty of Beck is in his goodness. The fact that at times he says remarkably confused things doesn’t change this.

Here are some glaring mistakes Beck made in today’s program. (Continued below.)

He declared that if Americans knew about the Progressives and their creeping, clandestine agenda, they’d reject it.

It all goes back to immigration, mis-education; the changing face of America, and general rot. A few guns and G-d types may reject the “conservative socialism” (progressivism) in which we are mired based on a visceral feel for the principles of the founding. But most Americans I talk to are clueless—and even hostile to the founding ideas. So let Glenn not presume that progressivism is not in the DNA of a changing America. Once the country is 50 percent Third World, Glenn might as well be talking to the hand.

LOST IN TRANSLATION. After bemoaning how Progressives, having infiltrated America’s institutions, have toiled to alter the meaning of the Constitution, Glenn proposed his own revisionism: rewrite the Federalist Papers so that Americans, whom Glenn insist are never dumb, can understand these brilliant, but difficult, debates.

“Writing In The Age Of The Idiot”:

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.’ That genius, Thomas Jefferson, also insisted that liberty would be ‘a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed and enlightened to a certain degree.'”

Updated: Dumb As They Come

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Democrats, Journalism, Law, Pop-Culture, Republicans

Among the many dumb things Republicans have given us (read “GOP and Man at Yale”) is a brand of tease “journalism” headed by Hannah Giles, a well-connected, monosyllabic, Town-Hall tartlet, who partook in an ACORN-exposing (tush-wagging) operation. Her partner (he played the pimp) was James O’Keefe, who, it transpires, is even dumber than Hannah.

A recent headline on Nola.com blares:

“ACORN ‘gotcha’ man arrested in attempt to tamper with Mary Landrieu’s office phones. James O’Keefe … a conservative activist who last year posed as a pimp to target the community-organizing group ACORN, is one of four people arrested by the FBI and accused of trying to interfere with phones at Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in New Orleans.”

O’Keefe and his pals are “charged with entering federal property under false pretenses for the purposes of committing a felony.”

Phone tapping or something.

The little pischer O’Keefe had given “a speech to the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, a libertarian group in New Orleans,” which seems to be standing by him.

While the ACORN fun lasted, Andrew Breitbart put O’Keefe up as some sort of editor on his Big This/Big That websites, and appeared with him and Hannah on all the Republican TV shows. Now Big Breitbart is distancing himself from his protege. I guess AB has some sense of how fascistic and fickle American law and culture can be (you can go to jail for a long time for non-offenses; and become the toast of the town for major offenses). Here’s the interview he hastened to give to Hugh Hewitt.

Update (Jan. 27): “A lawyer for one of the men said outside the courthouse that his clients may have the product of ‘poor judgment’ and that he didn’t intend to commit a crime; lawyers for other defendants could not immediately be reached for comment.”

This defense attorney is right, of course, but the American legal system, which Republicans (like this intrepid contingent of guerrilla journalists) are forever striving to make less constitutional, will fight to keep these idiots under its jurisdiction. It’s reflexive.

Updated: Obama Goes Getto On America (But Easy On Himself)

Barack Obama, Bush, Democrats, Healthcare, Politics, Republicans

HERE’S “what this bum thinks of America,” writes Larry Auster, and manages to capture the cretinous petulance of Obama’s response, at a town hall meeting in Ohio today, to the building resentment:

“… he is still ensconced in his little world, his little gnostic bubble, where reality is supposed to bend to his desires no matter how harmful and irrational they may be, and if it doesn’t, it’s other people’s fault–people who do nasty, ‘ugly’ things, people who ‘scare the bejesus out of everybody,’ people who ‘buzz-sawed’ his beautiful health care bill to smithereens in Massachusetts. Yes, that’s right, he described a peaceful, lawful election in the state of Massachusetts as a ‘buzz saw.’ That’s what this bum thinks of America. All of which is a good sign. It suggests Obama will not adjust to reality, will not ‘grow’ in response to defeat, but will remain a bitter, hostile alien in this country, clinging to his health care bill and his cap and trade, which in turn will make it more and more difficult for him to impose his will on us in any area, and will also make it a reasonable possibility that he will be a one-term messiah. Which is sort of a contradiction in terms, isn’t it?”

Auster rounds off with a Mark Steyn quip (“I’ve never denied that Steyn has his moments,” Larry writes. Ditto.) in response to “Obama’s astounding remark that the reason the voters of Massachusetts chose Republican Scott Brown over Democrat Martha Coakley and thus destroyed the Democratic Party’s revolutionary legislative agenda was that they were angry at eight years of Republican President Bush”:

Presumably, the president isn’t stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it’s dispiriting to discover he’s stupid enough to think we’re stupid enough to believe it.

Update (Jan. 23): Here is the prepared text of Obama’s “jobs” speech in Elyria, Ohio.”

Précis:

* BO sets the scene by blaming the big banks for this latest bubble created by loose monetary policy and compounded by decades of affirmative-oriented lending policies imposed on banks by government legislation.

* Pats himself on the back for the Recovery Act, bailouts, and nationalization of The Big Three, and for single-handedly averting a Second Great Depression through delirious spending, and by designing functioning, efficient, fair markets (in Obama oratory: “creating the jobs of tomorrow”). Yes, command economics worked in the Soviet Union; it’s working in these United States. Amen, Bro.

* BO then bemoans rising prices. In other words inflation—the increase in the money supply promulgated by the government-owned Federal Reserve’s habit of mucking about with interest rates or plain printing paper. Fiddling with the money supply courtesy of the government-Fed syndicate—and for the purpose of funding, if clandestinely, Big O’s debt—that’s inflation. “The truth is that inflation is caused by government,” observed Ronald Reagan. “It’s caused by government spending more than it takes in, and it will go away just as soon as government stops doing that.”

* Throw into the mix dollops of class warfare and you have a pacified crowd. “[S]ome Americans made huge amounts of money,” blasted BO, “while many others pedaled faster and faster, only to find themselves stuck in the same place.”

Yes, I agree. Do read “Life In The Oink Sector” to find out whose ranks you need to join if you want your wages to rise continuously—up to 50% higher than the average salary out there—never have to fear downsizing; being fired, reprimanded, or worked to the bone, and to retire after 30 years of abusing your “clients” on an annual income of a $100,000. Hint: It’s not the private productive economy.

Remember Lilly Ledbetter (it’s in the speech)! In the little lady’s honor, as Barack reminds us, he unleashed on struggling American businesses armies of strong-arming (and buff-armed, no doubt) Girls Gone Wild, eager for their pound of flesh. Read about it in Barack Against the Boys.)

Shout out for the Obama-expanded SCHIP program, the entitlement plan known as the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

More self-congratulations. Barack leaves.

I’m off to barf.