Category Archives: The State

Update IV: Let’s Fret About Our Own Tyrants (Little Satan Strikes Daily…)

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Iran, Middle East, Terrorism, The State

The excerpt is from my new column, now on Taki’s Magazine:

“Americans are still in the grips of a Bush foreign-policy hangover. Obama refocused a drunk-on-democracy country, by reminding it that ‘the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as has been advertised. Either way, we were going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States; that has caused some problems in the neighborhood and is pursuing nuclear weapons.'”

In other words, thumping majorities in the Middle East do not necessarily coincide with American national interests. …

Iran’s leading reformist, the mullahs-approved Mousavi, backs Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and has said he would not suspend uranium enrichment. Most Iranians concur. Like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mousavi doesn’t recognize Israel. Since the Holocaust appears to have become a centerpiece—and a precondition for diplomacy—in neoconservative talking points, they might be interested in this tidbit: on Holocaust denial, Mousavi and Ahmadinejad are on the same pseudo-scientific page.”

Read the complete column, previously on WND, and now on Taki’s titled “Fighting Tyranny Should Start at Home.”

Miss the weekly column on WND.COM? Catch it on Taki’s Magazine every Saturday.

(For the purpose of this column, Majnun is madman in Arabic.)

Update I (June 19): Bob’s comments hereunder about the Iranian Supreme Leader and his powers remind me of another Big Man in another country. What’s that place’s name again? Aha! The US! Have you counted the number of newly created, Messiah-appointed and supervised fiefdoms lately? Czars, anybody? We were supposed to have a government run almost directly by the people and their representatives. I bet we have a larger Managerial State than Iran has. We’re just so good at dubbing all that it does “freedom.” Oh, and we don’t wear towels. Please! We need to look in our own political plates.

How many people would die in the streets if Americans had the gall to protest in such numbers and at such a volume as the Iranians? We lose quite a few naughty citizens to Tazers—and other “necessary”—“discipline” almost daily, except these incidents are filed as “keeping the peace,” and “guarding our liberties” against those who would destroy them (such as Anne Gotbaum, the 100 pounder She Devil).

Update II: LITTLE SATAN STRIKES. So you think we can lord our freedoms over Iran. Again: look in your own backyard. Today, on behalf of Ron Paul’s Campaign For Liberty, The American Civil Liberties Union launched a suit against a lawful criminal gang: the Transportation Security Administration. What said bandits did to staffer Steve Bierfeldt the TSA thugs do daily, even hourly. The population complies. This time they got caught out “for the ‘illegal’ detention of the Campaign for Liberty’s treasurer in April at a St. Louis airport.”

“The ACLU damned what it called a ‘troubling pattern’ of aggressive invasions of privacy by the TSA.” Don’t we know it. Bierfeldt “recorded his confrontation with the airport security agents on his phone. The audio caused waves of indignation across the Internet, as he was seemingly harassed merely for carrying cash and Ron Paul campaign material.”

Harassed? The man was cussed, sworn at, and threatened.

On March 29, 2009, Steven Bierfeldt was detained in a small room at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and interrogated by TSA officials for nearly half an hour after he passed a metal box containing cash through a security checkpoint X-ray machine. Bierfeldt was carrying the cash in connection with his duties as the Director of Development for the Campaign for Liberty, a political organization that grew out of Congressman Ron Paul’s presidential campaign.

Bierfeldt was detained and questioned as he returned home from a Campaign for Liberty event transporting proceeds from the sale of tickets, t-shirts, stickers and campaign material. Bierfeldt repeatedly asked the agents to explain the scope of their authority to detain and interrogate him and received no explanation. Instead, the agents escalated the threatening tone of their questions and ultimately told Bierfeldt that he was being placed under arrest. Bierfeldt recorded the audio of the entire incident with his iPhone.

But we call this a minor issue in the greater cause of safekeeping “liberty.” Reality check: American airports and airlines are the scariest most oppressive in the world. Want a safe, civilized flight? Fly Emirates Airlines. Who are we kidding!

Update III (June 20): Pat Buchanan and I are on the same page (no surprise there). The following are excellent strategic policy points:

“This is another reason President Obama is right not to declare that the United States is on the side of the demonstrators in Tehran or the other cities – and against the regime.

Should this end in bloodshed, Obama would be blamed for having instigated it, and then abandoned the demonstrators …If Obama cannot assist the demonstrators, why declare we are with them? That would call into question the nationalist credentials of the protesters by tying them to a power not universally loved in Iran. It would play into the hand of the regime by confirming charges that the crowds are “rent-a-mobs” like the ones Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA used to dump over the regime of Muhammad Mossadegh in 1953.”

[SNIP]

On the other hand, here’s Chuck Krauthammer, pushing for some action.

Update II: Too Pale To Stay?

Education, IMMIGRATION, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Multiculturalism, Race, Racism, The State

Somehow I think that if this little girl’s name were GARCIA, MARTINEZ, ALVAREZ, RODRIGUEZ, ROMERO, LOPEZ, FERNANDEZ, HERNANDEZ, GONZALES—she’d be allowed to stay in the US of A. Read the story of the impending deportation to Poland of 11-year-old Ewelina Bledniak. (And where-oh-where are the churches and the ACLU?)

If only my own sister were a poor, illiterate, Hispanic scofflaw, sucking at the state’s teat.

Update I (June 11): I’m not sure I can agree entirely with Robert. To an extent he is right: errors and injustices are a function of a lumbering bureaucracy. I think he’ll find, however, that because so many of the bureaucrats are affirmative, or plain illegal, appointees, they often enact their preferences. It is misguided to deny: 1) the tremendous powers of the bureaucracy. 2) That said organ doesn’t exercise these powers energetically. We live under an unrepresentative, managerial state, the kind James Burnham (if I’m correct) wrote about, and certainly our friend Paul Gottfried has covered extensively.

My personal experience: “My daughter was … stripped of her [green card] on a debatable technicality when entering the US from Canada. This took a heroic show of force from the brave, U.S. citizenship and immigration law enforcers at the border. Moral: U.S. immigration law is enforced against people who obey the law. No doubt her hard-won green card was needed urgently for a real Bandido.”

Update II (June 11): So far, I’ve being vindicated. Readers have put down Bledniak’s neglect to nothing more than a “lumbering bureaucracy.” But as I contended, if Bledniak were Banderas, she’d have had CNN’s THELMA GUTIERREZ’s full support.

Tonight, GUTIERREZ went to bat for a “brilliant girl”—so brilliant, she has an “A” in “Race and Gender”—who cannot get you and me to pay for her Harvard degree in Education (worth nothing, clearly), because… wait for it: she’s illegal. However, unlike the Polish cherub, Nancy the Hispanic is not being deported.

The transcripts are here. Just as I surmised in the initial post, Nancy’s equally “brilliant” Harvard professors are LATINAS.

The “matric”—high-school finals—I sat for in Israel was harder than anything this “genius” has done at university. These students graduate from high school without math in the syllabus. Unheard of in my days, if you wanted a university entrance matric. And yes, I will (a little later) inflict on you the kind of core curriculum I was compelled to undertake for the first-rate academic matric I earned in Israel, back in the day.
This Nancy would be relegated to the sewing class—we were streamed into different paths in accordance with academic aptitude in those days. With the kind of nonacademic subjects “Nancy” has taken, GUTIERREZ’s protege would not have qualified to sit the academic finals in my old high-school. But then things have changed in Israel since then too.

Updated: Arnold Issuing IOUs

Classical Liberalism, Debt, Economy, Federalism, Government, Inflation, Political Economy, Republicans, The State

For a long time, “moderate” Republicans considered California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger a member of the “saner” Republican guard. Arnold drove his state to insolvency, and insolvency, you see, can shore up a moderate’s credentials.

Schwarzenegger has pumped up his state’s bloated bureaucracy and ballooning parasitical class. Now, in a referendum, California voters have rejected milquetoast measures that would allow The Terminator to continue to hobble along with his $21 billion deficit.

The Republican governor made sure he was out of town during the vote. “He was not the public face of the effort,” reports the New York Times. But rather, Arnold “let teachers and firefighters do his talking for him in advertisements, and indeed was not even in the state the day of the vote.”

“Representative democracy,” wrote Ludwig von Mises in Bureaucracy, “cannot subsist if a great part of the voters are on the government pay roll. If the members of parliament no longer consider themselves mandatories of the taxpayers but deputies of those receiving salaries, wages, subsidies, doles, and other benefits from the treasury, democracy is done for.”

One of the causes of inflation and debt is the public sector—with its capacity to hire while the public sector must fire—and award its members with inflated wages and benefits, the kind we can only dream of.

Update (May 20): Arnold gave it a bash; he tried to peddle a “package of budget-balancing measures that he promised would temporarily fix the state’s financial crisis.”

MSNBC: “Schwarzenegger said the state’s residents have had to sell off motorcycles, second cars and hold garage sales to make ends meet in recent months. Now, they’re telling state officials that the government has to shrink, too.

“Don’t come to us for extra help. That was the message.”

Me: Moocher-in-chief, however, knows how to try and prolong the party, with some leverage against the moochers he governs:

“Still, Schwarzenegger said the budget cuts to come may be more painful than California voters realize. While they may not want to pay more for services, they can’t say specifically which services they would pare, he said.

He said cuts will certainly come in education, health care and in prisons by transferring undocumented immigrants to federal facilities and transferring more non-violent offenders to local jails. He plans to meet with state lawmakers in the afternoon to discuss the state’s options.”

Olbermann’s State Worship

Britain, Government, Hillary Clinton, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, The State

Obama’s Doberman, Keith Olbermann, thinks he’s so smart. However, Olbermann appears clever only because he swims in such polluted professional waters. When the competition on cable is “Billo,” Barack’s bitch gets to cleave to his delusions of cleverness.

This partisan hack tickled himself pink by savaging Michael Savage for his alleged hypocrisy. For his strident commentary, the Talker was banned from the police state of the UK, and has since solicited Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s assistance in reversing this ban. Olbermann delighted in pointing out that:

It is delicious irony that [Savage] must call on the State Department, after calling our new Secretary of State everything from Godless, Hitler-like, to responsible for the death of JFK Jr, to accusing her of starting a race war.

Now Savage is forced to seek Hilary’s diplomatic intervention, gloated Keith.

This is the reaction of a born-and-bred statist, with a skewed perspective on the role of government. Keith thinks of citizens as subjects.

Hillary is supposed to SERVE Savage, stupid! It matters not how disrespectful Savage has been to Hillary, or to any other politician. They work for him. It is incumbent upon politicians to help the people at whose pleasure they serve. What else is their function? Ornamental? As deities, objects of supplication, to be held close to the adoring heart, as Keith holds Obama?

Keith’s statism trips him up again and again, but no one is the wiser, becasue, all are statist partisans now.