Category Archives: The State

Updated: Presidential History

America, Government, History, Pseudo-history, The State

“Of all historical genres, one of the least respected, at least among academics, is Presidential history. Mixing the unfashionable (with scholars) but generally popular fields of political history and biography, Presidential history is often a vehicle for national celebration and myth-making. Presidential historians often tend to narrate heroic tales of an unfolding national drama that sees the expansion of liberty and justice; words like “courage” and “leadership” abound. Nowhere does the “Great Man” history become greater than in histories of the White House. If patriotism is a kind of American civil religion, then Michael Beschloss, Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough are its high priests.” (Andrew Preston, TLS, December 21 & 28, 2007)
Goodwin is particularly repugnant.
Discuss.

Update (Jan. 15): From political economist Bob Higgs comes the quintessential guide to properly rating presidents:
“Washington, I think, actually does deserve a high rating–not even the historians can be wrong all the time. He established the precedent of stepping down after two terms, which lasted until it clashed with FDR’s insatiable ambition, and he prescribed the sensible foreign policy, later slandered as ‘isolationism,’ that served the nation well for more than a century. Other early presidents who were not entirely reprehensible in office include Jefferson and Jackson, though each committed grave derelictions.

Of the presidents since Cleveland, I rank Coolidge the highest. He sponsored sharp tax cuts and greatly reduced the national debt. As H.L. Mencken wrote, ‘There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance’—high praise in view of the execrable performance of other twentieth-century presidents. Taft and Eisenhower were a cut above the rest, but that’s not saying much…”
A guide to the perplexed in “No More Great Presidents.”

Update # II: Support the Draft…

Foreign Policy, Government, Iraq, Military, Politics, The State

For politicians, bureaucrats, and their family members.

Serving in Iraq is a “potential death sentence,” a member of the foreign service moaned. I have “post traumatic stress disorder” after serving there for a year, another whined. Who will take care of our children if we (gasp) die, was a complaint one audacious emissary of the American state (in good times) sounded.

Now they know how soldiers and their families feel when subjected to back-door drafts in the form of indefinitely extended tours-of-duty; now the political parasites know how taxpayers feel about a war that is sapping their savings and making it hard for them to provide for their retirement and their children. (Ordinary Americans don’t have hefty, free pensions and perks for posterity, such as the blood suckers at the State Department enjoy.)

Update # I: In response to John Smith’s letter: Make sure you read your contract; it is the solemn duty of members of the foreign service to go where they are posted.

Update # II/Nov. 8: To those who keep wanting to spare the foreign service from hardship: if you’re a friend of freedom, and wish to see the state shrink—or at least cease availing itself indiscriminately of tax dollars for its endless exploits—you ought to stop coddling its recruits. Why on earth would you wish to create a risk-free workplace for privileged government workers? The riskier their endeavor the less likely they are to engage in callous and confiscatory practices. I say let as much of the state apparatus as possible shoulder the consequences of in Iraq policy.

Update # III: As you can see from his demands, John want’s to work for government, but at the same time be able to pick and choose to serve in the promotion of only those policies he supports. Unfortunately, given the excessive power unelected bureaucrats wield, they’ll probably get what they want.
On another matter, the public sector, incidentally, was never supposed to be able to strike; that’s a later socialistic privilege they were granted. In addition, government employee, politicians included, should not be allowed to vote. This is because they are paid from taxes garnished involuntarily from taxpayers, and will always vote to increase their own powers and wages.

Update #V: Beware the Police

Constitution, Criminal Injustice, Fascism, Law, Rights, The State

Evidence is mounting for the increasing brutality of the police, especially your local “friendly” state troopers.

Read and watch how this journalism student is carted away and tasered for the offense of questioning John Kerry persistently. Kerry the coward didn’t intervene. Were a Republican present, I suspect the outcome would have been the same. Worse: the students sat there like golems as Meyer was assaulted. What obedient little lap dogs. Whatever one thinks of the 1960s, that generation would have started a riot, then and there. Here’s the account:

“Videos of the Monday night incident, posted on several Web sites and played repeatedly on television news, show University of Florida police officers pulling Meyer away from the microphone after he asks Kerry about impeaching President George W. Bush and whether he and Bush were both members of the secret society Skull and Bones at Yale University.
… Meyer struggles for several seconds as up to four officers try to remove him from the room. Meyer screams for help and tries to break away from officers with his arms flailing at them, then is forced to the ground and officers order him to stop resisting. As Kerry tells the audience he will answer the student’s ‘very important question,’ Meyer yells at the officers to release him, crying out, ‘Don’t Tase me, bro,’ just before he is shocked by the Taser. He is then led from the room, screaming, ‘What did I do?’”

There have been many other incidents, the last of a young man, Brett Darrow, who had the good sense to mount a dashboard camera in his car and film an officer, Sgt. Kuehnlein, threatening to fabricate charges against him. The poor lad was terrorized, but showed remarkable composure.

Here Radley Balko exposes more of the ubiquitous violations perpetrated by our protectors—and worse: the laws that help police conceal crimes against those they swore to protect.

Update # I: The fascists on cable all, left and right, with no exception, agreed with glee that for the police to assault this manifestly non-violent protestor, sans provocation, was A-Okay. It would be poetic justice if the son or daughter of one of the cable capos was tasered and thrown in jail overnight for speaking loudly and waving his or her arms in the air during a debate. You’re a slave if you rationalize this incident. Even if, as one reader claimed, this was a set up (whatever that means), isn’t it obvious that a non-aggressor, who has hurt nobody should never be assaulted, hurt, and incarcerated, not in a free country. Even if he was being provocative.

Balko makes the same point with respect to Brett Darrow: “I’ve heard people make the argument that this kid’s habit of baiting cops into abuse somehow diminishes the excesses he’s captured on tape. I don’t agree at all. His ‘baiting’ thus far has consisted of asserting his rights. Perhaps not as politely as he should, but being impolite isn’t and shouldn’t be a crime. Neither is parking in a commuter lot, or asking why you’ve been pulled over when you haven’t broken any laws.”
America isn’t free.
I do want to give Dick Morris, of all people, credit for showing the utmost revulsion at the brutality of the cops. I have never seen the smarmy smooth Morris grow as livid as he did earlier today on Hannity and Colmes, who both giggled about the incident. Morris called it fascism. A Taser, moreover, is not without its dangers. It can cause permanent heart-muscle damage and even kill. Tasering Meyer was so clearly sadistic, unnecessary, and reckless. It’s obvious that the cops use the Taser very flippantly.

Update # II: Tasers do kill. Here, the cowards are incapable of controlling a wheelchair-bound woman, so they kill her. Ann Coulter once wrote a fine column about the increased deaths associated with women in the police force. Women, being weaker and generally more fearful than men, tend to use lethal force more frequently. The sadist cop who used her Taser for 160 seconds on the victim was female.

Update # III: Some of the responses to the Comments Section, unpublished, alarmed me, in their inability to grasp that this is not about an annoying kid, who might have been playing to the cameras. Rather, this concerns the proper role of law enforcement in a free society. Free people grasp that assaulting a person who has not aggressed against a soul is unconscionable and authoritarian. As I say, if you can’t recognize that, you are a slave—or perhaps you haven’t internalized the fact that you could just as well be on the receiving side of such brutality.

To those who accused me of generalizing from a few isolated incidents, I suggest you bring yourselves up to speed, fast. Under the auspices of the Drug War, our militarized feds conduct daily “no-knock” raids, barge into homes, confiscate property, and rob people of their liberty—sometimes of their lives.

The Tyranny of Good Intentions by Paul Craig Roberts is highly recommended as well. As I wrote in “Remember Reno”:

“Back in the day, the law was intended as a bulwark against government abuses. It has now become an implement of government, to be utilized by all-knowing rulers for the ‘greater good’—the founders’ Blackstonian view of the law has been supplanted by a Benthamism that encourages ambitious prosecutors to discard a defendant’s rights.
Add the aggravating circumstances of a highly militarized federal law enforcement that shares the judiciary’s contempt for the Rights of Englishmen, and is abetted by a public dimmed by statist schools and media—and one has a recipe for disaster.”
I’ll leave you with another startling visual from rural America of a man being violated by police for no reason other than that THEY CAN.

Update # IV: More evidence that “‘To Protect and Serve’ often translates into harass and control”:
• Salty Burger Lands McDonald’s Employee in Jail
• The Case of Monica Montoya

Update # V: I confess that I’ve become quite fearful of the liberties these government goons seem to take—the brazen “I’m your boss, you serf, free to do with your body as I please” attitude. When I venture down the road to the gym, for example, I always make sure I don’t forget my driver’s license. It’s hard not to speed in this torqued-up devil, but I do my best.
It’s quite uncanny how, no matter how hard free men and women have illustrated what the issue here is, slaves of the state on this blog have demonstrated an inability to grasp what liberty means. Freedom is the unassailable right to raise your voice, flail your arms—even make a harmless nuisance of yourself during a debate; fascism is when those acts could get you assaulted, injured, even killed. That’s all there is to it! The cops who’ve written in supporting the vile conduct of their colleagues enforce my fears.
Incidentally, when Sean and I went down to our local police station to get our carry-concealed licenses, the cop spat bitterly: “Yes, you ex-South Africans like your guns.” I was naïve then, imagining, somehow, that he’d be happy we were proponents and practitioners of the magnificent 2nd Amendment.

On Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Old Right, Reason, The State, War

By now, my thinking on conspiracy theories should be known; they are the refuge of the weak-minded. Remember Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil? Reality is bad enough; there is no need to look beyond it. That is tantamount to conjecture and fantasy. As I said in the introduction to my book, the state presides over the disintegration of civil society, but it does so reflexively, rather than as a matter of collusion and conspiracy.

The premise for imputing conspiracies to garden variety government evils is this: government generally does what is good for us (NOT), so when it strays, we must look beyond the facts—for something far more sinister, as if government’s natural venality and quest for power were not enough to explain events. For example, why would one need to search for the “real reason” for an unjust, unscrupulous war, unless one believed government would never prosecute an unjust war. History belies that delusion.

Conspiracy is not congruent with a view of government as fundamentally antagonistic to the individual and to civil society, a position I hold. I see most of what the behemoth does nowadays as contrary to the good of the individual, and aimed reflexively at increasing its own power and size. Even if government embarked on a just war, it would find ways to prolong it, since this involves the consolidation of fiefdoms. Soldiers don’t benefit, but their superiors—those “generals” everyone reveres so—do. Our government, given its size, reach, and many usurpations, is a destructive and warring entity. It is natural for such an entity to pursue war for war’s sake. The constituent elements of the behemoth continuously work to increase their spheres of control. This is why we must curtail the state’s powers.

Propensity for conspiracy is yet another facet paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians share with the hard-left. I pointed out in “Deriding Dershowitz,” and elsewhere, that the far-out right has made common cause with the far left on quite a number of fronts. That’s a shame. You’ll find no such incongruities in my thinking. By way of example, my anti-war sentiments have never strayed into these murky precincts—don’t look for any war-for-oil-&-Israel kookiness here.