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.”
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.
“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.'”
I’m really looking forward to hearing a speech by someone who is involved in innovation, knows America’s place in the world market and has fiscal responsibility. And I hope that Obama is listening very carefully when Steve Jobs speaks tomorrow.
“That was Penn Jillette on the eve of Barack Obama’s first, much-anticipated State of the Union address. The celebrity libertarian magician was making mischief with one of Larry King’s stock
questions.
It takes a magician to know one. On the day of Obama’s State of the Union sermon, Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., launched a magic mobile device called the ‘iPad.’ Perhaps Jillette thinks that the solution to America’s economic inertia lies in visionary producers like Jobs, and not in vain, profligate politicians like the president.
Technology is certainly a task for which Obama and minions are singularly ill-equipped. But that has not stopped them from tinkering – and attempting to bend industry in ‘green’ directions.
‘We should put more Americans to work building clean-energy facilities,’ Barack boomed last night. “You can see the results of last year’s investments in clean energy – in the North Carolina company that will create 1,200 jobs nationwide helping to make advanced batteries.’
Not according to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Against its politically correct instincts, the IEEE was forced to ‘cast stones at a wide selection of … poorly conceived technology projects.’ One of these was Government Motors’ Chevrolet Volt, ‘a car known as a plug-in hybrid because it will get most of its power from the wall socket in a garage.’
You see, unless the Big O issues a mandate compelling Americans to purchase the commie car, the Volt won’t be making money. …”
I thanked Nancy Pelosi once in the past for going up against The Decider and his ditto heads. This time she’s owed some gratitude for confronting the Democrats’ deity.
Obama’s proposed Big spending Freeze is a big farce. In 2009, he increased overall spending by 22%. Nancy is insisting that “pork-laden Pentagon programs shouldn’t be protected from President Obama’s proposed three-year spending freeze.”
“While we all want to support our men and women in uniform… and our national defense and our veterans, I don’t think that we should protect military contractors, and I want to make that distinction very clear,” Pelosi said at her weekly press conference Thursday.
The government can’t minimize wasteful spending without auditing the Pentagon, Pelosi said, citing a 2009 report indicating that top U.S. weapons programs went over budget by some $296 billion.
“I don’t support exempting them from the freeze,” she said.
“… the Warfare State is every bit as corrupt, corrupting, and bankrupting as the Welfare State. Over $1 trillion is spent yearly on imperial expeditions that are awash in American blood, but offer few benefits to the sacrificed. Besides, what kind of a nation neglects its own borders while defending to the death borders not its own? [From“Addicted To That Rush”]
