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.

Updated: Coakley’s Corrupt! What About Journalism?

Democrats, Ethics, Etiquette, IlanaMercer.com, Intelligence, Journalism, Liberty, Media, Political Philosophy, Private Property

WE KNOW that Attorney General Martha Coakley, who lost Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, is at the very least philosophically corrupt. But what about the said omissions of those who’re supposed to check the “lady” and her posse? I mean the roving citizen journalists, endeavoring to expose her?

I watched the hereunder YouTube clip twice. Perhaps I missed something but, as far as I could see (and hear), nowhere did the “journalist” filming the Coakley goons’ crass conduct articulate for her viewers why they ought to be furious at the conduct of these fascistic public servants.

WATCH the clip. What lessons for citizens does it impart? How does this YouTube snippet help, or even convey, the cause of liberty? The answers to these questions: “Nada” to the first; “it doesn’t” to the second. Not unless you consider being polite and not calling journalists Nazis as contributions to liberty and freedom.

Goons say to journalist, “You are on private property.” Journalist replies softly, “We want some questions answered,” “Why so rude?,” and, “We’re on a public sidewalk.”

Unless “journalist” is able to append a principled tag to her gritty clip, the Democrat mafia appears merely impolite.

THE SHORT, SWEET instructive reply to these fattened fascists would have been this: “You are NOT on private property but on public, taxpayer-funded property. You and Coakley are civil servants, beholden to the public who pays your way.”

What service do you perform as a putative journalist if you cannot convey the only philosophical truth the viewer ought to take away from this snippet? None, as I am sure a Democrat journalist could easily film similar infractions.

All this journalist has done is add a tit to the other side’s tat.

I grow impatient with the “Age of the Idiot” activist. Resources such as this blog and its companion site, ilanamercer.com, can help the corrupt and the clueless (with attribution please) become acquainted with the now “defunct foundations of the republic.”

But to take instruction, one has to have courage and humility. Dream on, ilana.

Update (Jan. 24): Say the Democrat Party paid for the offices of this candidate. Is this property then accessible only to a select portion of the public? Was Coakley seeking to represent some constituents to the exclusion of others? At the very least, journalists ought to be able to pose such question, when a politician’s brown shirts turn them away from said premises on the grounds that the offices from which a candidate is operating are walled off from the individuals she is endevoring to represent.

What do you say?

Update III: Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values (Senegal Does It Right)

America, Celebrity, Christianity, Ethics, Foreign Aid, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Media, Morality, Political Economy, The West, UN

The excerpt is from my new, WND.COM column: “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values”:

“… in all its self-serving displays, humanitarianism is, overwhelmingly, a Western affair; a Judeo-Christian thing. It’s as simple as all that. Liberals like Angelina Jolie will trace Western generosity to the founding of the United Nations, to the League of Nations, or to some other supra-national structure.

I suspect that what is at play in Haiti, and in countless locales around the undeveloped world, began with the revolutionary, universal, elaborate moral and legal injunctions encoded first in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus – and, thereafter, throughout the Hebrew Bible – to protect and do justice by the poor, the weak, the defenseless, the widow and the stranger. The people of Israel were enjoined to practice what Christians later perfected.

That stuff stuck.

A different set of beliefs animates Haitian society, and helps explain its helplessness and hopelessness. ‘Haiti is not a Catholic country, Haiti is a Voodoo country,’ Erol Josue told National Public Radio. Josue is a Voodoo priest in a country whose former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, officially recognized Voodoo as a state religion.” …

The complete column is “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update I (Jan. 22): Martin’s comment hereunder reminded me what I clean forgot: the Obamas’ very public giving. I’m also grateful to Martin for bringing to our attention the DIRECT injunction in the New Testament against showy charity. Martin quotes the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 6: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them.” How has this country forgotten something as foundational as that?

Self-righteousness has replaced righteousness and self-aggrandizement has supplanted simple goodness.

Update II (Jan. 23): CHILD SLAVERY still thrives in Haiti in the form of the “Restavec system.” Children are kept in grinding poverty and worked to the bone. In the West this would be considered perverse in the extreme; in Haiti owning a Restavek is a status symbol. CNN has done stories on Restavec children, but has never connected the dots, as the favorite phrase goes. The angle is, invariably one of, “Look how good I am [Dr. Gupta here]; I’m crying.” Coupled with, “This happens in the US too.

No it doesn’t. When a slave is discovered, usually in the home of immigrants who imported their bad habit, American society shames and punishes the offenders.

Update III (Jan. 24): SENEGAL DOES IT RIGHT. Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade has offered Haitian refugees a “parcels of land – even an entire region. It all depends on how many Haitians come. If it’s just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region,’ he said.”

Wade “insisted that if a region is handed over it should be in a fertile area – not in the country’s parched deserts.”

Wade’s got the right idea, or at least the righteous one. He is offering Haitians a most generous chance at self-sufficiency; at working the land.

“Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher and codifier of Jewish law, holds that the most praiseworthy and effective means of fulfilling the commandment of Tzedakah [charity] is through offering an impoverished person a business partnership, a business loan or a job. … the Prime Minister and [former Finance Minister] of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, apparently understood this well. Speaking on the benefits of workfare reform in Israel, Netanyahu was once quoted in the press as saying that it is not enough to be a Thatcherite, a Jew should go even further and become a Maimonidite. [Excerpted from the monograph titled Judaism, Markets, and Capitalism: Separating Myth from Reality, by Corinne and Robert Sauer of the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, with which I am affiliated.]

[SNIP]

Will Haitians be tempted by a chance at an honest living when hand-outs abound?

Support The Salahis

Barack Obama, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Fascism, Law, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

Tareq and Michaele Salahi, two reality TV “stars,’ crashed—or livened up—President Obama’s first White House state dinner. The two harmless interlopers, who dared to gaze upon their celestial leader,” are being subjected to an inquisition by the People’s posturing, sneering, fascistic “representatives.”

CNS: “Tareq and Michaele invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination Wednesday, refusing to answer a House committee’s questions about their uninvited appearance at a state dinner.”

Good for them. Apparently, the White House is open only to visits from inner-city kids.

“Crashing a Trashy House”: On the night of the offense, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue “was packed with nasty, noisome parasites. An extra pair would have made no difference. Quite the contrary: There’s something apropos about a couple of reality-show exhibitionists, who themselves ‘have left an extensive paper trail in federal bankruptcy and state court filings,’ brazenly elbowing their way into a party of ponces.”