The Liberal Media is Deserting Obama

By Alan Caruba

The conservative media has been criticizing President Obama since before he was President and that hardly comes as a surprise, but there is a discernible trend occurring among the liberal media. They are beginning to abandon Obama and, if that continues, it will erode his base and the electoral turnout he needs to be reelected.

New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, is one of my barometers and she has been backing away from Obama for weeks. In an August 6 column, “Downgrade Blues”, she opined that “Barack Obama blazed like Luke Skywalker in 2008, but he never learned to channel the Force. And now the Tea Party has run off with his light saber.” It’s more like Obama has become Darth Vader, destroying the economy since the day he arrived in the Oval Office.

“When he had power,” said Dowd, “he didn’t use it.” No, Obama’s problem is that he did use it and most dramatically in his effort to impose Obamacare on an America that did not want it. Only a straight party vote in Congress passed it despite a massive 2009 march on Washington to protest it. That sparked the Tea Party movement and that transferred power in the House in the 2010 midterm elections.

The syndicated columnist, Eleanor Clift, a strident devotee and defender of Obama, wrote on August 9th that “Disappointed liberals are among Obama’s harshest critics. They feel he’s given away too much to conservatives and they don’t understand where his gifts of intellect and oratory are now that the country is looking to him for a bold plan forward that can take the economy out of the doldrums.”

Like so many liberals, reluctant to assign any blame to Obama, Clift ignores the trillions in additional debt that Obama added to an already tenuous situation when he became President. She ignores the failed stimulus program or his administration’s all out attack on the energy sector of the economy. It’s a long list of bad judgments.

As to his alleged intellect and oratory, Obama’s dependence on teleprompters became a running joke early in his first months in office. During his address on Monday, his “oratory” fell flat with both the media and the public. A string of clichés and worn-out ideas, plus a plea for bipartisanship he has never displayed resulted in a further plunge in the stock market.

A Spurned Prom Date

David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, on July 25 sharply criticized Obama after the debt ceiling negotiations, saying “the president lost his cool. Obama never should have gone in front of the cameras just minutes after the talks faltered Friday evening. His appearance was suffused with that ‘I’m the only mature person in Washington’ condescension that drives everybody crazy. Obama lectured the leaders of the House and Senate in the sort of patronizing tone that a junior high principal might use with immature delinquents. He talked about unreturned phone calls and being left at the alter, personalizing the issue like a spurned prom date.”

Assessing the Monday address following the Friday Standard & Poor’s credit rating downgrade, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, wrote, “Yet Obama plods along, raising gobs of cash for his reelection bid—he was scheduled to speak at two DNC fundraisers Monday night—and varying little the words he reads from the teleprompter. He seemed detached even from those words Monday as he pivoted his head from side to side, proclaiming that ‘our problems is not confidence in our credit’ and turning his bipartisan fiscal commission into a ‘biparticle.’”

In October 2010 the Washington Times published a commentary of mine that asked if Obama was a moron. Turns out, he is.

In the August 9 edition of the conservative Wall Street Journal, columnist Bret Stephens’ column was titled “Is Obama Smart?” Concisely summing up the two views of the President, Stephens wrote “Liberals say he’s too cerebral for the Beltway rough-and-tumble; conservatives often seem to think his blunders, foreign and domestic, are part of a cunning scheme to turn the U.S. into a combination of Finland, Cuba and Saudi Arabia.”

“I don’t buy it,” wrote Stephens. “I just think the president isn’t very bright.” He concluded “Stupid is as stupid does, said the great philosopher Forrest Gump. The presidency of Barack Obama is a case study in stupid does.”

For me, there is more than a degree of schadenfreude, taking pleasure in other’s misfortunes, but the really bad news is that Obama’s misfortunes are America’s misfortunes and the mainstream media is beginning at last to take notice.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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First Ignored, Then Attacked: 6th International Climate Change Conference

By Alan Caruba

In the words of Gandhi, “First they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Thursday, June 30, will mark the beginning of the Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by The Heartland Institute, a free market policy center headquartered in Chicago. The conference will be held in Washington, D.C., an appropriate location considering how much hot air emanates from Congress and the White House.

I attended the first conferences that took place in New York City, just across the river from where I live, so I was “there at the beginning” for conferences that were, in the words of Gandhi, largely ignored by the mainstream media and subsequently mentioned but only as the object of mockery.

When, in 2009, emails exchanged between a handful of scientists who provided the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with the most specious, deliberately duplicitous “data” to prop up the “global warming" hoax were revealed, the whole house of cards began to collapse.

It has since been propped up by a bunch of media, political, and science dead-enders who had stacked their reputations on pulling off the great hoax of the modern era; that an infinitesimal amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—0.038 percent—was causing the Earth to heat up, the seas to rise, and Minnie Mouse to announce she was pregnant.

The success of the forthcoming conference, however, has been blessed by the modern form of respect, a preemptory news release attacking it. The Center for American Progress issued a “press call advisory” titled “Climate Deniers Congregate in the Nation’s Capital.”

It began, “The Heartland Institute, a conservative group funded by Exxon Mobil and Charles Koch…” Whoa! Mr. Chairman, we rise to question why the Center for American Progress would engage in an outright lie? Answer: That’s what progressives do because they are immune to the truth.

For the record, neither Exxon Mobil, nor Mr. Koch, has contributed to the cost of the conference. The former has not contributed to the Institute since 2006 and the Kochs have not sent any money in more than a decade.

But let’s finish the Center’s opening sentence that characterized the conference as “boasting a full agenda of notable climate deniers.” The term climate deniers has long been attached to any scientist, academic, politician, or commentator such as myself who had the temerity to point out that every single claim made on behalf of “global warming” was pure horse-hockey.

Since 1998 we have been discussing the new climate cycle, a COOLING one!

The Center for American Progress sought to make light of the conferences’ theme, “Restoring the Scientific Method.” And a damn fine theme it is considering the damage to the entire scientific community that, prior to the global warming hoax, was not famous for deciding what the truth was by “consensus.”

Real science still depends on peer review and the thorough testing of a hypothesis until it can no longer be disputed because it is reproducible. You can say the Earth is flat until you are blue in the face, but it is still round. The “warmists”, however, did everything they could to short-circuit this rigorous process.

The Center for American Progress is concerned that the forthcoming conference asserts that “global warming is not a crisis” and it will be devoted to “ending global warming alarmism” and “disputing that global warming is man-made.”

Would someone please tell the Center that the Earth is now more than a decade into a perfectly natural cooling cycle and that mankind does not control the sun, the oceans, the clouds, the volcanoes, or any climate event? Whenever a tsunami, blizzard, or tornado occurs, Mother Nature’s advice to mankind is “Get out of the way!”

Since I am loath to travel further these days than the Bagel Chateau one town over from where I reside, I shall be watching the conference on streaming video, June 30 to July 1. It should be noted that, in addition to a roster of some of the world’s most respected climate scientists who will make presentations, the Institute has routinely invited some of the most prominent alarmists—warmists—to participate.

A recent Forbes article noted that “a virtual Who’s Who of global warming media hounds” had been invited to participate in the conferences over the years. Conference coordinator, James Taylor, the Institute’s senior fellow for environment policy, said that Al Gore, James Hansen, Michael Mann and others “all seem to have some sort of scheduling conflict whenever they have to share the stage with a scientist who will be challenging their evidence.”

Meanwhile, the egregiously misnamed Center for American Progress will hold a conference call on Wednesday to launch an attack on the conference. No longer ignored or mocked, the Heartland Institute and its conference are clearly on the winning side.

Funeral ceremonies for “global warming” will follow with the mourners all wearing green.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Liberals Exit Stage Left

By Alan Caruba

Granted that reading anything in the liberal media can be daunting for the sheer volume of infantile content it represents, but it can be instructive, particularly as regards the emergence of trends in Leftist opinions.

I am sure that liberals were delighted to read all the criticism conservatives directed at George W. Bush, but they seemed unaware that Bush43 was more frequently than not on their team. As the debate over modifying Medicare rages on, they forget that he expanded the program by adding prescription benefits to it. W never saw a spending bill he would not sign.

Now, however, liberals have their man in the Oval Office and have had two and a half years to assess his performance. They are increasingly unhappy.

Sunday’s Rasmussen daily presidential tracking poll found that 24% of the nation’s voters “strongly approve” of Obama’s performance, but short of changing his party affiliation that is a near-constant level of approval. It just means that nearly one-in-four voters are too dumb to be allowed to use sharp instruments. I call it the Food Stamp Vote.

By contrast, “Nearly half of U.S. voters give President Obama poor marks for his handling of the economy,” noted Rasmussen and it is the economy that will dominate the 2012 elections even if he totally emptied the Strategic Oil Reserves.

I have long regarded Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, as a barometer of what liberals are saying to each other. She’s the Ann Coulter of liberalism and almost as entertaining.

Her Sunday column was titled “Why Is He Bi? (Sigh)” and notes that Obama is “binary” and “likes to be on both sides at once.” After that she was off and running, citing how “In Afghanistan, he wants to go but he wants to stay” while “On Libya, President Obama wants to lead from behind. He’s engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi while telling Congress he’s not engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi.”

“On the budget, he wants to cut spending and increase spending.” Her column is well worth reading because, essentially, she skewers Obama in a fashion that only a former true believer could.

“With each equivocation, the man in the Oval Office shields his identity and cloaks who the real Barack Obama is,” chiding that “On some of the most important issues facing this nation, it is time for the president to come out of the closet.”

Conservatives know who the “real” Obama is. He’s a Marxist. He’s possibly a Muslim. He is incompetent, arrogant, and was ineligible to run for the presidency or hold the office.

If it was just Maureen Dowd voicing her doubts, it would not be a trend, but over at the Huffington Post, Arianna was having her own doubts about recent Obama decisions, noting that “This week brought two high-profile examples of what has become the president’s trademark approach to leadership—‘the fierce urgency of something later’—as he kicked the proverbial can down the road on Afghanistan and gay marriage.”

An apparent memory lapse regarding Libya caused Arianna to write “We know that it’s easier to start a war than to finish one…” It was Bush who first ventured into Afghanistan to drive out al Qaeda and the Taliban after 9/11 and then got distracted by Iraq. Even so, he was elected twice. Obama has taken to openly expressing doubt he will be a two-term president.

Meanwhile, over at the reliably liberal Washington Post, the lead story was “Obama’s focus on visiting clean-tech companies raises questions.” Well, yes, it does and it was nice of the Post to notice. By now we all know that Obama is besotted by solar panels, electric cars, and high-speed trains where none are needed.

All those “green jobs” he promised have failed to materialize, but neither have all the other jobs he promised two trillion dollars ago.

Could we be witnessing a slow inching off the stage by the Left? Having lost three governorships and power in the House to Republicans, liberals/Democrats may be having second thoughts about the Obamessiah. This is surely a trend worth watching.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Esquire Magazine Telling Lies

By Alan Caruba

There is often a thin line between so-called "satire" and telling lies. That's what happened when Mark Warren blogged in Esquire's "Politics" online segment the following:

"Breaking: Jerome Corsi's Birther Book Pulled from Shelves!"

Not funny, not true.

It is a deliberate act of disinformation intended to hurt the sales of Corsi's new book, "Where's the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President."

I became aware of it when a link was posted on the May 18 Drudge Report in a fashion that suggested it was an actual news story.

Warren appended an "Update, 12:25 p.m." saying "We committed satire this morning..." Warren may disagree with the facts in Dr. Corsi's book, but he has no right to suggest "it's core premise and reason to exist" was "gutted by the news cycle" when Obama released an alleged long form birth certificate that has been judged a forgery.

Dr. Corsi, a regular contributor on World Net Daily and author of several bestselling non-fiction books, is a public figure and subject to such attacks, but to cloth this one as "satire" ignores its obvious intent when it claimed that World Net Daily's "Chief Executive Officer, Joseph Farah, has announced plans to recall and pulp the entire 200,000 first run printing of the book."

Just when one is recovering from a baseless. liberal, mainstream media attack on some conservative and/or Republican political figure, or someone expressing opposition to Barack Hussein Obama, along comes some new, vicious effort like this one.

I don't expect it to stop. Indeed, I expect it to increase as the Obama reelection campaign picks up speed. It is already telling various reporters and media they are not welcome or will not have access because of news coverage deemed unfavorable. Well, too bad.

As is often said, "The truth hurts", and Dr. Corsi's new book may well end the worst presidency of the modern era since Jimmy Carter's. It could even do so prior to the 2012 elections.

(c) Alan Caruba, 2011

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Liberals Attack America's Security

By Alan Caruba

“Exactly thirty years after Bolshevism consumed St. Petersburg and Moscow, it created a firestorm in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. In October 1947 the U.S. Congress held dramatic hearings on the subject of Communist infiltration in Hollywood.”

Now, decades after repeated attacks on U.S. embassies, U.S. Marines in Beirut, the USS Cole, and, of course, nearly a decade since 9/11, Rep. Peter King is holding hearings on Islamic radicalization in America, the kind that led to the murder of soldiers at Fort Hood and which The Wall Street Journal identified as “more than 50 known cases, involving about 130 individuals, in which terrorist plots were hatched on American soil.”

The similarities between the 1947 House Committee on Un-American Activities and Rep. King’s hearings are remarkable and, in both cases, the mainstream media played an extraordinary role in depicting them as a witch hunt. That metaphor was used by playwright Arthur Miller when he wrote “The Crucible” and Miller’s application to join the Communist Party of United States of America was one of the items the Committee made public.

Along with revelations that many Hollywood scriptwriters were CPUSA members, sworn to obey Russia and their Soviet masters and that a number of Hollywood stars had been duped by Communists to lend their names to anti-American activities has long been subsumed by a relentless campaign to depict the Committee as Un-American, not those working to undermine America. At the heart of that campaign, then and now, was the mainstream media and those in academia.

Liberals will always embrace totalitarian governments and movements. From Jane Fonda to former President Jimmy Carter, liberals have always seen America as the enemy and worked to further the aims of our enemies.

The opening quote to this commentary came from “Dupes”, a book by historian Dr. Paul Kengor that reveals not only the names and activities of Communist dupes in America from the years just following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia to the present day.

That history has been largely re-written by the many liberals in the nation’s media and in its colleges and universities. Among the most famous advocates of the Soviet Union were leading academics and, today, the revolutionaries of the 1960s, including some who bombed U.S. facilities, are found on America’s campuses, indoctrinating new generations.

To give you an idea of how great the threat to America truly is, Rep. King and his family have been protected, according to the Associated Press, by “round-the-clock security” provided by the New York Police Department and the Nassau County, N.Y. police.” Capitol police secured the congressional hearing room and surrounding areas, as well as his office.”

And, then, true to the media agenda to undermine and disparage the current and past hearings, the Associated Press report noted that “Critics have likened them to the McCarthy-era hearings investigating communism.” Bingo!

You would have to have read the March 10 Wall Street Journal editorial to learn that, among the efforts by jihadists to attack America being investigated, there were “plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, an office tower in Dallas, a federal court house in Illinois, the Washington, D.C. metro, and the trans-Alaska pipeline.”

“Most of these schemes were foiled at an early stage, though the Times Square bomber failed only at the moment of ignition. The worst attack was Major Nidal Hasan’s November 2009 murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood.”

And the White House response in all these cases was, “Do not jump to conclusions.” The Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security, led by Janet Napolitano and the Attorney General, Eric Holder, have choked on the words “Muslim terrorist” or even the word “terrorism.”

If you want to see how the purpose of these hearings will be twisted, you need only pay heed to the top ranking Democrat on the committee, Bernie Thompson of Mississippi, who said he believes the hearings could be used to “inspire terrorists.”

Only terrorists don’t need to be inspired by a U.S. Congressional Committee. They are already inspired by the Koran, the Muslim holy book.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Duped! Relentless Marxist Deception

By Alan Caruba

“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But, under the name of ‘liberalism’, they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”   Norman Thomas, former U.S. Socialist Party president candidate

Those of my age—I am in my seventies—have a strong recall of the Cold War, fought from the end of World War Two in 1945 until the fall of the infamous Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. We grew up knowing that the Communists—Marxists—were the enemy.

All throughout that period, American liberals—Leftists—did what they could to ridicule efforts to rid the government of Communists, attacked those like Sen. Joseph McCarthy who spoke out against them, defended the likes of Fidel Castro who turned Cuba into a prison-state, and worked to “improve” U.S.-Soviet relations.

A book I wish everyone would read, liberals and conservatives alike, “Dupes” by Paul Kengor, went into a second printing in January of this year (ISI Books, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Wilmington, DE). Kengor, a PhD, is a professor of political science at Grove City College. His book runs just over 600 pages, all thoroughly documented, and tells the history of the effort to impose communism on America and worldwide, dating back to the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

One of the characters in the book is Whittaker Chambers, a former Soviet spy who came to realize how evil Communism was and who revealed how the administrations of Roosevelt and Truman were shot through with spies and those cooperating with the Soviet Union, the most famous of whom was Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department official. Richard M. Nixon first came to public notice as a Senator from California who ran on an anti-Communist platform.

“While Communists make full use of liberals and their solicitudes, and sometimes flatter them to their faces, in private,” wrote Chambers, “they treat them with that sneering contempt that the strong and predatory almost invariably feel for victims who volunteer to help in their own victimization.”

Socialism has had a long, hard time establishing itself in America and has mostly been the gift of the Democratic Party that held control of Congress for forty years until that grip was broken in 1995. Despite that, Bill Clinton was reelected and, halfway through George W. Bush’s second term, congressional power returned to the Democrats.

Then, in 2008, a virtually unknown Senator who had not even served a full term, who had no paper trail of documentation regarding his life, who had written two memoirs that hinted at his far Left upbringing and associations, was elected President. Putting it bluntly, Americans were duped.

As Kengor points out, Americans “in poll after poll, year after year, have described themselves as ‘conservative’ over ‘liberal’ by a margin of roughly two to one, by approximately 40 percent to 20 percent.”

The political environment of America is conservative, but it has been the growing number of independent voters that have determined election outcomes. That says something about the disappointment that both political parties have created with their emphasis on enlarging the federal government, excessive spending, questionable wars, and general indifference to the voters.

The independents also reflect the sudden emergence of the Tea Party movement that occurred to protest Obamacare. They and others have swung back toward conservative candidates electing Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia, a Republican Senator from Massachusetts, and sent Allen West and Marco Rubio to Congress from Florida, along with a host of candidates supported by the Tea Parties.

Independents along with conservatives in America have been demonstrating a level of political resistance to senseless spending and the rough-shod imposition of leftist legislation that suggests the 2012 elections will “save” America from Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and their far Left minions.

The election of Barack Obama was the result of the greatest act of political deception in the modern era. It was aided by a news media that not only ignored all the obvious signs that Obama was a denizen of the far Left, but was surrounded, not only by Leftists, but Communists like Van Jones whose Apollo Alliance helped write Obama’s budget-bursting $800 billion ‘stimulus’ bill.

The revolutionaries of the 1960s had mostly migrated to positions in higher education where they could influence a new generation, oblivious to the carnage that has always accompanied a Communist revolution, killing millions. Younger Americans in 2008 meant that those aged 18 to 29 made up nearly one in five voters or about twenty-five million ballots. They preferred Obama by a margin of more than two to one, 66 percent to 32 percent. They had no memory of the Cold War.

Seeking to dupe Americans Obamacare was an act of raw political power that ignored the same widespread rejection that an earlier version, dubbed “Hillarycare”, had encountered. “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it,” said then Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Its purpose was to completely socialize healthcare in America.

Americans, old and young, must not be duped again. The very future of the nation depends on the actions of a Republican-controlled House in the years remaining as America’s first Marxist President works his way, seeking always to make dupes of us all.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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How Expert Are the Experts?

By Alan Caruba

We live in a society that apparently has experts on everything stacked ten deep. You cannot turn on the television without being introduced to experts of every description about everything.

That being the case, why is the nation on the brink of insolvency despite the fact that I can order a product, receive email confirmation, and a tracking notice of its shipment without once having to talk to a living person?

That, I submit, is pure genius, whereas creating programs for the wasteful redistribution of wealth, mine and yours, is my definition of really, really stupid.

Why stupid? Because communism and/or socialism, sooner or later always fails. Because banishing the ownership of private property—this is MY stuff, not yours—runs counter to everything we humans strive to achieve and because people don’t want to interact with the government in some fashion every damned day, unless it’s the postman.

As Thomas Paine put it, “that government is best which governs least”, calling it “a necessary evil.”

I got to wondering how many PhDs there are in the United States and, it only took a bit of Googling to conclude there is a huge glut of PhDs, not just here, but worldwide. Considering that it takes from 7.5 to 10 years to nail the diploma to the wall that is a lot of time acquiring something that often does not kick open the door to prosperity, although it does look good on their resumes.

Let us grant that we want our physicians, Doctors of Medicine, to have spent a good stretch of time learning how not to kill us in the process of curing us. Other fields critical to our well being include engineers who design bridges, buildings, and such. We want smart people to ensure that the vast preponderance of dumb people don’t kill us prematurely.

Anyone who has spent any time around PhDs or, in my case, answering their emails, soon concludes that many of them are just nitwits. The greatest drawback of being a PhD is, apparently, concluding that you are smarter than everyone else and then wanting to make that point on an hourly basis, particularly with strangers.

So, forgive me if I have grown old and skeptical listening to or reading PhDs and the views of “experts”, people who are supposed to know what they are talking about.

Permit me to cite just a few examples.

“So here is the Great Society. It’s the time—and it’s going to be soon—when nobody in this country is poor.” – Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965.

“You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.” Jim Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, firing Elvis Presley after one performance on September 25, 1954.

“Get your feet off my desk, get out of here, you stink, and we’re not going to buy your product.” – Joe Keenan, president of Atari, responding to Steve Job’s offer to sell him rights to the new personal computer he and Steve Wozniak had developed, 1976.

“There is not the slightest indication that (nuclear) energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” – Dr. Albert Einstein, 1932. (PS. He changed his mind).

Let me close this observation on expertise or the lack of it, by noting that all politicians lie. The best and most noble of them lie on occasion and the rest of them lie all the time. Our current President has managed to lie ceaselessly, with or without the aid of a TelePrompter. Other than the hardcore 25% of Liberals, most Americans have concluded that he is not to be trusted.

Likewise, far too many scientists have taken to lying a great deal as well and this has been particularly obvious as regards all those telling us that global warming is real, carbon dioxide is a lethal pollutant, and just about anything involving the use of a chemical is suicide.

In Proverbs it says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Let me amend that by suggesting that wisdom includes regarding all those experts on the television, radio and print media with a degree of skepticism. This is another way of saying take the time to do your own research. A republic such as ours requires people to seek the best answers to present problems.

The views of Liberals defy history, science, economics, and logic. They are wrong. Their experts are wrong. That is why we are struggling to put right, to eliminate, all their governmental “answers” to our present crisis.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Government as a Criminal Enterprise

By Alan Caruba

The Obama administration is “one of the most corrupt administrations in modern times” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) Sunday, January 2st. As the incoming chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, we can expect some explosive revelations.

The larger question is how long can a nation survive when its east and west coasts are occupied by liberals who are so out of touch with reality they cannot understand why the rest of the nation would disagree with them about anything? Two States alone, California and New York, are so broke and so laden with red tape they exist by mercy alone.

Liberals are people who still think bigger government, more regulations and more spending is the answer to every problem and need.

These are people who still talk about “global warming”, often in the midst of a raging blizzard.

These are people who refuse to consider the daily headlines of Muslim bombings of Christians, often in their churches, poses a threat to Western civilization.

In the middle, in “fly over country”, the bulk of the population simply stares in disbelief at the White House and Congress and keeps asking, “What are those people thinking?”

Having sent a small army of new people, conservatives, to the House of Representatives and narrowed the Senate’s ability to do further damage, these are independents who now expect change of a different kind than Obama’s.

It’s not so much change as a “return” to smaller government, less borrowing and spending, and such, but those days essentially ended in the last century as progressives got an income tax written into the Constitution, took away the right of State legislatures to name Senators who would represent their State’s interests, and then went on a binge of “entitlement” programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

A century of liberal government has bankrupted the government.

Indeed, just about anything one wants to do, go to college, start a small business, begin raising alpacas, whatever, the government will provide a loan or a grant or a tax exemption. The federal government determines how much each State receives for road and bridge repair, for its school systems, for just about everything for which States were formerly responsible.

The so-called Stimulus Act was nothing more than Representatives and Senators throwing every state and local project into a huge spending bill and then claiming it would create jobs. As has been the case for decades, the only jobs that get created from such largess are government jobs, while businesses large and small are required to waste thousands of hours and thousands of dollars filling out government forms.

There’s a word for that. It’s called communism. To avoid the ugliness of that, it is also called socialism, but it is still communism when the government makes the most important decisions about virtually everything affecting one’s life.

The financial collapse of 2008 was the result of the utter failure of two “government entities”, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that so distorted the housing mortgage marketplace that it finally collapsed from an excess of incoherence. No one knew who owned the mortgage. Not Fannie or Freddie, not the banks, investment firms or AIG that used them as “bundled” assets.

The current bank failure rate is testimony to the need to shut down Fanny and Freddy.

Those mortgages were loans made to people that often didn’t have a job, bought homes so large they were beyond their ability to make the monthly payments, or just got fired and couldn’t pay. Whose fault was that? The lenders who knew they could turn around and sell the mortgage to Fannie and Freddie, and stick the American taxpayer with the cost to the tune of billions.

Beyond the mortgage fiasco, there is the government’s steady erosion of American’s vast energy industries. They cannot drill for oil anywhere. They cannot mine coal. If, however, you want to build a wind or solar farm, the government will give you millions to produce minimal amounts of electricity and require utilities to purchase it.

Or perhaps you want to be an ethanol producer? The government requires that all gasoline be mixed with ethanol, thus raising the cost per gallon for a chemical that actually reduces the mileage you’d get without it. In addition, since it’s mostly made from corn it forces up the cost of feed to livestock which in turns forces up the cost of meat at the supermarket and the countless other food products that utilize corn in some fashion.

In a free market ethanol would not exist. Even Al Gore has disowned it!

What kind of government would insist on regulating carbon dioxide, claiming it is causing “global warming” when it is obvious to everyone there is no “global warming” and CO2 is not causing anything except the growth of every form of vegetation on planet Earth.

When a government lies that much to everyone in an effort to control all energy use, it has become a criminal enterprise.

While all this is going on, that same government is borrowing and borrowing and borrowing, mostly from China, to keep the monstrosity it has created going. Our government is flat broke.

When you add in a President who thinks America is too arrogant and represents people who eat too much, drive too much, and need to expect less if they get sick, it is little wonder people are beginning to lose faith in him.

We need a lot of change in a big hurry or one day we will all wake up and there will be no United States of America because it had to default on nearly $14 trillion in present debt. That's equal to our current Gross Domestic Product. The U.S. dollar continues to lose its value and we have two more years of a President who cannot sign more spending bills fast enough.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Thou Shalt Not

By Alan Caruba

Is there anything that some special interest group or some government agency doesn’t want to forbid you from eating, driving, wearing, using, and enjoying? We live surrounded by a multitude of “thou shalt not’s.”

Throughout history people have been afflicted with rulers and others who felt compelled to create lists of things forbidden to them. In matters of moral behavior, the Decalogue, otherwise known as the Ten Commandments, is quite sufficient to get you through life. Generally speaking, everything else from dress, food, and fun should be an individual decision so long as no one else is harmed.

The biggest “success” story among the lifestyle puritans are the endless restrictions on smoking. The biggest crock is the claim that “secondhand smoke” killed a lot of people who did not puff on a cigarette, cigar, or pipe. Worse, millions in “stimulus” money, public funds, have been allocated to anti-smoking campaigns.

As just one example, Georgia’s Dekalb County’s Board of Health received $3.2 million for an anti-smoking campaign and it is just one of four urban areas that have received such funding. A total of $650 million is being wasted in this fashion. How many jobs will this create? None.

My late Father lived into his early 90s and I cannot recall a day he did not light up his pipe, nor the sweet perfume of the smoke as it wafted around the house. My late Mother, who never smoked a day in her life, also lived well into her 90s.

Mother was a cookbook author who taught classes in gourmet cooking and dining for three decades in the adult schools where we lived. An authority on wines and liquors, we had a wine cellar in the basement fit for royalty; apparently all that wine had no adverse affect and likely prolonged her life, Dad’s and mine.

Americans love fast food. We love our McDonald’s, our Burger King’s, the many pizza franchises, Red Lobster’s, Olive Garden’s, Outback, and all the other wonderful places to take the family or a date. They all remain the object of scorn and scolding by endless self-appointed “consumer advocates” They and every other thing we eat are blamed for an alleged epidemic of obesity. Do I care if someone is fat? No. It’s none of my business.

Claiming that fat people cost taxpayer’s money is absurd. Many come from a long family line of hefty ancestors. Surely all those people who are genetically disposed to cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses cost money as well, particularly if they have lost their jobs and no longer have health insurance.

I am concerned about illegal drug use, mostly because it fuels the Mexican drug cartel wars that are killing Americans foolish enough to wander into bandito land. I yield to my libertarian inclination to think that we could eliminate a lot of wasted time and money if we just legalized drugs and let those foolish enough to use them pay taxes for the privilege.

I know that drug users, like alcoholics, underage drinkers, and a wide variety of solid citizens will drink and drive, but that’s why we have police and jails. Nothing will stop it except perhaps for bartenders who refuse to sell “one more for the road.” You could close every liquor store in sight and people, as in the bad old days of Prohibition, would find a way to have a drink or two or three.

I grew up in a time when kids rode bikes without mandatory safety helmets, drank water from the garden hose, played ball in the street, and lived to tell about it. We were told “don’t talk to strangers” and it was good advice. We were told to be home for dinner, a time set aside for the entire family to sit down together and discuss the events of their day.

I dislike the eco-freaks who demand that everyone buy a hideously expensive electric car when the ones we do buy are marvels of technology while there’s an estimated thirteen trillion untapped barrels of oil sufficient to keep them running on high octane for a very long time to come. Consumers will save an estimated five billion dollars if the government allows the ethanol mandate to end this year.

I don’t frankly want to hear that every single thing I buy is not sufficiently “Green” or that my “lifestyle” is an offense to planet Earth. I harbor the notion that the Earth doesn’t care and that these annoying people will complain that my ashes were despoiling the Atlantic Ocean when I pass from this mortal coil.

I have a friend who lives in a cabin in the backwoods of Missouri with two dogs as his companions. In the past he has enjoyed a fair degree of success as an author and other literary endeavors, but these days, when not earning a living as an editor, he is into the distilling arts and sciences, making some excellent hard cider and other potable potions. For his 51st birthday, he has signed off social networking on Facebook and yanked his blog from the Internet. To his longtime friends he said you know my phone number and address.

He is a happy man, having earlier rid himself of a crazed wife and dodged a potential one for whom he was the perfect “fixer-upper.” An unfortunate investment in a saloon in the methamphetamine capitol of the U.S. did not pan out. He accepts the fact that the nation is broke and that he cannot do a damn thing about it, nor does he expect Congress will do anything sensible to avoid this outcome.

I find his attitude refreshing though it is my “job” to warn against the coming collapse.

It is, however, the nature of all people elected or appointed to any position of power, no matter how low or high, to thereafter enlist an army of bureaucrats to enforce a multi-volume encyclopedia of regulations intended to save us from ourselves and to behave exactly as they want us to. I don’t like any of these people.

I wish all those harridans, hypocrites, and others who think they know better how you and I should live our lives would all be transported to the dark side of the Moon.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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Are Liberals Just Nuts?

By Alan Caruba

Anyone who has tried to discuss, debate, or argue political issues with a liberal eventually concludes they are dealing with someone too deranged to be influenced by facts. The midterm election defeat of Democrats in the House and the narrowed margin of control of the Senate mean nothing to liberals whose explanations ignore reality.

Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, explained the defeat in almost classic liberal terms. “Well, anger certainly continues to be all the rage in the corridors of American politics,” he pouted in an commentary titled “Man Up, America!” ignoring the fact that Nancy Pelosi--a woman--wielded the power in the House that produced the largest turnover of seats since 1938.

Ignoring the possibility that two years of legislative insanity that forced Obamacare on an unwilling majority of Americans, of stimulus bills that were nothing more than pork, of financial reforms that ignored the source of the mortgage meltdown, Carter concluded that “The general anti-Obama rage out there is palpable, adding that the “hatred for Obama” had “more to do with race than anything else.”

This “white, conservative and independent Americans are all bigots” mantra ignores the fact that Obama made history as the first black man to be elected president and that it could not have happened if a lot of white people had not voted for him, starting with the Iowa primaries in a very white State.

“What makes today’s fury more worrying,” Carter continued, “is the fact that angry right-wing extremists tend to carry guns in disproportionate numbers to their liberal counterparts.” Where have we heard this before? Oh yes, it was Obama talking about people “who cling to their guns and religion” instead of turning their lives over to an all-powerful central government.

Nearly a million “angry right-wing extremists” turned up in Washington, D.C. to peacefully protest passage of Obamacare without a single arrest or incident. They were summarily dismissed by a very arrogant White House that was too busy forcing “healthcare reform” on the majority of Americans to pay attention to how many of them were unemployed.

There is an aspect of psychology called “projection” when one accuses someone of the very characteristics found in themselves. “What do you call an electorate that seems prone to acting out irrationally, is full of inchoate rage, and is constantly throwing fits and tantrums”, asked Carter. We call them liberals.

Compounding the failure, refusal or inability to accept the reality that liberal, Democrat actions, led by President Obama and enacted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, we have learned that the Speaker has made it clear that she wants to retain her power as the new House Minority Leader.

Historically, House Speakers who have presided over a loss of power resign, but not Nancy Pelosi. Indeed, her letter to the Democratic caucus cited “the most productive Congress in a half century” without apparently taking any notice that its legislative program led to a loss of 61 seats in the House. “We have no intention of allowing our great achievements to be rolled back,” she said, citing the programs that were responsible for a crippled party in Congress.

Under normal conditions, the current Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer, would be expected to be elected by the Democratic caucus to replace Madame Pelosi, but there does not appear to be anything “normal” about those who lost or those who survived.

Pelosi wants the Democrat Seal of Approval for two of the worst years Americans have been through and, of course, Democrats have been in control of Congress since 2006, halfway through former President Bush’s second term. Stimulus hasn’t worked. Unemployment is higher now than when Obama was elected. Obamacare, passed by Democrats who hadn’t even been allowed to read the bill, and a multitude of other ills resulted in a massive rejection of Democrats in Congress.

What have liberals learned from this? Nothing! The swift decline of confidence in Obama is attributed to his skin color. The economic stagnation is the fault of Wall Street. The rise in healthcare premiums will be blamed on insurance companies, not Obamacare. The anger of the electorate is blamed on angry, white-wing conservatives even though Tea Party candidates did not all get automatically elected to office.

On the Saturday following the elections, Rasmussen Reports summed up the situation for Obama as follows:

“Still somewhat in shellshock following Tuesday’s elections, President Obama so far seems content to blame the messenger, not the message.”

“In other words, the American people would really like his agenda if he had just explained it better. We’ll see.”

“Voters have mixed feelings about the tone the president set at his first post-election press conference on Wednesday. Most, in fact, are not confident that the president can work with the new Republican majority in the House to do what’s best for the American people.”

“Just before Election Day, the majority of voters said the election was a referendum on the president’s agenda and that he should change course if Republicans win control of the House. But most also don’t expect him to make that change.”

Obama got elected on a message of hope and change, but voters did not like the change and are running out of any hope that he understands what happened on Election Day.

That’s what happens when liberals are given power and that is why the next two years will be continued resistance to the changes voters want. Expecting them to rationally interpret the elections is a waste of time.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → Are Liberals Just Nuts?

Liberal Organizations Betray Their Members

By Alan Caruba

As we head into the home stretch leading to the November 2nd midterm elections, one factor getting very little attention is the way that liberal organizations have failed or betrayed their members, starting with the Democratic Party.

Even a brief look at the Democratic Party provides a reminder that it stood against civil rights from the days of slavery, giving rise to the Republican Party whose first presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, who had to preside over a Civil War to end it.

The Democratic Party has managed to serve up some truly awful presidents from Woodrow Wilson to FDR who prolonged the Great Depression with his policies, to Lyndon Baines Johnson whose Vietnam policies filled cemeteries, to Jimmy Carter’s bumbling, to Bill Clinton who used the Oval Office for sexual dalliance, to the current White House resident, Barack Obama, whose diminishing approval ratings are testimony and an indictment of his incompetence.

In a similar fashion the National Association for Colored People has demonstrated in the years since the Civil Rights movement that it is little more than a liberal platform for some of the worst bias to be found, including that expressed against African-Americans. It was quick to denounce Shirley Sherrod, the former head of the Department of Agriculture’s rural development office in Georgia. The organization then claimed it had been “snookered” by a video that purported to show Ms. Sherrod expressing bias, but it had failed to conduct even a cursory investigation to defend her.

Lately the NAACP issued a resolution denouncing the Tea Party movement as biased, claiming that it is rife with “racist extremists.” Its president, Ben Jealous, said “We take issue with the Tea Party’s continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements” but there isn’t a shred of evidence to support such blatant nonsense.

The NAACP has conveniently forgotten that it was a former Republican President, George W. Bush who elevated two African-Americans to the position of Secretary of State, one of whom, Colin Powell, had previously been endorsed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George H.W. Bush.

Another liberal group, the National Organization of Women, have become famous for failing to defend or support women who have become vocal advocates of conservative issues despite their rise to national recognition as authors, talk show personalities, and as political leaders. The result is a lopsided babble that largely ignores the enormous strides women have made across the political and social spectrum.

Few women running on the Republican ticket running for public office these days have a NOW endorsement. The California chapter has actually endorsed former governor Jerry Brown and is backing Sen. Barbara Boxer for reelection. This reflects most of the NOW chapter endorsements.

It is an extreme irony that one of the most hated women in America today was the first to have become the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Her name alone is enough to incite cross-over votes.

It can be argued that these two national organizations do not reflect the views of either the African-American community or that of women, but both have been around long enough to command attention and to have been thoroughly infiltrated by liberals oblivious to the role conservatives have played in advancing their goals.

We may well see a sea change among their membership, large scale defections, as they confront the reality that Democrats and liberals have long since taken their support for granted.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → Liberal Organizations Betray Their Members

The Party's Over

By Alan Caruba

Gray skies are gonna clear up,
Put on a happy face;
Brush off the clouds and cheer up,
Put on a happy face.
Take off the gloomy mask of tragedy,
It's not your style;
You'll look so good that you'll be glad
Ya' decide to smile!

What, may I ask, is there to smile about in an America whose economy is in decline along with many other aspects of life in our nation?

I have been thinking lately about some of the nasty history I have lived through. The difference was that from the end of World War Two until the dawn of the 21st century, the nation was a superpower backed up by a super economy. That was then, this is now.

The party is over.

Americans need to understand what the problems are and what must be done to turn around an economy that is rapidly losing momentum to nations like China and India. We must have new jobs and lots of them. Instead, we are bleeding jobs and government at the federal and state level must take much of the blame.

We have been through bad times before. Many of my readers are too young to remember President Nixon’s Watergate scandal that began with a break-in at the Democratic headquarters on June 17, 1972 and ended with Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974. You had to have been there to know what it was like to live through two years of slow revelations regarding the role of the president and many of those around him. It was a national agony.

That wasn’t the worst of it. Watergate transpired against the background of the Vietnam War that had escalated under Lyndon B. Johnson who, in turn, had become president when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Anyone who has ever lived through a assassination never wants to live through another. So the war raged on with no end in sight and Americans marched, and marched, and marched against it. I was one of them.

Those were not happy times, but then, in response to the Nixon debacle, we elected the biggest dufus to ever hold the office until the 2008 elections and that was Jimmy Carter. As president, he was utterly clueless. The Iranian Islamic revolution occurred on his watch along with an energy crisis. As just one example, it was Jimmy who was the first to put solar panels on the roof of the White House and guess who is re-installing them again? The latest dufus.

Economists cite 47 recessions since 1790 and all were driven by bad governmental regulatory policies. And, no, we have learned nothing from this because the latest one repeats all the errors of the Great Depression; mindless government spending, even more regulation of Wall Street, and the failure to phase out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

After World War II ended in 1945, the U.S. had recessions in 1949, 1953, 1958, 1960-61, 1969-70, 1973-75, 1980, et cetera. In short, there hasn’t been a decade since the 40s without a recession, but most lasted on average about eleven months.

Some mysterious group of gnomes recently announced that the present recession “ended” in 2009. I think they were all smoking from the same hookah when they came up with that whopper. A look at unemployment and “under-employment” (same thing) figures give no real-world indication it’s over, nor does a growing population on food stamps.

President Obama, a man who never ran a business in his entire life and whose economic advisors fit the same description, has dealt with the present economic crisis by blaming it on George W. Bush. No longer able to do that, he now simply refers to “the last eight years.”

The Blame George excuse ignored several essential facts. The housing mortgage crisis is entirely the result of the “social justice” agenda of progressives, i.e., Democrats, who created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and defended both (are you listening Barney Frank and Frank Dodd) even as this house of cards was collapsing.

Americans must share the blame for buying homes they could not afford from banks who frequently had no choice but to make the loans. The government’s housing policy dates back to 1934, at which time the nation was already into the Great Depression.

The taxpayers ended up owning nearly fifty percent of all mortgages. Banks and investment houses that bought the “bundled securities” took a bath. Where in the Constitution does it say the federal government should be in the mortgage business? It doesn’t!

Then, too, you may remember that George W. Bush got real busy on 9/11 having to make some very tough decisions about a bunch of stateless enemies calling themselves al Qaeda and the Taliban. Okay, he also helped balloon the deficit by signing some very bad ideas such as the expansion of Medicare with a pharmaceuticals benefit. It’s not like he came up with Obamacare; a wholesale disaster.

Once we all get passed the midterm elections, likely to reflect a sweeping rejection of everything Obama and the Democrats represent, we should expect the Republicans to do what they were supposed to do in 1994. There will be a lot of new faces in Congress who, in theory, are beholden only to the people who put them there. In reality, however, they are beholden to the large campaign donors who put them there. That said, much depends on the quality of the GOP leadership expected to take over Congress.

There’s a lot to do, not the least of which is to clear away mountains of regulations that have driven American industry everywhere other than America. We don’t make things here any more and no economy can last very long without a manufacturing base.

Obamacare must simply be repealed. Whole government agencies need to be scaled back or eliminated. We not only can’t afford them, they are counter-productive in vital areas such as education, energy, and of course the environment.

Recently, in my home State of New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie lowered the boom on a multi-billion dollar railroad tunnel linking the State to New York City. He said that the State simply could not afford it. When was the last time you heard a politician say that?

The Secretary of Transportation paid him a personal visit to get him to change his mind about the tunnel. If he does, I’m thinking a lot of federal funds will start flowing to the Garden State. It’s called politics.

Still, it was refreshing to hear a governor, any governor, say “We can’t afford that.”

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → The Party's Over