Palin or Cain and a government Americans deserve

In a free society citizens deserve the government they vote for. As much as I might despise the everything the liberals stand for and are doing to this country, the truth of the matter is that they did not seize power in some coup d'état… except for maybe Stuart Smalley. Nor did they come to power legally and then change the rules once they got there as Hitler did. No, they were by and large voted into power promising to do exactly what they have done. The fact that most of America is unhappy with the way things are going says more about Americans in general than it does about the politicians themselves.

Although the dysfunction of government goes back for decades, 2008 provides a perfect prism through which to understand the failure of the American people. As most Americans now recognize, Barack Obama is a complete disaster as President. While this reality may have come as a complete surprise to some, the truth of the matter is that all of the signs were there for anyone who wanted to look. From being raised by self identifying Communists, to seeking out Communist professors, from spending two decades in Reverend Wright’s church to announcing his entry into public office in the home of two terrorists to being the point man for ACORN, all of this and much more was easily available to anyone who wanted to see it. Indeed, despite the mainstream media’s efforts to ignore or whitewash such aspects of Obama’s background, many Americans decided they were immaterial. He had after all been elected to the Illinois legislature and was a serving US Senator and he gave rousing speeches. Apparently that was enough to qualify him to lead the most powerful nation on earth.

To put this in perspective, that’s the equivalent of an NFL owner inviting a sports columnist to coach his team. Just because the columnist uses the lexicon of the game and knows how to criticize what others are doing doesn’t mean he has a clue how to actually run an offense, a defense or lead a team up of alpha male millionaires in their quest to outsmart and outperform 16 other teams made up of alpha male millionaires and led by professional coaches. Not only would the team get demolished, but anyone with a functioning brain could have predicted that outcome from the start. Appropriately enough Obama’s election in 2008 began America’s march to becoming the 2008 Detroit Lions... who went 0-16.

At the end of the day, Barack Obama being elected President of the United States is nothing more than a dereliction of duty on the part of the American people and is an example of the despicable state of the American body politic. To many Americans Barack Obama was an empty vessel into which they poured their hopes and dreams. And if he could assuage their white guilt in the process, even better! The problem is, he wasn’t an empty vessel. He was a filled to the rim with everything un-American and none of it was hidden from view. To not see it one simply needed to willingly avert their eyes.

It’s not a surprise that the Tea Party movement began even before Obama’s ineptitude became apparent. The election itself started to galvanize much of the population, particularly those who were dispirited by the GOP’s nomination of the squishy John McCain but pulled the lever for him nonetheless, just to watch the “electable moderate” lose. As President Obama’s incompetence became apparent and his anti-capitalist policies began to make it into legislation and the Federal Register, more and more Americans began to understand the threat that the left in general and President Obama in particular represent to the United States. On February 19th, 2009 Rick Santelli put words to the feelings that tens of millions of Americans were experiencing… viola’ the Tea Party was born.

The question for the GOP is, do they want the 2012 election to look more like 2008 or 2010? In 2008 they nominated a “moderate” who had been the darling of the media until he vanquished any real conservative opposition… what little there was. He then was morphed into a clone of the hated George Bush. In 2010 on the other hand, when voters across the country were given a slate of largely conservative candidates, the GOP picked up over 60 seats in the house and sent bedrock conservatives like Pat Toomey, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul to the Senate.

Is the GOP going to once again bring to the dance a “moderate who can win the general election” like Mitt Romney or are they going to go with a true conservative who can make a case to the American people that the time for meandering down the road to socialism and fascism is over? Although a moderate like Romney might put on the brakes, the reality is that what the United States needs is a full stop and a return to a Constitutional government. Let community organizations run social programs; Let states and parents manage education; Let citizens focus on creating wealth and prosperity as they pursue Life, Liberty and Happiness while the government focuses on securing the borders, adjudicating contract disputes and providing for national defense.

Disgust with Barack Obama and his party is not going to be sufficient to change the direction of the country. If the GOP is going to victorious it will have to field a candidate who clearly articulates a different path and who will be able to stand up against the media’s coming full court press in support of Barack Obama. Sarah Palin should be the one making that case, but unfortunately she is not running… yet. Herman Cain is a close second. Until Saturday night his chances were rather slim. Perhaps things have shifted… we’ll see if the $25 I just sent him helps.

However things go for Cain, the debate thus far leaves much to be desired. The back and forth about how RomneyCare differs from ObamaCare is a red herring. Arguing whether the Ponzi scheme that is Social Security should be called a Ponzi scheme is a debate more appropriate for a kindergarten class. They distract from the central message of lower taxes, less regulation and basically getting government out of the way so that people can live their lives. The government that takes the oath in January 2013 will indeed be the government Americans deserve. Let’s hope GOP gives them a candidate to lead that government that they can be proud of as well.

The left's 40% blue core... insanity, stupidity or religion?

It’s still a year out from the election, but Rasmussen’s most recent poll makes one start to wonder. It shows President Obama at 46% of the vote against GOP frontrunner Rick Perry’s 39%. That was a flip from the previous week’s Obama 41% vs. Perry’s 44%.

The Perry part of that poll is not really of consequence. President Obama tends to perform about the same against various other challengers and against the “generic” Republican candidate. The ebb and flow of a weekly news cycle has an impact on the fringes, but not so much on the core. And that core is the thing that one has to wonder.

It appears that about 40% of the country makes up a core of blue… people who are wedded to their leftist philosophy as if it were a religion… they believe it will succeed despite all evidence to the contrary. From the economic malaise it has inflicted on the United States to the economic meltdown that is playing itself out in Europe to the wholesale abandonment of the leftist policies by governments from Beijing to Delhi to Hanoi. Despite the complete lack of a single demonstrable example of a sustained success of the Marxist / Keynesian / Alinsky philosophy, they still believe and it appears that virtually nothing anyone in the red corner can say can change their minds.

Today the aspirations embodied by their messiah are no longer just theoretical solutions and aspirational promises. This is not 2008 when the press could blame all of America’s woes on a reviled Bush White House. It’s not 2008 when Barack Obama could tell stories about how he plans on putting America back to work by rebuilding our infrastructure and creating green jobs. It’s not 2008 where Barack Obama could promise to make America respected again in the eyes of the world by closing Guantanamo and ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s not 2008 where Barack Obama could rail against George Bush’s “years of unprecedented fiscal irresponsibility.” On the contrary, in the summer of 2011 President Obama finds himself in the middle of a perfect storm of failure, yet it seems to have no effect on his followers.

The most recent issue is of course Solyndra. The solar panel company that was the poster child for the green jobs that were the key to fulfilling his campaign pledge to future generations that (his election) “was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” In 2009 the Administration gave the company $535 million in loan guarantees and in March of 2010 the President toured the company, declaring “the promise of clean energy isn’t just an article of faith.” Today the company sits bankrupt and taxpayers are out half a billion dollars. What’s worse for President Obama’s green jobs agenda is the fact that apparently each of those touted green jobs costs $5 million…

On the jobs front the President has just gone back to Congress and requested that they give him an additional $500 billion for a second stimulus program… because his previous $1 Trillion stimulus plan worked so well. The President suggested that his stimulus program (circa 2009) would bring unemployment down to 7.1% by August of 2011. In reality, his stimulus program did pass yet unemployment stands at 9.1% today. Fully two million more Americans are unemployed today than were promised by the President.

On the single most important issue of the day, jobs, President Obama has demonstrated not only that he is out of ideas, but that he wants to double down on the same bad ideas didn’t work in the past… and he wants to pay for the whole thing by raising taxes by $1.5 trillion. Unfortunately for him, things don’t look any better anywhere else. Domestically, inflation is on the rise, the economy is on life support and federal deficits are larger than at any time in history. Internationally, America’s leadership is once again so strong that the Palestinians are heading to the UN to ask for recognition despite US opposition, the Arab spring threatens to put Islamists in charge across the region, Europe is crumbling and Asian allies wonder about America’s commitment to the region as Taiwan is left twisting in the wind by the administration’s decision not to sell the island nation 66 new F-16 fighter jets for fear of offending the Chinese. Politically, the President’s leftist policies have so pummeled the citizens of New York that last week the GOP captured a house seat that had been held by the Democrats since 1923.

While the nirvana that was to be ushered in by Hope and Change has not materialized, it’s not because the administration has demurred from putting its policies in place. On the contrary, they’ve done so in most cases either by legislation or executive action. Despite all of this failure, a solid 40% of the electorate still supports President Obama and the discredited policies of the left. One wonders how is it possible that seeing all of this they could still believe? Then again, maybe it’s not so difficult to understand. A sign of a religion after all, is believing in something despite all empirical data that suggest it might not be true, or perhaps more accurately, the lack of empirical data that suggest it is true. The difference between a religion and the leftist policies of President Obama is that the former typically promises nirvana in the afterlife while the latter is supposed to be focused on this one. Nothing can prove Heaven doesn’t exist and therefore believers continue to believe. It’s called faith. History on the other hand, from FDR right up to Barack Obama, demonstrates clearly that the socialist, redistributive policies of the left simply do not work. Yet, the believers still believe, and vote accordingly. That fits Einstein's definition of insanity. In this case it might just be called stupidity.

The Democratic Party - A Picture America can do without...

Sometimes when we look at events in isolation we see them as tragic or despicable or just lamentable. When we look at them together as a group however we come away with a completely different impression. They can seem to form a pattern or a picture that was hardly discernible when seen in isolation. The following is a collection of just such events.

• Earlier this year Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, seeking to save the state from financial ruin, set about to adjust the way the state dealt with public employee unions. The result was a demonstration of force and the threat of violence from the unions. Union minions took over the state capitol, intimidated legislators and in the end caused millions of dollars of damage to the capitol itself.



• This year has seen a wave of flash mob attacks around the country where youths utilize social media to coordinate attacks on stores or random people. From Chicago to Dallas to Philadelphia to Washington these attacks represent something different. Many of the attacks were caught on tape. The thing that jumps out at one is that many of the criminals had smiles on their uncovered faces. They were literally having fun destroying or stealing others property or harming the innocent store clerk or random passerby. In a mirror image of the riots in the United Kingdom last month, these adolescents seemed to be sociopaths in the sense that they had no connection to civilized society.



• The voters of Indiana’s 7th District must be proud. Their congressman, Andre Carson last week told an audience in Miami that some in Congress would “love to see us as second-class citizens” and “some of them in Congress right now of this tea party movement would love to see you and me…hanging on a tree.” The Congressman is accusing Tea Partiers and fellow Congressmen of being murdering racists. The most despicable thing about the Congressman’s comments is not that he said them in the first place, but that his comments aroused approval of the members of audience. In addition, so acceptable to Democrats are the Congressman’s statements that he was more than willing to defend them once they made it into the public square.



• At this year’s Labor Day celebration in the Democrat run disaster that is Detroit, Teamster’s Union President Jimmy Hoffa said this: “President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let’s take these sons of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong!” Hoffa was literally declaring war on the Tea Party. This was not delivered in the dark corner of a union hall somewhere but in front of thousands of people as well as the President of the United States, not to mention a number of news cameras. In his remarks that followed, President Obama not only did not distance himself from Hoffa’s remarks, but acknowledged him by name as one of the “Proud sons and daughters of Michigan representing working people here and across the country.”



• Finally there are the longshoremen in Washington State. Five hundred members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union stormed the Port of Longview last Thursday and destroyed the property of EGT, LLC, a company with whom they are involved in a labor dispute following EGT’s use of workers from a different union. What’s worse, the union thugs threatened a policeman and took six guards hostage for a number of hours. The union’s actions defied a federal restraining order issued the previous week against it after the union was accused of assault and death threats. While the union officially branded Thursday’s action a “wildcat” action over which they had no control, the day before the ILWU President Bob McEllrath and 18 others were arrested and vowed to return.

The thing that stands out about these various events is not that violence occurs or that people use despicable rhetoric to try and gain support for their unsupportable platforms or positions. No, the thing that stands out about them is that the people at the center of these various events seem surprisingly comfortable doing what they were doing or saying what they were saying in full view of God and Creation - not to mention the general public via some video cameras.

Few of the flash mobbing youths are concerned enough about anonymity to even bother to make the most rudimentary attempt at covering their faces. The Wisconsin Capitol had an air of Mardi Gras about it as demonstrators went about defacing state property in full view of news cameras from around the country. Jimmy Hoffa felt entirely comfortable offering the President of the United States his “army” in order to “take these sons of bitches out” in front of thousands of people and numerous cameras.

While criminals and manipulative politicians are not particularly unique or new, what is new is the brazenness with which they perpetrate their crimes or throw around demonstrably false charges or exhort their followers to violence. Other than the longshoremen who used violence under the cover of night, none of these people seem to be a bit concerned with a threat of sanction or consequence.

Individually these events are disheartening to say the least. Together however they are something more. Together these events form a picture of the modern Democratic Party. Government welfare programs, identity politics and union thuggery. This is a picture the United States can do without.

Unless America wants these anecdotes to become the norm, a change will have to be made. A century of failed policies should be enough to send the Democratic Party to the dustbin of history. Let’s hope 2012 is the beginning of the end for the party of big government, confiscatory taxes and anti-social behavior. Now that's a picture worth seeing.