The Borg of Uncle Sam...

I grew up in the shadow of World War II. It had been over for almost 30 years by the time I started school, but nonetheless WW II was probably the most talked about subject in my history classes throughout. But the funny thing is, as close as it was, it seemed like it was ancient history.  It was finished. The evil Nazis were vanquished and the world had moved on. America and her allies had won and there were new enemies to slay.

While too young to understand Vietnam when it was raging, by high school I had a better grasp of world events and we were living on Guantanamo Bay, down in Cuba.  Although today it’s more well known for its prison facilities, at the time it was a U.S. Navy training / support station and the enemy was the Soviets and Fidel Castro. 

In the late 80’s after college, I was stationed with the Army in West Germany and our biggest alerts were usually related to the East Germans and they killed an American officer while I was there.  I don’t remember all the details but the Americans said he was on an approved inspection mission and the East Germans said he was spying.

Throughout these decades, I always knew that America was on the right side of history.  It was not that I’d been brainwashed, but it always seemed to me that an objective analysis of the circumstances, from WW II to Korea to Vietnam to the Cold War, America was the good guy, trying to do what’s right.  It’s a funny thing about the “good guy” framework, however, that everybody, even the guys who we know are the bad guys, think they’re the good guys!

Nor is it that I never questioned anything.  In college (of course) I had professors who said the US was the bad guy in Vietnam and that the Soviets only built missiles to defend themselves against the imperialist Americans. I disagreed but my words fell on deaf ears.    

So now we are here 35 years since the collapse of our last superpower enemy and a quarter century from 9/11, and I’m starting to wonder if America’s still the good guy. 

Some time ago it dawned on me that for most of my life I had given the government the benefit of the doubt.  Indeed, while imperfect and often inefficient and ineffective on a wide variety of policies, my default position for most of my life had been that the government was, at the end of the day, working for the American people.

Today, sadly, my default position is literally the opposite. 

In college I read Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lindon Johnson and according to it LBJ was a deeply egotistical, power hungry son of a bitch who would sell his mother to get power. While I think that’s clearly true, it seems that once in office he was genuinely interested in helping people and solving America’s problems. While he was a feckless buffoon as it relates to Vietnam, in domestic matters he wanted to help solve long standing problems, and that intention is not diminished by the fact that his programs were stunning failures.

That’s the way it is sometimes, people in government make mistakes. We all know that. But what has happened over the last two decades is a much different animal. Beginning with Barack Obama using the IRS to shut down Tea Party groups and right up until the moment someone in the White House used Joe Biden’s autopen to give pardons to half the Democrat Party and their swamp comrades, the American government has transformed from a virtuous, if frequently stumbling, vehicle for safely navigating the country through the chaos of life into an autonomous borg that largely operates without effective constraint and almost solely for the purpose of perpetuating itself. 

Biologists frequently say that the fundamental nature of life is to propagate the species, and that seems to be the path the borg of American government has taken. In the 21^st century we’ve seen an amalgamation of the Democrat party and the bureaucratic state, with a bastardization of both.  Maybe no better example exists than the Department of Education.  The education of children is easily one of the most important things a society can do to help perpetuate its culture and civilization, and the DOE spends $280 billion a year on it. Sadly, of that number, less than $70 billion actually goes to educating children.  The rest goes to bureaucracy, consultants, NGOs and ultimately, back into the pockets of Democrat politicians. This would be a crime even if schools were properly educating children, but they’re not.  Across the country you have failing schools where kids can’t do simple math, easily the most basic skill one should take from school. But you know what they are learning?  How to be LGBT.

This, like so much of the rest of government is far beyond incompetence. It’s criminal. It’s ceased to be a vehicle for ensuring the freedom of American citizens and promoting the interests of the United States.  It’s literally become the opposite. From funding prosecutors who release violent criminals into American communities and funding leftist thefts of elections while quashing of free speech internationally, to funding the invasion of our country and undermining the Bill of Rights, the American government has become the enemy within. 

If nothing else, Donald Trump and DOGE should be applauded for exposing what so many of us felt for so long but could never quite put our fingers on. 

Somewhat like learning that there is no Santa Claus, in the back of my mind I’m a bit wistful for that feeling of inner peace I had when I used to think of the country and the government as a single inherently good entity. While I think the former still is good, the latter, not so much, and I was late to the party in internalizing the idea of a difference between the two. For me Uncle Sam was America and the government combined.  Sadly, the Democrats weren’t under that illusion, and their recognizing the dichotomy long ago gave them decades to brainwash their constituents and hide the inner workings of their machine in plain site, behind countless official looking government seals and compassionate sounding NGOs.

Despite what the Democrat / bureaucrat borg has wrought, I firmly believe America remains a great, if imperfect nation and I remain convinced that taken as a whole throughout most of her 250 years, the county and the government have been mostly on the right side of history.  To the degree that that’s no longer true for the government, I’m glad we’re at a point where much of its malfeasance and malevolence is being exposed. It will take a long time and a lot of courage on the part of Republican politicians to fix this situation, but at least it’s being exposed before it’s too late. We’ll see in the next two years if the GOP has the courage necessary to actually set a course for bringing government back under the control of the citizens. Rand Paul, Mike Lee & Thomas Massie have their work cut out for themselves… Hopefully they’ll get some help along the way. 

30 Million Dead Americans? The Coronavirus Is Not A Hoax, But The Hysteria Surrounding It Very Much Is...

On June 6th 1944 over 250,000 American and allied personnel left from England and headed to the Normandy to face the Nazis who were entrenched along in giant fortified bunkers all along the French coast. The Nazis had control of virtually all of Europe and Operation Overlord was the Allied attempt to gain a beachhead in northern France from which they could open another front against Germany.

Once the smoke cleared on D-Day, the Allies had suffered approximately 10,000 casualties, 4,400 of which were fatalities. Those numbers are of course staggering for one day, but the truth is, relative to the anticipated casualties, those number are quite low. Prior to the invasion General Eisenhower and his staff estimated 13% of the invasion troops might die and 25% of those who landed on the beaches would end up casualties. Together those calculations suggested that during the first 24 hour period nearly 30,000 Allied soldiers and sailors would end up dead and another 24,000 would be wounded.

That’s not what happened… but it could have. And that’s the point. Despite the potential for over 50,000 dead and wounded in one day and for a failure which could have allowed Germany to make its hold on the continent permanent, Ike decided to launch Operation Overlord nonetheless… because it needed to be done. Life with a Europe ruled by Nazis was simply not feasible for the United States and her allies. And so D-Day was launched. And the rest is history.

Today while there it’s not a Nazi storm taking over Europe or America – although BLM and Antifa certainly demonstrate very similar tactics – it’s the neutron bomb of Covid 19 is. Neutron bombs of course are generally intended to leave structures standing while killing people via radiation poisoning. That is exactly what Covid 19 is doing to the American economy. Not the virus itself or course, but rather the shutdowns, quarantines, lockdowns and other government interventions.

Not that the virus is not killing people. It is. Thus far about 165,000 people in the United States. That is not a small number by any stretch, but in a country of 330 million people in which 2.5 million people die annually, it is far from a catastrophe, although for the victims and their families, it is no doubt catastrophic. On Friday the government announced that 1.8 new jobs had been created in July and that unemployment dropped to a 10.2% down from almost 14.7% in April – and up from a record low of 3.5% in December. This good news comes despite the fact that the media pillories Republican governors for opening their states while venerating Democrats who seek to keep the country locked up tighter than a drum. Despite what seems to be an economy on the mend however, the reality is, the only reason the nation is still standing is that the federal government and the FED have pumped close to $10 billion into the economy since March… much of it ending up in the stock and debt markets.

Everywhere you look, hotels, restaurants, gyms, karate classes, airlines, sports teams, convention centers, the number things that are closed or working at threadbare capacity are extraordinary. But these are only the faces we see. Behind all of these public facing businesses are millions of small businesses that provide services like, pool maintenance, janitorial services, furniture repair, painting as well as goods like bread, eggs, chairs, exercise equipment, foam fingers, bobbleheads and thousands of other things businesses use and need to survive. Those businesses employ millions of people who are today not working.

Sure, companies like Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Campbell’s Soup, Netflix, Amazon and Clorox are doing fine, but they are a small fraction of the American economy. And there’s the rub. America can’t survive just buying Great Value tomato sauce and Behr paints or cleaning the kitchen with Windex when not arguing on Facebook or watching Netflix and eating Orville Redenbacher Popcorn. Small and medium sized businesses drive the American economy, representing a majority of the job creation and sustaining tens of millions of employees. The true cost of this disaster – the government shutdowns rather than the virus itself – have yet to be felt, and are likely to be felt for years to come.

The Democrat’s and media’s willingness to use this virus to keep the country closed for the purpose of harming Donald Trump is simply despicable. Unlike the Nazis in 1944, Covid 19 is not an existential threat to the country, or the world. Below is a chart from the CDC. It tracks the one week average death total in the United States going back to July 2018. The funny thing about this chart is that it shows that the number of excess deaths relative to the number of expected deaths is quite small, averaging 14.4% more deaths each week than was expected. Since February 15th the number of excess weekly deaths has averaged 8,000 above the 63,000 average expected.

For a nation with a population of 330 million people, the 165,000 people who have died represent .00005% of the population. To give you an idea of how good a job of misleading the public on the dangers of Covid 19 the media and the Democrats have done, according to a July 15 poll by Publicis Groupe (page 24), Americans on average think 9% of the population has died from Covid 19… that’s 30 million people! That’s 180 times more than the actual number who have died!

So we’ve shut the country down for a virus that Americans think has killed 30 million people when in reality it’s killed 165,000. We’ve added $10 trillion to our national debt, we’ve seen tens of thousands of businesses declare bankruptcy, we’ve watched as tens of millions of people have gone on unemployment, we’ve seen depression and suicide leap, we’ve stopped people from going to church, school and in many cases, work. And all in an attempt to keep Donald Trump from being reelected in November.

To come full circle, the United States lost 400,000 troops during WW II when the population was 140 million. That’s .002% of the population lost – mostly young men of working age – in the pursuit of fighting a real, existential threat to the country and the world. Today, America has essentially eviscerated her economy and much of her community in reaction to a virus that has killed .00005% of her population, 80% of whom were 65 and older, most with underlying health problems. The Coronavirus may be many things, but it’s far from an existential threat to the United States. Heart disease kills 4 times as many people each year and we don’t shut the country down for it. Cancer kills 3 times as many people each year and we don’t shut the country down for it. Sure, they’re not contagious, but the Flu is and it kills 1/3 to ½ as many people each year and we don’t shut the country down for it either.

The bottom line is, while the Coronavirus is not a hoax, the shutdowns, the lockdowns and the hysteria surrounding it very much are and it was perpetrated on the American people by the Democrats and their media sycophants in their willingness to sacrifice the nation for their “Orange Man Bad” psychosis.

In November voters will have the opportunity to demonstrate to these anti-American misanthropes that most Americans are not snowflakes… That most Americans understand that life involves risks, but that is the cost of building a better life for their families and their communities and yes, building a better country. Ben Franklin said: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” That quote, like many of Franklin’s seems to have a particular resonance in America 265 years after he uttered it. In the face of real threats Americans have demonstrated a real willingness to sacrifice for the common good. Covid 19 is not that, despite what the media and the Democrats want us to believe. Americans have had enough of this hoax of a national threat and the pernicious statists who have foisted it on the country. Hopefully they will demonstrate their displeasure in November…

How the Greatest Generation Begat the Stupidest Generation and Lost America

The first half of the 20th Century was one of the most devastating in human history. The people who lived through that calamitous period are called the Greatest Generation for good reason. They came of age during the Great Depression and went on to save the world from the Nazi and Japanese tyrannies. They fought hard to save the world and later built the United States into the dominant economic and military superpower on the planet.

The thing about the Greatest Generation was that their lives were tough… with a great depression sandwiched between two world wars, life was simply brutal. So when peacetime came around, they were enthusiastic about finally being able to focus on raising their families.

They of course wanted their kids to have better lives than they did. They didn’t want their kids have to deal with the food shortages, the unemployment and the wars that they had lived through. And so they pampered their children and tried to give them good lives. The problem is, their children became spoiled brats and grew into unrepentant socialists and Communists.

America saw that play out in front of their eyes during the 1960’s and 70’s. The postwar years saw an unprecedented economic boom in the United States with jobs and incomes growing to spectacular levels. Families moved to the suburbs, cars became ubiquitous and the golden age of television was upon us. So it’s not a great surprise that when things are going fairly well, spoiled children become spoiled young adults. Which is exactly what happened. From student protests demanding universities bend to their wills to anti-war marches demanding an end to the Vietnam War (really what they wanted was to not be drafted…) to supporting terrorist groups like the Weather Underground & the Black Panthers, young people spent much of the 1960’s & 70’s protesting and demanding pretty much everything. And when they didn’t get their way, they would cause mayhem, taking over universities, rioting and occasionally setting off bombs…

If that sounds a lot like what’s going on today in the streets, it’s no coincidence. The thugs out in the streets today causing mayhem are the children of those 1960’s hippies. One might think that parents who grew up in the midst of the chaotic, anything goes 60’s and 70’s might swing somewhat in the opposite direction and raise their children with a bit more discipline than they had growing up. But that’s not what happened. Just the opposite.

The children of the 80’s and 90’s and 00’s were even more spoiled than their parents. There was virtually no war – and of course, no draft – and although there were economic hiccups along the way, the economy grew steadily from the early 80’s. Things were often comfortable… Video games, participation trophies, MTV and grade inflation… what wasn’t to like? But something was going on… the hints of today’s chaos were being sowed without anyone noticing…

It was during this time that the radical students of the 1960’s and 70’s became the professors and administrators in the colleges they had previously attacked. They became politicians and media personalities and corporate flunkies and whatever passed for journalists. They became board members of foundations and literally wrote the text books used by their fellow travelers who’d become teachers in classrooms across the country.

And so here we are today… Not surprisingly, after these hippy fans of Marx and Lenin and Castro spent decades teaching America’s youth that the United States is evil and racist to its core, the youth have little respect for anything, much less their country. But more importantly, they have no awareness of context and history and reality. That Thomas Jefferson might have been a great if flawed man… Nope. That Gone with the Wind or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn might be masterpieces of literature despite their decidedly “unwoke” themes… Nope. That St. Louis might have been in the middle of a known world war when he led the Crusades… Doesn’t matter. That men can’t actually have babies… Scoff. Ronald Reagan once said: “It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so.”

And that is what makes the current generation of people wreaking havoc in the streets so stupid. Not because they can’t score well on the SAT, because they can – which like so much else in America these days has been watered down to almost irrelevancy – but because they refuse to see what’s right in front of them. Venezuela and Cuba are “worker’s paradises” but both are economic trainwrecks caused by socialism. Yet somehow these young people seek to take the United States down that same path. They are out in the streets protesting the death of a tiny handful of black men at the hands of police while black men kill 8,000 fellow black men every year. Activists and anarchists claim they want to remove monuments of a racist past yet they destroy statues of giants in the battle against slavery like Lincoln, Grant and Douglass. They decry capitalism but are seemingly oblivious to the fact that they live in a world of mobile phones, the Internet, Uber and Amazon that capitalism built.

That the imbecilic BLM and Antifa thugs currently seeking to erase history and destroy the country are the progeny begotten by the Greatest Generation brings to mind a quote from author G. Michael Hopf in Those Who Remain: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” In their desire to give their children and grandchildren better lives than they had to endure, the Greatest Generation created two generations of idiots not smart enough to recognize that in the lottery of life they have been gifted the Golden Ticket.

It’s only because they’ve had life so good that they have the luxury of excoriating the country in the first place… Rather than being caught up in the many wars that crisscross Africa or living daily with the threat of starvation or the lopping off of limbs, they can craft the fiction of “institutional racism”. Rather than being shot or have tanks roll over them for speaking “Truth to power”, they can put on their Che Guevera tee shirts grab their skateboards and scream “Fuck the Police” while firebombing police stations secure in the notion that they’re unlikely to face any consequences. And on the off chance they did face the possibility of consequences for their actions, they’re confident in the notion that they’ll have an army of empty headed Hollywood and Twitter personalities ready to raise money for their defense and turn them into martyrs for the cause. They can burn the flag, blockade highways, tear down statues and vandalize churches and monuments, comfortable knowing the protections afforded by the very system they want to destroy will likely protect them from harm.

That so many Democrat politicians across the country have thrown in with and knelt down with these modern day Jacobins and sans-culottes, and allowed so much of our history to be destroyed will one day be written about as a turning point in American history. It will be the beginning of a revolution… either one in which real Americans decide to take back their history from the Stalinists running academia, the media, Silicon Valley and increasingly, “woke” corporations; or one in which the “woke” Democrats prevail in November and set about destroying the Constitution and the killing the goose that laid the golden eggs they have been eating their entire lives. One will see a free United States leading a the world as the 21st century unfolds while the other will see the world collapse into a fire of war as the world’s beacon of freedom, prosperity and strength is replaced with a fascist state wrapped around a Zimbabwe like economic disaster.  Forrest Gump said "Stupid is as stupid does" and that's exactly what the country is looking at as the progeny of the Greatest Generation destroy the very legacy that was built for them. Hell is after all, paved with good intentions. 

The Speech Barack Obama Should Have Given Last Sunday... But Didn't

My fellow Americans, I’m speaking to you on the eve of the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the event that launched the United States into a war against fascists who sought to eliminate freedom and our way of life. That war was long and hard and uncertain… but we prevailed and today the United States is the greatest nation on earth.

Seventy four years later our nation is facing another fascist enemy, radical Islam. The events of San Bernardino last Wednesday, the events in Paris last month make it very clear that we are indeed at war. We may not be at war with Islam, but we are very much at war with radical Islam. In fact, the reality of this situation is that the vast majority of victims of radical Islam are actually fellow Muslims. From Pakistan to Saudi Arabia to Libya and beyond, by far the largest number of deaths has been among other Muslims. Unfortunately we cannot solve the schism that exists within Islam, that battle is not ours. If Muslim nations seek peace and prosperity for their citizens they will have to face the threats within.

What we can and will do however is utilize all of our resources to eviscerate radical Islam everywhere it may pose a threat to the United States, our allies or our interests. We will use every resource at our disposal to root out terror cells and capture or kill those who wish to do us ill.

On the domestic front we will not allow these radicals to use our freedoms against us. We will not allow a fifth column to grow and metastasize inside our body politic. I am, as of today suspending the acceptance of Syrian refugees until we have a more effective screening process. We will send resources to Turkey and Jordan and other nations to help support them, but we will not be accepting any more refugees for the immediate future. In addition, beginning tonight, persons seeking to travel to the United States who have traveled to any one of 30 different Muslim nations within the last 4 years will be subjected to extra scrutiny prior to being allowed to enter the country. This will no doubt be an inconvenience to many travelers, but it is a step we must take.

At home we are going to root out the radicals in our midst. We are not only going to be looking for terrorists, but we are going to begin a concerted effort to find the people who enable them with financing and other forms of support. In that vein I have directed the Justice Department to harness all applicable RICO statutes to find and take down whatever radical Islamist cells may be operating in the United States. That RICO order also applies to organizations that fund, harbor or otherwise support such cells. Those organizations may have foreign elements to them and if that is the case the CIA will be called in to coordinate in taking action. They may also be using mosques and charity organizations in an attempt to obscure their activities. Those attempts will not be successful. Americans and others in our country enjoy freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but they do not enjoy the freedom to plan and support those who wish to harm this country and kill the innocent. Indeed, I think it was Justice Jackson who said "The Constitution is not a suicide pact". I have directed Homeland Security make this initiative their number one priority.

On the international front, we will immediately begin bombing ISIS locations across Syria and Iraq and wherever else we find them, particularly those related to oil production. I am today having my Joint Chiefs of Staff alter the Rules of Engagement under which our military can and will operate. Currently the driving force of our ROE has been to ensure no or minimum civilian casualties. That is a luxury we no longer have. No longer will we allow terrorists to set up shop in hospitals and mosques and schools and target our aircraft with impunity. Our troops will begin targeting fighters wherever they are, which may regrettably result in greater civilian casualties.

In addition, we will begin fully supporting and arming Kurdish forces in Iraq as they seek to take back territory from ISIS.

I have also directed the Joint Chiefs to present me with a plan for putting up to 10,000 US troops in Iraq with the objective of training and supporting genuine anti ISIS forces fighting in both Iraq and Syria. Within that number will be special forces who have a list of the top 25 ISIS leaders and enablers. Their objective is to find and eliminate every person on that list. And let me be clear… not all of those enablers are fighters, nor are they all men... and some of them may be hiding far from the battlefield. None of those things will protect them.  When that list is done we will compile a new top 25 list of the next most valuable targets. In addition, we will be imposing no fly zones and no travel zones in various areas of both Syria and Iraq in order to stop fighters from targeting areas that have been freed from the grip of ISIS and stop shipments of oil that the group is using to fund its operations.

There are of course additional measures being considered that I will not go into.

Let me wrap up by saying this: From September 11 to the bombings of London, Madrid, Paris and countless attacks in between, it is now clear that we are very much at war with a strain of fascist, radical Islam and they seek nothing less than the destruction of our way of life, our freedoms, our liberty and our prosperity. Just as the United States did not let fascists prevail 70 years ago, we will not let these new fascists win today. We will not let them manipulate our freedoms to attack us at home and we will not let them hide behind religion and civilians elsewhere. As of today we are no longer fighting a defensive battle. We are at war with the cancer of fascist radical Islam, and we will be taking the battle to them, whether they are hiding here at home or killing innocent Christians, Jews or Muslims on the sands of Syria or Iraq. We may have made some missteps in the past, and we will undoubtedly make some in the future, but let me be clear… this is a war we will not lose. The United States and the world of freedom we helped shape will not acquiesce to those who hate what we and our forefathers have fought so hard for and worked so hard to build.

Thank you and good night, and God bless America.

Obamacare, WW II and how hubris undermines citizen confidence in government

I recently heard a broadcast minute from Neal Boortz. He said the following:

During the 3 1/2 years of U.S. involvement (in WW II), here’s what we manufactured: 8 battleships, 22 aircraft carriers, 48 cruisers, 349 destroyers, 420 destroyer escorts, 203 submarines, 4 million tons of merchant ships, 100,000 fighters, 98,000 bombers, 24,000 transport aircraft, 58,000 training aircraft, 93,000 tanks, 257,000 artillery pieces, 105,000 mortars, 3,000,000 machine guns, 2.5 mil military trucks, 16.1 million men in uniform, and we developed the atomic bomb. Simply astounding.

“During this same period of time, three and a half years, it should be noted that Obama couldn’t put together a functioning website,”

That contrast is simply amazing. The difference between then and today is much greater than the stark numbers might suggest however. Not only did the government of the early 1940s figure out how to harness the productivity of the American economy to build an unprecedented war machine in record time, but at the same time it was able to employ those resources to defeat enemies entrenched on three different continents, each thousands of miles away from home.

As anyone who has even a minor sense of history knows, it takes more than hubris to actually accomplish anything of consequence. In the case of the Roosevelt administration, in terms of domestic policy they were very much full of hubris. It most clearly showed itself in FDR’s legion of domestic programs which not only didn’t end the depression, but prolonged it and kept unemployment in double digits for years.

On the war front however, it was a different story. Not only was there no hubris, there was a great deal of anxiety and uncertainty as to what the prospects were for success. Nonetheless, while partisan divisions persisted – FDR’s Democrats lost 47 Congressional seats in 1942 – the nation was united in its pursuit of victory. Everyone understood that it was all in. As a result, through a combination of government direction, private sector ingenuity and productivity, individual courage and effort, the United States was not only able to develop everything Boortz talks about, but to employ those materials effectively enough to defeat the combined efforts of Hitler and Tojo.

While not perfect, FDR’s execution of its war strategy was successful for a number of reasons. First, the government was operating in an area where it had a unique skillset, one where it had an unambiguous Constitutional role to play, and one where it could focus the resources the energy of the nation on a common goal. Second, there was a finite clear measure of success everyone understood and agreed upon: the defeat of the Germans and the Japanese.

The competence of the various role players and clarity of the objectives allowed the government to lead the country to achieve what some might call its greatest moment. Such triumphs are rare with government action, and it’s no surprise Obamacare is not among them. Obamacare is the polar opposite of WW II in every way, from start to finish… although in Obamacare’s case it’s never finished. Obamacare did not have a Pearl Harbor to unify a nation… it had dubious statistics manipulated by duplicitous politicians seeking to extend government power. Unlike in WW II, with Obamacare the government had no Constitutional foundation for its actions. And finally, there is hubris. At the beginning of WWII nobody, from FDR down to the greenest private in the Army knew how they were going to defeat the Axis powers, and they knew they didn’t know. But they were confident they would find a way. With Obamacare you had exactly the opposite. You had lying, manipulating politicians, power hungry regulators and their legions of ivory tower lackeys telling the country that they knew exactly how the healthcare market worked, exactly what to do to fix it and precisely what the results would be for the American people. They were extraordinarily wrong on all three, and spectacularly so. As Boortz notes, there was the years in the making website debacle. But then there were the promises of “You can keep your doctor” and a $2,500 reduction in healthcare costs that turned out to be actual lies. And perhaps most ominously, the geniuses in the Obama administration so badly misunderstood how markets work that today, fully a quarter of the country’s doctors have opted out of participating in Obamacare exchanges, and more are opting out every day.

And so it goes with hubris and arrogance, emboldened by police power, the government inflicts the consequences of both on the country’s citizens. From Obamacare to green energy debacles to immigration to the disaster of the VA to… pretty much everything else this administration has tackled has been a textbook demonstration as to why government should not reach beyond its powers laid out in the Constitution. If the citizenry’s view on the Constitutionality of a law is murky, perhaps one should tread lightly and not jam it down their throats. If half of the population is viscerally and vociferously opposed to a law, it might be prudent to move slowly rather than rush through a 2,000 page law no one can read. Finally, if there is no endgame, if there is no clear, objective measure by which government action can be determined to be successful or not, then it might be time to go back to the drawing board and reexamine the goals of the law in the first place. Without such clarity laws are either too broadly written or too ambiguously written and either way adds up to too much power in the hands of bureaucrats and not enough in the hands of citizens. And that's how hubris leads to a collapse of citizen confidence in government...

War and Liberty - The Enemy Within

Today, when people talk about winning World War II, they often talk about freedom defeating tyranny. That is mostly true as the United States, the UK, Canada and Australia were indeed democracies. But it was not tyranny we went to war against. Indeed one of the powers that helped defeat Hitler was itself a dictatorship that only declared war on Hitler after having been invaded.

Adolph Hitler didn’t suddenly become a dictator in 1939 or even 1941. He had been a dictator for years before war broke out. While he didn’t start out as such, soon after getting power legitimately in January of 1933, he became one. Mussolini similarly became dictator three years after coming to power legally in 1922. At the same time, in Japan Emperors had ruled without opposition for more than two generations. Dictatorship, as unseemly as it might be, is rarely a reason to go to war – however it can be a great motivator once war is declared.

We also hear people talk about WW II as a fight against evil. Again, while true, we did not go to war against evil. The Nazi’s came to power on a platform imbued with anti-Semitism and for most of the 30’s they were engaged in marginalizing, quarantining and murdering Jews and others who didn’t fit the profile of their superior Aryan “race”. In Asia the Japanese had been massacring Chinese for years, and in one of the most horrific events in modern history, they raped, mutilated and murdered hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, women and children in Nanking in 1937.

At the end of the day it was not tyranny that America went to war against, although our enemies certainly were tyrants. It was not evil America went to war against, although our enemies were certainly evil. No, it was aggression that America went to war against. Specifically, it was aggression directed towards us and secondarily against our allies. The United States did not engage in WW II until the Japanese attacked our forces at Pearl Harbor in 1941 – although the United States had been providing aid to the British and the Chinese for some time. And while Congress declared war on Japan the next day, it did not do so against Germany until after they had declared it on us.

Why does any of this matter? Because freedom matters. Because understanding that freedom’s not just preserved simply by defeating an enemy on the battlefield matters. While the Axis was indeed a threat to American liberty, German and Japanese atrocities made it easy to rally support against them. Rallying support for freedom against an enemy is much easier if that enemy is a viscous, ruthless killing machine. It’s far more difficult if the enemy of freedom is someone who’s ostensibly trying to help.

And that’s what makes 2014 different from 1941, or 1944 when D Day was launched 70 years ago this past Friday. During WW II the enemies of freedom were tyrants doing despicable, abhorrent things, and doing them largely over there. Eventually they targeted the United States and we engaged. Today, while there are enemies of freedom who do despicable, horrific things largely over there, the biggest enemies of freedom are over here and appear far less menacing. Indeed they couch their tyranny in the paternal pleas for “fairness” or equity or protecting the children. It’s hard to raise an army people who claim to be trying to help. But make no mistake, they are just as dangerous in the long run. This battle will not be fought with guns and bombs and the enemies of freedom aren't nearly as easy to identify as those flying the swastika or Rising Sun flags.

For Barack Obama and the rest of the big government cabal – which includes many Republicans – nothing less than American freedom is the enemy:

• Economic freedom is hard to maintain when they have regulated the American economy into virtual stagnation. Insufficient jobs and more government largesse leads to more people falling out of the workforce and becoming wards of the state. Today the Labor Force Participation Rate is at its lowest in almost 40 Years and fully half of Americans live in a home that receives government benefits.

• Intellectual freedom is difficult to maintain when government is snooping on your every move and listening to virtually every word you say. 

• Political freedom is hard to maintain when the government uses its police power to harass its enemies and allows unfettered entrance to those who do not share our values.

• Liberty itself becomes somewhat unrecognizable when virtually every element of your daily life is regulated by nameless faceless bureaucrats in Washington and beyond. They may not yet tell you when to get up, when to go to the bathroom and when to go to bed, but it’s only a matter of time as virtually every single thing you interact with every day is regulated. Who must live in your neighborhood. The type of plastic your alarm clock is made of. The amount of sugar in your cereal. The amount of water your toilet flushes. What kind of gas your car must use. The kind of car seat you must have for your kid. What you can give that kid for lunch. What they must learn in school. What your boss must pay you. What constitutes overtime. How many minorities your bank must lend to. Who can contribute how much to political campaigns. What people can say on the radio or TV. What the cable companies can charge you.  What information Google can collect. What a company can say on the label of a can of corn. The kind of refrigerant used in your refrigerator. The kind of light bulbs in your night stand. Not to mention the confiscatory tax rates and a tax code that even its enforcers can’t understand. There’s virtually nothing you do in any given day that does not require Uncle Sam’s stamp of approval at some point along the way.

In substituting for Rush Limbaugh last week Mark Belling wondered if the United States today could rally a force to defeat… well, anything. That’s a good question because it appears to be the case that the nation that rallied itself to defeat the greatest menace in human history is unable to recognize the threat to liberty right in its midst. Seventy five years ago the German and the Japanese conduct made them an easy target against whom to focus American attention and energy. Today, after a half century of the cancer of big government liberalism crippling American prosperity and eviscerating American freedom, perhaps it will be its flowering in the person of Barack Obama that will finally bring about its downfall. The soft tyranny of liberalism may not be as easy to recognize as the tyranny practiced by our enemies in WW II, but it is no less important to defeat. I hope Mark Belling will soon find himself pleasantly surprised.