"There is no more neutrality in the world," said Black Panther leader, civil rights activist and fun-loving rapist; Eldridge Cleaver. "You either have to be part of the solution, or you're going to be part of the problem-- there ain't no more middle ground."
We live in Eldridge Cleaver's world now, a world with no more middle ground. Where not doing anything does not mean you will be left alone. This is no longer a nation founded on the curious premise that the government should leave people alone unless they are causing problems.
That peculiar idea was held by a nation of farmers and merchants who fled religious persecution, and whose great contribution to human history was the notion that governments shouldn't be all-powerful and that everyone should mind their own business when it comes to other people's affairs. Our present-day rulers revile them as racist slave owners who only cared about money, but they also happen to be racist slave owners who only care about money, and they have far more of both.
The average American still holds the fanciful belief that, if he isn't annoying anyone, he should be left alone. To the people running his country, this is as bizarre and unworkable as Phrenology or the Geocentric theory or handing out universal health care without also compelling everyone to buy it.
This is not a nation where people are left alone anymore. This is a nation where they are hounded from the moment they are born until the moment they die by the arms of a regulatory state run by men and women weaned on Cleaver, Alinsky, Fourier, Marx, Wells and countless others. This is a nation, where accordingly, being left alone is the greatest of luxuries.
It takes a lot of money to be left alone. Regulatory space is much more expensive than physical space, and buying it requires investing in lobbyists, fundraisers and lawyers. If you make the right payoffs, then you can buy the privilege of being left alone, exempted from regulations, going uninspected and protected against the agents of the state. But once you do that, you are no longer neutral. You have bought yourself the privilege of not being considered the problem; instead, you have become part of the solution for the people you are paying off.
The Americans bushwacked by ObamaCare, the scam artist's dream of a tax paid to a third-party in exchange for benefits accrued to a fourth party, still thought they had the freedom to take the middle, to despise meddling politicians in both parties, ignore most things the government did, while living their own lives. They had seen their savings devalued, their homes seized, their lives bedeviled by a thousand regulations, but they still thought that it was possible to take a middle-ground, to reject the solutions by asserting that they are not the problem.
They did not understand that in Cleaverland, in Alinskytown and in Obamaville-- no one opts out. Either you volunteer or you get drafted. Raise your hand or you will be called on anyway. Not volunteering to be part of their agenda means that you are the problem.
You, sitting right there in your chair, watching these words move across your screen, are the problem. A problem 311,591,917 human souls strong. You eat too much or you don't pay enough taxes, you drive your car too often, you haven't bought solar panels for your roof, you browse extremist websites when you should be browsing government informational sites for tips on how to do or not do all of the above. But most of all... you still don't understand what a great problem you are for the people running this country into the ground between the Atlantic and the Pacific. They keep trying to solve you, but you don't go away.
There is no neutrality when dealing with people who reject the very concept of neutrality. Who draw everyone into the long columns of their spreadsheets and catch everyone in their spider's web. There is no middle ground with people who don't believe there is a middle ground, who believe that every human on earth is part of the problem and can only opt out of being the problem by joining up with them and following their directives.
That is what we are up against. We confront the Great Solvers of the Human Problem who are determined to arrange everyone and everything to their liking. They began by controlling everything that people did. Now, they have moved on to controlling what people don't do. If you live, if you breathe, if you stir, move your muscles, track moving objects with your eyes, then there are obligations imposed on you.
ObamaCare is one of the final declarations that there is no opting out. Even if you don't drive, own a home, own a business, own a dog, or do one of the infinite things that bring you into mandatory contact with the apparatus of your local, semi-local, trans-local, national or global government, you are committed to a task from maturity to death. Your mission is to obtain health insurance, and, in a system in which you become the ward of the government as soon as you taste air, it is the price that you pay for being alive.
In a free country, you are not obligated to do things simply for the privilege of breathing oxygen north of the Rio Grande and south of Niagara Falls. But this isn't a free country anymore; this is a country in which you get things for free. And there is a big difference between those two things.
We are a nation in which everyone is entitled to everything, except the right to opt out of all the entitlements and the cost of paying for them. We may not have the Bill of Rights anymore, but we have a hell of a bill to settle and, every year, the deficits keep making it bigger and bigger. Our forefathers passed on to us a Bill of Rights, and we shall pass on to our descendants a Bill. A tremendous Bill which can be unrolled from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam... and all the way across the ocean to China.
The Bill of Rights was a list of things that the government could not do. The Bill is a list of things that the government has done. It's an endless bill, because we have an endless government that is doing things all the time. And though we didn't do any of them, we are still stuck with the bill. Even if we could reach into our pockets and settle the bill with a couple of loose trillion dollar bills, this Bill doesn't just demand money, it demands power.
If all that government officials did was go to Vegas, give each other prizes and sing silly songs, then the Bill would be large, but it wouldn't ask for a piece of our soul. But the amount of money that the government spends is almost beside the point. The amount may bankrupt us, it may destroy our economy, it may turn us into debt slaves-- but it's secondary to how the money is being used. It's bad enough to be eaten out of house and home-- worse to be forced to feed the occupying army that is taking away your freedoms one by one.
People often talk about the First and Second Amendments, the Fifth comes up, and even the Fourth. But how often do we think about the Third Amendment, that old relic of a time when we were ruled by a distant power with no concern for our lives or our freedoms? "No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner". It's one of the few amendments that goes unnoticed. No one challenges it. No Supreme Court blots it out with the stroke of a pen or rephrases it to mean that there is a Constitutional right to abortion or a ban on executing juveniles.
There is no occupying army quartered in our homes. They have sizable barracks with marble floors, gleaming chandeliers and metal detectors through which you must pass in order to meet with even one of their lower officers. They aren't quartered in your living room, they rent hotel names and build buildings and send the bill to you. And then they send you another bill, which informs you that they have decided that the War on Obesity, the War on Health Care or the War on the Economy requires you to do a set number of things, the costs of both the doing and the enforcement to be borne by you.
The old kings used to play chess games with human chess pieces, a metaphor for how they saw their power over their subjects. The new kings or czars play with hundreds of millions of chess pieces. They assess how many pieces they have in a census, determine what kind of pieces they are and pass laws telling them where to move, what to buy and how to live. And they are no more tolerant of pawns who fail to move when ordered to; than the old kings playing human chess in their gardens.
In the last century, the Great Solvers went to work on a national and global game of human chess. They called this game by various names, The New Deal, the New Frontier, Hope and Change, or, most commonly, Social Justice. The real name of the game is "There Ain't No More Middle Ground". Either you are a New Dealer, a New Frontierer, a Hope and Changer, a Tolerator, a Liberal, a Donor, an Activist and an Organizer-- or you are on the wrong side.
You might think that you are standing in the great moderate middle, the open-minded frontier of the old American, but the frontier and ground are both gone. There is only Problemtown and Solutionville and the bulldozers are coming to knock down Problemtown next week and deport its residents to Solutionville.
ObamaCare is the bus to Solutionville. It is the problem that is "You" being solved in the same inept brute-force fashion in which the Great Solvers solve everything, from Russian agriculture to European Union democracy.
The problems are many, and the Solvers are impatient. There are too many peasants, and weekends are too short, the golf courses are too crowded, the protesters are too annoying, and the numbers never add up. Each problem keeps needing to be solved many times, but they have already moved on to the next problem and the one after that in the great mass of problems that some people still call America.
The American Bushwhacked still wonder what happened. When did this stop being a free country? Then they finish pumping their gas, buy their sodas, paying several taxes on each and completing a transaction for two commodities whose production and distribution involve more laws than the entire legal codes of Rome and Greece combined, and then drive home, where they begin making notes for next year's taxes, while reading how the latest laws will affect them.
On the television, an anchor with carefully molded hair and the grave look of the career idiot who has learned to disguise this fact by always appearing concerned about something, interviews an activist who is proposing new regulations as the only responsible thing to do. "If you aren't part of the solution," she says with equally grave sincerity, "then you are part of the problem."
The American Bushwhacked nod along because the proposal seems so reasonable. Who doesn't want to do something for the children, the oceans, the endangered red-banded shrub, the people somewhere who don't have something and that sincere young woman who really seems passionate in a way that few are anymore. Then he turns back to his desk, somewhere in the great middle ground that once was, studies the tax forms again and wonders when this stopped being a free country.
Liberals whine incessantly about Citizens United and corporate personhood-- yet the signature achievement of their first administration in almost a decade, was to force everyone to pay taxes to corporations.
What's worse exactly? Corporate Personhood or Corporate Taxation?
When liberals whine about corporate control of politics, remind them that it was their party that created a tax to be collected directly by corporations for the profit of corporations.
No Republican president ever authorized corporations to collect taxes and use those taxes for their own profits, their own bonuses and their own golden parachutes.
It took a Democrat to do that. Forget corporate control of politics. Obama outsourced the functions of the IRS to his corporate donors. Call it the real Warren Buffet Tax.
Truly a signature achievement.
APPRECIATION
This week Rush Limbaugh dedicated about a half hour of his show to reading and discussing my article, "Why the Newsroom is Good for Republicans". It's a great honor and I would like to thank him and any new readers who have come here that way and hope they will stick around.
I have had major conservative media personalities use my work before. One nationally known figure adapted an article into an entire video episode, without ever mentioning my name or giving credit in any way, shape or form. But I don't choose to dwell on the negative, but to appreciate the positive.
Bloggers often get shortchanged and it's important to recognize a class act like Rush Limbaugh who does the right thing and helps the people who produce the material that drives the debate.
THAT WHICH IS CROOKED
"That which is crooked cannot be made straight." (Kohelet 1:15)
The problem with government is... government. Not just its existence, but the culture of government.
What Roberts didn't shouldn't be that much of a surprise, because it's what Republicans have been doing for ages.
Liberals enact or propose a drastic expansion of government. Republicans modify it to a compromise solution. A version that isn't quite as awful. The ball goes further left.
The only politics of the Republican Party are Bismarck's "Steal the Socialists' Thunder" politics. Pass a modified version of the same laws that meets similar social goals, but isn't as drastic or disruptive.
Democrats are proposing a DREAM Act in a bid for Mexican votes? Let's propose a more reasonable version of it. Democrats passed a mandate requiring everyone to buy health insurance? Reject it under the Commerce Clause, call it a tax, ignore that taxes are raised by the Federal government and apportioned by it to the states, not paid to private companies. Then wait for Romney to come into office with another modified version of national health care. Thunder stolen. Socialism wins.
The Steal their Thunder mindset is a socialist mindset. It says that the left is right, but too left, so we'll take their crazy ideas and make them workable. In the minds of Republican officials, it's probably something like running a corporation where the boys downstairs come up with a solution and the boys upstairs turn it into something more in line with the business model.
This twisted partnership is how we got here. It's not just the Democrats, it's the Republicans. It's the whole culture of government, where most of the participants agree on 90 percent of the problems, but differ on how to best implement solutions. And very few of them think that the solution to a problem might be to just leave it alone.
The culture of government is the belief that all problems have legislative solutions. And that's a recipe for tyranny.
Change is only going to come from outside. It is going to come from grass-roots movements, from the rise of organizations and movements that are dedicated to fundamentally changing the impact of government power on us. Electing politicians opposed to the current model is important, but it's even more important to build defenses outside the system. The left very successfully dismantled policies and laws that they opposed in that way. The right is catching up.
FAST AND FURIOUS II: SYRIA EDITION
Remember the CIA helping the Muslim Brotherhood smuggle weapons into Syria. There's a bit more to the story...
The weapons and intelligence pipeline being routed through the Brotherhood is only half the story. The other half involves the true purpose of those weapons. Officially the weapons are needed to fight Assad, unofficially they are meant to give the Brotherhood military parity with the Free Syrian Army, which has done the bulk of the fighting, and has remained outside the SNC.
There is a major gap between the Free Syrian Army, which conducts the actual rebellion, and the SNC, which claims to be the true provisional government of the rebel groups. The Muslim Brotherhood isn’t in this to overthrow Assad just to hand over power to a group of army officers. The Brotherhood’s chief foes have been Middle-Eastern regimes run by groups of army officers who took power. The Brotherhood and its backers in the Obama Administration are determined not to allow another secularist officer like Husni al-Za’im to undo all their plans for Syria.
While the administration and its media mouthpieces praise the “Brave Syrian people” fighting against Assad, they are determined not to allow the soldiers and officers doing the fighting to determine the post-Assad future of Syria. Instead the game plan calls for a provisional SNC government followed by another “Democratic election” that will allow the Brotherhood to reap all the benefits of the rebellion.
About a year ago I had the privilege of becoming involved with an important documentary project that brings home the very personal toll of the War on Terror through the story of two fathers.
One father whose son was killed by a Muslim terrorist and one father whose son became that Muslim terrorist.
The film is Losing Our Sons and it is an intimate look at the destructive power of Islam over the lives of two ordinary men, one white, one black, both Christians, neither of them fanatics, whose sons each lost what they might have been through the power of the Koran.
This is a close-up ground-level view of the impact that Islam is having on America. And the words to take away from this are those of Carlos' father. "This was not Carlos, this was Abdul."
Abdul in Arabic means slave of Allah. There is something chilling in an African-American man seeing his son become a willing slave of the enemy.
This is a powerful film and it is being screened now in parts of the country. It was a privilege being involved with it and it's worth seeing and bringing to your church, synagogue or community.
DEEP IN DENIAL
No matter how many times Congressman King emphasized that most Muslims are good people, or as he put it, “outstanding Americas”, the accusations of McCarthyism kept coming. By now King has been accused of McCarthyism more often than the actual McCarthy. And for the same reason.
Accusations of McCarthyism were a convenient way for the left to avoid addressing their affinity for an ideology that had killed millions of people and kept hundreds of millions of people as virtual slaves. It was a way of placing debate on the entire topic of Communism off limits by denigrating it as “Red-Baiting”. Today accusations of “Islamophobia” serve the same purpose.
A more heavily Orthodox American Jewish population spells the end of a long love affair with liberalism and the Democratic Party. Numerous polls indicate that Orthodox Jews are more politically conservative, and more supportive of the Republican Party, than non-Orthodox Jews. On a host of controversial social issues, including abortion, same-sex marriage and parochial schooling, they think more like Evangelical Christians than liberal Jews. This provides a huge opportunity for the Republican Party to do what it has tried and largely failed to do for the past three decades - prize American Jewish voters away from their historic attachment to the Democrats.
If the American-Jewish community becomes more right-wing and abandons its traditional support for liberalism, this will only further alienate the already shrinking number of non-Orthodox, liberal Jews in its midst. Rather than remain within the community, they could well become completely estranged from it, further cementing the religious and right-wing orientation of the organized Jewish community.
And if the Jewish liberals trying to destroy the Jewish community are alienated from the community because of their successful destruction of existing liberal Jewish communities... that will be...bad?
To escape Right-Wing American Jews, liberal Jews will have to flee somewhere. Israel? No good. It's subject to the same demographic trends. What about Europe?
The gradual demographic transformation of New York's Jewish community is merely a microcosm of what is happening across the Jewish world. The Orthodox proportion of the European Jewish population is also growing. Haredim, for example, now make up an estimated 17 percent of Britain's Jewish population and account for three-quarters of all British Jewish births. It has been predicted that by 2050, half of all British Jews will be Haredi.
What about Mars? I hear Mars needs Liberal Jews. It hardly has any social justice activism at all and a major inequality of oxygen distribution.
IT'S CALLED THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN...
More than $140 million dollars were spent by the US government in 2010 to make sure Pakistanis, Kenyans, Indonesians, and others, got relevant, targeted news and information, according to a report published by the Center for International Media Assistance.
I shouted “salam! Salam! Allah! Allah!”. In my desperate state I also shouted “ma’is salaama!” which actually means “goodbye” – just about the worst possible thing to say to a horde of men trying to ruin me. I might as well have yelled “goodbye cruel world! Down I go!”
...
The women told me the attack was motivated by rumours spread by trouble-making thugs that I was a foreign spy, following a national advertising campaign warning of the dangers of foreigners. But if that was the cause, it was only really used as a pretext, an excuse.
The men outside remained thirsty for blood; their prey had been cruelly snatched from their grasp. They peered in, so I had to duck down and hide. They attempted to attack the tent, and those inside began making a barricade out of chairs. They wanted my blood.
Women were crying and telling me “this is not Egypt! This is not Islam! Please, please do not think this is what Egypt is!” I reassured her that I knew that was the case, that I loved Egypt and its culture and people, and the innate peacefulness of moderate Islam. She appeared stunned. But I’m not really a vengeful person and I could see through the situation. This vicious act was not representative of the place I had come to know and love.
....everything you need to know about the future of the free world is right here in those words.
The horde will rape Europe, Israel and America and we will go on shouting "Salam! Salam! Allah! Allah!" and assuring the few Muslims who do the decent thing that we are not vengeful people and we know better than to assume that what we are experiencing is representative of the people and their culture.
BLACK MAGIC
The Saudis, our allies against the terrorism funded by Saudi Arabia and consisting of Saudis, are beheading witches. (This is in no way representative of the people and their culture.)
While America fights a war on terror... the Saudis fight a war on sorcery. Harry Potter look out.
Saudi Arabia has decided to bolster its religious police unit specialized in arresting magicians within an ongoing war on sorcery which is punishable by execution in the Gulf Kingdom.
The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the influential law enforcement authority in the world’s oil powerhouse, reported that it had created a “field unit” charged with fighting sorcerers, who it described as “key causers of religious and social instability in the country.”
The Commission’s president, Sheikh Abdul Latif Al Shaikh, ordered the creation of that unit which the statement said is designed to “activate field action to fight sorcerers and charlatans in all parts of the Kingdom.”
Sure it's funny. What's even funnier is that a backward dictatorship which blames all the problems on sorcerers (this is what happens when you drive out all the Jews, you have to blame all your problems on evil wizards) also controls much of our foreign policy and is colonizing America and Europe.
Hilarious.
But one Kemal Argon, a self-proclaimed "Specialist on Islam in the Modern World" has written an article at the Huffington Post which claims that Muslims are just like witches.
American Muslims are increasingly concerned about persecutions of Muslims in American society. I would urge more of them who can do so to make their way to the Salem Witch Museum. However, taking a short tour of the Salem Witch Museum is to be recommended as an important educational experience for anyone concerned about fear-driven persecution of any group or individual in our society today.
We can recognize that this hysterical witch hunting and persecution that we sometimes see in America is nothing new. At the very least, we can recognize any pattern of intolerance and persecution recycling itself in American history for what it really is and refuse to be part of it. In the case of Islamophobia manifesting as witch-hunting and persecution, although we cannot oppose this persecution with our hands in our current situation, we can oppose it with our voices and with our hearts. Such nonviolence in opposition to unjust persecution is legitimate.
In case you missed it, let me draw your attention to three particular words. "although we cannot oppose this persecution WITH OUR HANDS in our current situation..."
Should the situation change... yadda yadda. In the meantime let's troop down to the Salem Witch Museum as a metaphor for American Islamophobia, even though it's Muslims, not Americans, who kill witches these days.
While looking through it, I would urge you to remember that this is not at all representative of anything, nor does it have any long-term implications for an America and Europe where Islam is defined by Saudi mosques.
It's just one of those things that has nothing to do with us... in our current situation.
I FOR ONE WOULD LOVE TO SEE BARACK'S BACK
Hours before the ruling, the Obama for America campaign sent out an email titled “Today’s decision” to potential donors.
“We don’t know what will happen this morning,” campaign manager Jim Messina says in the email. “But no matter what, today is an important day to have Barack Obama’s back.”
Gaza's Ministry of Health on Monday denied reports of a new strain of bacteria found by medical researchers in the Gaza Strip.
Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qedreh told Ma'an there was no deadly bacteria or virus in the Gaza Strip, and Israeli reports to the contrary were designed to destroy health security in Gaza.
Not that Ashraf al-Qedreh would be likely to recognize a deadly bacteria or virus if he encountered one. Past history seems to suggest that his sole function is denouncing Israel. But he missed a golden opportunity here. Unlike spiders in chewing gum or remote controlled sharks or spy eagles, the virus actually exists. Time to blame Israel for it.
JEW, ACCEPT THE MESSAGE OF ISLAM
Unlike the 100 odd Jews still living in Yemen — who in recent years began hiding their traditional earlocks under hats for fear of being singled out — Aharon was trusting of his Arab environment. A popular mechanic, he would exit the gated compound where Jews have been living under government protection for the past four years, undaunted, with his traditional headgear. He went shopping in the market every day.
But on May 22, a man jumped him as he was returning to his car, stabbing him in the neck. Aharon’s son Yahya, who stood nearby, rushed him to the hospital where he died four hours later. Yahya says the assailant was an Al-Qaeda terrorist who drove four hours from the city of Hadhramaut in search of Jews to kill.
Zandani is the third Jew to be murdered in Yemen over the past decade. In December 2008 Moshe Yaish-Nahari was gunned down in the northern city of Raidah — home to the country’s second Jewish community — by a man who reportedly shouted at him “Jew, accept the message of Islam."
We'll have a saner world when more people accept that the message inflicted on the few remaining Jews of Yemen, on the World Trade Center and on millions of people throughout history is indeed the message of Islam.
WILL OF THE PEOPLE, WHAT'S THAT?
Almost 100 Conservative MPs this week wrote to Mr Cameron demanding a legal commitment to hold a referendum on Britain’s relationship with the EU after the next election. Several ministers privately believe that leaving the union should not be ruled out.
Mr Cameron did not rule out some sort of vote on European issues eventually, but insisted that he would not give the British people the option of leaving the EU outright.
"I completely understand why some people want an in/out referendum, why they wanted it yesterday, why they want it today, Some people just want to get out: I completely understand that but I don't share that view, I don't think that's the right thing to do.”
The Justice Secretary launched a sustained attack on advocates of a popular vote on Europe, which he described as “a total irrelevance” that would create turmoil and undermine Britain’s economic credibility.
"In the middle of a global financial crisis to start asking a yes/no question about whether or not we should stay in the biggest trading bloc in the global economy, I think would be a slightly foolish thing to do," Mr Clarke said.
Some people might think that's the exact right time to ask the question, but that would just undermine confidence in the EUtanic, which is unsinkable, so long as people go on believing in it.
Also referendums are a very silly thing.
"I cannot think of anything sillier to do than hold a referendum. I’m not keen on referendums, I see no case for this referendum.”
And we're bound to win a referendum anyway, so there's no need to actually hold one.
Voters have little interest in the issue, Mr Clarke suggested.
“If you ask the public what are their priorities at this difficult time, what would they like to see us turn our attention to for three weeks and campaign about, the idea that they’re all demanding a referendum on the European Union would be regarded as ridiculous; it’d be out of sight as a public demand, as a priority,” he said.
There's growing referendum madness in Germany too, which is bearing the cost of this disaster.
The leader of Merkel's Bavarian allies in the CSU, Horst Seehofer, wrote in business daily Handelsblatt: "Politicians cannot simply impose more Europe on us from the top down ... That's why I'm pleading for our constitution to allow us to have referendums on all important European matters."
German voters will no doubt be thrilled by scenes such as this.
An acrimonious summit dragged on late into the night as Italian and Spanish leaders threatened to delay approval of a €120bn "compact for jobs and growth" unless they secured immediate help on their borrowing costs.
In a welfare state, the welfare recipients have to be talked into accepting their welfare.
IRAN FINALLY NAILS DOWN SOURCE OF DRUG TRADE, WORLD'S EVIL
The Islamic Republic is the source of the meth trade across half of Europe and Asia. But finally at an international drug conference it announced that it has determined what the source of all those drugs is (no, not all the meth labs in Iran or the poppy fields of Afghanistan.)... it's the Jews.
The teachings of the Jewish book of law, the Talmud, are a driving force behind the international drugs trade, Iran's First Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi said
"The spread of narcotics in the world emanates from the teachings of the Talmud... whose objective is the destruction of the world," Rahimi said in comments published by the official website of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as well as state media.
"If one seeks what lies behind all forms of corruption, there is the repugnant face of Zionists. This is the same case for the narcotics trade ... whose primary operator is the Zionist regime," he said.
And since Iran is actually the nexus of much of the drug traffic in the region and its affiliated groups actually make money from the drug trade... we must conclude that Iran is Zionist.
Anyway keep in mind that Iran is Anti-Zionist, not Anti-Semitic, as every media outlet covering this story will tell you.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran will pay for anybody who can research and find one single Zionist who is an addict,” Mr. Rahmini said. “They do not exist. This is the proof of their involvement in drugs trade.”
Israel has quite a few drug addicts so I'm sure there will be a line of people asking the Islamic Republic to pay up.
The Vice President then began aggressively competing for the position of Joe Biden.
Mr. Rahimi told stories of gynecologists’ killing black babies on the orders of the Zionists and claimed that the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 was started by Jews, adding that mysteriously, no Jews died in that uprising.
I assume he then diverged into explaining that the Jews stole all the anchovies and invented pants.
Everyone has condemned Rahmini, from the UK to the EU to the UN
European diplomats were shocked, shocked to discover that the leaders of a Muslim country believe that Jews are the devil.
A European diplomat said afterward: “This was definitely one of the worst speeches I have heard in my life. My gut reaction was: why are we supporting any cooperation with these people?”
But the diplomat, who declined to be identified by name or country, defended his presence at the conference. “If we do not support the United Nations on helping Iran fight drugs, voices like the one of Mr. Rahimi will be the only ones out there,” he said.
...and this way the UN helps Iran fight drugs and provide a forum for Iran to explain that they only have to deal with drugs because the Jews invented them.
THE GREAT POSTAL WORKER HUNGER STRIKE BEGINS
A small group of postal workers and supporters began a four-day hunger strike Monday to protest the U.S. Postal Service’s deteriorating finances and service and Congress’s failure to address the situation.
Public unions can go on hunger strikes, but when local and national governments start collapsing, the hunger will become real, especially for those who depend on food stamps.
AND THE WINNER FOR GAYEST PHOTO OF TWO WORLD LEADERS...
Arizona Sen. John McCain, without naming the president he hopes to succeed, told the Republican Jewish Coalition Tuesday that he saw something else entirely when he met the Russian leader: “I looked into Mr. Putin’s eyes and I saw three things — a K and a G and a B.”
...I think Obama sees the same thing as he looks into Vladimir's eyes... and he likes it.
From Mr. Abdul Hakim Belhaj
Commander Tripoli Military Council.
commander.tripolimilitarycouncil1@hotmail.com
Assalamu alaikum warahmotullahi wabarakatuh.
I got your contact through some discreet inquiry from the chamber of commerce and industry; one has no doubt in your ability to handle a financial business transaction. My name is Abdul Hakim Belhaj, Leader of the newly formed Tripoli Military Council who ousted the repressive regime of Col Muarmar Gaddaffi.
After fighters from my Tripoli Brigade broke through the defences of the ousted leader's fortress in the heart of the city, Col Muammar Gaddafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound, we discovered A metal save: containing (US$75.000.000:00) Seventy Five million United States of American Dollars, which we shared among ourselves, and I managed to move out my shear US$15.Million Dollars, to a financial firm with the help of a Private Company, the deal was absolutely successfully, I am seeking your help to allow me transfer the funds into your bank account for save keeping and investing in your country,I also want you to join me in any area i want to invest the fund in your country, if you don't mind.
I am willing to offer you 25% of this fund for your assistance if you cooperate to help me receive this deposit.
Thanks and Jazakum Allah Khair
Awaiting your reply through this E-mail :< commander.tripolimilitarycouncil1@hotmail.com> >
BEST REGARD.
Mr. Abdul Hakim Belhaj
Commander Tripoli Military Council.
...and there's the scam that says putting someone like Abdul Hakim Belhaj, who was affiliated with Al-Qaeda and with the Muslim Brotherhood and who wants to turn Libya into an Emirate, will lead to an Arab Spring.
People who think that they're too smart to fall for the Jihadi Prince scam, fall for the other kind of Jihadi Prince scam instead.
A FEW NOTES
For those in LA, Caroline Glick will be speaking at a Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors event. Follow the link to learn more.
Yahoo Groups Labs is shutting down. This may wreck the Image Free email subscription, though I don't think many people use that anyway.
A small personal note.
I'm experiencing some Repetitive Stress Injuries (turning out 12,000-13,000 words a week adds up) and I'm trying to cut back on my typing. I'm going to keep up my writing, but I'm going to cut back a bit on the emails, tweets and messages I reply to.
If you send me an email and I don't reply to you, it's nothing personal, it's just what I need to do to be able to write the next article without wearing wrist braces that make typing feel like The Incredible Hulk trying to use an ATM.
My left and right wrists thank you for your understanding.
As the day of judgment approaches, half the country sits waiting for a small group of men and women to decide how many of our civil rights we get to keep. After two flawed decisions that draw not from the Constitution, but from policy and opinion, we wait hopefully for a third opinion that will set us free.
Today the Supreme Court is slightly tilted in our favor, which is to say that it has a few members who believe that the Constitution is more than blotting paper for their opinions, and that individuals and states have rights, rather than just being troublesome cogs in the mighty machine of the national policy apparatus bent on tackling one growing crisis or another.
How long will that tenuous state of affairs endure? Who knows. In the meantime we are caught between an omnipotent executive who believes that he is above the law, an unelected court which includes two of his appointees, one of them his lawyer, and a Congress which does little except spend gargantuan amounts of money. And our best bet is the court, because it is the hardest to bribe and some of its members believe in the law, rather than in the almighty policy ends that justify all means.
When the highest official in the land decided to sell the American people into slavery to insurance companies to get his landmark legislation passed, we took to the streets to protest, we changed the composition of Congress, and here we are waiting for the Supreme Court to decide that maybe we aren't the property of the Executive Branch, warm bodies to be traded at the slave market of policy to get a bill passed.
147 years after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, we are back to debating slavery. But it's not a debate that began today. Everyone who pays taxes can calculate how much time they spend working for their masters in Washington, D.C. How much of their income the serfs are obligated to send home to the barons in the white palaces who will decide how much of it to hand out to their friends and how much of it to use on the endless expenses of government.
Around the same time as the evils of racial slavery were being fought, the building blocks of economic slavery were being hammered together with the Revenue Act of 1861, the first Federal income tax and the first attack on the Constitution, that concluded with the Sixteenth Amendment. One hundred years before the election that brought Obama to power, the Democratic platform called for an income tax, "to the end that wealth may bear its proportionate share of the burdens of the Federal Government".
The burden has grown vastly since then. It has grown out of all proportion. And to achieve its goals, the government began selling off its assets. Its chief assets are us.
The ObamaCare Mandate is a fairly simple trade between health insurance companies, which largely owe their existence to government tinkering with the health care market, and its government patron. In exchange for giving the government what it wants, the government gives them what they want, us.
Supporters of the Mandate have been legitimately confused by all the protests. As they understand it, we are property-- so why are we complaining about being rented out to another master? If Obama and Congress own us, why can't they lease us out to their supporters in the insurance industry? Especially when it's for the greater good.
Today we're being leased out to the health insurance industry. Tomorrow we might be sent out to go bring in the harvest, the way that citizens were compelled to in Communist countries. Once we have been designated as warm bodies for sale to the highest bidder, when there is, what politicians can describe as, a legitimate concern, then there is absolutely no end to it. And when China finally decides to recoup some of its investment, there will be a mandate for that too.
The Constitution has been so comprehensively violated and we have been deprived of so many rights that defending any right becomes a rear-guard action. After so many violations, we take a stand on the chalk outline of the latest outrage, while having to argue that this is the red line. This is the one that is too much. And we put our faith in a Supreme Court that occasionally respects the Constitution and occasionally creates its own Constitution. And we sit here waiting to find out which it will be this time. Freedom or slavery.
Even a Supreme Court defeat for the slavery of the state mandate will not be the end of the story.
The policy machine that grinds on in Washington, in state capitals, in municipal city halls and in the halls of a thousand think-tanks and the banquet rooms of a hundred forums is built to deprive people of their rights. It is not easily stopped. Even when the Supreme Court rules against it, it studies the ruling and attacks it from another angle until it gets its way.
Many of the modern violations of our rights went through this process, losing a Supreme Court decision and then finding another way through the door. Once the policy apparatus has agreed on something, the mere objection that it is against the law will not halt them for long. The only way to stop the machine is to break the machine. To tear out its levers and gears, to fill it with sand, spill out its oil and turn it to grind uselessly facing a wall.
A Supreme Court of Constitutionalists might deal it some serious setbacks, but it has become clear that we are headed into dark territory where the laws don't matter anymore. Obama has shed most of the pretense of legality, doing things because he wants them done. The legal rationale for ObamaCare never existed. Those who wrote and passed it did not believe that such a rationale was even needed.
Their only argument has been the policy argument, the ends justifying the means. The policy ends which justify the oppressive means is their argument for every one of their endless streams of abuses. It is a position that places them and their actions completely outside the law. Anything they do is justified because it is for the greater good, to meet one "growing crisis" or another, whether it's health care, obesity, racism, bullying, profiteering, homophobia, high prices or anything you see discussed with serious faces and even more serious hairdos on the evening news.
Even Supreme Court rulings depend on executive compliance. Obama has demonstrated several times that he will simply not comply with the law. And a showdown between the law and an executive backed by the media and a parade train of experts, not to mention a completely corrupt Attorney General, will not be a pretty sight.
The mere willingness of the executive branch to operate outside the law acts as a restraint on the Supreme Court's willingness to challenge the executive. That is what FDR managed to accomplish by alternately terrorizing and bypassing the Supreme Court. Obama has shown every sign of being willing to do the same thing. Some liberals are already proposing their own court packing schemes. The Washington Post has an article calling for upping the number of justices from 9 to 19, which is certainly one way to gain a majority.
The left has gotten this far by subverting institutions and it is being increasingly open about not caring for the forms or for anything that interferes with its objectives. As a defense against it, the Supreme Court is a fragile entity. It is meant to serve as a final review for a law-abiding legislature, not for a thuggish executive and a legislature that passes bills without knowing what it is in them. In an era in which the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches have all been warped, none of them can be relied on to do the right thing.
We are in the midst of another Civil War. Not a war of bullets, but a war of laws. And the lawmaking apparatus is a tool for depriving people of rights, not a tool for creating safe spaces for rights. In the firefight, those who want to limit rights through government mandates will have the upper hand. The Supreme Court, as a reviewing body, is less vulnerable to the seduction of legislation than the legislative and executive branches, but it has done its share of legislating, and activist Federal judges are a reliable way of subverting democracy and states' rights.
We can't depend on the Supreme Court to do the right thing, though it can occasionally be an important ally in the struggle to restore the Constitution, the rule of law and the rights of the individual. The ball is not in their court, it is in ours. And it is important that we understand what is at stake. Behind all the policy debates is a simple question. Do we want to be free men and women or will we agree to be slaves?
The final review of every act of government does not come from within the government, but from the people, who have to decide what is acceptable and unacceptable. This is a law of human nature that is not subject to any higher court, only the court of the conscience. Rights and freedoms do not come from government, they come from the people. We have seen how in Egypt, the people chose slavery. That makes it all the more vital to remember that, no matter what we are told, we have a choice, and the greatest power that we have is the knowledge that the choice and the final decision are ours.
Elizabeth "Fauxcahontas" Warren told the Boston Globe last week that she wants to win the Senate race so that she can "bring an outsider’s perspective to solving the nation’s problems". And who better to bring an outsider's perspective than a Harvard professor, a member of the FDIC Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion and the chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel.
If a law professor who spent 15 years on and off government and quasi-government commissions and whose prescriptions have become policy, and who could raise 7 million dollars in a few months is an outsider, then who exactly is an insider?
When Warren's Cherokee claims became a little too embarrassing, The New Yorker ran an article asking, "Who is a Native American?" as if the question of who the hell were you parents were some imponderable paradox like "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" or "How much debt can government amass before Washington D.C. becomes a black hole whose gravitational pull will suck in the economies of the entire planet?"
If Warren's assertion that she is an outsider meets with as much mockery as her assertion that she is a white aborigine, then The New Yorker may run yet another article, "Who is an Outsider?"
Elizabeth Warren's whole purpose in claiming to be an Indian woman was to claim outsider status. Unlike the other blue-eyed, blond-haired law students, she was an outsider, a member of a proud people who once roamed the plains hunting buffalo and writing corporate liability legislation before they were rounded up and forced to teach law at Harvard U.
Outsider status is prized by insiders. The more of an insider you are, the more outsider flair you need to add to your identity. And no man or woman is better proof of that than the completely unqualified candidate sitting in the White House, who began his national coming out party at the DNC 2004 convention by announcing, "My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin- roof shack."
Obama's outsider biography proved to be as phony as Warren's Cherokee claims, but it served its purpose, introducing him to the Democratic Party and the country at large as the ultimate outsider. A man whose father grew up in a shack with a bunch of goats, but whose son is, as his future V.P. described him, "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean".
Biden was presumably very impressed by Obama's ability to remain bright and clean after being around goats all day. So was the nation which did its best to get that nice young man away from all the goats and under a proper roof in the White House.
Obama might have spent as much time around goats as Warren spent around the Cherokee that she claimed to have wanted to meet so badly, but he was determined to remain an outsider. Eight years after the convention, where he declaimed, "There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America" and four years after the election that took him from the tin-roof shack of the United States Senate to the White House, he was still complaining how hard it is to get voters to support someone with his unique outsider biography.
Obama's books exploring his outsider identity, his speeches tediously summoning up the moonlit night that a dimwitted hippie fell in lust with an abusive Kenyan polygamist to produce a child who would base his entire career on his DNA, and his victimization parade which leaves daily from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to tour MSNBC, CNN and the Washington Post recounting to sympathetic reporters how hard it is out there for an outsider; are the goats and tin-roof shack all over again.
We have spent more time, vicariously, in that tin-roof shack than Obama's father ever did. We are forced to relive it each time Obama screws up in some grandiose fashion and the media tells us that we want him replaced with someone competent only because we hate outsiders. Suddenly he's no longer at the golf course or a lavish foreign soiree, but back in the tin-roof shack, complaining that we won't let him get ahead.
When Obama and Warren pose for a photo, we are told to see, not two law professors with Harvard on their resumes, but two outsiders, two tragic persecuted souls forever trapped on the wrong side of the American glass ceiling, forced to toil in the menial depths of government, while the rest of the country rakes in hefty five-figure salaries and gorges itself on cans of Spam.
If the Kenyan goat-herder and the Cherokee maiden are the outsiders, then we must be the insiders. We are the people that Warren is hoping to take back the country from and place it in the swaddling clothes of big government. We are proof that this is still a racist country because we refuse to give up the last shreds of our civil liberties to Obama and Warren-- just because they're different than us.
The Outsider alliance of Obama and Warren benefited Warren Buffett, the ultimate outsider, who like so many billionaires is a strong supporter of the outsider administration and has even lent his brand name to its classless class warfare. With trust-fund babies protesting at Occupy Wall Street and the second-richest man in America promoting class warfare, the outside truly is the inside.
The Wall Street bailouts allowed Warren Buffett to buy many goats worth of companies, and he's passed along some of those goats back to the White House. Last September, Buffett headlined a fundraiser for Obama at the perfect outsider venue, the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan. Actual roof included.
Hollywood stars, the ultimate outsiders, have swarmed to fundraisers for Obama and Warren, finding mutual kinship as rebels with a cause. Together, the billionaires of Wall Street and the millionaires of Hollywood, outsiders in a country divided between those who are out of work and those worried about losing their jobs, are banding together against the coupon-clipping wage-earning insiders who run the country.
They are here to take back America, from the people they already took it back from in the last election. From the people who want to be able to earn a living without having to be an outsider-insider with dabs of Cherokee, Kenya and Harvard Yard green.
There's a lot of talk about getting rid of the insiders, but the outsiders who claim to be insiders are even more pernicious than the insiders. Claiming to be outsiders gives insiders the inside track on seizing power and then playing the victim, while their follow outsiders swarm the barricades and clamor for special treatment.
The current raft of outsider-insiders, includes actors who play politicians, politicians who act like actors, billionaires who push class warfare, blue-eyed Cherokees, Nobel Peace Prize warmongers, fighting on behalf of outsider groups, like gay marriage advocates and illegal aliens, whose agendas are backed by some of the largest and well-financed lobbying groups in the country. Meanwhile, the entire mob of East Coast and West Coast outsiders keeps crowding in the flyover country insiders out of their own country.
Outsiders have become the new insiders. Nothing can be done without consulting an outsider or including an outsider. The legitimacy of the entire country rests on political conventions where a graduate of some Ivy League college can get up on stage, namecheck the goats and the shack, and describe his own biography as the fulfillment and validation of America's existence to people who no longer feel all that secure in their belief that their country has a right to exist. The goats and shack have become more important to the nation's legitimacy than the Constitution.
There's no such thing as being too much of an outsider. The more of an
outsider you seem, the more valuable your identity is, the more crowds
will thrill when you wrap yourself in the flag and vow to destroy the
country in the name of your neo-American values.
To get anywhere in life, you must be an outsider. You must dig for your Cherokee roots beneath a white birch tree, locate some Pow-Wow Chow recipes, and present them to Harvard in lieu of your admissions essay. It doesn't really matter whether they are genuine, what matters, as with all academic subjects, is that you are paying fealty to the farce and playing the game.
Write your biography about being a confused half-black, half-white, three-quarters Hawaiian, one-eight Indonesian, six-fourths Chicagoan, nine-thirtieths Cherokee and four-fifths Jim Beam teenager looking to sort out a confusing identity. If you can't be bothered to write it, outsource the project to a Caucasian radical terrorist, who, like you, comes from a wealthy family. If that one sells, write another one.
It doesn't matter if it's real or not, it shows that you are an outsider. Who but an outsider would write an entire book dealing with one's own "outsiderness"? Everyone feels like an outsider sometimes, and your outsider status will be proof that you can relate to all the actual outsiders who don't feel like they are represented in a government run by Harvard graduates with paper degrees and iron decrees.
A splintered nation, a divided land, is a land of outsiders. The more that the outsiders play their game of Divide-and-Conquer, the more people look for outsiders to represent them. The more that they are told that America is illegitimate because it is a nation of insiders, the more willing they are to prove the charge wrong by electing an outsider. An outsider who's exactly like the insiders, only worse.
It's hard out there for an outsider and in a nation run by insiders who pretend to be outsiders, we are all outsiders.
The last time Aaron Sorkin had a high-profile political television show, liberals used it to cope with the decline and fall of the Clinton Presidency and the long winter of the Bush Years. The West Wing was a coping mechanism for the death of a liberal dream, and so is The Newsroom. Both are an escape into fantasy to avoid dealing with the harsh reality.
On an episode of Seinfeld, George is stung by an insult but is unable to think of a retort, so he spends days trying to come up with the perfect comeback, until he finally thinks of it and travels around the country to get the chance to deliver it. The Newsroom, set in the past, and jumping in right before the political balance tilted toward the Republicans in the mid-term elections, is the same thing.
The Newsroom is Sorkin's sad attempt to win an argument by rewriting history and coming up with all the comebacks that his side couldn't think of two years ago. It's the sad and pathetic spectacle of an ideology creating its own fantasy version of its reality in which it won the argument.
Unlike The West Wing, The Newsroom isn't set in an alternate world in which
the universe innately favors liberals. Instead it's set in an alternate
version of the past, in which liberals were smarter and won all the arguments that they ended up losing here. And the existence of The Newsroom is the greatest possible concession that the argument was lost.
There's no reason for Republicans to look down on The Newsroom. It's a safer outlet for liberal anger than Occupy Wall Street. It's a miniature universe in which they are smarter, nobler and better than everyone else. Children have fantasy worlds like that. There's no reason that liberals shouldn't. Not only does it give them the security of believing that they really were superior, but it prevents them from learning any useful lessons from their defeat.
It's never a bad thing when your enemies escape into a delusional state, to a world of their making in which they are in complete control of everything. It makes it more likely that they will cede at least some control over the real world. And it's not only an admission of defeat, but of emotional and mental fragility. Adults don't need to build fantasy worlds to escape the effects of their failures on their precious self-esteem. That's for overgrown children who are used to getting trophies for just showing up.
The Newsroom is the kid that everyone hated losing his race for class president and creating a fantasy world in which he won the election and everyone cheered his obnoxious tantrums. It may not be good for him, but it's good for us because it means he hasn't learned to win. All that he's learned to do is manage the emotional experience of defeat through delusional tantrums of superiority.
Propaganda that tells you that you won, when you actually lost, is corrosive; it inhibits any serious self-evaluation. And without some soul-searching and error-checking, the same mistakes are bound to be repeated over and over again. Seventeen years after the Clinton Presidency was nearly torpedoed by universal health care, his party's successor, who defeated the woman who shaped the initiative, went down the same road, but with much less caution.
That kind of stupidity would not have been possible if the winners had learned any lessons from the past. But the winners had been living on The West Wing, in which liberal speeches and principles are all it takes to win. Where the good guys never lose, because the scripts are written that way. Rather than living in the real Clinton Years, many of them had been living in the imaginary version. Now, rather than remembering the actual Obama Years, they will remember The Newsroom's fictional version of them. And they will make the same mistakes all over again.
HBO, which has invested big in liberal propaganda, knows exactly what it's doing. At a time when customers are dropping cable, particularly the high-priced packages, it is insulating itself with a built-in audience. Forget MSNBC or Comedy Central with their tantrums against real-life Republicans, on HBO, liberal audiences can go on safe safaris to see experienced liberal great hunters taking potshots at imaginary Republicans.
When the real-life Republicans are just too scary, the good liberal viewer flees to HBO, where the Republicans are just waiting to be deflated with a smarmy line about school prayer, science or terrorism. Just as the family sitcom reassured viewers about the state of the nuclear family, HBO reassures liberals about the state of their ideology, nurturing them and coddling them, until they are ready to reemerge at the next political rally.
The message that The Newsroom feeds to liberals is that they didn't have enough self-esteem, they weren't as self-confident, as abrasive and as biased as they should have been last time around. And that's a welcome thing, not for anyone who still harbors hope that a sane two-party system will prevail, but those who want to see liberals destroy themselves, their institutions and their ambitions.
If liberals acted in public life the way that they do on The Newsroom, they would be signing their own political death warrant. The Newsroom's message to the media is to be more openly biased. And who wouldn't welcome that? The media's last shreds of credibility come from its pretense that it is neutral. The day that news anchors routinely take to the air, announce their political affiliation and begin to rant about Republicans is the day that the last pieces of their empire come crumbling down. The day that every news channel is MSNBC is the day that they will all have to divide the MSNBC audience among themselves.
The liberal media is already following that path, and their newspapers, magazines and news shows are turning into ghettos because of it. The Newsroom berates them for not following it quickly enough. And the faster they go down that road, the less influence they will retain. If I wanted to destroy the liberal media, I would encourage them to follow The Newsroom's model. And while they won't listen to me... they will listen to Aaron Sorkin.
The real topic of The Newsroom is egotism and it's the perfect mirror for the destruction of the administrations of two egotistical Democratic chiefs who self-destructed because they had as little impulse control as The Newsroom's protagonist. The celebration of self-destructive behavior is self-destructive and it programs the Democrats to seek out the next cycle of egotistical, self-destructive politicians.
A failure to recognize one's own flaws means an inability to change. Hell is being trapped in one's own flaws forever. And that is The Newsroom, it is a hell that liberals have made for themselves, a Sisyphean exercise in which they roll the boulder endlessly up the hill, only to be flattened by it, and then resume the same exercise without having learned anything in the process except to push the boulder even faster next time.
The Newsroom reeks of its own smugness. It is entirely self-reflective. Its politics are a matter of identity. And that identity creates its own universe. There are universes like that already in cloistered urban centers, in ideologically-gated communities and in academia. And when their inhabitants mistake the larger world outside as being no different than their universe, the contest between the ideology and the world begins.
To the sociopath, the universe is a solipsistic place. So too the modern liberal sees the world as a place on which to force his own sense of internal identity. He reacts to the "otherness" of those who don't share his political identity by trying to stamp them out. If he can't physically destroy them, then he retreats to physical and mental enclaves where he destroys them intellectually over and over again, fighting battles against legions of ghosts and shadows, mocking and ridiculing them out of existence, until he is forced to face them in real life and attempts to treat real people the way that he treated the imaginary obstacles to his ego.
With The Newsroom, the cycle continues as, anticipating defeat, liberals retreat to a safe place in an imaginary version of the past, in which they can line up all their enemies and knock them down like rows of toy soldiers, in which everything seems clear and certain, and their side always wins. Their hibernation is a good sign. It's a sign that they are afraid they are about to lose.
Bears leave hibernation in the spring, but, since the spring, liberals have begun crawling into their own caves, arranging the cushions, closing the blinds and shutting away the world, for the better world glowing from their television screens.
The Corporate Cult evolved in the United States as a hybrid of the sales force of the corporation and the religious devotion of the cult. This type of entity might be a cult like Scientology, which used the aggressive and organized sales tactics and marketing campaigns of a corporation, or it could be a corporation like Apple, whose employees earn little, but feel a sense of satisfaction at being part of a meaningful entity.
The Obama Campaign is a fantastic marketing machine. It is constantly discovering new ways to sell things to people. But the problem is that it has no actual product. A company that goes corporate cult uses some of the tactics of a cult to inflate the value of its product. But a cult has no product except the sense of satisfaction that comes from being in the cult. The only things it sells are images of its leader, emblazoned everywhere, his books, speeches and photos, and these are used as tokens of membership in the cult.
In retrospect, the Cult of Obama had much in common with other cults. Like them it recruited young volunteers on campus. Its recruitment materials leaned heavily on books by its beloved leader. It promised them that a new age was coming and that they could be a big part of bringing it about. And its vector of introduction to older viewers was through a woman who has been accused of promoting cults on her popular television show.
Strip away the politics, forget the push and pull of the election issues, wipe the polar identities of the parties from your minds and take a fresh look at the 2008 campaign. Then compare the pitch to any of the major cults in the seventies and eighties. There really isn't all that much of a difference. They're all "Transformative" movements that promise to solve society's problems by using new insights to create a wave of change that begins with "us".
Even the political angle isn't new. Jim Jones and his murderous child-abusing cult started out as community organizers for California Democrats, and leading politicians, including saintly hero Harvey Milk, covered for his crimes until the whole thing got too big and Jones got too crazy. Long before Obama, Lyndon LaRouche went the campus cult route and if you are morbidly curious, you can find videos where "LaRouche Youth", who have broken ties with their families and friends, shout insane slogans while their glazed eyes stare fixedly into the camera.
The pitch is "Transformative" but it isn't the world that is being transformed, only the participants, and the method of transformation is constant labor and omnipresent awareness of the program. That is where the Cult of Obama's retention efforts fell through. Successful cults maintain control over a core cadre and use them to expand their base, but projects like Americorps did not come close to meeting those goals.
The corporate part of the Corporate Cult deals with adversity by redoubling the sales pitch. If sales fall, it finds more things to sell. The Obama Campaign is insanely intensifying its sales efforts, without understanding that its sales are falling because the value of the brand is failing. Many cult survivors dropped out during a similar phase when the cult supervisors pressured them to increase sales and recruitment, even as the cult was no longer relevant. When the history of this campaign is written, we will likely discover that the people on the inside were being just as ruthlessly pressured to achieve impossible goals to compensate for the failings of their candidate.
When businesses hysterically deluge you with offerings for their product, it's a sign of fear. Obama's campaign rolling out invitations to dinner with him and suggestions that you use your wedding to raise money for him stinks of that same fear. It's ingenious from a marketing standpoint, but from that same standpoint, it's also a bad tactic. The last thing that a company or a campaign wants to do is wear people out. But that is exactly what Obama is accomplishing by burning through his base for a short-term cash grab, when what he really needs is to have those people committed to him at the end.
Obama's people are clever, but not good, which is a common combination at dot com companies that go under when the trend passes them by. The Obama trend has long since gone and no one is all that excited about another four years. Like Steve Jobs debuting one more feature, the campaign has doled out gay marriage and the DREAM Act to gets its base excited about another four years. But it still isn't excited. These are features that it expected years ago and it's not in the mood to work itself up into a frenzy over finally getting them.
This is the part where the marketing consultants spend six months on a study and inform the company that their brand is done and has to either be retired or salvaged through a high-profile campaign that will reinvent it as cutting edge. But when your brand is a man, how do you reinvent him? And when your brand is "Transformative Politics" and even your staunchest supporters don't feel like anything has been transformed, how do you move the product?
Cults shift the burden of failure from the guru and the program to the participants. It isn't the man or the idea that failed, but the people.
There are the outside enemies who make enlightenment impossible. "How very much I've tried my best to give you a good life. But in spite of all of my trying a handful of our people, with their lies, have made our lives impossible," Jim Jones said at Jonestown. That is the epilogue of the Obama campaign. The one being scripted for him by the media.
Like Jim Jones, Obama has done his best to give us a good life, but the Republicans, FOX News, the Supreme Court, the Koch Brothers and powerful interests have sabotaged his efforts with their lies. And yet in the end it's not the enemies who bear the final burden, but the people who weren't good enough.
Cults demand more and more from their followers to impose upon them an unreasonable and unshakeable burden of guilt. The cult appeals to those who want to make more of their lives, and it destroys their will by making them feel like failures. The Obama campaign's endless demands of its followers have that tenor as well. Behind all the flowery words, the burden of responsibility is being shifted from his people to his supporters.
The cult frames everything in terms of commitment. What begins as a commitment to personal and global transformation becomes a commitment to the demands of the cult. The commitment is meant to be mutual, and it is occasionally even framed in terms of a marriage.
"In all our years of marriage, he's always looked out for me. Now, I see that same commitment every day to you and to this country," Michelle Obama's campaign mailing says. "The only way we'll win this election is if we can rely on one another like that."
The commitments, of course, aren't mutual. They can't be. The disparity in power is too great. The cult exists for the sake of the leader, but the leader does not exist for the sake of the cult. Once the followers realize this, the illusion of mutual commitment breaks down. And to keep them from realizing it, the cult strives to make them feel that they have not lived up to their commitment.
The cult intrudes into personal and marital relationships because it cannot allow any commitment to dwarf the greater commitment. That is why cults will arrange marriages and control whom members may marry. It may command divorces or just solicit donations to its cause at a wedding. It acts as if it knows no boundaries, but, in truth, it is setting its own boundaries. It is claiming the intimate territory of personal relationships as its own.
And yet all this only works for as long as the transformative illusion endures. When the sense that the commitment to the cult is not transformative, that the principles of its program cannot make a better world, then its power fades away and dies. The cult may amp up its marketing, but the only product that it ever truly had was intangible.
The Obama campaign never sold Obama; it sold the idea of Obama. The illusion that was more than the sum of his false biography, his chin up speeches full of momentous pauses and stolen poetry, or the typography of his posters. It was the sense of imminence, the perception of a transformative figure who could change the country and the world. That magnetic tug wasn't Obama, it was the confused mess of desires, fears, hopes, dreams and wishes that the people were encouraged to project onto him.
The essential product of every cult is the promise of global transformation through personal transformation. Years later, few people can say that their lives are any better, and while many are still willing to echo Jim Jones and blame that on outside enemies, there is no real faith that the program can work.
Whether or not Obama wins again, his cult has failed. It failed because it was not able to deliver on its promises of transformation, nor was it able to place the blame on its followers. Most of those who voted for Obama will drink the Kool-Aid one more time, but there will be little enthusiasm in the drinking of it.
A lawless society is a depressing place to live because it's a place completely without law. And while going lawless might be appealing, we aren't talking about an end to laws requiring you to wear bicycle helmets or drink small sodas. Not even laws ordering you to pay recycle, pay taxes and join up during a war. These are laws, but they're also ordinances, commands and compulsions. They are not really any different from your parents telling you to wash behind your ears or a mugger ordering you to give him your money. They might be right or wrong, but they aren't law.
Law exists apart from what a group of people at any given time want you to do. That is why the aged nature of the United States Constitution is a strength. The farther away we travel from 1788, the less that the foibles and frailties of the Framers affect us. The transitory human things fall away leaving only the essence of law.
A Bill of Rights drafted today would look very different than it did back then. Not only would there be no Second Amendment, but most of the others would read dramatically different. There would be few severe restrictions on government power. Nor would there be unlimited Freedom of Speech. The entire thing would run a few thousand pages and would be filled with all sorts of escape clauses, which when added together would render the whole thing meaningless.
Take for example the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which includes dozens of new rights, such as the right of asylum, the right to environmental protection and consumer protection, and the right to social security, in addition to the more basic rights familiar to Americans, but it comes with a simple addendum.
"Any limitation on the exercise of the rights and freedoms recognised by this Charter must be
provided for by law and respect the essence of those rights and freedoms. Subject to the principle of proportionality, limitations may be made only if they are necessary and genuinely meet objectives of general interest recognised by the Union or the need to protect the rights and freedoms of others."
Which is to say there is freedom of speech, only until a compelling argument can be made why banning someone's freedom of speech will help protect the general interests of the European Union or the rights of others to have environmental protection and social security.
That is the essence of a lawless society, which is to say that there are oodles and oodles of law, but it's merely a complicated way for those in power to enforce their will on others. If you want to force people to do something, all you need to do is study enough clauses, lay out your reasoning and it's done.
It's law in the same sense that a mugger putting a gun to your head is law. He has a gun and he makes the laws. The laws don't apply to him. They don't apply in any larger universal fashion. The mugger can choose to suspend any laws at his whim, because he has a gun.
The United States has drifted into lawlessness, into laws that are the guns of government. Want to force everyone to buy health insurance? Pass a law. Ignore any questions of legality because legality doesn't matter. If people come out to protest, send out your SEIU thugs to beat them. If you lose your Senate majority, use Reconciliation to pass it. If the Supreme Court threatens to investigate the Constitutionality of the law, threaten the Court.
The only thing separating tactics like these from the mugger on the corner is public interest. Which is to say that the government is playing Robin Hood. It isn't mugging you because it likes the smell of money, but because it wants to help those less fortunate. Robin Hood was rebelling against the illegal authority of the Sheriff of Nottingham. And our government is rebelling against the authority of... the people and the law.
The government is the outlaw, doing what it likes because it must resist all the "powerful interests", the most powerful of them being the Middle Class. The Revolution becomes permanent, with the Reds in power constantly rebelling against the bourgeois capitalists by raising taxes and outlawing soda. Every year, the outlaws swing out of the trees, rob the merchants and ride back to Washington D.C. for a glorious feast over the stolen goods, which they may in some small way share with a few peasants, to secure their support.
This farce can take place under the guise of law, but it represents a lawless society. Law limits power. It limits the power of individuals, institutions and governments. But in a lawless society no limitation on power applies if the power is being applied for the sake of the higher ideals which the society can be said to represent. If those higher ideals involve helping the poor, then every institution can act like Robin Hood. And it's perfectly legal, because there is no law.
In a lawless society, law is a function of emotion. The one who screams the loudest gets his way if he can influence enough people to believe that he has a case. Laws get made from a sense of "rightness" that is entirely a function of emotion. Everyone operates in the egotistical "I feel" mode, sharing and feeling their mutual pain, and passing laws to outlaw anyone from hurting anyone else... unless it is in the interest of preventing pain.
Rights become entirely positive and empathy based. Negative rights become associated with selfishness. Everyone has the right to a thousand benefits, but no one has the right to opt out. Everyone is free to speak their mind, so long as it is an expression of need, rather than a demand to be left alone.
Empathy makes for very bad law, because it isn't law at all. It's a subjective response to the suffering of others. And often those who excel at marketing their suffering aren't suffering at all, while those who are genuinely suffering remain silent. Empathy-based law commodifies pain, but it's empty of justice.
A lawless society is one where those who manipulate empathy gain power. Where temporary outrage substitutes for policy. A video that stirs anger and goes viral matters more than law. Everyone is a muckraker, and everything is a muck of competing narratives because everyone is a victim and everyone is dirty at the same time.
There is no law and so every case, every incident is political, because law is made on an ad hoc basis. One side projects grief, the other side charges cynicism. The side that manipulates the emotions of the crowd most deftly, wins. Every politician is an actor, every debate is a performance and every victory is a chance to gather more spoils.
The idea that there should be one law for all, rather than one law for the sufferers and another for those who aren't suffering, is alien to a society where empathy trumps law. Rather than making it easier for the rich and poor to compete, the rich hobble the middle-class for the benefit of the poor. Rather than outlawing racial discrimination, it's reversed so that it favors those discriminated against. Rather than doing the right thing, the left does the Robin Hood thing, leaping from the tree, looting the society, and writing songs about its own dashing courage.
The government-media complex acts out the empathy narrative. Its reporting has nothing to do with the facts, but everything to do with emotion. A law is bad when it protects the privilege of the opposition, but good when it protects their privilege. The powers of the Senate, the Executive and the Supreme Court are good when they serve their ends, but bad when they serve the ends of their enemy. The blame always goes to one side, the side blocking their agenda.
A society that lives by law can have laws that mean something, but in a lawless society, a law only matters so long as it serves the purpose of those in power. When it doesn't, then it's ignored or tossed aside.
Last week we witnessed Obama playing Robin Hood by casting aside immigration law and transparency to the jubilant cheers of the media, whose fondest wish is for politicians to play Robin Hood, cut all the Gordian Knots and just carry out their agenda without regard for the law. That is what they wanted, that is what they got. But a lawless society cuts both ways and takes the system out of the protection of the law.
Law is impartial. It states absolute principles that apply regardless of faction and position. But in a lawless society, there is no law, only power. The left has ushered in a lawless society, but we will all have to live with the consequences.
