Tag: politics

It is becoming increasingly clear that Obama is not eligible to hold the office he is presently usurping. This nominal debate between two San Diego columnists clearly demonstrates that the pro-Obama side has no defense for its position that Obama is a natural-born U.S. citizen and therefore Constitutionally eligible for the presidency other than snark and nonsensical appeals to conspiracy theory. The claim that doubts about Obama’s eligibility might lead to another Holocaust even though the writer can’t figure out how that might come to pass is particularly noteworthy.

Question 2) Where is the controversy today?

WL: With the failure of the courts to allow any examination of the merits based upon forensicly obtained evidence, birthers have turned to various other ancillary investigative venues to obtain disclosure.

Recent documents substantiate that Obama only attended Columbia University for 9 months in 1982-1983, contrary to official accounts.
FOIA and other requests have been submitted to the State Department for passport and travel records.
The Selective Service and Social Security Administrations have been asked for documentation regarding Obama’s Connecticut-based social security number 042-68-4425.
Investigators have traced the number prior to Obama’s [ending in 4424] to Newington, Conn. resident Thomas Wood, deceased at age 19.
To date no government agency can explain how Obama obtained the Connecticut number when at no point in his child or early adult years was he a resident of the state.
Investigations continue into Hawaiian infant-death records for sequential relationships with Obama’s COLB record number 151 01961 010641.
The Nordyke twins have made public their long-form certificates with numbers ending in 37 and 38.
There are several infant-death candidates that may have had birth certificate numbers issued during the August 1961 time frame. These efforts hope to yield more information now kept from the public.

DE: Today, birtherism is a matter of right wing political convenience. Besides the fact that the birther thing is one big ridiculous distraction from all the actual and very real problems currently facing our country and our world, it is useful for politicians as a dogwhistle. It isn’t 100% politically correct or fashionable to call someone a dirty stinking UnAmerican brown shit stain who hates Jesus and apple pie. That kind of talk is simply not allowed, but it’s possible to allude to that kind of thing. It’s very easy to thanks to the f**kwitted, evidence-free birther conspiracy theory. That’s why it’s beneficial for Donald Trump, a man who has got to be smarter than he looks, to imply that – golly gee willickers, guys, you know, hyuck, I just don’t know if Obama is an American or not since nobody from his childhood remembers him at all – excepting of course, for his kindergarten teachers.

In summary, while it is still possible that Obama is Constitutionally eligible, you have to be an ignorant fool to believe that he has offered any conclusive evidence on his own behalf. And when one considers all the actual evidence that has been amassed along with the mass of information being hidden from the public, the logical conclusion is that there is something very unusual about the man that likely goes well beyond his probable lack of Constitutional eligibility.

Whatever the truth turns out to be, one thing is perfectly clear. The man is a fraud from start to finish and will be a strong candidate for the most inept president in U.S. history. I will be extremely surprised if he can manage to obtain the Democratic nomination next year, much less the election.

I don’t know if they have, but it is clear that they would be perfectly justified in doing so. An Instapundit reader emails:

“Can’t speak for the whole tea party but I can speak for many of those with jobs, kids, limited resources and true love for this country. The issues facing this country at the federal level are so large and complex that only honest people have a chance of fixing the problems. We all know that we are not dealing with an honest opposition. We are dealing with people who are only trying to maintain their disgusting grip on the levers of power. See Shumer just today. This country is about to crash in a horrible “Man caused disaster” and we can not get that message to the vast majority of people. Our leadership plays games while we know the Titanic is sinking. The question is do we actually get pitch forks and march on Washington and gig them (If we did we would be terrorists) or do we hunker down and prepare for the worse. Unfortunately, most people are doing the later and it is only a matter of time before they will be proven right. If you publish this, I want our leaders in Washington to hear only one thing. Stop the games and the power grabs and do what it right. The future of your country and your children/grandchildren are depending on you and you are play politics. Shame on you. Wake up and do your duty.”

The problem is that it isn’t just the Democratic opposition that isn’t honest. It is the majority of the Republicans who were endorsed by the Tea Party as well. Even worse, the same accusation of dishonesty – or at least logical incoherence – can be directed at the greater part of the Tea Party itself, since most Tea Partiers support the expensive military occupations and kinetic actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya. It is impossible to simultaneously argue that the nation is near bankruptcy and that it can afford to continue its foreign military adventures and foreign aid grants. As long as the Tea Party attempts to do so, we will know it does not merit being taken seriously.

Speaking of unserious, a Tea Party darling, Sen. Marco Rubio, demonstrates that he is not to be taken seriously either: “I will vote to defeat an increase in the debt limit unless it is the last one we ever authorize and is accompanied by a plan for fundamental tax reform, an overhaul of our regulatory structure, a cut to discretionary spending, a balanced-budget amendment, and reforms to save Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”

In other words, he’s willing to throw away a concrete limitation on the size of government for nebulous promises of future responsibility. I can’t help but be reminded of Reagan’s last-ever 1986 immigration amnesty… and given that Florida is now represented by a Hispanic senator, I think it is fairly obvious how much credence should be placed in the effectiveness of those promises.

SE asks about libertarianism vis-a-vis conservatism:

I have enjoyed your blog for many months, and find your work both insightful and refreshing. Over the last few months, I have been pushed from standard conservatism to libertarianism. However, I have a few reservations about the latter. It is clear that, in theory, libertarianism is ideal to a certain extent. But I cannot get rid of an instinctive feeling that something is wrong with the libertarian movement (not the theory itself).

For example, many articles seem to simply enlarge on how things go wrong when government gets involved in just about anything. I cannot disagree with the sentiment, and it has been a revelation to me to find out just how useless and destructive governments can be, but I think that libertarians can concentrate on this too much, and ignore the deeper realities of human nature. They seem to think that once government is cut down to size and most things are left to the market, everything will fall into place. I agree in part, but I cannot help thinking things are not so simple. (I am of course not suggesting that more government power is a good idea.)

The heart of my doubts, however, is in the similarities I can perceive between some libertarian and leftist writings. I know that libertarian opposition to wars, imperialism, police heavy-handedness etc. is based on principled and reasoned arguments, but it’s the rhetoric that bothers me, as it reminds me strongly of the standard liberal line. There are two sorts of anti-government movements, but it is possible to confuse the two due to their similar rhetoric. And how many people may have just looked at the basic ideas, concluded that they like a system which is anti-government and wants to legalise drugs and so on, and have called themselves libertarian on that basis without thinking of all that it necessarily involves?

There is overlap between libertarian and liberal policies, although the principles behind them are completely different, eg. liberals are obviously not really anti-government, just anti-certain governments. I worry that some libertarians may actually be motivated by the same mindset as those on the radical left. It seems to be becoming quite a common label people give themselves, and unfortunately, when a good idea gets to be widely known and popular, it often loses its original purity. Couple this with the emotional appeal to the ideas of revolution, tearing down the system etc. and the libertarian movement may get apparent support from people who are not truly sympathetic to it in all its ramifications.

It is my belief that libertarianism should encompass every aspect of life in order to avoid this danger. I don’t mean there should be a set of, for example, religious beliefs associated with it; I just mean that it shouldn’t just be something you tack onto your other beliefs, or merely pay lip service to. We need a strong moral basis for libertarianism to work, as well. The minds of the majority of people need to be thoroughly made pro-liberty. The human mind is constantly in danger of abandoning liberty, and falling prey to statism, and perhaps libertarians do not concentrate enough on this crucial problem.

Touching on specific issues, I know that many libertarians support abortion, for example. This may be totally at odds with their advocacy of protection of individual rights, but you have to concede that, as yet, not that many have admitted the contradiction. Is it a simple oversight or something deeper? Again, a lot of libertarians support open borders. In an ideal world where there were no cultural or religious differences, this might be an admirable position. But human nature is such that allowing mass immigration will almost always be a disaster eventually, as I have come to accept from reading your thoughts on the topic. And yet the policy of open borders seems to follow from libertarian principles.

However, the biggest problem in my view is a feeling that I cannot get rid of no matter how much I agree with the libertarian arguments. Feel free to ridicule but I just have this sense that something is wrong when I read their writings – not with the facts or reasoning as such, but with the way it sounds. Perhaps it is the economic focus in some cases, obscuring the moral or behavioural aspects. It is significant that I have never once got this feeling when reading your blog or columns, but often have when reading on mises.org, or Rothbard’s essays, for example (although I agree with most of his arguments). I was looking into this thought, and found that in The Betrayal of the American Right, Rothbard says “The book was written after the end of our alliance with the New Left, which had begun promisingly in the early and mid-1960s but had ended in the mad if short-lived orgy of violence and destruction at the end of the decade.”

Such an alliance just seems strange to me, and indicates either a very naive move, or a deeper relationship between the two movements. This fact bothers me, as on an intellectual level I cannot think of a better system than libertarianism. It does not help when libertarians confuse things by claiming theirs is a leftist ideology. Or is this actually true? I would have thought that, in theory, despite their non-conservative views on such things as drugs and homosexuality, libertarianism is of the right. I had believed that it was at least related to conservatism; and this seemed verified when I noticed that many libertarians seemed to originate in conservative circles. But I was surprised to see an entry on Wikipedia for ‘left-libertarianism’, and unnerved to find links to the anarchist movement.

This is my dilemma: now I have been exposed to libertarian ideas, I cannot with integrity remain loyal to the conservative movement, whatever that may be, and I find their views too vague and statist. But although I find libertarian ideas on many topics so intellectually convincing, I cannot take the leap and give it my wholehearted support because this undefined, but very real, feeling gets in the way. (However, I would vote for the UK Libertarian Party despite all this, if I thought it would make any difference, having given up long ago on the Conservatives.)

Of course I am new to libertarianism, so there may be a perfectly good explanation for this. It is possible that as I learn more, I will see something I missed. I also realise that conservatives have their own problems, mostly a fatal attraction to government intervention when it suits them, and an irritating lack of strong principles, whereas libertarians seem to have a much better ordered system of thought.

I sincerely would like to believe that I am just imagining things. Do you think this niggling doubt is based on reality? Is there a conceptual link between the two ideologies?

The first thing that always has to be kept in mind when considering a political ideology is that one should never judge the ism by the ist. MPAI applies to libertarians every bit as much as it applies to conservatives or liberals. Because ideology is neither logic nor science, most ideologies are self-contradicting to a certain extent. Thus, we have libertarians who simultaneously support both open borders and the concept of the sovereign nation-state, liberals who support both free speech and hate speech laws, and conservatives who support both a strong military and rampant foreign intervention.

Few libertarians trouble to think through the rational consequences of all their positions. But human liberty is not a justification for ignoring either gravity or population demographics. And as for abortion, that is a simple matter of whether the unborn child is considered a human individual or not. It is both unscientific and irrational to insist that it is not, but few people are actually capable of grasping the relevant science or reason with regards to the subject.

The important thing to understand about libertarianism is that it is not ideals that drive it, but rather a cynical view of human nature. It is the anti-progressive ideology, because it is predicated on the idea that humanity cannot be improved and that government will always eventually turn on the people over whom it governs. While some libertarians wax lyrical about liberty and the free market, libertarianism is ultimately about preventing the government from killing its citizens by refusing to permit it the means or the justification to do so.

As for the similarity of liberal and libertarian rhetoric, that is easily dealt with. Modern “liberals” are liars. Even their stolen name is dishonest, as there is nothing liberal about the average “liberal”; it would be much more accurate to label them statists as their preference is almost uniformly in support of more state interference in the economy and the lives of the citizenry rather than less. Since they are intrinsically dishonest and deceptive, there is no reason to take their rhetoric seriously.

One wonders how democracy is supposed to work, even in a representative form where the elected representatives actually follow through on their campaign promises to the voters they represent, when the majority of voters are completely ignorant:

When NEWSWEEK recently asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar.

I’m slightly embarrassed to say that I only got 19/20 correct on the citizenship test, although perhaps that’s not too bad for someone who left the country more than a decade ago. But only slightly, since although I made a dumb mistake, I also got one correct that I didn’t think I knew.

Socialist Hugo Chavez speaks out against breast implants:

Venezuela has one of the highest rates of plastic surgery per capita in the world and in some cases teenage girls have had breast enlargements as birthday presents from their parents. Now Mr Chavez has condemned doctors who “convince some women that if they don’t have some big bosoms, they should feel bad.” Speaking on state television, he said that it was a “monstrous thing” to see that even women from poor backgrounds were now choosing to pay to go under the knife.

Libertarians are in favor of women being free to improve the aesthetic appeal of their bodies if they wish. Socialists call big, beautifully-sculpted breasts “monstrous”.

Any questions?

The Right-Wing News polls a collection of so-called “right-of-center” bloggers, thus revealing that the right-wing blogosphere is a) not particularly intelligent, and b) barely to the right of the New York Times token conservative. Consider their list of most unpopular figures:

10) WorldNetDaily: 60.6%
10) Michael Savage: 60.6%
9) Christine O’Donnell: 60.7%
7) Ron Paul: 64.7%
7) Mike Huckabee: 64.7%
6) David Brooks: 71.2%
5) Pat Buchanan: 71.6%
4) Kathleen Parker: 77.8%
3) Joe Scarborough: 80.6%
2) David Frum: 87.5%
1) Meghan McCain: 93.8%

So, most of the “right wing” bloggers dislike the leading paleo-conservative, the leading libertarian Republican, and the largest right-wing Internet site. Now look at who they like for president:

8) Ron Paul: 35.3%
8) Mike Huckabee: 35.3%
7) Mitt Romney: 44.8%
6) Newt Gingrich: 54.4%
5) Mitch Daniels: +76.1%
4) Michelle Bachmann: +83.6%
3) Jim DeMint: +87.9%
2) Sarah Palin: 89.8%
1) Chris Christie: +98.6%

This shows that the so-called right vastly favors an elephantine RINO over the only candidate who has any clue about the dreadful economic and geo-strategic situations in which the nation finds itself. Hell, they favor Newt Gingrich over Ron Paul! But at least give them credit for preferring Palin to Captain Underoos and the Huckster; they may be short-sighted and foolish, but they’re not complete idiots.

In other words, you can safely conclude that this is not the group that will be leading the charge for human freedom or a Constitutional restoration.

The Senate outflanks the Democratic fleebaggers.

The Wisconsin Senate succeeded in voting Wednesday to strip nearly all collective bargaining rights from public workers, after Republicans outmaneuvered the chamber’s missing Democrats and approved an explosive proposal that has rocked the state and unions nationwide.

“You are cowards!” spectators in the Senate gallery screamed as lawmakers voted. Within hours, a crowd of a few hundred protesters inside the Capitol had grown to an estimated 7,000, more than had been in the building at any point during weeks of protests…. All 14 Senate Democrats fled to Illinois nearly three weeks ago….

I don’t think the side whose elected representatives ran away has a lot of room for calling anyone else “cowards”. The only cowardly thing the Republicans have done is to exclude police and fire unions from the new law, but I don’t think that’s what the protesters meant. As for the calls for a general strike, Governor Walker will be hoping that the unions try it as this will give him the chance to shatter the public unions for good. There is a term for politicians who take on and break unions in economic hard times, and that is “respected head of government”. Don’t forget that union-breaking was the early signature of both Reagan and Thatcher. If the unions are foolish enough to go to the wall on this, despite getting played so badly, and Walker crushes them, both the Republican nomination and the White House will be his for the taking.

UPDATE: The Democratic Left is showing its newfound, post-Arizona respect for political civility: “Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your familes will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks. Please explain to them that this is because if we get rid of you and your families then it will save the rights of 300,000 people and also be able to close the deficit that you have created. I hope you have a good time in hell. Read below for more information on possible scenarios in which you will die.”

What happens when the unstoppable political force meets the inevitable political issue?:

In the poll, Americans across all age groups and ideologies said by large margins that it was “unacceptable” to make significant cuts in entitlement programs in order to reduce the federal deficit. Even tea party supporters, by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, declared significant cuts to Social Security “unacceptable.”

Doesn’t matter. Here’s the numbers. Show me what we’re going to do about it.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment and Welfare comprise 56.7% of the federal budget ($2.1 trillion.) Defense comprises another 18.7% (about $700 billion.) And interest, today, is a paltry 4.6% (primarily due to ZIRP). Interest expense will double even if we don’t add one more dollar of debt to the Federal side.

Not might double, will double.

And will do quite a bit more than that when interest rates return to historic norms. Color me skeptical that the Tea Party is going to be any more successful in holding the Republican Party’s feet to the fire when two-thirds of them won’t even look at the elephant in the room. Playing ostrich and declaring the inevitable to be unacceptable just isn’t going to accomplish anything.

It would appear Death By 1000 Papercuts’s Alexa-based metric has Vox Popoli listed as the 24th most popular libertarian site on the Internet. Perhaps this will suffice to convince people that I am really not a social conservative, given that my staunch support for legal drugs, prostitution, and nuclear weapons, (to say nothing of my opposition to military imperialism, financial interventionism, government-sanctioned marriage, and the pledge of allegiance), doesn’t appear to have done the trick.

Now, I’m not into chest-thumping over hits and lists and awards. Except, of course, the one award given by Bane, which I will cherish always. (Note to those who bought into the whole Bane is Dead charade… just look at the Middle East. Now you know what he’s been up to.) First, there are too many horrible sites that are highly ranked and too many very good sites that virtually no one reads to take the numbers game very seriously. Second, let’s be honest, I am a little too arrogant to be inclined to put much credence in a metric that depends upon what most people like, most people being idiots and all.

But I do find it a little mystifying when those with readerships that are but a fraction of the Dread Ilk – let alone the WND readership – attempt to dismiss what I’m writing because they think no one reads it. How, precisely, does that compute?