Tag: politics

The Right Wing News has named Vox Popoli the 37th best conservative blog. I appreciate that Mr. Hawkins thinks well of the blog, but I do find it to be somewhat ironic in that I am not a political conservative. But, I suppose that I am somewhat of a religious reactionary and there are a lot of conservatives who comment here, so it’s not a totally unreasonable inclusion.

In case it’s not already sufficiently apparent to you that neither the American nor European political elites actually give a damn about democracy, the Swedes are underlining this observable fact:

Members of several Swedish political parties are calling for a restructuring of the Riksdag [the Swedish parliament] to minimize the influence of the far-right Sweden Democrats. The parties are investigating whether it is possible to shift the make-up of parliamentary committees to reduce the sway of the far-right, anti-immigrant party which was voted into parliament for the first time at the weekend’s general elections, several Swedish dailies reported. Both Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt’s Moderate [center-right] Party and the main opposition Social Democrats are reportedly involved.

“Democracy” in both Europe and America is a complete sham. It’s nothing more than rhetorical propaganda; countries like Iraq and Afghanistan are invaded in the name of bringing democracy to their peoples even as genuine democracy is routinely crushed through the use of the courts in the United States and parliamentary rules in European countries.

In the USA, it doesn’t matter if you vote for Democrats or Republicans because you’re going to get essentially the same government either way. The differences are only at the margins and it is more accurate to think of them as a single bi-factional ruling party rather than two rival parties that subscribe to different ideologies. As Sweden is demonstrating, if it were possible to significantly transform society against the will of the trans-party political elite through voting, voting would be made irrelevant.

At this point, it is clear that despite all of the genuine dangers of democracy, representative democracy is actually worse. Since the tactic of expanding the franchise has rendered the limits of representation worse than toothless, the best strategy is to support real democracy. Therefore, I am thinking of changing my party identification from Christian Libertarian to Technodemocrat. But not Democrat in the sense of the modern U.S. Democratic Party, I mean a full and open democracy that dispenses with all of the limitations on the will of the people imposed by representative democracy in favor of technodemocracy.

The unfortunate fact is that the idea of protecting the minority against the will of majority has been utilized to impose the will of the corporatist oligarchy on the majority. Therefore, it would be a significant improvement to remove all limits on the will of the majority.

Albeit this time they are peace camp rather than presidential:

Two activists have exposed a disturbing phenomenon that they say is an open secret within the “peace camp”: female “peace” activists are routinely harassed and raped by the Arabs of Judea and Samaria with whom they have come to identify. They say the phenomenon has gotten worse lately and that many foreign women end up as wives of local Arabs against their will, but cannot escape their new homes…. Aloni-Sedovnik cites two specific cases which she has knowledge of – one is a case of rape and another is “severe sexual harassment.” The attackers in both cases, she stresses, were familiar with the victims and knew that they were “peace activists.” The rape occurred several months ago in the village of Umm Salmona, near Bethlehem. The victim, an American activist, wanted to press charges but leftist activists put pressure on her not to do so, so as not to damage the struggle against the ‘occupation.’

With feminism, as with other left-wing movements, the ideology always trumps the individual.

Lest one think for even a fraction of one second that the professional Republican class, also known as “the Republican leadership”, has any genuine commitment to any ideological principles beyond maintaining its own power and influence:

Party fractures on full display, Republican aides told Fox News Tuesday that O’Donnell would not be getting national fundraising support. State party leaders had warned that O’Donnell cannot compete against Democrat Chris Coons and vigorously backed Castle, a nine-term congressman and former governor…. Party leaders no doubt were looking at midterm polls that showed Castle leading Coons in November but O’Donnell trailing. The seat could be critical for Republicans hoping to gain control of the Senate. They need to pick up 10 seats to do so.

The point, which both the Republican establishment and a significant portion of the conservative media either does not understand after the eight-year Bush administration debacle or simply will not accept, is that it doesn’t matter if your party is in power if the representatives of that party are not ideologically reliable. If elected Republicans are simply going to behave like Democrats Lite in office, there is no reason for conservatives to elect them. None.

Lenin was correct in ascertaining that sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better. The conservative movement is in much stronger shape due to Barack Obama-Soetoro-Sobarkah’s election that it would have been if the RINO McCain had been elected; McCain would have moved things about 50 percent as far to the left as Obama has, but would have ensured that more Democrats were elected to the House and Senate this fall rather than the incipient Democratic drubbing that is in the making. The reason they would rather lose to a Democrat than see a genuinely conservative Republican get elected is because the former doesn’t threaten their long-term dominance over the party.

There are two flaws with the pragmatic approach. First, its analysis is always static and fails to recognize that the electorate responds to political dynamism. Second, it is an inept strategy that by its very nature prevents reaching the nominal objectives.

As the Instapundit reader commented: “It’s not enough, seemingly, to vote these people out. We have to stomp on them for them to get the message.”

2010 is gone for Democrats. “He cannot save 2010,” the big-time Democrat is saying of Barack Obama. “It is gone. He must now concentrate on saving 2012. But the biggest fear of some of those close to him is that he might not really want to go on in 2012, that he might not really care.”

I chortled a bit. You may recall that I have predicted three things here a while back. House lost. Senate lost. Obama doesn’t even make it to the general election in 2012. Suddenly, all three are looking a little less crazy then they were back then.

Apropos of yesterday’s discussion of the inimical effects of immigration, Dinesh D’Souza shows that Obama’s driving motivation is neither socialism nor traditional Democratic progressivism, but rather African anti-colonialism:

Clearly the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. And we can be doubly sure about his father’s influence because those who know Obama well testify to it. His “granny” Sarah Obama (not his real grandmother but one of his grandfather’s other wives) told Newsweek, “I look at him and I see all the same things–he has taken everything from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted. The dreams of the father are still alive in the son.”

In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir “the record of a personal, interior journey–a boy’s search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American.” And again, “It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself.” Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, “My father’s voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man!”

The climax of Obama’s narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father’s grave. It is riveting: “When my tears were finally spent,” he writes, “I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America–the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago–all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father’s pain.”

In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that “I sat at my father’s grave and spoke to him through Africa’s red soil.” In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father’s spirit. Obama takes on his father’s struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.’s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.’s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son’s objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father’s struggle becomes the son’s birthright….

Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.

The Obama presidency, too, is strongly indicative of where America stands in Glubb’s theory of imperial lifecycles. In much the same way that the later Roman emperors were not Romans in the sense that Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, Gaius Marius, or Gaius Octavius Thurinus were, Mr. Soetoro-Soebarkah is not an American in the same sense that past presidents such as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, JFK, and Bill Clinton were. None of Barack Hussein Obama’s predecessors identified with foreign cultures or ambitions, much less were motivated by them and none of them were steeped in expressly anti-American ideologies from their childhood.

And here you would have thought that all those futile years of George W. Bush, Arlen Specter, and Arnold Schwarzenegger would have cured the onetime conservative magazine of its dedication to power and political pragmatism.

Forty Jim DeMints or 60 Lindsey Grahams? Forty Christine O’Donnell’s or 60 Mike Castles?

These are questions conservatives have to think about when they see polls like the latest Rasmussen, which has Rep. Mike Castle, a moderate Republican thoroughly unloved by tea partiers, leading Democratic nominee Chris Coons 48-37 while conservative Republican Christine O’Donnell trails Coons by the same eleven-point margin, 47-36….

So, again: would conservatives in Delaware rather win, or send a message?

For actual conservatives, the only rational answer is 40 DeMints. Daniel Foster has asked a misleading question. The correct one is, would conservatives rather elect a false conservative majority that will vote against conservative principles while ensuring that a Democratic majority succeeds it when the inevitable reaction comes, or continue building towards a genuine and committed conservative majority?

But you can’t entirely take the madrassah out of the politician that the boy becomes. Obama whines about his “some powerful interests” and their opinion of him:

“Some powerful interests that have been setting the agenda in Washington for a long time, and they’re not always happy with me. They talk about me like a dog. That’s not in my prepared remarks, but it’s true.”

To me, the most interesting aspect of this is that the first negative thing that sprang to mind when Obama wanted to express how people were badmouthing him, he thought of “a dog”. That is not a normal American expression. One works like a dog, one is as loyal as a dog, one is dog-tired, whereas the negative forms tend to utilize the term “bitch” instead. Using dog in this perjorative sense is much more common in the Arab world.

It seems to me that this is, in addition to demonstrating Obama’s inability to withstand legitimate criticism, an example of his Indonesian Muslim upbringing showing itself in a moment of stress. This doesn’t mean he is a crypto-Muslim, but it is rather yet another indication of his essentially foreign perspective. In support of this interpretation, I would note that while I have seen many distinctly negative terms applied to Obama since he first launched his presidential candidacy, I have never read nor heard of him being referred to as “a dog”.

It wasn’t all that long ago when I wrote of my assumption that the Republicans were going to take the House and might take the Senate as well, thus leading to Obama’s eventual implosion in the 2012 Democratic primary. More than a few critics said that I was crazy. Of course, once it happens, everyone will believe that it was practically inevitable.

Typically cautious Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, is rocking the political world with a new “Crystal Ball” prediction: The GOP will win the House, making Ohio’s John Boehner speaker, might get a 50-50 split in the Senate, and will pick up some eight new governors.

The winds at Republican backs are more favorable than they were in 1994. If the idiot Republican establishment can merely avoid falling over their own feet and embrace the anti-government mood instead of attempting to tamp it down, they’ll clean up. But never underestimate Republican self-destruction.