January 3, 2013
Lucky 2013
Happy New Year, everybody! And if you had any hopes that things might actually get delightfully boring for a change...well, there's always next year. Already we've been treated to the High Drama of the fiscal cliff deal -- freshy passed by both houses of Congress in the dead of night the way that Brother Bluto might cram for a chemistry final -- but look on the bright side: At least we won't have to endure another election cycle until 2014. Time enough to restock the liquor cabinet in any case.
I know there's been a lot of grousing over the the deal (It only cuts $1 of spending for $41 in tax hikes!) and a fair amount of counter-grousing (The middle-class Bush tax rates are now permanent, hallelujah!), but in the end it's probably the best the Republicans could have hoped for given their largely self-inflicted weakness of position and having Barack Obama on the other side of the bargaining table. God only knows what really went on during those closed-door sessions, but with the president constantly moving the goalposts around I imagine that John Boehner must've felt a bit like Lando Calrissian negotiating with Darth Vader.
Boehner: "1.6 trillion? That wasn't part of the deal!"
Obama: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further!"
And for all that trouble, we get to have another go-round in February when the debt ceiling comes knocking again. Nothing like long term vision in Washington politics, is there?
Ah, well. This is what the people voted for, right? Still, I have to wonder how long it's going to take for everyone to get tired of the All-Crisis-All-The-Time schtick that seems to be the administration's modus operandi and want to go back to some level of normalcy. Simply put, people can't deal with this kind of heightened uncertainly for very long before keeling over. On that score, the economy is already way ahead of the populace, having long since curled up into a self-defensive ball while Barack continues to slap it around backhand style. One can only hope that the people will soon tire of the same abuse: Voters, if you don't get help from the GOP, please get help somewhere.
As for me, I get to keep my tax rate -- at least for now. But everybody is gonna feel a little pinch when they get that first paycheck of 2013 and see that their payroll taxes have gone up (all holidays have to come to an end, alas). Consider it a foretaste of things to come -- because, one way or the other, if Washington wants to continue to spend like it has been, they're gonna come after the middle class. That is, after all, where the real money is. The extra $60 billion or so that they're squeezing out of "the rich" with these tax hikes won't even begin to feed the beast.
Bon appetit, everyone!
Hatched by Korso on this day, January 3, 2013, at the time of 4:33 PM | Comments (0)
January 1, 2013
The Emperor's New Gun Groove
It appears that President Barack H. "You didn't build that!" Obama has finally decided what will be (one of) the central animating crusade and agenda (CACA) of his second term: gun control and/or confiscation. He wants to make all of America into one vast "gun-free zone," a.k.a., a free-kill zone.
If you'll recall, last term's CACA was ObamaCare -- which he pushed onto the American people despite mounting dislike (and rejection, squirming, kicking, and howls of outrage), and which he insists will be implemented fully, every last drop, no matter what the people want. (The stimulus bill, that is, the trillion-dollar spree, was a sideshow, just payback for the many Friends of Statism who supported President B.O. through the seven lean years).
One can only presume that el Jefe will attack guns with the same violent fervor, the same fanatic, holy zeal, as he did the Patient Rejection and Unffordable Care Act; that is, he will ignore all previous failed attempts at gun control, set up his own organization (perhaps the Children's Crusade for a Gun-Free American Zone?) -- then relentlessly shill for the complete and extra-judicial transformation of constitutional America into confiscational Venezuela.
But if Obama does elevate gun control to be his new CACA, well, that's a very good thing indeed.
Oh, then good for the gun-control mob? No, certainly not for them; they shall be hijacked by and submerged under the president's own personal campaign to be kingmaker and achieve eventual deification, like a Roman emperor; but -- Tiberius, or Caligula?
Oh, then it's good for President Obama! No; in fact, it surely will go absolutely nowhere. It's unlikely that Congress can enact any major measure; and even if it did, such gun-control bills would have the same effect now as they have historically had: None at all.
It's all just mummery and flummery; perhaps not Obama himself, but certainly his firearms advisors know that virtually no homicides are committed using so-called "assault weapons," or any kind of rifle; know that a round with the same bullet and the same charge will produce about the same effect on the human body, whether or not that round is fired from a dreaded semiautomatic pistol or by a benign, sweet, and gentle revolver; know that knife wounds have about the same lethality as pistol wounds, and so forth.
So why flog that long-dead nag? Simple: Not cherchez la femme, but rechercher la puissance!
Then who the heck is it good for?
For us, baboso! By chaining himself to the albatross of gun control, Barack Obama has found perhaps the only issue which could destroy his presidency and besmirch his legacy... for even liberals and lefties love their Glocks.
Brief detour: In general, second-terms have a mixed and checkered history for American presidents. Richard Nixon's second term lurched from flip-flop to gaffe to incoherent rambling, culminating in an ignominious exit under the accumulated weight of Nixon's betrayal of our victorious military forces in Vietnam (in a cockamamie deal with the Dems).
Contrariwise, Ronald Reagan had an excellent second term: He cowed the Tyrant of Tripoli; he pushed through a second and decisive tax-reform bill, despite a Democrat-controlled House; he sent Mikhail Gorbachev reeling at Reykjavik; and he signed a series of nuclear-arms reduction treaties that for the first time were pro-America, not pro-Soviet. His policies (aided and abetted by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Pope John-Paul II) led directly to the 1989 tearing down of the Berlin Wall (as Reagan had urged in a Peggy Noonan speech two years earlier), and culminated in the complete collapse of the Soviet Union two years later.
What was the difference between Nixon and Reagan? One very striking distinction was that Reagan had a CACA (or several, really), but it was the same set of CACAs that he had pressed in his first term: tax reform, rebuilding our military, muscular foreign policy geared towards the needs and benefit of the United States, not "world opinion," and of course the destruction of the Evil Empire. He didn't dump his first-term goals, nor did he go haring off in all directions trying to find a new "groove" to follow.
By contrast, after Nixon's landslide victory in 1972, he seemed to have run out of ideas; he certainly had lost whatever CACA he once had.
But CACAs are not always helpful or beneficial to a president or his party; every CACA is unique and must be inspected carefully to sniff out the good from the stupid. On the Democratic side, consider the immense energy expended by Lyndon Johnson on the "war on poverty," giving us the so-called Great Society, which was basically the New Deal redux, and on steroids. This certainly was a "central animating crusade and agenda," but it left Johnson a nervous wreck, unable even to stave off credible primary challenges in 1968 -- challenges that ultimately forced Johnson to withdraw from his own reelection race, leaving the anti-Republican field to the unelectable Hubert Humphry (and the execrable George Wallace).
Why did Reagan's CACA succeed, while Johnson's failed? Again, I believe a significant distinction was that, Reagan's ideas were widely shared by the American people; whereas Lyndon Johnson's Great Society crusade, which mainstreamed and normalized poverty, squalor, and economic failure (forcing successful middle-income families to subsidize losers, drug addicts, and bums) was controversial from the beginning and hemorrhaged support with every passing year in which the country went from wrong track to worse track.
Barack Obama's gun-control CACA -- along with his unpopular ObamaCare law, the lawlessness of his administration, and his seeming kow-towing to the world's most vile and dangerous dictators -- clearly fits the corrupt, anti-liberty, unAmerican, "LBJ" mold far better than does the Reagan mold: Most of Obama's upcoming crusades, especially gun control and/or confiscation, are anathema to a huge swath of the United States. And not just red-state America; millions of Obama voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado, Florida, and many others still "cling to guns or religion."
But knowing Obama, as four years living under his regime has taught us, when the people begin to resist his regulatory state and his bombastic, unresponsive "negotiation" style, the president will dig in his heels on all of his various projects and proposals, and vow to stick it to the American people good and hard, whether they like it or no.
End detour; resume normal speed.
In the whole, wide, political world, nothing unites Republicans better than another attempt to disarm American citizens. Too, a gun-control agenda will likely turn the American people away from the Democrats, alienate the president from his base, and turn him into a nagging, hectoring, threatening, bitter old man, the opposite of cool. And it will set us up nicely for 2014 and 2016. Not a bad prospect -- for the GOP!
Obama appears determined to squander every bit of popularity he currently retains -- of which he has little to spare anyway these days -- to fling it all away on hopeless causes, from gun control to appointing Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense.
So to quote Obama's illustrious predecessor, "bring it on," el Jefe. Let gun control completely define his second term, or even become an integral component of a slew of liberal assaults on the United States' foundational principles.
But the more you tighten your grip, Mr. Food-Stamp President, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 1, 2013, at the time of 3:28 AM | Comments (0)
Awaken to Your Worst New Year's Nightmare...
Perfect Progressivist Paradise!
Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 1, 2013, at the time of 12:00 AM | Comments (0)
December 25, 2012
Have Yourself a Merry Little Chrismartini
Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 25, 2012, at the time of 12:00 AM | Comments (0)
December 24, 2012
Perversity, or Why I'm Ever the Optimist
End of the year musings...
I tend to wax philosophical at the turn of a new year; bear with me!
November 6th last, too many Americans made a terrible mistake: They voted for a Progressivist antiAmerican, a man obsessed with nightmare fancies of neocolonialism, who envies the action-action-action! of the French Revolution and the Terror that followed. Barack H. "You didn't build that" Obama appears to aspire to the values, such as they were, of that dark era: liberté (by which he would mean giving everybody the liberty to obey his orders), égalité (of outcomes, regardless of effort and intelligence), and fraternité (in the sense that since everyone is your relative, everyone can hit you up for a handout).
We know why Obama is a Jacobite; but why did the people vote to reelect him? Was it through sheer perversity, deliberately doing the exact opposite of what you know is right, moral, and effective?
No. That accurately describes the Progressivist leaders; but I believe the voters who reelect them (again and again) are quite ignorant of the great political struggle that led to the founding of our nation of freedom and true liberty, and why that means a damn. They have no inkling why the American Revolution stands alone, exceptional, the only uprising for individual liberty and Capitalism in the history of the world. Nor do they understand the distinction; to most folks, one revolution is as good or bad as another, just another power grab from the haves to the have-nots.
But why are the people so ignorant? Because the schools no longer teach civics, no longer teach honest history, no longer teach any formal logic at all. You go to public school for thirteen years, but you learn not a thing about those tumultuous, ideological arguments between democracy and kingcraft.
If it's mentioned at all, it's "taught" without authority or conviction. If mentioned at all, it's contrasted, unfavorably, to the French counterpart, where the narrative better fits the "story" that the Left wants to tell: citoyan-soldiers manning the barricades, a la Les Miz, to the accompaniment of stirring music and liberal subtext. Delving any deeper is counterindicated, labeled propaganda, mocked as "moral philosophy," and hushed in public schools.
All right, so why don't schools teach moral philosophy anymore? Because the axis of propaganda -- teachers, administrators, educational unionistas, presstitutes, and corrupt politicians -- never believed in either the cause or the street-level practice of the triumvirate of actual liberty: individualism, property rights, and equality under the law.
And last, before you ask, the axis doesn't believe in liberty because it wants, not to free mankind, but to shackle it to Progressivism's "inevitable progress"... a future of an endlessly expanding and intruding State that engulfs and devours the world, a totalitarian Leviathan.
The gift of moral reasoning waxes and wanes in society; it was strong right after the Revolution but dwindled before the Civil War. The grand argument over slavery revived the practice of moral debate, but it faded as the nineteenth century drew to its close in the Gilded Age, when ultra-materialism ruled and Gatsby was great. During the next half-century, two world wars drove us to think clearly about individualism and its opposite, totalitarianism; but a protracted, ambivalent, secretive "cold war" led an entire generation to question the fundamental premise that there was any difference between Us and Them. (Cf. John Le Carré.)
Moral clarity roared back following the attacks on September 11th, 2001, but we have lost focus again in the Obamic moment. Yet this very history of oscillation gives hope that today's moral apathy can reverse gear yet again. There is no reason to suppose that such "boom and bust" behavior anent moral reasoning has ceased, or that we Americans will never regain our ecstatic visions of divine liberty.
But not if Progressivism has its way. Everything in that perverse creed depends upon Americans' continued ignorance and willful blindness. However, we know from history that eventually, the sleeper wakes. And when he does, when something bursts his soap-bubble of somnolism, when he draws his first waking breath in decades, American culture can turn on a pinhead... and turn against the present pinhead.
The most important task for lovers of liberty is to keep making the moral argument for liberty, for decency, and for fairness... meaning treating everybody equally under the law, not singling out unpopular minorities -- the rich, Capitalists, businessmen, the Jews -- for a national "two-minutes hate." So long as we do that, we are primed for the long-awaited Unexpected, that unpredictable incident that yanks America's attention away from all the "free stuff [euphemism]" the government dangles then snatches away, and towards a true calculus of freedom.
And that is why I'm an eternal optimist: It's never too late to cast off the chains of intellectual atrophy and servitude, never too late to rediscover the revelations of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and yes, even Abraham Lincoln.
So no matter how bleak the playing field at the moment, quitting is not an option; defeat is a communal act: If we never surrender, we can never fully lose.
Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 24, 2012, at the time of 2:10 AM | Comments (1)
December 22, 2012
All Right, So It's December 22th 2012...
Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 22, 2012, at the time of 12:00 AM | Comments (1)
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