![]() | ![]() | Thought For The Day * It is incontrovertible; a huge majority of Jews refuse to acknowledge even the remote possibility, that as a people, they are being incrementally "frog-marched" into oblivion. |
Topics
America the Beautiful SearchArchives
July 2008 |
April 2008 ArchivesEngland Surrenders to Germany and FranceEngland's Call to Repeal Our (United States) Declaration of Independence It's a good thing that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's U.S. visit was upstaged by the dramatic reception Americans gave Pope Benedict XVI. Brown might have been booed if he hadn't delivered what aides called his "signature" speech within the cloistered walls of Harvard's Kennedy Center. Brown's tedious, hour-long speech impudently demanded that we issue a "Declaration of Interdependence" in order to submit to global governance. That's another way of calling on us to repeal our Declaration of Independence. Read More » The redundancy of Brown's outrageous semantics was oppressive. His speech used the word global 69 times, globalization 7 times, and interdependence 13 times. He referred to Kennedy 19 times, lavishing fulsome praise on John F. ("his influence abides everywhere"), Robert (he sent forth "ripples of hope"), and Ted ("one of the greatest Senators in more than two centuries"). Brown rejected the traditional concept of national sovereignty, which means an independent nation not subservient to any outside control, telling us to replace it with "responsible sovereignty," which he defined as accepting what he calls our global "obligations." Hold on to your pocketbook. Brown admitted that his "main argument" is that we must accept "new global rules," "new global institutions," and "global networks." Brown's global rules include massive U.S. cash handouts and opening U.S. borders to the world. Brown's use of well-known American political phrases was tacky. He tried to morph FDR's New Deal into a "New Global Deal," and JFK's New Frontier into "the New Frontier is that there is no frontier." Brown even slipped in an attempt at thought control: "Americans must learn to think inter-continentally." He declaimed, "We are all internationalists now." Using the rhetorical device of inevitability, Brown warned us that his vision of the globalist future is "irreversible transformation." He wants to "transcend states" and "transcend borders" as he builds the "architecture of a global society." Brown peddled the nonsense that the peoples of the world "subscribe to similar ideals." He tried to tell us that all religions (Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists) have "common values" and "similar ideals." No, they certainly do not. Brown wants to increase the power of the United Nations to become the source of "an international stand-by capacity of trained civilian experts, ready to go anywhere at any time," and even be able to exercise "military force." Americans do not intend to cede such authority to the corrupt UN. The silliest part of Brown's ponderous speech was his claim that "a global society" is "advancing democracy widely across the world." In fact, he doesn't even practice democracy in his own country. Brown refused to allow the British people to vote on whether or not they want to accept the European Union (EU) constitution. He acquiesced in the plot of the constitution's author, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, to put the EU constitution into effect by calling it a treaty so it did not have to be voted on by the people. Brown was chicken about the treaty subterfuge and did not permit a photographic record of his participation. He sent his Foreign Secretary to perform the official treaty signing in front of cameras. The EU constitution, now called the Treaty of Lisbon, requires all signers to surrender their sovereignty and democracy to unelected bureaucrats in Brussels and judges in Strasbourg. The EU constitution takes away England's right to pass its own laws, forces England to surrender more than 60 UK vetoes of EU decisions, and gives the EU bureaucracy and tribunals total control over England's immigration policy. Instead of a self-governing nation whose democratic system was developed over centuries, England is now ruled by what Margaret Thatcher called "the paper pushers in Brussels." Brown made his globalism speech emphatic by repeatedly invoking the words "New World Order." The New World Order Brown tries to con the United States into accepting would mean taxing Americans for foreign handouts so immense they would make the Marshall Plan look puny, global warming rules to drastically reduce our standard of living, and putting American workers in a common labor pool with the world's billions who subsist on less than $2 a day. Gordon Brown invited us to march forward to globalism "where there is no path." He's correct that there is no path on which we can expect globalism to lead us to a better world; in fact every path toward global government is a surrender of our liberty and our prosperity. Gordon Brown should go back home and study up on how Americans refused to accept orders from King George III. by Phyllis Schlafly http://www.eagleforum.org/column/2008/apr08/08-04-30.html Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article). « Close It Posted April 30, 2008 08:40 AM Permalink
Texas conservatives - They dislike President BushThe View from Gate 14 America is in line at the airport. America has its shoes off, is carrying a rubberized bin, is going through a magnetometer. America is worried there is fungus on the floor after a million stockinged feet have walked on it. But America knows not to ask. America is guilty until proved innocent, and no one wants to draw undue attention. America left its ticket and passport in the jacket in the bin in the X-ray machine, and is admonished. America is embarrassed to have put one too many one-ounce moisturizers in the see-through bag. America is irritated that the TSA agent removed its mascara, opened it, put it to her nose, and smelled it. Why don't you put it up your nose and see if it explodes? America thinks. And, as always: Why do we do this when you know I am not a terrorist, and you know I know you know I am not a terrorist? Why this costly and harassing kabuki when we both know the facts, and would agree that all this harassment is the government's way of showing "fairness," of showing that it will equally humiliate anyone in order to show its high-mindedness and sense of justice? Read More » Our politicians congratulate themselves on this as we stand in line. All the frisking, beeping and patting down is demoralizing to our society. It breeds resentment, encourages a sense that the normal are not in control, that common sense is yesterday. Another thing: It reduces the status of that ancestral arbiter and leader of society, the middle-aged woman. In the new fairness, she is treated like everyone, without respect, like the loud ruffian and the vulgar girl on the phone. The middle-aged woman is the one spread-eagled over there in the delicate shell beneath the removed jacket, praying nothing on her body goes beep and makes people look. America makes it through security, gets to the gate, waits. The TV monitor is on. It is Wolf Blitzer. He is telling us with a voice of urgency of the Pennsylvania returns. But no one looks up. We are a nation of Willie Lomans, dragging our rollies through acres of airport, going through life with a suitcase and a slack jaw, trying to get home after a long day of meetings, of moving product. No one in crowded gate 14 looks up to see what happened in Pennsylvania. No one. Wolf talks to the air. Gate 14 is small-town America, a mix, a group of people of all classes and races brought together and living in close proximity until the plane is called, and America knows what Samuel Johnson knew. "How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure." Gate 14 doesn't think any one of the candidates is going to make their lives better. Gate 14 will vote anyway, because they know they are the grownups of America and must play the role and do the job. So: Pennsylvania. As seen from the distance of West Texas, central California and Oklahoma, which is where I've been. Main thought. Hillary Clinton is not Barack Obama's problem. America is Mr. Obama's problem. He has been tagged as a snooty lefty, as the glamorous, ambivalent candidate from Men's Vogue, the candidate who loves America because of the great progress it has made in terms of racial fairness. Fine, good. But has he ever gotten misty-eyed over . . . the Wright Brothers and what kind of country allowed them to go off on their own and change everything? How about D-Day, or George Washington, or Henry Ford, or the losers and brigands who flocked to Sutter's Mill, who pushed their way west because there was gold in them thar hills? There's gold in that history. John McCain carries it in his bones. Mr. McCain learned it in school, in the Naval Academy, and, literally, at grandpa's knee. Mrs. Clinton learned at least its importance in her long slog through Arkansas, circa 1977-92. Mr. Obama? What does he think about all that history? Which is another way of saying: What does he think of America? That's why people talk about the flag pin absent from the lapel. They wonder if it means something. Not that the presence of the pin proves love of country - any cynic can wear a pin, and many cynics do. But what about Obama and America? Who would have taught him to love it, and what did he learn was loveable, and what does he think about it all? Another challenge. Snooty lefties get angry when you ask them to talk about these things. They get resentful. Who are you to question my patriotism? But no one is questioning his patriotism, they're questioning its content, its fullness. Gate 14 has a right to hear this. They'd lean forward to hear. This is an opportunity, for Mr. Obama needs an Act II. Act II is hard. Act II is where the promise of Act I is deepened, the plot thickens, and all is teed up for resolution and meaning. Mr. Obama's Act I was: I'm Obama. He enters the scene. Act III will be the convention and acceptance speech. After that a whole new drama begins. But for now he needs Act II. He should make his subject America. Here's some comfort for him, for all Democrats. In Lubbock, Texas - Lubbock Comma Texas, the heart of Texas conservatism - they dislike President Bush. He has lost them. I was there and saw it. Confusion has been followed by frustration has turned into resentment, and this is huge. Everyone knows the president's poll numbers are at historic lows, but if he is over in Lubbock, there is no place in this country that likes him. I made a speech and moved around and I was tough on him and no one - not one - defended or disagreed. I did the same in North Carolina recently, and again no defenders. I did the same in Fresno, Calif., and no defenders, not one. He has left on-the-ground conservatives - the local right-winger, the town intellectual reading Burke and Kirk, the old Reagan committeewoman - feeling undefended, unrepresented and alone. This will have impact down the road. I finally understand the party nostalgia for Reagan. Everyone speaks of him now, but it wasn't that way in 2000, or 1992, or 1996, or even '04. I think it is a manifestation of dislike for and disappointment in Mr. Bush. It is a turning away that is a turning back. It is a looking back to conservatism when conservatism was clear, knew what it was, was grounded in the facts of the world. The reasons for the quiet break with Mr. Bush: spending, they say first, growth in the power and size of government, Iraq. I imagine some of this: a fine and bitter conservative sense that he has never had to stand in his stockinged feet at the airport holding the bin, being harassed. He has never had to live in the world he helped make, the one where grandma's hip replacement is setting off the beeper here and the child is crying there. And of course as a former president, with the entourage and the private jets, he never will. I bet conservatives don't like it. I'm certain Gate 14 doesn't. Peggy Noonan URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120906741679842493.html Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article). « Close It Posted April 27, 2008 03:15 PM Permalink
Change doesn’t come by electing a presidentWe have heard during this presidential election cycle – ad nauseam – how our country is in dire need of “change.” We are promised by each of the candidates that they are the ones – the only ones – who can bring about this much needed change. Of course, this is all disingenuous politicking. The fact of the matter is this: the office of the presidency is quite limited in its power to affect any change at all. The real entity capable of affecting immediate and dramatic change in government, the governmental branch with the real power, is the Legislative Branch. When we examine the Charters of Freedom – and specifically the US Constitution – it is clear that the Executive Branch is charged with executing the laws of the land created by the Legislative Branch (with the consent of the Executive Branch via the signature of the President) and that the Legislative Branch is charged with crafting legislation; charged with debating, weighing and then enacting legislation that would become the law of the land. The Framers even established a mechanism where the Legislative Branch might “override” a presidential veto should the Executive Branch oppose legislation brought forth by an enlarged majority of Congress. Read More » This factuality accepted, it is next to impossible, but for the bully pulpit afforded the stature of the presidency, for the President of the United States to be an effective “change agent.” While he (or she) can certainly execute executive orders and signing statements, the fact remains, it is Congress that holds the power to legislate and fund laws and government programs. Therefore, simple logic mandates that for all the tall rhetoric of “change” coming from the presidential candidates – especially the Democrats – their promises will, for the most part, ring hollow. In order to bring about real change in government, one must “change” the Legislative Branch. In this truth the American people are in luck. By the structure of our constitutional government we find that the easiest political contests to affect are in the Legislative Branch. This is so because each of those we vote for are specific to our location, one more immediate than the other. Where the president represents the whole of the nation’s populace, our US Senators are elected by the whole of the populace in a singular state. Even more localized in voter constituency are those selected to become US Representatives. It is for this reason that so many of the constitutionally literate take issue with senators and representatives taking it upon themselves to dabble in foreign relations. Senators and representatives are not elected by the total of the American electorate and do not officially represent the total of the American people, no matter what Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid would have us think. In reality, those senators and representatives who do partake in unsanctioned foreign relations are rogue and should be recognized as such. Accepting the constitutional and electoral realities of the Legislative Branch, it is clear that it is the American people and not the presidential candidates that have the power to bring about real change, this power being the ability to easily vote to and out of office those elected officials who represent us in the US Congress. So, why is it that the American electorate is repeatedly duped into believing that it is the president who can bring about change? For that matter, why is it that the American electorate believes that the responsibility for the foibles of national government should be laid – completely – at the foot of the Executive Branch? The answer to those two questions is one in the same. It is easier to blame one man (or woman) than it is to blame 535. That said, when one looks at the performance of those in the Legislative Branch it is clear that We the People certainly do need “change” in Washington, DC. Admittedly, some actions taken by the Executive Branch – by President Bush and his administration – have been disappointing but when compared to the dismal performance of Congress over the past several decades it is clear that the Legislative Branch has become corrupted throughout and that they have used the tools of deception and deflection – aided by an agenda-driven media – to blame a singular man in the President of the United States for bad government executed at their hand. It is Congress that enacts financial allocations and who is, therefore, responsible for the deficit. It is Congress that has created so many unconstitutionally mandated entitlement programs that roughly a third of our paychecks isn’t enough revenue to satisfy the annual federal budget. It is Congress that has failed to rescue Social Security. It is Congress that refuses to simplify and make more equitable the tax system. It is Congress that refuses to cease the practice of earmarking. It is Congress that is dragging its feet on funding the securing of our borders. It is Congress that has elongated the military action in the Iraqi theater of the Global War against Islamofascism by refusing to learn from their past mistake of injecting politics into military operations when US boots are on the ground. And it is Congress – the Legislative Branch – that has seated those currently under indictment for financial and procedural malfeasance. The despotic quality of today’s Legislative Branch is not a malady unforeseen. In fact, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 13, 245.4 (1784), Thomas Jefferson professed his belief that the concentration of government power in the Legislative Branch, “...is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not a single one. One hundred and seventy-three despots [the number of the Virginia legislators] would surely be as oppressive as one...An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of the government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others...” To be certain, our country does need “change.” But to believe that we need to rely on the three candidates vying for the presidency to bring about this change is to be deceived by those who quest to maintain their seats of power at the American public’s expense. If we are to have change it must come through the Legislative Branch. If we are to affect change through the Legislative Branch then we have to honestly look at those we elect to the US Congress and that means taking the time to be informed and to get involved...locally. We all vote for the president. But we are all responsible – and therefore, culpable – for those we send to Congress. Frank Salvato Frank Salvato is the Executive Director and Director of Terrorism Research for Basics Project Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article). « Close It Posted April 25, 2008 05:01 PM Permalink
GW Students Refuse To Condemn GenocideWhen George Washington University senior Sergio Gor tried to get campus student groups to sign a Declaration Against Genocide last week, he thought it would be a no-brainer. Who, after all, wouldn't support a statement endorsing such uncontroversial tenets as the "right of all people to live in freedom and dignity," the equal dignity of men and women, and the freedom of conscience? All too many, as it turned out. Having approached all the largest student groups at the school to support the declaration, Gor, the president of the George Washington chapter of the Young America's Foundation, was refused time and again. For most students, the message of the declaration, which is a central component of the Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, was simply too "controversial to support." Read More » It is instructive to reflect on just what is now deemed excessively "controversial" on American campuses. For instance, the Declaration Against Genocide condemns an Islamic hadith (a narration about the life of the prophet Mohammed) that calls on Muslims to kill Jews. It also condemns terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has declared that "the accomplishment of a world without America and Israel is both possible and feasible" – an unmistakable expression of genocidal intent toward the countries that Islamic radicals consider to be the "little Satan" and the "great Satan" respectively. There is nothing, in short, that can be considered even remotely objectionable. Yet, at George Washington and countless other schools across the country, groups ranging from the Muslim Students Association to the College Democrats – to even the College Republicans – have been unwilling to condemn these and other affirmations of hatred when they concern Islamic militants. George Washington's Gor found that out the hard way: In a week of trying to promote the Declaration Against Genocide, what Gor heard most often was not outrage at the atrocities of Islamic terrorist groups or revulsion at their murderous anti-Semitism. What he heard most often were excuses. Thus, the Black Student Union refused to sign the declaration because it didn't specifically mention the slave trade. Meanwhile, the College Democrats refused to sign the declaration because it singled out the following hadith from the prophet Muhammad: "The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time [of judgment] will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!" The College Democrats insisted that the quote was taken "out of context." They, too, would not sign. Perhaps the most surprising rebuff came from the school's College Republicans chapter. Although some individual members expressed support for the declaration, the club as a whole would not support it. "It was a shock when the College Republicans said that [the declaration] was too 'controversial,'" Gor recalls. "They said they didn't want to offend anyone. But I thought, 'Who is going to be offended if you oppose genocide?'" Less shocking, perhaps, is that Gor failed to garner the support of the Muslim Students Association. Founded by members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian forerunner of al-Qaeda, the group today has over 200 chapters on American college campuses and retains much of the political extremism of its parent organization. Some MSA chapters, for instance, have held an annual "Anti-Zionist Week" to denounce the state of Israel. When in 2005 a group called the Free Muslim Coalition Against terror held a rally in the nation's capital condemning terrorism and expressing support for Muslim democrats in the Middle East, the MSA conspicuously refused to take part. Considered against this background, it is not surprising that the group has refused to condemn Islamic terrorists and their ongoing war to destroy the Jewish state. On more than one occasion, it has been on their side. Just as troubling as the MSA's silence is that no other student groups were willing to support the declaration at George Washington. Nor is this the first time that the school has shown itself to be intolerant of any and all debate about Islamic extremism. When the inaugural Islamo-Fascism Week was held last fall, radical students at the school plastered the campus with bigoted flyers – "Hate Muslims? So Do We!!!" the flyers proclaimed – to condemn the alleged bigotry of the campaign. The students later claimed that they put up the flyers in protest over "Islamophobic racism." Although it was never explained why it was "Islamophobic" to point out the demonstrable fact that Islamic terrorists justified their atrocities using the Muslim religion, let alone why doing so was "racist," the flyer incident acutely demonstrated the abject failure of many American universities to engage in a serious discussion about the threat of radical Islam. Terrorism fueled by religious extremism is a brutal reality in many parts of the world, but within the groves of American academia, a complicity of silence obtains. Students like Sergio Gor despair at that reality. "On our campus the political correctness is at a new level," Gor observes. "Students are afraid to stand up for anything, and to offend anyone. We're just a few blocks from the White House, and these are groups that will protest the war [in Iraq] in a heartbeat. But when it comes to genocide, they won't take a stand." FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, April 16, 2008 Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article). Response from Red State Patriot: SO THEN, WHAT DO THESE NE'ER-DO-WELLS STAND FOR? Response from Mark: After a decade or more of PC speak, more accurately known as censorship, we come to this point when a very simple letter opposing genocide is not supported by college campus groups for a number of different reasons, but for the cowardly Republicans it was to not to offend anyone. I blame the ACLU largely for this. For they have been fighting battles in court to remove religion in all its form from anyplace other then the home, and law suits against organizations such as The Boy Scouts of America, and for supporting only groups that promote their secular progressive agenda like NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association)in MA. Because the mere threat of an ACLU lawsuit has curbed the desire and will of the majority citizens in this country on so many subjects, we are starting to think and behave as the citizens in Orwell's 1984 where free, independent, intellectual, thought and discourse are no longer tolerated, let alone spoken. You can see this in Ben Steins new documentary called Expelled where the majority of scientist are shouting down, and ridiculing any theory other than Evolution / Darwinism. Hey it's only a Theory! It has not been proven beyond scientific doubt using the scientific method. For that matter neither has Global Warming as a result of man's presence on the planet. The same tactics used to promote only Evolution and shout down, and ridiculed any other theory is currently being conducted by the fanatics on the side that man is the cause of Global Warming, when in most likelihood it is a part of the regular cycle that the planet has been under since the beginning of time due largely to the sun. How does that axiom go? Usually the right answer is the simplest answer. Hereto, the Earth is getting hotter or colder due directly to the increase or relative decrease in the temperature of the Sun. According to the self anointed God on this topic, Al Gore, there is no debate. The answer to the global warming theory has already been determined, not by scientific method, but by the majority of scientist saying it is so. Good thing Columbus did not listen to them in his day for if he did, we may still think the planet is flat. Response from David R.: I don't blame the ACLU at all. Their power to influence anything is miniscule. They are a very small voice, usually of caution (living in the court system as I do, I now know for a fact how little influence any public interest legal group has). The real villain of this piece, and purveyor of New Speak, is the monolithic media and education unions. When the public discourse came to be controlled by graduates of "Schools of Journlism" and "Schools of Education", and quite possibly the rise of the "Film School", those gaurdians of the zeitgeist (always known to be vital to the integrity of the state, and therefore tightly controlled by government even in places like Britain), wholey fell into the hands of groups committed to their hatred of Western Civilization, patriarchy, family, and the United States. I am not exagerating when I propose that the schools of "Education" were quickly dominated by a matriarchy heavily seasoned with lesbians. "Film Schools" and "Theater Departments" are nearly universally dominated by homosexuals, and the "Schools of Journalism" are dominated and controlled by 60's radicals, inspired by their hatred of Nixon and the Viet Nam war. With these groups controlling eight tenths of the input into the developing minds of the populace, is it any wonder the influence of "New Speak". Every angle attacks the normal nuclear family, attacks the intelligence/authority/wisdom of any white male seen in popular media, and rails against the evils of western civilization while lauding any other backwater "culture" regardless of how pernicious or retrograde. Why? Because those previously named groups, who are now the gatekeepers, to the industries that shape the zeitgeist, have personal, deep seated, resentment against the country, culture, and civilization they have felt rejected by, for their entire adult lives. They readily scream racism, sexism, or homophobia, so loudly at every turn, when it is they who live to promulgate the hatred they seethe with. Response from Len S.: Many of today's "students" (and I use that term loosely) have apparently totally lost the faculty of critical judgment. Perhaps this stems from the pervasive influence of multiculturalism which eschews judging others. Perhaps it stems from political correctness which strives to take pressure off individuals to avoid the ramifications of judging others which could lead to your scrutiny by others ("He's a racist for saying that."). This extends to campus life which has changed from inquiring discourse and freedom to expand your horizons, to strict speech codes and know-nothing college administrators who won't stand up for academic freedom. How ironic that a supposedly liberal atmosphere promised by the college environment has been muzzled and perverted by a new intolerant liberalism that numbs the mind. Do you think that such a Declaration taken in most American universities following World War 2 would have been refused like this one was? « Close It Posted April 20, 2008 02:37 PM Permalink
When Birth Rates CollideWhen Birth Rates Collide – Coping with Immigrants and High Birth Rates An agrarian economy will naturally have a higher birth rate in part because children have a greater economic value and utility in an agrarian economy vs. a post-industrial economy, where children can quickly become an economic burden rather than an asset. Third World cultures are likely to be less self-oriented and individualistic while being more religious and traditional and therefore have a higher birth rate. First World countries center around the individual and his or her sense of satisfaction. Consumerism has made satisfying individual needs into a ritual and the individual into the totem idol in the center of his own worship circle. This leaves little room for children and abortion is as much the bastard child of consumerism, as fast food and 300 television channels. Read More » Child labor laws have drastically decreased the economic value of children, (except as child actors and celebrities); accordingly birth rates have dropped even in industrialized Second World nations with child labor laws. With children less able to contribute to the family and with an increasingly prolonged educational process that now culminates anywhere from ages 18 to 22 to a high of 26, high birth rates become increasingly difficult to support. Consumerism itself drastically raises spending on children and by children, making larger families all the more economically trying. When Third World cultures enter First World nations, they enter an industrial economy whose birth rate they quickly exceed. These multiple births however are out of place in an industrial economy which is no longer meant to accommodate them. Supporting such a birth rate therefore becomes a problem that is foisted onto social services. Once a family becomes dependent on social welfare programs, it can often decide to milk the system for all it can get, creating endemic fraud. Even if does not go this route however, the children are often put to finding extralegal means of contributing to the family income, which generates crime and creates a criminal culture within the family and the community that can then last for generations. There are a number of ways for First World nations to cope with this situation. First of all set immigration quotas by birth rate. While some immigrants are needed, immigrants who out-reproduce you are not, since they create radical change that a nation's own culture cannot sustain. The melting pot only melts so far until it explodes. If immigration quotas are set by family size and by the average birth rate of the country of origin, a country can better accommodate the collision of birth rates, taking in those immigrants whose birth rate is more compatible with their adopted country. This would for example mean more Polish (10/1000), Chinese (13/1000) and Irish (14/1000) immigrants and less Pakistani (27/1000), Mexican (20/1000) and Somalian (45/1000) ones. Note how this compares to the American (14/1000), Canadian (11/1000), British (10/1000), French (13/1000) birth rates -- and decide for yourself which groups are more compatible birth rate wise. The advantage of this is obvious. Large birth rates are more taxing and require heavy investment in schools and social services infrastructure. This diminishes the value of the immigrants to their host society and creates a heavy burden. Secondly, increase native birth rates to better match those of the incoming populations. The common approach has been to do this through tax incentives and similar programs, but that has been demonstrated to be unsatisfactory. First World countries have adopted economies that make childbearing a burden, even with incentives and generous maternity leave and similar programs, all that is accomplished is to make the burden a little more manageable. It is important to recognize that the entire economic structure in the West, from consumerism to high tax rates to heavy debt to extended educational processes that primarily serve as an advanced educational form of babysitting, effectively make large families difficult to sustain. Restoring the birth rates we used to have will require deemphasizing consumerism and the debt economy, reducing the tax burden significantly on native born families and enabling the return of the extended family, trimming the extended educational process and accepting a larger role for children and teenagers in contributing to family finances. While none of this is likely to happen, it is worth noting in order to contemplate what it would take to compete in terms of birth rates with incoming immigrant populations. Thirdly the economic structure of the population in the target country and the country of origin must be heavily weighed in considering prospective immigration. People from a country of origin who are not capable of properly functioning in a Western economy without becoming a burden on social services should not be admitted. Western countries have no shortage of shopkeepers that we constantly need to be importing more and more of them. Taking in immigrants who cannot function economically and demographically in a way that contributes positively to the country without excessive negatives, is unhelpful both to the host country and to the immigrants themselves. The real problems of immigration stem from its unplanned and chaotic nature as random rules and a complete lack of oversight make no coherent attempt to plan the flow of immigration with a view to integration. Sultan Knish http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2008/04/when-birth-rates-collide-coping-with.html Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article). « Close It Posted April 20, 2008 11:08 AM Permalink
Barack Obama is as tedious as he is dangerousA Living Lie An e-mail from a reader said that, while Hillary Clinton tells lies, Barack Obama is himself a lie. (Emphasis added) That is becoming painfully apparent with each new revelation of how drastically his carefully crafted image this election year contrasts with what he has actually been saying and doing for many years. Senator Obama's election year image is that of a man who can bring the country together, overcoming differences of party or race, as well as solving our international problems by talking with Iran and other countries with which we are at odds, and performing other miscellaneous miracles as needed. Read More » There is, of course, not a speck of evidence that Obama has ever transcended party differences in the United States Senate. Voting records analyzed by the National Journal show him to be the farthest left of anyone in the Senate. Nor has he sponsored any significant bipartisan legislation -- nor any other significant legislation, for that matter. Senator Obama is all talk -- glib talk, exciting talk, confident talk, but still just talk. Some of his recent talk in San Francisco has stirred up controversy because it revealed yet another blatant contradiction between Barack Obama's public image and his reality. Speaking privately to supporters in heavily left-liberal San Francisco, Obama let down his hair and described working class people in Pennsylvania as so "bitter" that they "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them." Like so much that Obama has said and done over the years, this is standard stuff on the far left, where guns and religion are regarded as signs of psychological dysfunction -- and where opinions different from those of the left are ascribed to emotions ("bitter" in this case), rather than to arguments that need to be answered. Like so many others on the left, Obama rejects "stereotypes" when they are stereotypes he doesn't like but blithely throws around his own stereotypes about "a typical white person" or "bitter" gun-toting, religious and racist working class people. In politics, the clearer a statement is, the more certain it is to be followed by a "clarification," when people react adversely to what was plainly said. Obama and his supporters were still busy "clarifying" Jeremiah Wright's very plain statements when it suddenly became necessary to "clarify" Senator Obama's own statements in San Francisco. People who have been cheering whistle-blowers for years have suddenly denounced the person who blew the whistle on what Obama said in private that is so contradictory to what he has been saying in public. However inconsistent Obama's words, his behavior has been remarkably consistent over the years. He has sought out and joined with the radical, anti-Western left, whether Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers of the terrorist Weatherman underground or pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli Rashid Khalidi. Obama is also part of a long tradition on the left of being for the working class in the abstract, or as people potentially useful for the purposes of the left, but having disdain or contempt for them as human beings. Karl Marx said, "The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing." In other words, they mattered only in so far as they were willing to carry out the Marxist agenda. Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw included the working class among the "detestable" people who "have no right to live." He added: "I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves." Similar statements on the left go back as far as Rousseau in the 18th century and come forward into our own times. It is understandable that young people are so strongly attracted to Obama. Youth is another name for inexperience -- and experience is what is most needed when dealing with skillful and charismatic demagogues. Those of us old enough to have seen the type again and again over the years can no longer find them exciting. Instead, they are as tedious as they are dangerous. (Emphasis added) By Thomas Sowell Hat tip: Len S. “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names” – Old Chinese proverb. Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article). « Close It Posted April 15, 2008 06:52 PM Permalink
Party of DefeatThe following is the introduction from the new book Party of Defeat by David Horowitz and Ben Johnson. The introduction lays out the book's thesis: that the opposition to the war in Iraq has crossed a troubling boundary. For the first time, a large number of national leaders have not merely opposed a war; that would be their inalienable right under the U.S. Constitution. Instead, they have actively sabotaged an ongoing war they voted to authorize and which our troops are currently winning. The object of war is to break an enemy’s will and destroy his capacity to fight. Therefore, a nation divided in wartime is a nation that invites its own defeat. Yet that is precisely how Americans are facing the global war that radical Islamists have declared on them. The enemies who confront us are religious barbarians, armed with the technologies of modern warfare but guided by morals that are medieval and grotesque. Their stated goal is the obliteration of America and the conquest of the West. They have assembled a coalition that includes sovereign states such as Iran and Syria, Muslim armies such as al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas, and terrorist cells that are globally dispersed and beyond counting. Read More » This jihad has access to biological, chemical, and possibly nuclear weapons. It actively threatens the regimes in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Turkey, and Egypt. Among its allies are non-Muslim states such as the Communist regimes in North Korea, Venezuela, and China. Its enablers include Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the vast political networks of the international Left. [1] Its pool of sympathizers and supporters can be counted in the hundreds of millions, and its political fronts are embedded in almost every nation and every continent, including Europe and the United States. The warriors of the jihad are promised salvation for slaughtering innocents; their highest honor is to sacrifice themselves for Allah by murdering infidels; their goal is to restore an Islamic empire that once stretched into the heart of Europe, until it was defeated in the battle of Vienna on September 12, 1683. Three hundred years later, Osama bin Laden turned this date of humiliation into a day of vengeance—and revival. Striking America’s homeland on September 11, 2001, jihadists murdered thousands of unsuspecting civilians, and came within a terrorist attack or two of destabilizing the American economy and unleashing chaos. As the victim of these unprovoked and savage attacks, and as the defender of democratic values in three world wars, America would seem a worthy cause. Instead, America is on the defensive, harshly criticized by its traditional allies and under political attack by significant elements of its own population. In this epic conflict Americans appear more divided among themselves than they have been at any time in the century–and–a half since the Civil War. Never in those years was an American commander-in-chief the target of such extreme attacks by his own countrymen with his troops in harm’s way. Never in its history has America faced an external enemy with its own leaders so at odds with each other. Even as American soldiers have fought a fanatical enemy on the battlefields of Iraq, their president has been condemned as a deceiver who led them to war through “lies;” [2] as a destroyer of American liberties; [3] as a desecrator of the Constitution; [4] as a usurper who stole his high office; [5] as the architect of an “unnecessary war;” [6] as a “fraud;” [7] as a leader who “betrayed us;” [8] and as a president who cynically sent the flower of American youth to die in foreign lands in order to enrich himself and his friends. [9] These reckless, corrosive charges are made not by fringe elements of the political spectrum, but by national leaders of the Democratic Party, including a former president, a former vice president and presidential candidate, and three members of the United States Senate (among them a one-time presidential candidate). These attacks occurred not after years of fighting in Iraq, when some might regard the result as a “quagmire,” but during the first months of the conflict, when the fighting had barely begun. They were made not over a war that was forced on Americans, or surreptitiously launched without their consent, but a war authorized by both political parties. They were directed not merely at its conduct, but at the rationale of the war itself—in other words, at the very justice of the American cause. Although they voted for the bill to authorize the war, leaders of the Democratic Party, such as Senator Hillary Clinton, turned around after it was in progress and claimed that it was “George Bush’s war,” not theirs. [10] They argued that Bush alone had decided to remove Saddam, when in fact it was a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who made regime change the policy of the United States. [11] They argued that the war was “unnecessary” because Iraq was “no threat.” [12] But who would have regarded Afghanistan as a threat before 9/11? They maintained that because the war in Iraq was a war of “choice,” it was therefore immoral. [13] But every war fought by America in the twentieth century, with the exception of World War II, was also a war of choice. Above all, they claimed the president had manipulated intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and thus the premise of the war. But copies of the National Intelligence Estimate on which the president’s decision was based were provided to every Democratic senator who voted for or against it. The findings were confirmed by government intelligence agencies around the world, including those of France, Britain, Russia, and Jordan. [14] In other words, President Bush could not have manipulated the intelligence on which the vote was based and the war was actually authorized. In attempting to make the war in Iraq a sinister plot of the Bush administration, Democrats claimed that it was a distraction from the war with the Islamic terrorists who had attacked America. “The issue is the war they got us into,” Nancy Pelosi told 60 Minutes just before she became Speaker of the House and the second elected official in line for the presidency. “If the president wants to say the war in Iraq is part of the war on terror, he’s not right.” 60 Minutes: Do you not think that the war in Iraq now, today, is the war on terror? What nation can prevail in a war if half its population believes that the war is unnecessary and unjust, that its commander-in-chief is a liar, and that its own government is the aggressor? What president can mobilize his nation if his word is not trusted? And what soldier can prevail on the field of battle if half his countrymen are telling him that he shouldn’t be there in the first place? It was July 2003, only four months after American forces entered Iraq, when the Democratic Party launched its first all-out attack on the president’s credibility and the morality of the war. The opening salvos were reported in a New York Times article: “Democratic presidential candidates offered a near-unified assault today on President Bush’s credibility in his handling of the Iraq War signaling a shift in the political winds by aggressively invoking arguments most had shunned since the fall of Baghdad.” [16] While American forces battled al-Qaeda and Ba’athist insurgents in the Iraqi capital, the Democratic National Committee released a television ad that focused not on winning those battles, but on the very legitimacy of the war. The theme of the ad was “Read His Lips: President Bush Deceives the American People.” The alleged deception was sixteen words that had been included in the State of the Union address he delivered on the eve of the conflict. [17] These words summarized a British intelligence report claiming that Iraq had attempted to acquire fissionable uranium in the African state of Niger, thus indicating Saddam’s (well-known) intentions to develop nuclear weapons. The report was subsequently confirmed by a bipartisan Senate committee and a British investigative commission, but not until many months had passed and the Democratic attacks had taken their toll. [18] On the surface, the attacks were directed at the president’s credibility for repeating the British claim. But their clear implication was to question the decision to go to war—in other words, to cast doubt on the credibility of the American cause. If Saddam had not sought fissionable uranium in Niger, it was suggested, then the White House had lied in describing Saddam as a threat. In the midst of a war, and in the face of a determined terrorist resistance in Iraq, Democrats had launched an attack on America’s presence on the field of battle. This separated their assault from the normal criticism of war policies. Senator John Edwards, then a candidate for the Democrats’ 2004 presidential nomination, had voted to authorize the war and was still claiming to support it. In an interview with the New York Times, he identified the significance of the Democrats’ attack: “The most important attribute that any president has is his credibility—his credibility with the American people, with its allies and with the world.” But even as Edwards said this, he joined the Democrats’ attack, publicly insinuating that the president was a liar who had deceived the American people on the gravest issue imaginable. “When the president’s own statements are called into question,” Edwards explained to the reporter, “it’s a very serious matter.” [19] When the nation is at war, it is graver still. To destroy the credibility of the commander-in-chief while his troops are in battle is to cripple his ability to support them and to win the war they are fighting. For this reason, throughout the history of armed conflict, a united home front has been an indispensable element of victory. For the same reason, a principal aim of psychological-warfare operations has been to target the credibility of the enemy’s leaders and the morality of the enemy cause. General Ion Mihai Pacepa was the highest-ranking intelligence official ever to defect from the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. In a commentary about the attacks on President Bush during the war in Iraq, Pacepa recalled: “Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels.” [20] No president can marshal his nation’s resources if his people distrust him or don’t believe in their own cause. To attack a president’s credibility in the middle of a war, over a matter as ambiguous as a sixteen-word summary of an allied intelligence report, is an attempt to undermine the war itself. During the Vietnam War, General Pacepa wrote, Soviet intelligence “spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America’s presidents sent Genghis Khan–style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren’t facts. They were our tales, but . . . as Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness.” [21] Nor did this Soviet campaign to discredit the United States stop with Vietnam. As Pacepa explains: “The final goal of our anti-American offensive was to discourage the United States from protecting the world against communist terrorism and expansion. Sadly, we succeeded. After U.S. forces precipitously pulled out of Vietnam, the victorious communists massacred some two million people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Another million tried to escape, but many died in the attempt. This tragedy also created a credibility gap between America and the rest of the world, damaged the cohesion of American foreign policy, and poisoned domestic debate in the United States.” [22] It is one of the ironies of the campaign against the war in Iraq that its opponents cite the political conflict over Vietnam as a precedent for their extraordinary attacks on a war in progress. In doing so, they misconstrue the past and misunderstand its lessons. During Vietnam, the nation’s political leaders, both Democrats and Republicans, were united in their support of the war effort for more than ten years. Their bipartisan unity came to an end only when both parties conceded that a victory was no longer politically possible. It was only in the presidential campaign of 1972, eleven years after the first American advisers were sent to Vietnam that Senator George McGovern ran against the war itself. By that time both parties were agreed on a policy of military withdrawal, and by that time truce negotiations with the Communists, initiated by a Republican administration, had already begun. The conflict over war policy during the 1972 campaign was over the proper way to accomplish the withdrawal favored by both parties. It was over how to leave, not whether to leave. The McGovern Democrats favored a policy of immediate and unconditional retreat. Their campaign slogan was “Come Home, America.” The Nixon Republicans wanted to negotiate a truce whose terms would preserve the non-Communist regime in South Vietnam, and deny victory to the Communist aggressors. Their slogan was “Peace with Honor.” The McGovernites did not believe American forces should have been in Vietnam in the first place. McGovern’s candidacy was astrategic campaign to block America’s Cold War policy of containing Communist expansion. Unlike the Democrats of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the McGovern Democrats believed America was the problematic imperial power, not the Soviet Union. This represented a sea change in the Democratic Party, whose leaders had actually launched the Cold War policy of containing Soviet Communism beginning with the Truman administration in 1947. It was the Democrats, led by John F. Kennedy, who had initiated America’s military presence in Vietnam. Until the McGovern candidacy, the Democratic leadership, including its presidential candidate in 1968, Hubert Humphrey, had supported the Vietnam War. It was the first time since the Civil War that an opposition party had conducted a national campaign to challenge the justice of America’s war aims. The campaigns against the wars in Iraq and Vietnam may seek the same end—the defeat of American power—but the differences between them are revealing. In regard to Iraq, the Democrats’ attacks on the justice of the American cause came not after ten years of stalemate, but within three months of the swiftest, most successful campaign in military history. The attacks were conducted not by movement activists but by leaders of the Democratic Party, and they came in the first months of a war that both parties had until then supported, and that the previous Democratic administration had endorsed, and that both parties had voted to authorize. The attacks on this war have no precedent in the American past. The effort to remove the Iraqi regime by force, which Democrats now maintain was provocative and unnecessary, originated with a Democratic president, Bill Clinton. Four years before Bush ordered American troops into Iraq, Clinton asked Congress to pass an “Iraq Liberation Act,” which specifically called for regime change by force. To emphasize the seriousness with which he regarded the threat that Saddam posed, Clinton ordered the American military to fire more than four hundred cruise missiles into Iraq. [23] The Iraq Liberation Act authorized American aid for any insurgent group that was ready to overthrow the regime. It was ratified by both political parties—Democrats and Republicans—with barely a dissenting vote. Four years later, when Bush asked Congress to authorize the use of force to accomplish the same goal, a Democratic majority in the Senate supported his request. When American forces entered Iraq on March 19, 2003, a large majority of the Democratic leadership, including the former president, his secretaries of state and defense, and his entire national security team, supported the invasion. When the Iraqi regime was overthrown three weeks later, the Democratic leadership joined in the celebration, although some dissenters, such as Representative Nancy Pelosi, were already complaining that it cost too much. [24] Dissent is a cherished and justly protected right in a democracy. But it is also a privilege. The right to dissent exists only on condition that the government that guarantees it is able to defend itself against enemies who would destroy it. No bulwark has been more durable or more important to the stability and survival of America’s democratic order than the solidarity of its leaders in wartime. A president under relentless attack from the domestic opposition has less political space for flexible response. The more severe the attacks, the more limited his room for political maneuver. If the Bush administration has been slow to admit error in the present war, or to take corrective measures on the field of battle, the unrestrained attacks on its integrity and motives have undoubtedly been a significant factor. Should more troops have been deployed to win the war, as General Eric Shinseki advised at the outset? What Democratic leader at the time proposed legislation to provide the funding which would have made such a remedy possible? What Republican legislator, faced with attacks that brand his president a liar who tricked the nation into a needless war, would join a chorus of Democrats in attacking their president’s policy on that war? Another aspect of reckless criticism that opponents of the war are loathe to discuss is the impact of such attacks on enemy morale. If America’s enemies have been encouraged by these divisions at home, this consequence cannot be simply dismissed as though it did not exist. In time of war, criticism of war policy—particularly reckless and rejectionist attacks on the nation’s war aims and efforts—cannot be granted “no fault” status, as though no repercussions ensued. In a democracy, policy must always be subject to scrutiny, even in wartime, but so must criticism of that policy. This book is about unprecedented attacks on an American president and a war in progress. It is about the impact of a divided national leadership on the prosecution of the war. It is an attempt to understand the defection of leaders from a war they supported and from a national purpose they presumably share. It is also an effort to understand the influence on the Democratic Party of a radical Left that has defected from this purpose and no longer regards itself as part of the nation. This Left sees itself instead as part of an abstract “humanity,” transcending national borders and patriotic allegiances, whose interests coincide with a worldwide radical cause. Democrats have an explanation for their defection from a war they originally supported: the president is to blame. But this is a claim that will not stand up to even the most cursory inspection. Between the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, which the Democrats supported, and their attacks on the legitimacy of the war, which began in June, three months later, no event transpired on the battlefield and no change took place in the administration’s war policy that would explain their defection. What changed was the internal politics of the Democratic Party, and this was a direct result of the antiwar campaign organized by the Left. By coincidence, the buildup to the war took place during the early stages of a presidential-primary campaign, in the winter and spring of 2003. By June, the candidacy of an obscure Vermont governor named Howard Dean, a veteran of the anti-Vietnam Left, had gathered such momentum that he appeared to have become the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. [25] It was this political fact that precipitated an about-face on the war by more prominent Democrats, such as John Kerry and John Edwards, who eventually captured the party’s nominations. It was the antiwar radicals in the Dean campaign, not any events on the ground in Iraq, that produced the change in the position of leading Democrats and eventually of the Democratic Party as a whole. It was the political force of the antiwar movement, rather than any fact about the war, that explains the change. Aware that their attacks on the home front would appear indefensible to many Americans, critics of the war have attempted to argue that it was Bush who had created the political schism. Four years into the war, New York Times columnist Robert Wright wrote a typical broadside titled, “An Easter Sermon,” which drew an invidious comparison between Bush and Jesus Christ, and blamed the president for dividing the nation. The column focused on a statement Bush made in an address to Congress nine days after 9/11. In it he said: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Wright’s column appeared in April 2007, even as a newly invested Democratic Congress was proposing legislation to force an American retreat in Iraq. In the column, Wright portrayed Bush as a polarizing figure who questioned his critics’ loyalties. Wright cited a contrasting Gospel statement by Jesus, “Whoever is not against us is for us,” as a model for what Bush should have said. Commented Wright: “Weeks after 9/11, George Bush says roughly the opposite. His famous ‘You’re either with us or against us’ means that those who don’t follow his lead will be considered enemies. The rest is history.” [26] But this is a false reading of Bush’s sentence as well as of the New Testament, since Jesus also said, “He that is not with me is against me.” [27] It is also a false account of the history that followed, since it was Bush’s critics who made the White House and its supporters their enemies, not the other way around. Typical was an early attack by billionaire George Soros, the most influential non-elected figure in Democratic politics. Soros’s assault came in the fall of 2003, five months after the Democratic leaders had launched their scorched-earth campaign over the Niger incident, and just as they were escalating their offensive. According to Soros, Bush’s statement was proof not only that he was a divisive force in domestic politics, but that he was pursuing a “supremacist ideology” reminiscent of the Nazis: “When I hear Bush say, ‘You’re either with us or against us,’ it reminds me of the Germans,” Soros said. “It conjures up memories of Nazi slogans on the walls, like Der Feind Hört mit (‘The enemy is listening’).” [28] Such rhetoric illustrated the degree to which the political debate had already become poisonous on the Democratic side only eight months into the war. No administration official had used such language to describe Democratic leaders opposed to the conflict. [29] The statement that a wartime enemy would be listening to its adversary was in any case hardly a Nazi idea. During World War II, almost identical slogans were popular in America, such as “Loose lips sink ships.” During the Cold War the code of bipartisanship was sealed in the phrase “Politics stops at the water’s edge,” to acknowledge the importance of political unity in wartime. Soros’s statement was an example of the very politics it pretended to decry. If pointing to the fact that wartime divisions might entail some dangers made one a Nazi, as Soros suggested, what did that kind of comment do to the tenor of public debate? Yet no Democrat challenged Soros when he employed such a venomous allusion. In fact, the meaning of Bush’s statement was grossly distorted by both Wright and Soros. The president’s remark was made in the context of an assessment of the threat America faced after 9/11. The purpose of his speech was to outline a new American response to the global war that Muslim fanatics had declared on America and theWest. This war had come to American shores eight years earlier, in 1993, with the first attack on the World Trade Center. It had been followed by attacks on American targets in Saudi Arabia, Africa, and Yemen. But there had been no appropriate American response. Bush’s agenda was to announce such a response. Henceforth, America would answer with a war of its own: “Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest.” [30] The president called the new response a “War on Terror.” It was a war, he said, that was rooted in ideology: “They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism.” He described the war as not merely with al-Qaeda, the Islamic group that had struck the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11, but with every element of the jihad: “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” Having laid down these guidelines, Bush was ready to draw the line that caused Wright, Soros, and the Democratic leadership such consternation. Because the United States was now ready to recognize the global nature of the threat, it was also ready to recognize the complicity of Islamic governments such as Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and the Sudan in supporting the Islamic jihad and making possible the terrorist attacks. It was putting these regimes on notice: Sovereignty would no longer protect nation-states that aided and abetted the Islamic crusade. Governments would now be held responsible for the global terrorists within their borders. If governments did not cooperate in the War on Terror and here the Taliban in Afghanistan was foremost in Bush’s mind they would be regarded as enemies, too: “And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. This was a warning to governments—to the Taliban and other Islamic regimes that might provide havens and support for al-Qaeda. This is the statement that Wright and Soros, and the president’s Democratic opponents, first distorted and then misrepresented as an attack on domestic critics. Bush had said nothing of the sort. It was a projection of the way his critics felt about him. This new war policy of holding governments that harbored terrorists accountable was precisely what had been missing when terrorists struck the World Trade Center in 1993. After that attack, the bomb maker, an Iraqi named Abdul Rahman Yasin, was able to escape to Baghdad. The Clinton administration did not pursue Yasin to Iraq, nor did it hold the regime of Saddam Hussein accountable for providing refuge to him. If Clinton had done so, perhaps his fellow Democrats would better understand the connection between the Iraqi regime and the Islamic jihad against their country. Instead, the Clinton White House regarded the World Trade Center bombing as a criminal act carried out by individuals unconnected to a global jihad. The identical attitude was evident when an al-Qaeda warlord in Somalia, Mohammed Farah Aideed, ambushed U.S. Army Rangers in the city of Mogadishu, also in 1993. The failure to grasp the place of these attacks in a global jihad led directly to America’s vulnerability on 9/11. It is what Bush has meant on those occasions when he has accused Democrats of “forgetting the lessons of 9/11,” or failing to understand them. This is the real political fault line in the disputes over the War on Terror and its battleground in Iraq. Democrats believe that the War on Terror is a blunder committed by the Bush administration, even an invention of the Bush administration, rather than an actual war that has been declared on America by Osama bin Laden and the global forces of Islamofascism. This was the point of the celebrated statement candidate John Edwards made in 2007, during the presidential primary campaign: “The war on terror is a slogan designed only for politics,” Edwards claimed. “It is not a strategy to make America safe. It’s a bumper sticker, not a plan.” [31] And further: “We need a post-Bush, post-9-11, post-Iraq military that is mission-focused on protecting Americans from 21st century threats, not misused for discredited ideological purposes. By framing this as a war, we have walked right into the trap the terrorists have set—that we are engaged in some kind of clash of civilizations and a war on Islam.” [32] The same point had been made by Soros a year earlier. In a Wall Street Journal article, he explained that the War on Terror was “a misleading figure of speech [which] applied literally has unleashed a real war fought on several fronts—Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia—a war that has killed thousands of innocent civilians and enraged millions around the world . . . [W]e can escape it only if we Americans repudiate the war on terror as a false metaphor.” [33] In this view, George Bush and America are responsible for the war that radical Islam has launched against us. This is not a tactical difference between opponents of the war policy in Iraq and its supporters. It is strategic, and it explains why we have turned a corner in our history for which there is no precedent, and why the divisions over the war are deeper and more troubling than any of the specific issues that confront us. By David Horowitz and Ben Johnson For the original article and footnotes: Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article). Response by Sallie D.: Wow is Nancy Pelosi stupid! --------------------------- Advance Praise for Party of Defeat “Party of Defeat is an eye-opening account of one of the greatest political betrayals in American history: the unprecedented attack by leaders of an opposition party on a war they authorized and on America’s commander-in-chief while America’s troops were still in harm’s way.” - SEAN HANNITY, Fox News Channel anchor “Candid. Brilliant. Forceful. Brave. Do not miss under any circumstances.” - R. JAMES WOOLSEY (former CIA Director) “David Horowitz and Ben Johnson have written a timely and important analysis of the American political debate over the war on terror.” - Ambassador JOHN BOLTON “This book is a must read for every American who cares about the security of the United States.” - Rep. GINNY BROWN-WAITE “Brilliant, factual and historic, David Horowitz and Ben Johnson have documented how and why the Democratic leadership split the nation in the global war on terror. It will be judged as the seminal book on an unprecedented attack against America’s president and military in combat. Every American must read this book.” - Lieutenant General THOMAS McINERNEY, USAF (Ret.) “Having been one of David Horowitz’s more severe critics as a young officer in the foxholes of Vietnam, I can say with some authority that he is now bringing a message of national importance to the American people.” - Major General JAMES E. LIVINGSTON, USMC (Ret.) Recipient of the Medal of Honor “David Horowitz and Ben Johnson explain in detail the unprecedented attacks on a sitting President and expose the lack of understanding at the highest levels about the nature of our enemy. This book must be read by all Americans.” - Major General PAUL VALLELY, USA (Ret.) “In concise and riveting fashion, David Horowitz and Ben Johnson have laid out a bill of particulars against an anti-war Left whose efforts to undermine the terror war are little short of treasonous. It offers a stark reminder of the folly of fighting a war on two fronts: one on the streets and battle fields of Iraq, the other here at home against ourselves.” - JOEL SURNOW, creator of 24 « Close It Posted April 15, 2008 01:56 PM Permalink
Appeasing Islam - Bad MoveComments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article). Posted April 14, 2008 10:31 PM Permalink
The Sandy Berger CaperComments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article). Posted April 10, 2008 07:28 AM Permalink
Judge Me By the Company That I KeepJohn McCain stated in the Republican debates at the Reagan Library that people can judge him by the company he keeps. Well let's take a little look at the people John McCain considers his "company". Read on for the facts - instead of promises and disrespect for your intelligence. In fact, let's apply John McCain's admonition and judge every candidate by the company that they keep. Read More » There's Senator Ted Kennedy from the McCain-Kennedy immigration amnesty bill. Senator Lindsey Graham who once called those opposed to amnesty for illegal aliens "bigots" at a La Raza conference. Senator Mel Martinez an open borders proponent who favors amnesty and was a coauthor of the Hagel-Martinez amnesty bill prior to the McCain-Kennedy bill. Martinez once called enforcement without amnesty a "harshness only" approach. Juan Hernandez, a former Mexican government official, a dual citizen and major proponent of rights and amnesty for Hispanic illegal aliens and the end of the sovereignty of America. He currently is working on the McCain campaign as his Hispanic Outreach Director. Congressman Luis Gutierrez, a good friend of La Raza, who has put forth his own legislation for illegal aliens called the STRIVE act and was involved in formulating the amnesty bills. In addition he personally put forth a bill to give Elvira Arellano permanent residency - this was before she hid out in a church. He also called the police on a group of citizen lobbyists who came to question him on his stance on illegal immigration. Senator Russ Feingold who was half of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform fiasco. Joe Lieberman, who together with McCain brought forth the McCain-Lieberman Stewardship bill to fight global warming. Former Senator John Edwards who along with McCain and Kennedy wrote the McCain-Edwards "Patient's Bill of Rights". Are you starting to see a pattern here? Lots of Democrats and Republicans (who are really Liberals) working together with McCain. This is the company he keeps and asks us to judge him by. McCain will state that he is a "Reagan Republican", but nothing could be further from the truth. There's working together and then there is outright "being a member of the other party". Things to watch out for with McCain include the passing and implementation of the "fairness doctrine". Something that would censor and shut down talk radio stations, websites like this one and limit free speech in the United States. You don't think he'd sign it? Just watch him! Watch the above video and tell me this is someone who really is looking out for the American people and not just some illegal foreigners, big business and future Democrat voters. http://www.diggersrealm.com/mt/archives/002429.html Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article). « Close It Posted April 9, 2008 06:13 PM Permalink
The Right TimeThe Right Time "Buy from us, or go naked!" Such was the taunt the Tories delivered to the colonies in 1768. Enraged by a trade policy of advancing the interests of the Crown at the expense of the colony, the seeds of rebellion were thus fertilized with the frustration of the Founding Fathers. "The war of the American Revolution chiefly grew out of efforts of Great Britain to cripple and destroy our Colonial industries to the benefit of the British trader," wrote Sen. John Logan in his 1886 book The Great Conspiracy. "And... the independence conquered was an Industrial as well as Political Independence." Read More » After handing the Red Coats a one-way ticket across the pond, the Founders capitalized on their industrial independence by creating an economic system predicated on the commonsense principles of protection and preservation of domestic industry, especially manufacturing. Such was the key to unshackling America from the constraints of global dependency. For two centuries, Americans embraced an America First policy - one that placed the interests of Americans before foreigners and country before commerce - and the harvest was plentiful. From 1869-1913, a pivotal era of economic growth, protectionist America displaced free trade Britain on the global stage. Beginning the era with half of Britain's production, America, thanks to high tariffs, ended the era with more than double that of Britain. The verdict was in and free trade was headed for the guillotine. Thus, it is no surprise during the era of protection, which lasted until the close of WWII, free trade was a third rail of American politics. It was during this period that politicians treated free trade as a plague, and when Grover Cleveland got tagged a free trader during the 1888 election, he did everything he could to dodge the dogma. "It is a condition which confronts us, not a theory," Mr. Cleveland quipped. William McKinley and John Sherman, an Ohio congressman and senator respectively, would not relent and, under their direction, the Republican Party became an America First party, and that ended, as Mr. McKinley put it, the "great free-trade shadow dance." "Protection which guards and develops our industries is a cardinal policy of the Republican Party," read the 1904 GOP platform on which the Rough Rider rode back into the White House. So deep were the roots of protection in the Republican Party, Mr. Sherman believed Democrats were the greatest threat to his America First policy, causing him to warn if the Democrats had their way, "It is the protective industrial policy built by the Republican Party they would break down." How was the GOP rewarded for connecting protection to prosperity? From the Civil War to the day Woodrow Wilson took the oath of office, there were only eight years a Republican was not sitting in the Oval Office. More than a century later after his warning, Mr. Sherman would be surprised to see a number of free trade foxes had set up shop in the GOP hen house. "I am an unabashed supporter of free trade agreements," thundered presumptive Republican nominee John McCain last week as he called for a free trade agreement with the European Union. Juxtapose such a comment with Teddy Roosevelt's proclamation "Thank God I am not a free trader," and one wonders if he is in the same party. How was Mr. McCain's departure from traditional orthodoxy met by the defenders of the faith? With open arms. "In an increasingly protectionist and demagogic atmosphere, it is encouraging to hear a voice of sanity on this issue," said Club for Growth President Pat Toomey. Tell that to TR, Bill McKinley, Abe Lincoln and Alex Hamilton. How is a policy that has exported American jobs sane? How is it encouraging hearing the man leading the party that once protected American industry to swear allegiance to a policy that has devastated Ohio, Michigan and countless other states and has placed discount sneakers over national security? Free trade promotes peace and cheap goods, argues the free trader. The only problem, China is no more peaceful today than it was prior to joining the WTO, the reduction of the tariff paved the way for the income tax, and, as Mr. McKinley stated, "Cheap is not a word of hope... it is the badge of poverty; it is the signal of distress." In delivering his "Report on Manufactures," Alexander Hamilton handed the nation an economic blueprint that is just as relevant today as it was over two centuries ago. "The wealth ... independence and security of a country, appear to be materially connected with the prosperity of manufactures," stated Mr. Hamilton. "Every nation ... ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply. These compromise means of substance, habitation, clothing and defense." Today, soybeans, corn, wheat, rice, cigarettes, meat, hides, waste paper, fertilizers and cotton are among America's top exports. Industry, on the other hand, has been gutted, mines have closed, factories have been boarded shut, and America's labor force has declined over 20 percent since 1950. Twenty-five percent of our steel is foreign made, as is a third of our cars, two-thirds of our clothes, and practically all of our basic electronics. Two hundred years later and, in terms of trade, America is right back where she started. So are the spoiled fruits of free trade. By Joe Murray http://americaneconomicalert.org/news_item.asp?NID=3139040 Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article). « Close It Posted April 5, 2008 10:47 AM Permalink
I Wish I KnewCheckpoint Condi A new Hamas TV production for Palestinian children shows a puppet stabbing President Bush to death after telling him the White House has been turned into a mosque. The Palestinians elected Hamas as their leadership by a wide margin in January 2006, and in a poll two weeks ago a majority of Palestinians said they would vote for current Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh for president if there were new Palestinian elections. After the massacre at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem on March 6, Bush called Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and said “This barbaric and vicious attack on innocent civilians deserves the condemnation of every nation.” But the same poll of Palestinians found 84% of them approving the attack. And the official newspaper of the Palestinian Authority featured a front-page photo of the dead terrorist over a caption calling him a shahid (martyr). Read More » To say that Bush and his secretary of state don’t appear impressed by these problematic proclivities of the Palestinians is a great understatement. Condi Rice was here yet again this week in what has become a grimly obsessive quest to award the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians—in their current condition of moral development—with a sovereign state by the end of 2008. Rice’s visit was seen as aimed at ensuring “progress” by the time Bush visits Israel in May to mark its 60th anniversary. Any remaining doubts as to whether Bush and Rice are serious—or just intended the “Annapolis process” as a spectacle to appease broader Arab opinion—can be laid to rest by the fact that Bush has also invited PA president Mahmoud Abbas to the White House in early May. So Rice came to Israel with an agenda of “easing conditions” for the Palestinians—meaning mainly the removal of roadblocks and checkpoints in the West Bank that the entire Israeli defense establishment regards as a key element in Israel’s mostly successful containment of West Bank terror over the past couple of years. Rice’s main foil was reportedly Defense Minister Ehud Barak. A former military hero, a left-of-center, Labor politician who himself—as prime minister—made draconian offers to Yasser Arafat in 2000 and 2001, Barak is said to be concerned about jeopardizing the recent security achievements and, concurrently, his own ambitions to be prime minister again. Nonetheless, Rice didn’t find Barak too tough a customer this time and, along with her U.S. delegation, was reportedly “amazed” at the gestures Barak offered in a three-way meeting with her and PA prime minister Salam Fayyad. These include, among other things, removing a major checkpoint near Ramallah and 50 dirt roadblocks, allowing 700 PA policemen (trained in Jordan under U.S. supervision) to enter the West Bank terror-town of Jenin, building a city or several neighborhoods near Ramallah, increasing the number of Palestinians allowed to work in Part of why Barak folded so easily has to do with the pressure on him: as Jerusalem Post analyst Calev Ben-David noted, It can’t be easy for Rice to sit opposite the most decorated soldier in Israeli military history, and counter his arguments that the concessions she is demanding risk endangering the security of his nation’s citizens. Perhaps that helps explain why she has enlisted some heavy brass to help her in that mission, a trio of top US military officials: Gen. James Jones, Lt.-Gen. William Fraser and Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton. As Ben-David details, Jones—who is no less than former Supreme Allied Commander of Europe—is said to help Rice with putting the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” in a larger context and is the one who already “leaned on Barak to make security concessions ahead of the secretary’s visit.” As for Fraser, he’s a former top-level air force commander and currently assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as Rice’s top military adviser, and he’s also entrusted with monitoring Israel and the PA’s compliance with the “process.” Dayton , also no lightweight, was director of the Iraq Survey Group and a senior member of the Joint Chiefs, and helps oversee the training of the Palestinian security forces that Bush and Rice still hallucinate to be a pro-Western contingent that will resist and, if necessary, defeat Hamas. Ben-David speaks of “rumored tensions between Dayton and Barak, the latter reportedly bristling at [ Dayton ’s] criticism of [his] unwillingness to approve giving the PA security forces more operational latitude and higher-level military equipment.” If that sounds like a lot of pressure on the defense minister of a democratic ally, it is. If it sounds like the idea that Israel is supposed to be a sovereign country in its own right is getting lost in the shuffle here, it is. Barak’s recent reference to the decision to allow PA policemen into Jenin as a “calculated risk” prompted a letter to him from Nachman Zoldan, whose son Ido Zoldan—29 and a father of two—was murdered last November in a shooting attack by two PA policemen. Nachman Zoldan asked Barak to reconsider your decision. Over the years, considerable facts and figures have emerged that all point to deep involvement of those same Palestinian security forces...in the terror campaign against Israel . This involvement in terror, ranging from intelligence gathering through actual terrorist acts, is carried out by uniformed and plainclothed Palestinian policemen as well as high-ranking police officers…. Recent terrorist attacks have displayed a regrettably much-improved performance of the terrorist organizations. We are therefore very concerned regarding permission you granted to these same policemen to undergo training in Jordan . This training, under American guidance, will grant them heightened professionalism that will enable them, according to past experience, to act in the future against us, civilians and IDF soldiers alike, with increased effectiveness. Zoldan concluded by requesting an urgent meeting regarding your appalling justification of your decision to “take calculated risks.” The many ramifications of this statement include life in the shadow of bereavement and loss, the ongoing hellishness of pain and grief for the immediate families and extended circles of friends of slain victims, and the rage at the murders. And the murdered victims!...“salt of the earth” who placed their faith in you, their elected leaders, to protect them. And you take “calculated risks” with their lives! You, our elected representatives, do not take risks with your own lives, but are closely guarded and secured at great monetary cost to the public. Therefore it is not ethically appropriate to cast “calculated risks” on the unwitting public. As always it is hard to know how to apportion the blame between acquiescent Israeli leaders and American leaders who pressure them. One thing that appears certain is that even if the bereaved father’s letter had been brought to Rice’s, or Bush’s, attention, its pathos would not have mattered to them. Rice has already expressed her perception of the Palestinians as analogous to blacks in the segregated U.S. south. As for what motivates Bush in this policy of bullying an ally into going against its very hard-won security wisdom and endangering its citizens in the name of creating a terror state—I wish I knew. By P. David Hornik Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article). -------------------------------- Call me cynical. It seems to me that the US State Department has decided, some time ago, that since the strategic interests of the US depend MORE NOW on the ready availability of oil and the "friendship" of vast numbers of muslims throughout the world, sacrificing Israel, to obtain oil and arab friendship, is a small price to pay. I am convinced that, if tomorrow morning Bush were to awaken to headlines that Israel had been "wiped off the map" by nuclear weapons of unknown origin, his administration (and subsequent ones) would secretly sigh with relief that Israel was no longer the stumbling block and "burden" undermining America-Arab relations. Yes, the president, whoever he/she is, would wring his hands, and condemn the "dastardly act", but he/she would not launch any counterattack in Israel's name, at the probable suspect(s). After all, that oil's got to FLOW. Such restraint might score points in the arab world but would more likely signal American weakness and unreliability to our arab "FRIENDS". American citizens have shown little interest in the impending scenario of a monolithic muslim state which will likely form when we leave Iraq. Such a state, born with the assistance of Iran and its surrogates, will undermine the new Iraq government (as well as other weak middle eastern regimes), will murder huge numbers of Iraqis (just like the murder of 3 million asians But Americans can't think ahead about such geopolitics, and politicians running for office here understand that. Better to win elections with "Peace in our Time" sloganeering than to suggest that America's sons & daughters might be called upon in much greater numbers in a future conflict with radical Islam. Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article). Response by David R.: The Arabs have Oil. The Israeli's don't. The leftists of the world hate Western Civilization, and myopically idealize any other "civilization" they can find, regardless of how violent, retrograde, or repressive. So the one thing big business and the leftists can agree on, is that they have no use for the Israeli's tiny little island of civilization, surrounded by bloodthirsty savages. Simple as that. It's always been easy to sell the jews up the river, who will care? « Close It Posted April 5, 2008 01:22 AM Permalink
The Obama BargainGeraldine Ferraro may have had sinister motives when she said that Barack Obama w |