Dealing With the Ugly Liberal

Sherman Frederick at the Las Vegas Review-Journal hopes that adulthood comes to some on the left, even if it comes late:

In case you missed it, when President George W. Bush was announced to the crowd, some booed loudly, shocking even the commentators on the official Obama network, MSNBC. One section of onlookers sang, “Nah nah nah nah, hey hey hey, goodbye.” And, finally, as Bush left the White House, one deep thinker took the opportunity to give the “one-finger salute,” thus saying more about himself than anything else.

This from a movement that fancies itself all about peace, love and global karma.

Now look, it would be a mistake to paint all Democrats and Obama supporters with the actions of these few on Inauguration Day. And, according to news reports, some in the crowd tried hard to shush the boo-birds. That is a hopeful sign.

But let’s also not ignore the obvious. There is a growing faction of the American left that seeks revenge more than righteousness.

Intolerant of dissenting views, this faction thinks as comedian Janeane Garofalo does that some members of the opposing political party should be “jailed.” Terrorist acts (such as mailing envelopes of white power to Mormon temples because the gay marriage vote in California went the church’s way) are seen by this faction as understandable and acts of legitimate political expression.

There is also an ugly racial component to it. We first saw it with Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who said, among other things, that white America had deliberately inflicted black Africa with AIDS.

When the Rev. Wright first hit the national stage, we hardly knew what to make of his irrational and separatist statements. Consequently, we pretty much ignored the substance of Wright’s racially divisive rhetoric and focused on it as a day-to-day political story. It made us more comfortable, I think.

But in light of the things we saw at the inauguration, it may be time to revisit the dangers of intolerance and hate — no matter the color of the person who makes them — and nip this ugly mean streak in the bud.

As our president said, it is time to grow up.

The word “tolerance” to the left means “agree with the left”, but real tolerance means “you may do your business without let or hindrance from me”. One doesn’t have to like President Bush and his supporters, but in a pluralist, democratically governed republic, one does have to tolerate them…and part of tolerance is not doing hateful things to them, such as booing their presence at a solemn moment, or demanding they be arrested for imagined crimes. We here on the right were soundly beaten at the polls last November, and that should be satisfaction enough for liberals – but its not, as we see in so many comments and actions by liberals since the election.

The ugliness of the left stems, I believe, from the fact that their worldview isn’t true – defending a false front, they are forced ultimately to rely upon intimidation and the politics of personal destruction to maintain their position. What this means is that as things go forward towards ultimate disaster for liberalism, our liberals will become more rather than less nasty – only those who admit their error completely will be able to free themselves from an all-consuming hatred and bitterness.

If you think that in 2008 we saw the most nasty, hate-filled and dishonest campaign possible from the liberals, then you just haven’t seen 2012, yet.

Remove Any Lingering Doubt

Much was made over Comrade Obama being administered the oath a second time to remove any lingering doubt about whether or not he was legitimately installed as president.

This brings up an interesting question… If White House counsel Greg Craig felt taking the oath again was necessary to silence Obama critics by removing “any lingering doubt” why doesn’t Obama show us his real birth certificate, given the more significant and real doubts surrounding his legitimacy to be president?

Now steps onto the stage of world history a man apparently quite conscious that the Supreme Law of the United States prevents him from being president of the United States.

For why else would anyone hire lawyers and expend millions of dollars to avoid producing a $12.50 birth certificate to show eligibility under the Constitution? ‘Midst the rhythmic chants of a delirious, sycophantic media, inaugural splendor will substitute for simple proof that the United States of America will have a constitutionally legitimate president.

If Obama is not eligible, legally, the United States of America will have no president. A usurper will wield such power as few men have ever held, having no constitutional warrant. However beloved of the media or adored by racialist groupies, and irrespective of public support, Obama will be a tyrant, in the original sense of the word (from the Greek tyrannos meaning one who wields power to which he has no lawful claim). As he sends young soldiers to die, even the appearance of his usurpation of presidential powers will insult their sacrifice and thwart the Constitution they give their all to preserve. Even as he utters the oath – hand on Lincoln’s Bible – he will betray it, not upholding, protecting and defending the Constitution, but subverting it.

President Bush was never fully accepted as President by a number of left-wingers because they felt the election of 2000 was stolen. if Obama wants to silence those who question his legitimacy, all he has to do is show us the birth certificate. Otherwise these questions will remain and plague him for the next four years, and beyond, as one day someone will be able to uncover the truth, and if it its found that Obama was constitutionally ineligible to be president… well, who knows what the ramifications will be in that cirumstance?

What is the GOP to Do?

Kristol offers some cautions and some hope:

Republicans, newly liberated, need to resist calls to shackle themselves to prematurely announced agendas and already anointed leaders. This is the time for a thousand Republicans to bloom. Congressmen used to looking to the White House for guidance or approval–or fearing disapprobation–should show some healthy ambition and unleash their inner policy entrepreneur. Backbenchers need to come forward with heterodox ideas. There should be vigorous debate. Disharmonious disarray is in the short term much less of a danger than a false and stultifying unity.

Everyone looks back nostalgically to 1993-94, the last time Republicans were out of power, but that example is a bit misleading. In 1992, Clinton had won only 43 percent of the vote, and the Republicans had gained congressional seats. The successful Reagan years remained fresh in voters’ minds. The task was simply to reclaim and revivify the Reagan agenda. The task today is both harder and less well defined.

The situation is more like 1977. For one thing, given the unlikelihood of Republicans taking back Congress in 2010, it requires a four-year horizon rather than a two-year one. More important, it requires serious rethinking in fundamental areas. Consider how far the party moved from 1977 to 1980. It was a period of vigorous, even hectic, political, policy, and institutional entrepreneurship, among conservatives both old and new. Thanks to the controversial efforts of backbenchers like Jack Kemp and Bill Steiger, the party rejected green eyeshade budget-balancing and embraced pro-growth supply-side economic policies. Thanks to the emergence of the neoconservatives, Kissingerian détente gave way to Reaganite freedom-fighting. Religious conservatives moved en masse to join the ranks of the GOP. All of this in four years.

The revival of the GOP has to come from the ground up and from outside Washington – from the ground up because we need fresh blood, new faces and bold, new ideas of reform; from outside Washington because the healthy contempt most Americans feel for the people who run government is simply going to get stronger and broader-based as Obama and his Democrats set America rolling on the slow-motion train wreck which will be the Obama Administration. We don’t want to be identified at all with what is going on in DC, except in as much as we can be involved in opposing the clearly bad bits of Obamanomics and offering those bold, new proposals as a counterweight to the Democrat plans.

It is time that we started looking our selves in the mirror and realizing that there’s no Reagan out there to come rescue us. Indeed, if we pay close attention we’ll realize that Reagan wasn’t able to do half what he wanted because the GOP simply sat around waiting for Reagan to do it. No one man can ever do it all (and Obama should pay attention to this truth…but I don’t think he even suspects it exists) – each must play his part, large or small, to advance the cause. If we want to have a conservative government in the United States which will undo the social, political and economic damage liberalism has inflicted over the past decades, then we’re going to have to make it happen – person by person, precinct by precinct, State by State until we get it done.

Nothing can be left off the table and no area of the country can be conceded to the Democrats – while it is certain that prayer in public schools and banning abortion won’t play well in, say, Los Angeles there is the fact that there are plenty of people in Los Angeles who want strong defense, low taxes, secure borders, less burdensome regulation, etc, etc, etc. We can put candidates up all over the country, and we should – because conservative ideals are for everywhere; because liberalism is bad everywhere and must be opposed; because if we even get the liberals to spend 10% of their effort holding their own, that works to our overall advantage.

While adhering to the core values of conservatism (limited government, low taxes, free markets, individual liberty, etc), we must be willing to mix it up and play take away from liberalism. We have to change the terms of the debate – we have to cease having the debate being over whether or not we’re rat bastards and change that debate into a question of who can best govern the United States in the interests of the average American?

Obama Vs Limbaugh (Updated)

This will be fun:

President Obama warned Republicans on Capitol Hill today that they need to quit listening to radio king Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with Democrats and the new administration.

“You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done,” he told top GOP leaders, whom he had invited to the White House to discuss his nearly $1 trillion stimulus package.

One White House official confirmed the comment but said he was simply trying to make a larger point about bipartisan efforts.

I’m reminded, now, about that incident early on in Obama’s campaign where he took a reporter to task for daring to mention his rather large ears – I wonder if our President is one of those really sad political specimens who is kept awake at night with anger over a hostile media mention? The best way to thwart someone is to rattle them – get under their skin and get them concentrating on fighting you, rather than carrying out their plan.

In a battle between Obama and Limbaugh, you have to go with El Rushbo – because Rush doesn’t care what Obama thinks about him…but Obama seems to care about what Rush thinks.

UPDATE: Byron York over at NRO got comments from Rush on this:

To make the argument about me instead of his plan makes sense from his perspective. Obama’s plan would buy votes for the Democrat Party, in the same way FDR’s New Deal established majority power for 50 years of Democrat rule, and it would also simultaneously seriously damage any hope of future tax cuts. It would allow a majority of American voters to guarantee no taxes for themselves going forward. It would burden the private sector and put the public sector in permanent and firm control of the economy. Put simply, I believe his stimulus is aimed at re-establishing “eternal” power for the Democrat Party rather than stimulating the economy because anyone with a brain knows this is NOT how you stimulate the economy. If I can be made to serve as a distraction, then there is that much less time debating the merits of this TRILLION dollar debacle.

Obama was angry that Merrill Lynch used $1.2 million of TARP money to remodel an executive suite. Excuse me, but didn’t Merrill have to hire a decorator and contractor? Didn’t they have to buy the new furnishings? What’s the difference in that and Merrill loaning that money to a decorator, contractor and goods supplier to remodel Warren Buffet’s office? Either way, stimulus in the private sector occurs. Are we really at the point where the bad PR of Merrill getting a redecorated office in the process is reason to smear them? How much money will the Obamas spend redecorating the White House residence? Whose money will be spent? I have no problem with the Obamas redoing the place. It is tradition. 600 private jets flown by rich Democrats flew into the Inauguration. That’s fine but the auto execs using theirs is a crime? In both instances, the people on those jets arrived in Washington wanting something from Washington, not just good will.

As I’ve said, the whole thing here is power – Democrats want it and never want to surrender it. The desire for power is bound up in a lot of things but it goes at bottom to a desire to work the socio-economic levers of society by people who genuinely believe they are smarter than everyone else. Our Democrats fixate on college degrees and presume that a person who has one is inherently smarter than the person who doesn’t. There is a belief that a person is a plumber because he isn’t smart enough to become a lawyer or a tenured college professor. It doesn’t enter their heads that some people are just not interested in the sort of things Democrats are interested in – and when you really believe you are smarter than those sad, downtrodden individuals who bitterly cling to God and guns you get really, really ticked off when they fail to pay court to you. Limbaugh gets under liberals’ skin for the same reason President Bush did – because he doesn’t give a darn what liberals think.

It is bad enough that Limbaugh disagrees; much worse is the fact that Limbaugh never once, not even when he was knocked flat by personal failings, sought the good will of liberalism. Limbaugh can’t be bought and he can’t be intimidated and with millions of listeners day after day, he has a larger overall effect on public attitudes than anyone in politics, including the President of the United States. And therein lies the battle with Rush – Democrats from Obama on down remember that on that glad morn 16 years ago, Democrats thought they had it all. After a 12 year interregnum, Democrats were back in full control of all branches of government and they believed they’d never be out of power again – America had changed, there had been demographic shifts, religious right types were turning off moderates, the people had woken up from their GOP-noise-machine-induced slumber and realized that investing in America via government spending was better than the newly-discredited free market. And then there was Rush – and he was not at all coincidentally identified by National Review magazine as the leader of the opposition in 1993. And what a leader – in 1994, the Democrats’ 40 year grip on the Congress was broken largely as a result of Limbaugh relentlessly hammering away at the failures of the Democrat Congress and President Clinton.

Democrats don’t want a replay of this – so, they want to break the GOP Congressional leadership away from the GOP base and they want to marginalize Rush Limbaugh. If they can do that, then by 2013 (presumptively at the start of Obama’s second term and with a continuing Democrat Congressional majority), Democrats will be able to get more than half the population relieved of any taxation at all and also get half the population in some way dependent upon government spending for their living – voila!, we’re a socialist State with a permanent liberal/left majority no longer having to worry itself about those troublesome conservatives.

It won’t work, of course – because where the GOP is being led is outside of Washington, DC. We hope that the GOP leadership in DC wakes up to the fact that uniform opposition to Obama is the name of the game for a resurgence in GOP power…but if they prefer to listing to the dying MSM and decide to cooperate with Obama, then we’ll just have to flatten the entire governing establishment from the outside, just like we’ve done it before.

Barack Obama, The Great Emancipator of Terrorists

That is what he will deserve to be called if his plan to close Gitmo goes through… as it has already been docmented that terrorists who have already managed to use our system to against us have rejoined al Qaeda.

The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.

The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

His status was announced in an Internet statement by the militant group and was confirmed by an American counterterrorism official.

“They’re one and the same guy,” said the official, who insisted on anonymity because he was discussing an intelligence analysis. “He returned to Saudi Arabia in 2007, but his movements to Yemen remain unclear.” 

Bleeding hearts may treat examples like this and other examples with skepticism, but sadly, that is exactly what these terrorists want. It is the same thing with allegations of torture. It was reported a few years ago that al Qaeda’s strategy was to make false claims of torture… those claims would help them take advatage of the American court system, and of course the media.

An al Qaeda handbook preaches to operatives to level charges of torture once captured, a training regime that administration officials say explains some of the charges of abuse at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

[...]

A directive lists one mission as “spreading rumors and writing statements that instigate people against the enemy.”

If captured, the manual states, “At the beginning of the trial … the brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by state security before the judge. Complain of mistreatment while in prison.”

American bleeding hearts have given credence to bogus claims of torture,  which has been the primary justification for closing Gitmo.

One has to wonder if part of al Qaeda’s strategy was to get sleeper cells in America to campaign for Barack Obama. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.

UPDATE: Captain Ed explains how al-Shihri got released.

How did Shirhi get released?  He told the Gitmo tribunals that he only traveled to Iran and Afghanistan to get carpets for his family’s store.  The Pentagon’s dossier on Abu Sayyaf showed that he trained at a terrorist camp outside of Kabul, went to Iran to bring extremists into Afghanistan, and wanted to assassinate a writer on which a mullah had placed a fatwa for his writings.  Shihri was fortunate that his review came at a time when the Bush administration was getting enormous pressure to reduce the number of inmates at Gitmo, and Shihri went into the Saudi rehab program.  A year later, Shihri disappeared — and now he’s running the AQ network in Yemen.

Torture is Out…But Torture is In

What the left has been salivating over – oh, glorious day, we’re now back in the business of ripping children to shreds while they are in the womb, as a nation:

…President Obama signed several Executive orders. The one of particular note was related to ensuring that the United States would not engage in torture; that we would treat even our enemies with proper recognition of their fundamental human dignity.

In that executive order, the new administration reaffirmed the requirements of the Federal Torture Statute… “regulating the treatment and interrogation of individuals detained in any armed conflict, such persons shall in all circumstances be treated humanely and shall not be subjected to violence to life and person (including murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment, and torture), nor to outrages upon personal dignity (including humiliating and degrading treatment), whenever such individuals are in the custody or under the effective control of an officer, employee, or other agent of the United States Government….”

The move was welcomed by many, this writer included.It received the affirmation of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and loud praise from throughout the world…

…Our new President signed another executive order today. This one he signed quietly, late on a Friday afternoon, at the time when actions are usually taken with hopes they will not receive much coverage. It was not done with lights and cameras and words of explanation. With the quiet deadly stroke of a pen, President Obama rescinded what is called the “Mexico City Policy”.

The policy was drafted by Pro-life champion Alan Keyes when he served the Reagan administration. It was instituted in 1984. The Policy made it clear that any non-governmental entities requesting foreign aid from the United States would not use those funds to provide for, refer or promote abortions. It was intended to prevent the United States from exporting abortion on demand around the world.

In short, the “Mexico City Policy” protected another group of human persons from being tortured, unto their death. Only these small people are not in a detention center. They are living in the first home of the whole human race, their mother’s womb.

Come now, liberals, tell us how proud you are about this. We’d especially appreciate an explanation for why this courageous step forward for the rights of children wasn’t done with more fanfare by President Obama – I’m sure you’ve got a good explanation for that.

I’m certain the artsy types among you are right now planning a documentary which will actually show a glorious abortion on camera…because in the exercise of our basic human rights, nothing should be hidden, right? I mean, we speak in public in the exercise of our right to free speech – so why not do abortions in public? What is there to be ashamed of? I mean, its just as natural and good an act as a mother nursing her child, and we don’t really mind when a woman does that in public, do we?

Why not some school field trips to the local abortion mill? You can have a one hour old baby brought in so that you can explain the our old baby is human and thus has rights, but that other baby – in the birth canal – isn’t, so here’s how we punch a hole in its head and suck out the brains…cool, isn’t it, kiddies?

That is, unless you – deep down inside – realize that it is a shameful thing to do, and thus you want to hide it from public view, and call your support for it support for a “right to choose”. Tell us, liberals, what is it?

Democrat Ethics

He’s no good, but he’s the best we’ve got:

A senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee said he believes Timothy Geithner’s failure to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes is “completely unacceptable” and would in any other time disqualify Geithner from heading the Treasury Department. But the senator, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, decided to vote for Geithner because it would take too long to find a replacement candidate for the key cabinet post.

“On the matter of Mr. Geithner’s failure to pay certain self-employment taxes, I find it completely unacceptable,” Conrad said before the committee’s 18-5 vote to approve Geithner yesterday. “I’m a former tax commissioner, I’ve dealt with hundreds of cases like this one, and in normal times that alone would lead me to oppose his confirmation. But these are not normal times, and I personally don’t think we can afford a further delay in the filling of this critically important position.”

Got that? Morality is to be set aside during abnormal times. One wonders if Senator Conrad has a list os sins which are permissible at various times – tax cheating is ok during a recession, so is adultery ok when one is lonely? This is taking situational ethics to its natural end – which end being a moral vacuum.

These are the guys in charge of the shop, boys and girls. Feel comfortable?

Hillary's Replacement Upsets Kook Leftists

Which means she might be a Democrat we can learn to love…until 2010, when Rudy sends her back home:

Gov. Paterson, defying the liberal wing of his Democratic Party, has chosen little-known, NRA-backed, upstate Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton as New York’s junior senator, it was learned last night.

The surprising – and, for many Democrats shocking – decision to pick the conservative Gillibrand, 42, from Hudson in Columbia County, was disclosed by the governor in calls to party officials and some members of the state’s congressional delegation, many of whom said they were unhappy with the selection, sources said.

It is clever politics, of course – she’s an attractive, young mother with some conservative inclinations which will be useful in the Democrats’ attempt to hold the seat in 2010. She’s sort of a Democrat Sarah Palin, with her NRA support and such. Cynical political gamesmanship aside, it is useful to get into the Democrat caucus some people of common sense, which this lady seems to have.

Still, we’ll have to beat her – nice, semi-conservative Democrat Senator still provides power for nasty, uber-liberal Democrat majority in the Senate. Better to have Giuliani in there.

Congressional GOP Growing a Spine?

We’ll have to see:

Just days after taking office vowing to end the political era of “petty grievances,” President Obama ran into mounting GOP opposition yesterday to an economic stimulus plan that he had hoped would receive broad bipartisan support.

Republicans accused Democrats of abandoning the new president’s pledge, ignoring his call for bipartisan comity and shutting them out of the process by writing the $850 billion legislation. The first drafts of the plan would result in more spending on favored Democratic agenda items, such as federal funding of the arts, they said, but would do little to stimulate the ailing economy.

The GOP’s shrunken numbers, particularly in the Senate, will make it difficult for Republicans to stop the stimulus bill, but the growing GOP doubts mean that Obama’s first major initiative could be passed on a largely party-line vote — little different from the past 16 years of partisan sniping in the Clinton and Bush eras.

“Yes, we wrote the bill. Yes, we won the election,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters yesterday, saying Republicans were not being realistic in their expectations.

Hoping to recapture the bipartisan spirit, Obama will host nine congressional leaders at the White House today for talks about the economic recovery package, which he has asked to be on his desk by Feb. 16, Presidents’ Day. He also agreed to talk with House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) and other GOP lawmakers next week about their proposals for more tax cuts.

Republicans have a long list of grievances.

Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), who gave Vice President Biden a 17-page list of spending requests, said he opposes the proposed increase in funding for Pell Grants for college students because it would do little to spur short-term economic growth. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio) said the plan lacks enough “fast-acting tax relief,” such as a temporary halt to payroll taxes and more relief for businesses. Sen. John Thune (S.D.) said the nearly $1 trillion price tag would add too much to a federal deficit that is already predicted to top $1.2 trillion for 2009.

“The Republican concerns about what’s moving in the House are growing by the day,” Thune said. He dismissed as “very, very ambitious” Obama’s hope of securing a bipartisan majority of 80 votes for the stimulus plan in the Senate, which could consider its version of the legislation next weekend.

Yes, Nancy, you won the election – and we GOPers should not sign off on a plan which looks to be a slow-moving economic disaster. We can’t do much to actually stop the legislation from going forward…but there’s no need for GOPers to provide a patina of bi-partisanship to a bill which is relentlessly partisan as well as horribly flawed.

Before we GOPers sign on to this, we must insist upon at least some free-market, supply side provisions be inserted into the bill…even if its just making President Bush’s tax cuts permanent. That would at least allow businesses to engage in long-term planning and might help turn the economy around by the middle of 2011. All the current bill does is spend bags of money to no actual purpose – and if such a bill is passed, then whent it all comes crashing down, we want “Democrat” written all over it.

Raid on Murtha's Donors

Of course, we’ll have to see if Obama’s Justice Department allows this to move forward:

Media outlets in Pennsylvania are reporting that federal agents have raided the offices of a defense contractor with close ties to Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.).

The Johnstown Tribune-Democrat reported Thursday afternoon that Federal Bureau of Investigation and Internal Revenue Service agents raided the offices of Kuchera Defense Systems and Kuchera Industries in Windber, Pa.

Murtha has provided millions of dollars worth of earmarks for the company, and company employees have provided tens of thousands of dollars for his campaign.

There is no indication what investigators are looking for and no suggestions that the investigation in any way involves Murtha.

Murtha’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The mid-terms, they are a-coming…and Democrats won’t need attention brought to the rampant corruption on their side of the aisle. This will be an early and crucial test for Obama – if he’s really there to change the way things are done in Washington, then this investigation will move forward briskly, especially if Murtha is discovered to be hip-deep in it.