Revealing editorial from the NYTimes

Reading this editorial from the NYTimes, one realizes how far liberals have sunk into the world of make-believe, fantasy and the most virulently destructive philosophies of the 20th century.  It is inconceivable that anyone could take seriously the arguments in this editorial that claim Romney is flip flopping, changing his basic positions on issues and/or lying.  And yet the libs who run that paper make all these claims and only fault Obama for not taking Romney to task for all this dissembling.  In truth everything Romney said rebutting the Obama campaign's serial distortions of the Romney/Ryan campaign positions is consistent with the platform put forth at the Republican Convention in Tampa last month.  Smaller government, strong defense, lower taxes to stimulate economic growth, elimination of socialized healthcare and regulations that stymy business activity that creates jobs and opportunity for those willing to put forth the effort.  But since none of these prescriptions for success involves controlling other people's lives that the liberal elites prefer, they are forced to resort to these mindless attacks on conservatives' lack of specificity in matters of policies of their agenda.  Which is exactly the point.  Liberals want 3,000 page bills that control every conceivable contingency concerning the delivery of healthcare services.  They want regulations that control all aspects of businesses trying to serve consumer needs and wishes.  They want total control over citizens' lives in order that their vision of the correct society can be achieved.  In the end their proscriptions for society are the same as those of the National Socialism of the Germans,  the Fascism of Mussolini, and the Marxist utopia of the USSR, and we all know how well those isms turned out.  In short, Republicans want maximum freedom for the individual while Democrats want maximum control of each individual's life by the state.

Gangster government

Michael Barone has spoken out on the subject of "gangster" government many times since that description was first used by him at the beginning of the Obama administration.  Here, here, and here are three such discussions by Barone.  "Gangster" government is really simply a euphemism for statism or totalitarianism of the Mussolini/Hitler variety in which the the state controls all aspects of an economy without taking outright ownership of the means of production.  It does this by edicts, by taxation, and of course increasingly complex regulations all of which inhibit and limit innovation and wealth creation.  There's a reason why all socialist states, all fascist dictatorships have failed in the end.  They can make the trains run  on time for a while, but they cannot innovate and create the environment that produces the Bill Gates, and Steve Jobses who literally create brand new industries that end up creating businesses that create millions of high paying jobs.  There are a number of reasons why the Obama gang should be run out of town this November, but at the top of the list of these reasons is their fundamental lack of understanding of how the free enterprise system, i.e. capitalism, works.  Everyone would do well to remember that when Hoover and FDR began the federal central planning programs in the 1930's designed to put the government in control of the economy to prevent any future depressions, there was no real improvement in unemployment conditions for over 10 years.  It took WWII to put people back to work.  The message:  the government does not create jobs, the government does not create wealth therefore the government does not create a growing, expanding, productive economy.  The Obama people simply don't get this.

A sidebar to this gangster government discussion is the tiresome and largely false mantra of leftists columnists and pundits 24/7 that greedy Wall Street caused the 2007/8 sub-prime mortgage driven financial meltdown and that government must step in and take control of these vampires before they suck all of our collective blood dry.  This is not a complicated nor difficult issue to resolve.  A starting point is this article by Joe Pinto in the AEI Journal.  There's plenty more written about this disaster in this blog in the past.  One thing is clear.  Wall Street played a part in the fiasco, however, that role was largely at the behest of the government at many levels.  What needs reforming here is the liberal notion that a private dwelling and every other material consumer good should be considered a civil right.

Epstein on Obama

Richard Epstein, a Hoover Institute fellow, has it just about right in this essay on Obama's Osawatomie, Kansas, speech last week.  The really scary aspect of Obama's presidency is his abject ignorance about job creation, the role of competition in free markets, and of course the role of government in its role as rule maker for free enterprise.  Never experiencing first hand what happens in the real economy, Obama simply relies on the academic left's failed ideas largely derived from Marx and Engels and their followers.  The fact that all of those ideas have been tried and found not to work doesn't bother socialists like Obama who are driven by a concept understood and known to true believer liberals as "social justice".  "Social Justice" has been the driving force behind the Civil Rights movement since the 1965 Civil Rights Act was passed and has given us the victim and grievance industry of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, et. al.  

Why Conservatives hate CBS's 60 Minutes

Okay, CBS and all the other so-called MSM (Mainstream Media) are in the tank for the democrat party.  This is not news, has been the case for ever and blossomed after Walter Cronkite decided in the late '60's that it was okay for news reporters, stations and the networks to take sides in "important" political issues of the day.  Since that time the liberal bias of the media has flowered to the point we now see on display in this 60 Minutes interview of Obama by Steve Croft over the weekend.  Conservatives have a hard time getting their message and the truth out when all these media outlets are this blatantly in the tank for the opposition. In this interview, Obama, who along with Joe Biden has been running all over the country blaming the Bush Administration for the financial meltdown of '08, is not asked by Croft to account for the fact the legislation enabling the deregulation of derivatives and the like to take place occurred during the Clinton Administration -- not the Bush Administration -- with the full support of the congressional democrats.  So much for the veracity and truth seeking by these MSM reporters.  Like all liberals (and Communists, and Muslims, by the way) outright lying and the omission of the truth in the promotion of a greater good is morally acceptable and even desirable. This point is usually overlooked when accounting for media bias, however it is the primary reason why no liberal is trustworthy.  Some refer to this particular tactic as moral relativism, which is as good an explanation as any.

Eric Holder Lies -- what else is news?

On display in this Washington Times article is Eric Holder's ability to lie with a straight face before a Congressional committee.  It seems liberals simply lie as a matter of course and probably don't even recognize they are engaged in prevaricating.  To lie is imprinted in the liberal's DNA, much as it is in the communist's DNA, or the Muslim's DNA as expressed in Taqiya, their justification for lying.   (Lying is allowed, as stated in Islamic doctrine, when a believer (Muslim) is speaking to a non-believer (non-Muslim) for the purpose of achieving his goal, the advancement of Islam. When this convenient tool is utilized by a Muslim in speaking to the non-Muslim, it is especially effective in promoting acceptance of Islam.)

The left's mantra

In his column today, David Limbaugh, Rush Limbaugh's brother, succinctly presents the liberal "position" on various matters, likening those stands to those of the leaders of various government ministries in George Orwell's  "1984"  in which they always meant the opposite of what they proposed to the public.  Limbaugh's got it exactly right. Since liberals know that the majority do not buy their line, in public they propose the exact opposite of what they intend to do.  Example: Obama will talk about cutting taxes in order to provide incentives for job creators on the one hand, while working with Congress to raise taxes on the wealthy  (as if the wealthy were not the job creators).  This is the way it has always gone with liberals.  They have to lie, dissemble, confuse, obfuscate and deceive the electorate in order to promote their programs and "solutions".  Unfortunately, the busy and hard working public doesn't engage all that much in the political dialogue going on, while those who benefit from those liberal deceptions do -- the predictable result is a lot of bad laws and regulations that twist and distort the economy and cause the kinds of problems of debt and loss of freedoms we are now experiencing.  The warning:  Whenever a liberal politicians proposes something that seems to make sense, know that they mean the opposite.  Here's the way Limbaugh presents this reality:

The left's Ministry of Truth, with the full-throated support of the "unbiased" mainstream media, has given us such Orwellian originals as "pro-choice" while suing an 80-year-old prayer-warrior for standing outside Planned Parenthood's abortion factory to share important information with pregnant mothers to help them make a fully informed choice. The ministry seeks to shut down conservative talk radio, with the "Fairness Doctrine." It forbids private ballots for employees to vote anonymously on union membership for the purpose of intimidating them to join -- in the name of the "Employee Free Choice Act." It boasts of "budget cuts" when it slightly reduces the rate of increases in spending. It calls the budget-busting Obamacare legislation the "Affordable Care Act." It calls a bill that would further expand unemployment a "jobs bill." It fabricates and manipulates a consensus on "climate change" and ostracizes dissenters as science-averse. (In Oceania, science had "almost ceased to exist.") It conspires with its Ministry of Tolerance to describe political dissent from its effort to legalize homosexual marriage as "hate" and to brand political conservatism as "racism." While the rapacious Obama administration recklessly squanders our national wealth in its lust for power, its ministries of Plenty and Bipartisanship vilify the wealthy -- who are paying a disproportionate share of taxes -- for not paying their fair share. The Ministry of Plenty, while presiding over the destruction of the private sector, castigates job creators for hoarding all the wealth.

Nice.

Who is this guy, anyway?

Naorman Podhoretz has "nailed" Obama in this column and revealed the fecklessness and venality of the liberal crowd who anointed and engineered his election to the presidency of the United States.  What's curious is that now that liberals are turning on him they are revealing for all those who didn't see it before the emptiness and wrong-headedness of their world view, if one can call it a "view".  It's really more like nihilism than socialism, or communism or even fascism.  Since all these other statist "isms" have been tried on large and small scales and failed repeatedly the liberals behind Obama really just wanted power.  Now that they have had that power and nothing positive has come of it, because it cannot,  the radical lefties have turned on their putative leader and are second guessing him and each other.  Good.  They deserve each other.  The rest of us who saw through this fake did not deserve him but we have him until at least 2012.

ADDED:  In a few paragraphs, Rex Murphy lays the blame for this tragic mistake precisely where it belongs.

Never, ever, ever trust a liberal

Scott Johnson of Powerline underlines and confirms a belief many conservatives have about liberals, at least most liberals.  They dissemble constantly and think nothing of it.  To a liberal lying is a perfectly acceptable strategy in order to further any cause they espouse, which usually starts with enlarging the size and scope of government through dependency programs they propose and get passed by their counterparts in the government.  After all administering some government handout program sure beats subjecting oneself to the vagaries of free market enterprises where one has to actually provide a product or service that someone else is willing to pay money for.  Furthermore the jobs liberals want typically don't ever go away and thus represent security not available to one making an honest living in the private sector.  It behooves everyone to read this post by Johnson to understand the venality of most liberals.  The lesson here:  do not trust a liberal anymore than you would trust a Muslim who practices Taqiya (defined as the practice of acceptable and permissible lying by Muslims to further the cause of Islam when dealing with infidels), or a communist who lies and dissembles with impunity in the furtherance of his evil cause.  In short, liberals are simply western political versions of Islamists and communists and should be recognized as such by the rest of us.  Elizabeth Warren, the subject of Johnson's post, is the Harvard law professor appointed by Obama to create the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau now operative.  Ms Warren,  like Obama a doctrinaire liberal, was not confirmed by Congress to run this abomination she created, but the dirty work has been done, the CFPB is now up and running with a new head, and Warren is back in her lair at Harvard where she can continue to make intellectual mischief.  Workers in the financial services industry need to rise up against the Warrens of academia or there may come a day when they will be involuntarily working for the government.

Libs disappointed with Obama

What's interesting about this this column by Robert Reich, the diminutive Big Government liberal professor, is his criticism of Obama, after first telling us about all his virtues.  He now sees The One as a vacillating, indecisive politician, whereas before he saw him as a man of great intelligence, vision and leadership.  One has to wonder where Reich was while Obama was building his resume by running away from controversial votes during his two brief gigs as an office holder, and where did he see all the signs of brilliance and vision in O's academic record (non existent), and where did he see evidence of his leadership qualities since he never held an executive position anywhere and never led anyone other than his election and reelection staffs,  cool aid drinkers all.  What we see here is the typical liberal thinking process for electing a leader.  Pick the individual most likely to appeal to all the varied collectivist constituencies of the democrat party who can also appeal to disaffected and wishy washy independents looking for change of any kind.  Unfortunately what this gets us is an unproven neuter unlikely to be anymore successful leading his party or country than he was as a lawmaker.  What liberals are really looking for is a White Knight who miraculously leads us all to Nirvana -- like, say, FDR whose policies and leadership prolonged the Great Recession by at least 8 or 9 years.  And of course for libs like Reich it also comes down to their favorite whipping boy, unequal income distribution.  This latter point because they see the economy as a zero sum game in which there is limited income available that therefore should be distributed evenly throughout the society in the interest of fairness and overall consumption.  What these dreamers fail to understand is that the driving force of a productive economy is a finite number of individuals called entrepreneurs. If these people don't have the incentives to create and build companies that satisfy consumer wants and needs, the economy does not grow and produce jobs.  Demonizing business types, over taxing producers, over protecting consumers are all disincentives that discourage entrepreneurs and stultify the economic growth.  It's not that complicated.

Political correctness and the incomparable Mark Steyn

If there is a more astute observer/commenter on the politically correct scene today than Mark Steyn, I for one would like to meet him/her.  This "monologue" is Steyn at his best and if we fail to heed what he is saying here, freedom of speech and freedom in general is sure to go down the drain.  Unfortunately to unwind this mess we have to perform root canal like surgery in the colleges and court system and among those already infected by the disease  of political correctness spread by the liberals in academia, federal agencies and among many in the legal profession.  Steyn knows from personal experience just how vulnerable we all are at this point in history.

The Ryan healthcare cost solution

The Cato Institute has produced a video here that explains the healthcare voucher reform proposed by Paul Ryan.  The essences of this proposal is to get away from the third party payer system we now have and introduce market forces into the system.  The video speaks to this subject in a clear and convincing manner.  The debate over this issue represents the clearest and biggest differences between the Republican and Democrat,  conservative and liberal positions on the organization of our affairs going forward.  Should the dems and libs prevail in this case, we will be taking a major step toward true socialized medicine for our country, i.e., the Canadian single payer, government monopsony model.  That model does control costs by government fiat but it also introduces delays and questionable quality of provider care.  Many "experts" seem to be in favor of this model.  We're about t0o see how many consumers of healthcare services are in favor.