"I suppose we'll just have to abort Jason and Theresa, won't we?"

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The whitsun bride; a procession of children in a village street during Whitsun

Scene
Upscale house on Hamptons estate.
Players: Attractive middle-aged mother and father, parents of six children, having a glass of wine in the solarium.  She dressed in a gossamer silk dressing gown, he in casual dress, with cravat and smoking jacket.
About 8 PM, late spring with light, cool breeze ruffling the curtains.
Resuming an earlier conversation.

Deliver Us from Strange Children

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More and more I find myself taking a decidedly biblical view of the world.  A view informed by Old Testament wisdom, law and the Covenant.  That is especially true when I think of the Adolescent Rebellion of the 60's and 70's and the evils that followed (and continue to follow) in its wake.
I dwell also on the societal consequences of the interruption of generational continuity.  For America the break was, in the main, brought about WWII; for Europe (and broadly, Western social, literary, economic, academic and religious foundations) dissolutions were brought by the combination of World Wars.  Disillusion and cynicism, following great breakdowns of confidence in institutions, secular and divine.

Is It Time, Yet, to Inquire Whether Our President is an Islamist?

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When I say "is it time,yet..." I mean, has the mountain of evidence from which we can infer the President's affinity for the Muslim enemies of the West achieved sufficient mass that we now dare to violate the canon of political correctness and broach the question.  Too harsh?  How about 'Fellow Traveler'?

Looking back on the foreign policy decisions taken by this administration (a.k.a. Mr. Obama), I cannot discover one that has not favored Islamists at the expense of America and the free world; not one.  

Tea Party Terrorism

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Che Guevara

I was recently dismayed to learn that, as a Tea Party member, I am, per se, a terrorist.  Well, a potential terrorist anyway.  And that revelation on no less authority than the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). [1]

A report commissioned by DHS called Hot Spots of US Terrorism tells us exactly who the terrorists are:

Extreme Right-Wing: groups that believe that one’s personal and/or national “way of life” is under attack and is either already lost or that the threat is imminent (for some the threat is from a specific ethnic, racial, or religious group), and believe in the need to be prepared for an attack either by participating in paramilitary preparations and training or survivalism. Groups may also be fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to universal and international in orientation), anti-global, suspicious of centralized federal authority, reverent of individual liberty, and believe in conspiracy theories that involve grave threat to national sovereignty and/or personal liberty.

Voter ID is Clearly Discriminatory

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Karl Marx

Laws that require careful verification of a voter's identity discriminate not so much against blacks, Hispanics or other ethnic groups and the poor as against an entire political class -- cheaters.  Known also as Democrats. [1]  Polls indicate that as many as 80% of the American public (including many of those said to be injured) favor stringent voter ID laws.  The Marxist-Progressive Left, however, behind lamentations and crocodile tears, stands in utter contempt of the righteous public will.  Citing a litany of imagined (and therefore real) abuses of helpless 'victims', they howl with feigned outrage.  If strawmen, in company with the dead, could vote, Marxists would never lose another election.

Human Nature

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Utopia

Human nature is imperfect, and it is unchangeable.  The failure of the naive to acknowledge and accept those two simple, yet elemental facts leads inevitably to grief.

But grief does not discourage idealists; when their schemes fail they see only error in planning and execution, never questioning the possibility of -- nor their own faith in -- achieving a perfect end-state.
 
Utopian Dreams
The belief that men are capable of creating a perfect society is an old one, attested in Biblical writings and in Plato's vision, articulated in his Republic.
That vision echoed through the Middle Ages and persisted, with growing momentum, into the current era.  Along the way it found expression in Thomas Moore's Utopia (most famously), in the writings of Rousseau and in the early codification of communist socialism by Marx and Engels in reaction to the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism. [1]

European Riots and the Vision of Thomas Hobbes

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The rioting we have recently seen in Great Britain, Greece, Sweden, France and parts of Germany (not to mention the emergence of American "flash mobs") gives us a window into the future.  A future that will surely come if the West persists in its determination to commit cultural suicide. The violence of mobs also invites us to look at the past, and, indeed at most of the world around us today.

Of the several points to be covered here I want to place special emphasis on this one: most of us in the West have lived so well for so long that we do not appreciate how fortunate we are. And we don't recognize than we are a tiny island in a vast sea of human predators who understand only existential conflict and brutality.  They exist in established states which attempt to conceal murders, starvation, slave prisons and the near-total loss of liberty, and they exist openly in the killing fields of Rwanda and other African states.  What good people know in these places we do not -- what it means to live in constant fear of other human beings.

The Locus of Political Violence (Updated, 12/10/10)

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[Please follow link below footnotes]

It is hardly surprising that the left and their enablers are attempting to characterize political opposition as violent, but it invites unintended consequences.  Chief among them is a factual assessment of the true locus of political violence (here and here) -- the left.

Actual violence, ranging from so-called "hate speech", (1) intimidation, and the destruction of property to wanton bloodshed has always been and remains the mark of the political left.  That many -- including many on the right -- may instinctively reject this assertion is a testimony to the skill with which the liberal (2) establishment has "managed" the truth.

The Left's Big Gamble

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For a number of reasons I believe the Left has made a calculated and careful assessment of the American political scene, and it has decided to gamble for the seizure and control of American political and economic power.  They believe, arguably with good cause, that that their hold on the strongest factions in American politics is sufficient to enable them to consolidate and exercise power over an increasingly hostile majority.  Whether they will succeed in the long term is not known, but, given the erosion of liberty we have seen over the course of the last century, the wind of history would seem to be at their backs.

"Liberty is an Evil Which Government is Intended to Correct"

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In the run-up to the American Civil War there were many bizarre and convoluted exercises in argumentation on both sides of the slavery debate.  The title quotation (1) is a statement by George Fitzhugh of Virginia, who advocated for socialism and asserted that not only blacks (certainly) but also whites should be enslaved.  Slavery was thought to be desirable because persons in that estate were spared the burdens of  independent thought.  It is akin to the parodic notion that there is no more secure environment than a prison cell.

Assault on Western Civilization

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What do ACLU-led attacks on public religious observance and the increasingly scant attention now given to Greek and Roman history by the K12 curriculum have in common? Together they symbolize the consequences of a powerful, ubiquitous, longstanding, relentless and largely successful assault on the values and traditions of the West. It is not confined to the Western Hemisphere or to Europe; it is virtually worldwide. We have come to expect it from the UN, controlled by Third World despots, but it is the West, itself, that leads this suicidal charge.
The pillars of Western civilization are the classical tradition and the Judeo-Christian heritage. Perhaps the true value of the Western canon lies in the fact that it best accommodates the strengths and weaknesses of human nature.

I argue that the best of the Western tradition was codified in the Anglo strain of the Enlightenment, and arguably achieved its zenith in the ideals, beliefs and actions of the American Founders.

The Enlightenment
I often make a distinction of convenience between the Anglo (Scottish, English and American) and French threads of the Enlightenment. It is over-simple, to be sure, but it is useful and generally avoids the margins of argument.

The French, following the ideas of Rousseau and the leadership of Robespierre and others, chose totally to embrace reason and to turn violently against religion and tradition. They set out with remarkable energy to change not only the present, but the past as well. The Anglos also embraced reason, but they opted to integrate it with traditions of the Western heritage. The Muslims, curiously, decided to abjure reason altogether and strengthen their faith as an alternative frankly hostile to reason. One might say that the French welcomed reason and rejected God and the Western tradition; the Anglos welcomed reason in the context of tradition and thanked God for it; and the Muslims rejected reason and turned to God as an antidote.

The French (and German) philosophes laid the foundations of post-modernist thought, which elevated pure reason beyond the realm of praxis (experience, observation) to the point of logical absurdity -- cultural, moral and intellectual relativism -- leading ultimately to nihilism. This school of thought is very much with us today, and its heritors -- people of the left (1) -- are determined to do all possible mischief to Western Civilization. Interestingly, they are in many ways allied with those who rejected reason -- Muslims.

The People of the Left - Part I
It is commonly observed that liberals are largely concentrated in media (entertainment and news), education, organized labor, minorities and "victim" identity groups, NGO's and government bureaucracies. This is largely true of the world-at-large, but it is certainly the case in Western Europe, North, Central and South America and Canada. It is noteworthy that these entities have much in common. With few exceptions, they are insulated from free-market competition; they are not existentially accountable for their performance -- the consequences of financial failure. Many have lost the traditional linkage between productive work and earnings. Apparently unaware of their debt to it, liberals tend to despise capitalism. One suspects the sentiment is a holdover from European aristocracy.

Insulation is perhaps a key concept. After generations of prosperity and security, unknown in most of the world, notions of existential threat have taken on an abstract (unreal) quality. In places where economies are weak and governance bad concern with survival is likely to be a constant among the people; they are daily threatened by the possibility of death by starvation, disease, violence and natural catastrophe. Life cannot be sustained without an intimate knowledge of quotidian reality.

Liberal separation from the consequences of thinking and behavior is the foundational point I want to make here: I'll have more to say about secondary characteristics -- assumptions and beliefs of the left and about the non-ideological, "accidental" spread of liberalism.

Affordable Self-Deception
In societies that are relatively free of real poverty, infectious disease (medically amenable where it exists), and death by violence, and that have infrastructure to minimize the consequences of natural disaster, things are different. People can afford to maintain a (delusional) distance from reality. If one observes a rattlesnake, safely caged, or a human predator contained in a prison cell, he can indulge in attributing to them qualities altogether superior to their nature. Similarly, a person living in comfort and security may be dismissive of such "abstractions" as tyranny, jihadi terrorism or economic collapse.

Liberals ignore the lessons of history at their (and our) peril, but they are constitutionally unable to recognize or acknowledge peril. They tend, for example, to favor various kinds of collectivism -- from democratic socialism to Marxism -- over individualism while ignoring the devastation wrought under socialism in the last century -- crippled economies and death and imprisonment suffered by tens of millions and, generally, the tyranny that socialism always engenders. Collectivist social structures inevitably suppress the best qualities of human nature and encourage the worst.

The Founders, to their great credit, understood the reality of human nature and how best to account for it in the organization of government.

The People of the Left - Part II
Is the assault on Western Civilization deliberate, planned and maliciously intended? Yes and no.
Since the beginning of the 20th Century, there have been individuals and groups actively and frankly hostile the Western Tradition and dedicated to its destruction. Many were the intellectual descendants of the French philosophes, but others were motivated by ambitions to power, tribal mentality, anti-individualism, antagonistic cultural differences or politically organized religious beliefs.

What unites liberal ideologues is a vision of social perfectibility -- whether utopian or eschatological. These are people who measure reality against their imagined standards of Utopia or heaven.

At the other extreme are non-ideological persons influenced by liberal memes in popular culture and the orthodoxies of the educational establishment adopted since the 1950's. They are not consciously anti-Western primarily because the don't understand the concept. In a word they are ignorant -- of history, economics, politics and government. They act upon beliefs uninformed by knowledge or analysis. Excluding functional illiterates this group is theoretically salvageable.

Of all the intellectual bigotries and prejudices the abhorrence of liberty seems to top the list. Flowing from that position are the following corollary fears of and enmity towards: anything that is unorganized or regulated, and thus unpredictable; individualism; capitalism; free markets. In short they seek control over the lives, organization and behavior of others; control from which they, themselves, are exempt (2).

A set of sacred beliefs characterizes the left, and these are zealously guarded: social Darwinism, the idea that men are perfectible if properly governed; multiculturalism, which follows from the fear of making value judgments, in part leading to anti-patriotism and contempt for national sovereignty; the conviction that economies (not governments) are zero-sum; a natural affinity for national governments (particularly fascist and socialist) that use oppressive power to control their polities; wars are caused only by failures of negotiation; all men are inherently good, and when behavior indicates otherwise it is because of environmental factors; nature, in all its manifestations, is superior to mankind; all men and societies are literally equal and many more. All contrary beliefs are intolerable.

Finally, there is a set of behaviors most commonly associated with left. These include: intolerance of dissenting opinion (above) expressed in vicious attacks on opponents; intensity of feeling antithetical to a sense of humor; avoidance of honest debate (on the issue of Global Warming, for example); denial of reality not congenial to their prejudices and contempt for factual verification where it would challenge ideology (they simply rely on repetition of fallacious ideas to counter evidence); the use of intimidation, institutional coercion and violence in service of ideology; willingness to lie in furtherance of the "greater truth"; the use of third person plural in reference to grievance groups (they can't afford health insurance). Again, a sampling.

As I have said elsewhere, there is a remarkable similarity between the left and Islam. Opponents are allowed three options: conversion, submission or death. If this statement strikes the reader as excessive, consider the death tolls at the hands of socialist governments in the last century. I believe that in contemporary Europe and North America the left is restrained only by an incomplete consolidation of power.

Future Of the West
Or, in the language of game theory, does the future of the West cast a shadow? The answer to this question is impossible to forecast with confidence, but weight of evidence bodes ill for the survival of Western Civilization.

As Plato has his revenge on Aristotle, so Rousseau has his on Burke. Cultural, moral and intellectual relativism infects and cripples the governments and peoples of Europe, much of Latin America and Canada and is hard at work in the U.S. The model of infection -- pandemic -- seems appropriate, for spread of collectivist memes appears to have a viral quality and is abetted by intellectual elites and allied institutions such as the UN and the EU -- precursors to world government.

Some assert that the populations of Western countries (taken as groups of individuals) are far more conservative than their governments. This may be the case, but they lack the necessary institutional wealth, power and organization of ruling parties that exert their will through the instrument of government. And managed economies (which most increasingly are) effectively destroy the incentives and motivation for the expression of individual will.

The problems arising out the growth of the left, are greatly exacerbated in Europe by growing Islamic populations hostile to the values of their host countries, routinely living on the dole, and not held accountable by feckless governments that seek cover under the suicidal mantle of multiculturalism. These countries willing or fearfully yield sovereignty to malign immigrants who contribute negatively to their economies and, under direct threat of violence, ridicule existing law and insist on Sharia jurisprudence -- not only for themselves, but their countries of residence entire. The US, so far, has not been similarly affected, but it is only a matter of time.

So the outlook for the survival in strength of Western values seems generally poor. If Western Europe is to overcome the decline, Denmark is most likely to lead the way; on the global scale the US must lead. In neither case are the odds favorable.

Some readers of this essay will inevitably question the importance of Western survival. What's the big deal, they may ask. Political change and the realignment of cultures and values, after all, is the natural course of history.

So it is, I would reply. But consider that in all the past, no better organization of human society, governance, and economy ever existed than that informed by the classical tradition melded with the Judeo-Christian heritage that culminated, by way of the Anglo Enlightenment, in the thoughts, actions, systems and structures passed on to us by the American Founders.

Today's Western Civilization has created and deployed, via free-market capitalism and sound, moral, republican political systems grounded in the rule of law, more wealth and security
worldwide than would ever have been thought possible a century ago. The practical work of that civilization has never been surpassed outside the realm of hypothesis.

--------------
(1) The terms, "left" and "liberal" -- as I use them -- refer to persons who have adopted (consciously or otherwise) the ideology and thought of the continental philosophes.
(2) Think of neighborhood and condo associations. While many persons who offer service to these organizations act out of a sense of civic duty, others seem attracted by a fundamental need to organize and manage the behavior of others.

About Power: Collective vs. Collectivist

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Pat Santy and others have written extensively about Obama-Left, Inc. being out of touch with reality and perpetually in denial. I agree with the analysis, but in the interest of simplicity, on the one hand, and praxis on the other, I have adopted a kind of bare-bones way of assessing liberal performance in the world. A way, that for me, answers the question, “so now what”?

I would argue that these people* are absolutely in touch with reality; but it is their reality. Where most of us perform to standards of quotidian efficacy -- i.e., paying the mortgage to keep the house, investing money for retirement, not meddling in other people's business, and so on -- liberals are busy making for themselves a place in Heaven (read Utopian 'justification'). What does it matter if their diplomatic strategy weakens and endangers the nation? If fiscal policy is profligate? If social policy enslaves us? Never mind -- their motives are pure. They have a vision. They belong to a tribe that sanctifies them.

We may call them elitists (which they are) or narcissists (which they are), but we need to know that the reality of our world is not the reality of theirs. We see their behavior as pathological and bizarre, but to them it makes perfect sense. They simply perform to different standards.

A useful conclusion: it is pointless to reason with liberals, for reasoning (in the traditional Western sense) runs counter to their primary goals -- defense of a secular religion and its belief system and the acquisition and maintenance of power. Power (collective power), they understand perfectly. It is their stock-in-trade. And it is opposing, naked power alone -- not persuasion -- that will cause them to change.

One knows one has scored points when hysterical cries of 'righteous' outrage are heard from the left. The potential loss of power threatens their very being. The argument for power is sustained by observing the effects (ranging from defensiveness to open hostility) of tea parties, town halls and the growth of conservative media and the Tenth Amendment initiative. Though the right, historically, has been uncomfortable with the collective exercise of political power and will, when liberty is at stake the time for that exercise has arrived.

It all comes down to this: it is one thing to understand the enemy (I use the word advisedly) but another to know how to defeat him. The left will use whatever power is at their disposal to subject or eliminate -- in one way or another -- those who hold a different world-view. To force non-believers into submission, forced alliance or extinction. Here, there are remarkable similarities to Islam.

One thinks of the dreary, demeaning, undifferentiated existence of persons living in the former Soviet Republics -- statism in one of its more benign forms. But is a short journey to recall crematoria, gulags and killing fields. Only a few years ago I would have dismissed that last sentence as pure hyperbole, but no longer. There is no want of historical precedent in the annals of collectivist governance.

When individual liberty is attacked by political powers that are not amenable to reason or persuasion, it must be defended by political power. Modest conservative organization (above) has so far been surprisingly effective, which suggests that the power of the left may be overrated. But the left, over the span of a century, has had enormous influence in government and society precisely because its power has been organized. Therein lies a lesson.

____*
When I use the terms "liberal" and "Left" in most of my critical essays I am referring to to committed ideologues on the far end of the political spectrum -- those whose intellectual heritage derives from Rousseau and Marx. These are the True Believers and their enablers.

Does BHO Rhyme with WHO? It Should.

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The metastasizing, coercive power of government, increasingly unchecked by constitutional restraint, led by a narcissist and his far-flung elitist cohort of KGB-progressives from the houses of congress and offices of bureaucrats to the streets of ACORN. One and all channeling the shades of Rousseau, Marx, Gramci, Marcuse and Alinsky; recklessly betting the wealth of our nation and the liberty of its people on the impossible prospect of reaping a bountiful harvest from the tainted soil of Utopia. Grownups who live on this side of the rabbit hole have reason to be afraid

Childish Fear

The darkened, crape-hung rooms, cobwebs, spaghetti intestines, pans of blood, severed heads, painted-grape eyeballs, skeletons, moans and screams from dark recesses... pretty scary stuff for an impressionable kid. You round a corner and come face to face with a motionless, ghoulish figure. You freeze and sharply draw in a breath. But by now you're beginning to sort things out -- it's just a prop, another dummy meant to terrify you. You relax and then the 'dummy' comes alive, jumps out at you and grabs you by the shoulders. BOO!

Adult Fear

The state of American politics today is somewhat reminiscent of that first haunted house. It has the same eerie, menacing otherworldly quality. And the same terrifying BHO!

Chairman BHO! now rules the haunted house, and if he holds sway, we may see it furnished with real body parts. There is ample precedent.

Alien Obama - Part I

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When we think of aliens our imagination may turn to the spacemen of the Roswell, NM or to the melded Robert Heinlein* sort. Of more recent vintage, sliders, conjured up by sci-fi writers who follow eleven-dimension physics -- parallel universes in "inner" space. Or infiltrated spies. More mundane, we may simply consider immigrants -- especially those reared outside the Western Tradition.

Whatever the kind of alien, the term conveys a sense of strangeness, otherness. It means strange, foreign, of or belonging to another. A person who is among us but not of us. It is notable that"Alien" and "Alias" derive from a common root.

Which brings to our president. Is he an alien or an alias, or both? If an alias, we might say, Obama A.K.A.... How to finish the sentence? Is he an original thinker or is he a creature of puppeteers? As I said in an earlier post, we know what he is by his actions and by those of his words that manage to make sense. But we do not know who he is.

I confess that I find it extremely difficult to understand, let alone characterize Mr. Obama and his stranger-than-Haight-Ashbury cohort. Most of their pronouncements are, to me, so outrageous -- so alien -- that I hardly know how to respond. Cognitive overload.

Of many examples, here are two. Mr. Obama on several occasions has put forward his view of "negative" and "positive" rights. Negative rights (one suspects that the adjective was deliberately chosen for its darker connotation) are the very ones spelled out in the Bill of Rights -- those crafted to protect the people from the otherwise inevitable abuse of government power. Positive rights -- those Mr. Obama favors, on the other hand, are those which would enable the government to exercise its power over the people -- always for "good" purposes, of course!

Then there is his stated and demonstrated disdain for notions of private property. Wealth is accumulated for the purposes of sharing -- redistribution; private enterprise, on its face, is not compatible with that view. These ideas are certainly alien to our founding principles.

James Lewis, in a fine article appearing in the American Thinker, captures the idea especially well.

And yet the Obama "birther" debate is important. What's important about it is the feeling a growing number of Americans have in their bones that Obama is foreign -- to our traditions, loyalties and shared understandings about the nature of America. In a way the legal debate matters less than that bone-deep sense that Obama is fundamentally "Other than American".

[snip]

This is not a secret. Obama is foreign to America in a way that has little to do with his birth certificate. He could be American-born and still think in this very anti-American way. A lot of people are. But whatever he is legally, there is not a shred of doubt that he is steeped in an Anti-American way of thinking.



In the concluding Part II I will try to point out that the more we learn about Mr. Obama the more questions are raised.


-----*
Stranger in a Strange Land

Marxist Obama

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Which is simply calling a spade a spade. While I can only guess at Barack Obama's motives, and motivations -- who he is as a man -- what he is, behind the evanescent mask of language, is plain enough.

He is a Marxist. 1. To elaborate I would add, consequently anti-American 2. and devoutly anti-capitalist.

Now the president's liberal (and robot conservative) defenders will object to the term -- arguing, as is their custom, only at the margins -- but the evidence is plain enough. His earliest and subsequent associations point us toward making that judgment, but his words and the policies he favors can leave no doubt. Obama's policies and his stated intentions to re-shape America (the world, if it cooperates) reflect clearly those of Marxists past and present.

Besides definitional objections, certain 'conservatives' who carry the memes of the 60's (comity at any cost) will say there is nothing to be gained politically by using the term. That may be so, but, as the left amply demonstrates, denying the truth of a matter does not make the truth go away. Denial is a refuge of comfort, but it carries danger. 3.

I make my case by examining Mr. Obama's policies, pronouncements and actions in the context of his work.

Foreign Policy. Honduras provides a telling current example of the president's views. Here the president chooses to view the lawful (constitutional) ouster of President Zelaya as a coup. It is hard to imagine a reason other than his wish to preserve congenial relations with Zelaya's communist allies, the Castros and Hugo Chavez and his contempt for democratic government. The popular uprising against the theocracy in Iran -- a provocative sworn enemy of the US -- barely drew Obama's notice. He has been hostile toward toward the only fully functional democratic government in the Middle Easy and our traditional ally, Israel.

The US Economy. As famously and unintentionally revealed in a recorded statement to 'Joe-the-plumber' Mr. Obama believes that justice is achieved by the redistribution of wealth. He encourages class warfare by his words and taxation policies. He has seized private business, abrogated the sanctity of contracts by fiat and uses every means further to accrue power to the federal government. The obscene 'stimulus' package, the drive toward socialized medicine and the devotion to taxing by 'cap and trade' in response to the mythical anthropocentric global warming are designs to destroy the US economy. Obama's repeated claim that he intends to rebuild the economy "from the bottom up" fairly boggles the mind. Paving the Road to Serfdom is a shovel-ready job.

Obama's Church. Liberation Theology is a religious denomination created in Latin America about 50 years ago. It is the result of a Faustian bargain between leftist Catholics and Marxists designed to suit their mutual purposes. The publicized preachments of Rev. Wright
supported by his colleague, Father Pfleger, are not aberrations, but rather the mainstream of the politicized church. And doubtless congenial to Mr. Obama.

There is much more to be said about President Obama, but I want to confine myself to the case at hand. If he succeeds in his pernicious objectives -- domestic and foreign -- the future, as game theorists say, will cast no shadow.
--------
1. The matter of political definitions is not an easy one. It is complicated by the fact that Marxist nations and movements have, absent any structural or philosophical change, taken to calling themselves Socialist -- presumably because the term is seen as more benign. But by far the greater problem is the fact that no combination of political, social and economic systems and the ideas that drive them will precisely fit a general definition. I view Marxism as the political heritage of the theories of Marx: dialectical materialism, critical theory of capitalism and revolutionary theory. Ideas that form a consistent thread from Gramci to Alinsky. To be sure the lines between the various surviving forms of collectivism blur, but the Marxist strain -- the most virulent -- tends to unify them.
2. "American" in the sense of the Founders and of history through the middle of the last century. -The America he may be for is a Utopian construction, centrally planned.
3. Denying the existence of a threat -- small, medium or existential -- is to yield the means and readiness to combat it. A herpetologist who calls a rattlesnake by another name and attributes to it innocuous qualities is unlikely to enjoy a long career.
The avoidance of properly descriptive language often makes us feel safer. I was once a jury foreman in a murder case. The case was simple and the evidence clear, but one juror could not agree with the verdict. "I understand the evidence and the law, but when I look at the defendant I just can't believe he's a murder."

Suicide by Government: The Obama-Kavorkian Connection

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Most readers will remember that Dr. Jack Kavorkian came to public notice because he was overtly engaged in the medical specialty of euthanasia. His clients, who were terminally ill and/or in constant, unbearable pain, engaged him to hasten their demise in a quick and humane manner. The courts ruled that his activity was illegal and ordered him to desist. He did not, and he was consequently imprisoned.

Mr. Obama and his party are similarly engaged, but with multiple “clients” – the American polity. Similarly, the plurality of that polity has entered a contract with government to assist them in the matter of assisted suicide. This analogy is sound but limited. When we broaden our examination we find notable differences between Dr. Kavorkian and the Obama government.
First, the polity is reasonably healthy and without severe pain. Second, the manner of death will be neither humane nor quick. Third, and most importantly, there is the matter of informed consent. Dr. Kavorkian, to his great credit, was careful in the extreme to ensure that those under his care (and their families) were perfectly informed regarding alternatives to suicide, and what could be expected in the final moments if they opted for death. And finally, the government will not be subject to prosecution.

We have proceeded from analogy to metaphor. Now, let us consider facts.
Security – economic, political and existential – has and continues to be aggressively undermined. We begin with economic security. The conceit of piety rather than the care of probity drives policies that are certain to weaken or destroy the economy. The wanton spending and printing money in the name of a litany of Utopian purposes seizes money from those who have earned it and distributes it among those who are content to live on government largesse in lieu of honest labor. Under current economic policy America is destined to become a third-world nation – Obamastan, if you like. Despite the stated intention of narrowing the gap between rich and poor, that gap will remain. But it will now be between a ruling bureaucratic aristocracy, on the one hand, and everyone else on the other. Worse than the loss of wealth will be the continuing and accelerating usurpation on personal liberty. Once liberty is surrendered the state will become totalitarian and ultimately murderous. (1)

In the matter of defense diplomatic and military decisions are being taken that make America appear weak in the eyes of our enemies. A posture of appeasement invites challenge from other nations on fronts military, political and economic. The most immediate threat, Islam (2), seems to have escaped this administration's notice; or, perhaps, they seek the comfort of denial. In either case failure to confront aggression in the Middle East serves only to encourage it. (3)

Voting for the services of Dr. Obama seems to have been unwise.

(1) The reader may ask if I am not taking an eschatological view of the world. I would reply that one has only to glance over his shoulder at recent history to note the appalling number of deaths in totalitarian (esp. Socialist/Communist) states. Excluding Nazi Germany, a million times 149.

(2) I use 'Islam' rather than the PC circumlocutions such as, 'Islamist', 'Militant Islam', etc. Diana West has a good article on the matter of corrupted language and the assertion of the right to free speech.

(3) It is vital that we recognize that Islam, in particular, is the natural and enduring enemy of liberty and democratic forms of government that flow from it and – ideally – support it. Where Islam does not threaten violence, it is corrosive to representative government (as we see clearly in Western Europe and increasingly in America).