Previous Commentaries

The Obama/Hitler Matrix

By Jerry A. Kane

 

Mr. Anderson, you disappoint me.  On your blog commentary, “Obama is Hitler? Hold on a Second,” you denounce comments comparing Obama to Hitler as substandard, unintelligent, and irresponsible. You further slander the commentators by equating their comments with the left’s mindless ad hominem attacks against the right.

 

Your commentary misapplies Godwin’s Law, “As an Internet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”  Mike Godwin’s rule does not apply to appropriate Nazi and Hitler comparisons; it applies only to the overuse of invalid ones, for they rob the valid comparisons of their impact. Before you evoked Godwin’s Law, you should have applied the Duck Test, “whereby one can infer the nature of an unknown based upon its outwardly visible traits… even if it is not wearing a label that explicitly states its identity.”

 

For those who would believe rather than think, truth is not an easy pill to swallow. All I’m offering is the truth, Larrey, nothing more. It’s important to acknowledge the difference between the left’s dream world and the real world. The claims that Hitler and the Nazis were capitalist reactionaries and that capitalism and Nazism were ideologically aligned are outlandish and preposterous.  In his book, Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg destroys these myths and explains how Stalinist propaganda advanced the doctrine of “social fascism” to discredit and delegitimize those who opposed Stalinism for being in league with the fascist far right.

 

It is obvious that Hitler and the members of the National Socialist Worker’s Party or Nazi Party were socialists; albeit, national socialists, but socialists none the less.  Hitler opposed the communists for power’s sake, not for statist ideology.  The Nazi/Communist conflict was a left verses left battle to determine which totalitarian system would rule, and the Nazis won and took charge of the German left.  When it comes to advancing the unlimited power of the state over the individual and society’s means of production, Nazis and communists are soul mates; their genus is the same. 

 

Totalitarian governments are antithetical to liberal democracies that promote individual liberties, private property rights, and free enterprise systems.  Totalitarian governments and their leaders are outgrowths of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism, the hideous progeny of socialism.  For this reason, the label Fascist or Nazi is applicable only to radical leftist, statist, and collectivist ideologues; the label does not apply to ideologues on the right who promote patriotism, personal freedom, individual liberty, and limited government.

 

Your, “can’t we all just get along,” plea is a bit late after eight years of incessant Bush-bashing and name-calling.  Almost every day since the November 4 election, leftist sycophants and mainstream media propagandists have gushed pathetically over Obama, comparing him to former presidents John F. Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and even to Jesus Christ. Yet, you and Reason Online’s Michael Moynihan have your hinnies in a huff over some comments and commentaries that draw attention to ominous parallels between Obama’s rise to political prominence and Hitler’s. 

 

For nearly eight years, Bush has been synthesized into the most diabolical, devious, dastardly, idiotic, incompetent, illiterate figure ever to go to and fro on the earth and walk up and down upon it.  Progressives and the mainstream media have marked Bush the most hated man in the history of the world.  “I wonder how Hitler’s supporters felt when he was the most hated man.  Did they realize they were supporting a monster?  Were they proud to be contributing to his power? … George is not the first ugly, planetary monster to be created.…[W]e should be studying the destroyed industries, the fraudulently justified actions and causes, the ecological disasters and the lies … that enabled Bush and his malignant predecessors to attain power.”  

 

Now that you have bathed in the stream of progressive consciousness, it’s time to dismount those high horses and examine the rhetoric that you and Moynihan have condemned as “bad taste” and “hysterics on the right” respectively.  Understand that I’m trying to free your mind, Larrey.  But I can only show you the door.  You’re the one that has to walk through it. 

 

The cult of personality and hysteria for a charismatic orator are frightening parallels between Obama and Hitler.  Like Hitler, Obama too is a phenomenal political figure, extraordinary in American politics.  No American politician has made such an impression on Americans.  He receives excessive admiration, adoration, and exaltation from his admirers and worshipers reminiscent of hero worship but with a messianic twist. 

 

In addressing a group of young people in his congregation, Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, said that Obama’s ability to interest them in politics was a sign of messianic proportions. “You are the instruments that God is going to use to bring about universal change, and that is why Barack has captured the youth.  And he has involved young people in a political process that they didn’t care anything about.  That’s a sign.  When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking.” 

 

Farrakhan is not alone in proclaiming Obama’s messianic eloquence.  Ezra Klein, associate editor at The American Prospect, writes, “Obama’s finest speeches … elevate.  They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped … and … made you aware of its presence and your role in it.  He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.  The other great leaders … guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is … able to call us … to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we … seem capable of … sharing in its meaning and transcendence.” 

 

Hitler’s oratory did not just inspire the masses, it elevated them.  He was not a politician; he was a demigod, a magical figure of majestic wisdom who would save Germany.  The Nazis staged public meetings and party rallies to create a supernatural and religious atmosphere, with Hitler’s entrance more befitting a god than a man.  Through propaganda, he projected himself as the Messiah of Germany and cultivated an attitude of infallibility, so the people worshiped him and surrendered their wills to him.  An American from Chicago who had visited Germany at the time of Hitler’s ascendance to power observed, “This is not a revolution, it’s a revival.  They think Hitler is God.  Believe it or not, a German woman sat next to me at the Passion Play and when they hoisted Jesus on the Cross, she said, ‘There he is. That is our Fuehrer, our Hitler.’”

 

Hitler believed that he was the “Chosen One,” a second Christ destined to lead Germany to glory and institute a new social order for the world.  He was convinced of his own infallibility and greatness.  As Howard K. Smith wrote, “I was convinced that of all the millions on whom the Hitler Myth had fastened itself, the most carried away was Adolph Hitler, himself.”  

 

Even though John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton were outstanding public speakers and possessed charismatic personalities, they were never raised to the level of Messiah, nor could they make audience members swoon to the degree Obama does.  He seems to exude the confidence of an anointed one and the certainty of a true believer regarding his own greatness.  When asked by a television interviewer if he ever had any doubts about his foreign policy experience, Obama replied, “Never.”  

 

Wife Michelle says the real Barack Obama plans to redesign America and to help Americans fix their broken souls.  In a campaign speech at UCLA, Ms. Obama told the students that they live in a divided nation whose people are isolated by fear.  She went on to say that she was there to let them know that she is married to “one of the most brilliant men you will meet in our lifetime,” and the only presidential candidate “who has a chance at healing this nation” for he understands the need to fix broken souls so that Americans can compromise and sacrifice for one another.  Michelle obviously believes in her husband’s personal greatness and envisions him a revolutionary ready to save both America and the planet.  “We have a chance, not just to make history, but we can change the world.”  

 

Look around, Larrey, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters, so inured, so hopelessly dependent on New Deal/Great Society socialism that they will fight to protect it, and that makes them the enemy of liberty loving Americans.  If you are not one of us, you are one of them. 

 

The commentators are not saying Obama is Hitler, but they are suggesting that a dictator can rise in America and bring about a totalitarian state.  And for that reason, when the leader of the free-world possesses a charismatic personality, comes from a socialist background, holds to a progressive worldview, rises to prominence, not for accomplishment, but for grandiose speeches the likes of which have never been heard before in America, is hailed as the nation’s savior by the masses, is admired by leaders throughout the world, and is elevated to the role of Messiah by worshipful followers from every class, race, and gender, it is both reasonable and necessary to wave red flags and sound alarms.  

 

After all, an obvious distinction exists between those who cry wolf but have never seen a wolf or have any idea what one even looks like, and those who cry wolf who have seen a wolf and know exactly what one looks like.  I have tried to show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes, Larrey, but it’s up to you to either stay in Wonderland or to start following white rabbits all over again.  

 

  

 

 

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A Tale of Leftist Hypocrisy

A Tale of Leftist Hypocrisy
By Jerry A. Kane

 

Bend your ears, boys and girls, for one of Baron von Münch-Kane’s s once-spun yarns and twice-told tales.

 

Once upon a time, America had enough sane people who realized that the captured Islamic terrorists who wanted to murder them and destroy their country must be kept from their shores at an island prison guarded by the U.S. military. Unfortunately, too many reasonably sane Americans stopped taking their medications Nov. 4, 2008, and elected a leftist ideologue president, LIP for short.

 

As one of his first acts in office, the LIP announced the island prison, at the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp, aka Gitmo, would be closed in a year. However, the LIP neglected to mention just where those detained Islamic terrorists would go. After the November election, the LIP sent up a trial balloon proposing South Carolina as a place to house those captured terrorists yearning for murder, mayhem and the blowing to smithereens of schools, shopping malls and night clubs. The deafening silence from leftist Democrats was a stamp of approval for the South Carolina idea; after all, Red-staters are rightly expendable when it comes to the left’s big blue-marble worldview.

 

Pennsylvania’s Cracker-Jack Congressman John “the Conman” Murtha was more than willing to offer up his racist-redneck district to house the Gitmo prisoners. Conman John said he’d “take ’em” and “handle them the way they would handle any other prisoners,” given that the cracker-jack congressman viewed captured terrorists as “no more dangerous in [his] district than in Guantanamo.” And of course, a district chockfull of racist rednecks is rightly expendable from the left’s big blue-marble worldview.

 

But now the LIP has another location in mind for the captured terrorists, and the wails of outrage and indignation have ensued. A senior Justice Department official in the LIP’s administration has suggested Alexandria, Va., as a prime location to house some of Gitmo’s 240 detainees. The new location has caused an outcry among the local leftist Democrats in Alexandria, who for obvious reasons find it much easier to impose their crap-laden ideas than to shoulder such idiocy themselves. The LIP’s ideologically leftist constituency, whose peeps of protest were not heard above the din of muted silence when South Carolina was the proposed site, became “absolutely opposed,” would “do everything in [their] power” to stop it, and demanded that “someone else have it.”

 

Deceit and hypocrisy appear to be the modus operandi of leftist ideologues. When it came down to protecting the environment or reducing his home’s energy consumption, Clinton toady Algore did what any good leftist ideologue would do – he used more energy and continued promoting environmental diligence as a means “to line his pockets and enhance his profile.”

 

In another example, Time magazine “hero of the planet” Robert Kennedy Jr. and his faithful uncle companion, Sen. Ted Kennedy, used some behind-the-scenes Hyannis Port muscle to stop development of America’s first offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound, all the while endorsing wind power as a viable energy alternative and denouncing President George W. Bush for destroying the environment.

 

The lesson to learn from this tale is not that the leftist ideologues personify phonies and hypocrites, but that they forgo scrutiny and escape accountability for their deceitfulness and hypocrisy – and therein lies the rub, boys and girls.

 

 

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Only Conserva-tarians Can Save the GOP

Only Conserva-tarians Can Save the GOP

By Jerry A. Kane 

 

At what point does complacency end and panic set in for the members and leaders of the Republican Party?  When will they notice the empty hour glass and recognize wickedness for what it is?  The hordes of satiated simpletons shouting in rhythmic cadence, “Oh we love, the O-One … Oh we love, the O-One” is not the Winkie chant of guards entering a castle in a scene from a classic fantasy film.  The ill winds of the 2006 and 2008 elections that uprooted the GOP House and Senate leadership and sent Republicans spiraling downward were not flash-in-the-pan Kansas dust devils but full-blown Category-5 whirlwinds. 

 

The party of Ronald Reagan has been victimized by disorganized thinking, held spellbound, and led astray by the siren call for moderation from its left wing, which by nature votes for progressive governance.  Before Republicans begin their assault on the castle to douse the progressive Democrats’ power grab, the party’s conservatives and libertarians, i.e., Conserva-tarians, must come out from under the spell and cast out the treacherous progressive element from the positions of power in their own ranks. 

 

Caught up in the tidal wave of the ’94 election, Republican exuberance soon gave way to a heightened sense of self-importance; instead of governing on principles and fulfilling their Contract with America, Republicans lost their way and spent the next 12 years trying to convince the electorate that their compromises were smart, courageous, and compassionate.  Now, it’s up to Conserva-tarians to rise to the occasion, accept the challenge facing them, and move the party in the direction of limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, greater economic opportunity, and respect for this nation and its heritage. 

 

For more than a decade, the far-left progressive movement has been advancing its socialist ideas and positions through an all-out war against conservative and libertarian principles.  The movement’s agenda includes a massive income redistribution scheme from corporations and the wealthy to low-income workers and the poor; a substantial reduction in military spending; an increase in social welfare spending; the implementation of universal healthcare; the adoption of living wage laws; the right of all workers to organize into labor unions and to engage in strikes and collective bargaining; the abolition of significant portions of the Patriot Act; the legalization of gay marriage; the execution of strict campaign finance reform laws; a complete pullout from the war in Iraq; a crackdown on free trade and corporate welfare; and the acceptance of the Freedom of Choice Act, which would cancel every state, federal, and local regulation on abortion, abolish all state restrictions on government funding for abortions, and use income taxes to fund abortions. 

 

Through the years, middle-class Americans were not mesmerized by progressive socialist movements such as Nazism, fascism, and communism; but now, many in the middle class have become captivated by the mainstream media’s image of Barack Obama and the agenda championed by the progressive Democrats in Congress.  They seem to have traded the American Dream for the empty promises of yellow-brick road infrastructure and merry old land tranquility. 

 

Progressives no longer make up a small percentage of lawmakers; in fact, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) is the largest partisan caucus in the House of Representatives, boasting 71 members, nearly one-third of House Democrats.  Until 1999, the CPC worked openly with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest socialist organization in the country, to strengthen the Democrat Party’s left wing.  DSA also helped to organize the CPC. 

 

Progressives have turned the American political arena into a no-holds-barred war zone, where laws and rules are suspended arbitrarily for the greater good.  Doubters need look no further than Joe Lieberman, who was out-of-lockstep with the Democrats on one issue only, but one was enough for the progressive elite to force him from the party. 

 

In contrast, Senators Olympia Hiss-Snowe, Susan Ames-Collins, and Arlen Rosenburg-Specter have continually adopted the progressive positions of the opposition party and abandoned their own party’s positions on issues central to its survival, and have done so with impunity.  ”Is there not some chosen curse, some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven, red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man who owes his greatness to his country’s ruin!” If the GOP has any hope of veering this nation away from socialism’s road to serfdom and back to its founding free-market ideals, it can no longer tolerate such treacherous acts inside its ranks. 

 

In the 2006 and 2008 elections, naïve Republicans brought a knife to a gunfight.  As a result, the party now lies flattened, its stuffing ripped out, strewn asunder from a full-scale progressive assault.  Grass-root Conserva-tarians must have the courage to brush aside any tinhorn leader who lacks the steely resolve to rid the GOP of Republicans in name only (RINOs). 

 

Though stalwarts Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and William F. Buckley are gone, their ideals and dreams for America remain, for they mirrored those of the Founders’ before them.  Only Conserva-tarian values and principles can restore the GOP to consequence.  Otherwise, America will have but one major political party and a host of lesser parties with no real political power, and suffering humanity’s hope for self government will have ended a failure. 

 

 

 

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The Musings of I.M. Kane

Milton Friedman Defends Capitalism and KOs Phil Donahue’s Feel Good Socialism

 

This exchange wasn’t even a contest and mercifully ended moments after the opening bell. In the 2:23 eyeblast snippet (or transcript below) taken from a 1979 Phil Donahue interview with Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, Friedman counters Donahue’s feeble, heart wrenching pleas for an egalitarian, socialist society governed by man’s better nature and strikes a clear, succinct blow for why free-market societies thrive and are the only societies that actually improve the lot for the masses.

 

Donahue conducted the interview at a time when hosts adhered to the principles of propriety and decency and permitted their guests to finish a thought or sentence before offering their comebacks or follow-up questions.  Now, hosts are mandated to follow politically-correct discussion techniques, which means they rudely interrupt, ridicule, or shout-down any guest who disagrees with their established position. 

 

Donahue actually personifies the fool who can’t be separated from his folly, regardless of the facts, logic, and common sense presented, for he automatically defaults to his foolish position and rejects Friedman’s position, no matter how reverently it is presented.  His exchange with Friedman was 30 years ago, and though much older now, Donahue remains none the wiser.

 

Transcript

 

Donahue:  You see around the globe the mal-distribution of wealth, the desperate plight of millions of people in underdeveloped countries.  When you see so few haves and so many have-nots, when you see the greed and the concentration of power … did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism, and whether greed’s a good idea to run on?

 

Friedman:   Well first of all, tell me, is there some society you know that does not run on greed?  Do you think that Russia doesn’t run on greed?  Do you think China doesn’t run on greed?  What is greed?  Of course none of us are greedy; it’s only the other fellow who’s greedy.  The world runs on individuals pursing their self-interest.  The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaucrats.  Einstein did not construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat.  Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way.  The only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade.  If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it is exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that.  So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear, that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.

 

Donahue:  But it [capitalism] seems to reward, not virtue, as much as ability to manipulate the system.

 

Friedman:   What does reward virtue?  Do you think the communist commissar rewards virtue?  Do you think a Hitler rewards virtue?  Excuse me.  If you’ll pardon me, do you think American presidents reward virtue?  Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their political clout?  Is it really true that political self-interest is more nobler somehow than economic self-interest?  You know, I think you’re taking a lot of things for granted.  Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us?  I don’t even trust you to do that! 

 

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Once-Spun Yarns and Twice-Told Tales

Escape Artists

By Jerry A. Kane

 

Bend your ears boys and girls for one of Baron von Münch-Kane’s s once-spun yarns and twice-told tales.  

 

Once upon a time America had enough sane people who realized that the captured Islamic terrorists who wanted to murder them and destroy their country must be kept from their shores at an island prison guarded by the U.S. military.  Unfortunately, too many reasonably sane Americans stopped taking their medications November 4, 2008, and elected a leftist ideologue president, LIP for short.  

 

As one of his first acts in office, the LIP announced the island prison, at the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp, a.k.a. GITMO, would be closed in a year.  However, the LIP neglected to mention just where those detained Islamic terrorists would go.  After the November election, the LIP sent up a trial balloon proposing South Carolina as a place to house those captured terrorists yearning for murder, mayhem, and the blowing to smithereens of schools, shopping malls, and night clubs.  The deafening silence from leftist Democrats was a stamp of approval for the South Carolina idea; after all, Red-staters are rightly expendable when it comes to the left’s big blue-marble worldview. 

 

Pennsylvania’s Cracker-Jack Congressman John, the Con-man, Murtha, was more than willing to offer up his “racist-redneck“district to house the GITMO prisoners.   Con-man John said he’d “take ’em” and “handle them the way they would handle any other prisoners,” given that the Cracker-Jack Congressman viewed captured terrorists as “no more dangerous in [his] district than in Guantanamo.”  And of course, a district chockfull of racist rednecks is rightly expendable from the left’s big blue-marble worldview.

 

But now the LIP has another location in mind for the captured terrorists, and the wails of outrage and indignation have ensued.  A senior Justice Department official in the LIP’s administration has suggested Alexandria, Virginia, as a prime location to house some of GITMO’s 240 detainees.  The new location has caused an outcry among the local leftist Democrats in Alexandria, who for obvious reasons, find it much easier to impose their crap-laden ideas than to shoulder such idiocy themselves.  The LIP’s ideologically leftist constituency, whose peeps of protest were not heard above the din of muted silence when South Carolina was the proposed site, became “absolutely opposed,” would “do everything in [their] power“ to stop it, and demanded that “someone else have it.“

 

Deceit and hypocrisy appear to be the modus operandi of leftist ideologues.  When it came down to protecting the environment or reducing his home’s energy consumption, Clinton toady Algore did what any good leftist ideologue would do, he used more energy and continued promoting environmental diligence as a means “to line his pockets and enhance his profile.” 

 

In another example, Time magazine “hero of the planet,” Robert Kennedy Jr., and his faithful uncle companion,  Senator Ted Kennedy, used some behind-the-scenes Hyannis Port muscle to stop development of America’s first offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound, all the while endorsing wind power as a viable energy alternative and denouncing President George W. Bush for destroying the environment.   

 

The lesson to learn from this tale is not that the leftist ideologues personify phonies and hypocrites but that they forgo scrutiny and escape accountability for their deceitfulness and hypocrisy, and therein lies the rub boys and girls.

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The Exact Word

The Exact Word

By Jerry A. Kane

 

What is the right word for Obama. He once told us “words matter.”

 

In his commentary “The Real Obama,” Thomas Sowell rightly points out the importance of using exact words to communicate effectively.  Sowell argues that Senator Barack Obama’s critics are making a strategic mistake when they use the word associate to describe the Senator’s ties to William Ayers, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and Father Michael Pfleger.  According to Sowell, the word ally is the more appropriate word to describe Obama’s connection to these people.  Obama is not guilty by association; his guilt is through alliance. He is aligned to leftist radicals in that he shares in their fierce opposition to the ideas of a free market, individual liberty, and religious freedom, which are America’s founding principles. 

 

Sowell is right; ally is the more accurate term for Obama’s relationship with these people.  The one thread that binds them is their radical, leftist politics.  Obama has been called the most liberal Senator in the U.S. Senate by right-of-center commentators and radio talk show hosts; but again the word choice problem crops up.  Obama’s politics are not liberal; his politics match those of Saul Alinsky and the leftist radicals of the 1960s. 

 

Obama’s radical leftist politics explain his political and theological ties with such radical and revolutionary pastors the likes of Wright and Pfleger, who incidentally are part of a nexus along with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan that aligns black-liberation theology with black Muslim nationalism.  Stanley Kurtz connects the dots of this unholy trinity in his National Review article “Left in Church:  Deep inside the Wright Trumpet.” 

 

Black-Liberation Theology is a type of Marxist Liberation Theology that promotes an Afrocentric social gospel.  Inspired by Black Muslim nationalism, James Cone combined Marxism with black religion and a black Gospel and created Black-Liberation Theology.  Cone’s theology is designed to liberate African-Americans from the economic slavery of the white man’s free market system and to build a completely new society. Cone is Wright’s mentor, and Cone credits Wright for lifting his theology from his books and making it work in Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ.  Cone’s theology is the core doctrine and his books are required reading in the church Obama attended for 20 years. 

 

Cone’s theology proposes that the black Jesus (Wright’s church believes and teaches Christ was black) will give black Americans the ability to do away with the white man’s greed and free market system and replace them with a black value system. In addition, Cone writes “black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy” and that being black means “committed to destroying everything this country loves and adores.” Obama has said that black liberation theology is sensible, has called Wright his mentor, has said that Wright has given him the best education he ever had, and throughout his campaign has declared America’s institutions as broken and in need of fixing. For a more comprehensive look at Black-Liberation Theology, read “Obama:  Stealth Socialist?” by Investor’s Business Daily.

 

Obama’s radical leftist politics are so meshed with his socialist religion that it’s difficult to know where one leaves off and the other begins.  For example, in a 1998 radio interview, Obama discusses how certain portions of the African American community are not doing very well with crime, education, and employment, and he recognizes his fate is tied with theirs.  He goes on to suggest that his “individual salvation is not going to come about without a collective salvation for the country.”  He further states, “Unfortunately, I think that recognition requires we make sacrifices and this country has not always been willing to make the sacrifices that are necessary to bring about a new day and a new age.” 

 

On the stump, Obama divines the time has come “to perfect this nation.” Not long ago, I brushed such statements aside, without a second thought.  When Hillary playfully mocked Obama’s remarks, “a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany … and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama,” it never occurred to me to take such remarks seriously.  When the Obama Sith, Chris Matthews, said, “This is bigger than Kennedy….This is the New Testament,” I just figured he was caught up in the exuberance of the moment. And when Halle Berry said that she’d “collect paper cups off the ground to make his pathway clear”; or Eve Konstantine said he is “our collective representation of our purest hopes, our highest visions and our deepest knowings,” I unthinkingly whisked them away as so much sophomoric giddiness and bizarre tripe.

 

Now, that the antenna is up and the red flags are waving, I am astounded when I reconsider that Bill Rush of the New York Times actually believes Obama’s election to the U.S. Senate,  “was divinely ordered….God’s plan”; that Oprah Winfrey thinks his “tongue dipped in the unvarnished truth”; that Gerald Campbell sees him radiate “truth and goodness”; that Gary Hart deems him not to be “operating on the same plane as ordinary politicians”; and that Deepak Chopra considers him “A quantum leap in American consciousness.”

 

It’s apparent that Obama not only believes his individual salvation depends on collective salvation, but he also desires to bring about a new day and age.  Maybe next time Charlie Gibson will ask the hubris question of Obama.

 

On second thought, hubris is not the exact word, megalomania is more appropriate.

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Upset of the Century?

Upset of the Century?

By Jerry A. Kane

 

It’s hard to say what Marine Corps Captain John Murtha thought of the people of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, when he took command of the 34th Special Infantry Company Reserves back in 1959.

 

The world-weary Cap’n wasn’t the natural born world-shaker type to take a pipe-cutter to the heads of parking meters just for something to do in the evening, so he went on to complete a tour in Vietnam, serve a few stints in the state House of Representatives, and run in a special election for Pennsylvania’s 12th District.  The former Parris Island drill instructor narrowly won the seat to become the first Vietnam veteran to serve in Congress.  But that was over thirty-four years ago, and now the 17-term Congressman has openly maligned western Pennsylvanians and his 12th District constituents.

 

The outpourings of discontent over the Capn’s remarks lead him to revise them and to clarify their meaning.  What the Cap’n had said was,  “There is no question that western Pennsylvania is a racist area,” but what he meant to say was, the history of southwestern Pennsylvania is teeming with racism, and “there’s still folks that have a problem voting for someone because they are black,” as “[t]his whole area, years ago, was really redneck.” 

 

Given that some Western Pennsylvania residents and District 12 constituents are still stinging from his revised remarks, it looks as if what we got here is failure to communicate.  Perhaps the Capn’s detractors are simply a bunch of thin-skinned, back-sassin’ hard cases who don’t know one boss’s ditch from another boss’s dirt, but polls are showing that some of his long-suffering supporters are a wee-bit angry for their being made a national laughingstock.

 

Although the standard rhetoric from the political punditry is that the Cap’n of Pork is invulnerable for his years of bringing home the bacon in the form of government projects to the depressed area, the immigrant melting pot is still boiling over remarks made by Barack Obama during the Democrat primary pronouncing that Pennsylvanians are clinging to their religion and guns on account of failed government policies and poor economic conditions.  The usually resigned constituents are beginning to recognize the Capn’s and Obama’s arrogant, elitist, disconnect as overt prejudice against the hard-nosed, down-to-earth people who live and work in Western Pennsylvania. 

 

In a district heavily gerrymandered specifically for the Cap’n, where Democrats outnumber Republicans two-to-one, Republicans have never gotten more than 42 percent of the popular vote during the Capn’s time in office, but his cancellation of the only debate with his Republican opponent, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Bill Russell, coupled with a recent slide in the polls suggest a chink in Abscam Jack’s impenetrable armor. 

 

The latest firestorm is just one more issue added to the list of controversies that is ticking off a lot of constituents in an area that has the highest percentage of veterans per capita of any district in the nation.  In 2006, the Cap’n said that a Pentagon investigation would show that Marines murdered “innocent civilians in cold blood” in Haditha, Iraq.  However, when 14 of the 15 Marines charged in the killings were cleared, the Cap’n did not apologize for levying false accusations against the innocent soldiers. 

 

Actually, the Cap’n seemed to suggest that his false accusations were beside the point, and his condemnation of the innocent Marines was really helpful because expanded engagement rules were produced whereby American troops are “no longer just breaking down doors” when they engage with Iraqis.  Clearly the end justifies the means for the Cap’n even if an acquitted Marine now sues him for slander. 

 

Another problem for the Cap’n has been his unrelenting call, which began in November 2005, for the withdrawal of the troops from Iraq, even though victory now looms large and the troop surge has been working.  The Cap’n hasn’t backed away from criticizing the war or the surge, but he has admitted that “the war effort is going a bit better.” Nevertheless, for the Iraq war to end the way he wants, Obama has to become president.

 

Even though Pennsylvania’s 12th district has the nation’s largest coal and natural-gas reserves, the Capn’s Kingdom of Pork has not created a solid base for economic growth.  In fact, its economy and adult population have steadily been in decline, and his federal handouts have effectively driven small businesses away, having caused them to bear the tax burden for the infrastructure of the multi-million dollar non-profits he brings into the district.

 

He’s waning and even trailing in the polls,  but the overarching possibility is that the shameless spreader of unprecedented levels of federal pork, the earmark magnet of Murtha’s corner, and one of the most unethical members of Congress will once again grin like a baby. 

 

However, given the Capn’s general disregard for his district, his condemnation of the Haditha Marines, and his recent insulting comments, it’s possible that the dark-horse Republican might pull off the “the upset of the century.” 

 

After all, it’s not that the Cap’n likes reminding his constituents of who they are anymore than they like hearing it; but he says it for their own good, at the behest of those who see oppression and racism lurking in every dark shadow.  However, come November 4, they just might wish the Cap’n would stop being so good to them.

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Lessons from Barney: No More Warm and Fuzzies

Lessons from Barney: No More Warm and Fuzzies

By Jerry A. Kane

 

When the three-year-old daughter of The View’s Elisabeth Hasselbeck asked her who had won and who had lost the election, the token conservative on the morning television chat show replied,  “No one lost … today is a victory for this country.”  The View’s conciliatory co-host, who campaigned with Sarah Palin during the election, let her viewers know that she would “get in a long line of supporters … for this president.”

 

Unfortunately, the “warm and fuzzies” are not exclusive to only audiences of The View.  During a heart-felt moment of candor on the Dennis Miller radio talk show, the generally jocular columnist and editor, Andrew Breitbart, extended the olive-branch,  “This is our president and we should treat him accordingly.  It’s no longer about Bill Ayers; it’s no longer about Reverend Wright. The American people heard about those people and they’ve moved on to a different place, and I think we can’t continue this cycle of hatred towards our elected officials.”

 

Exhibiting a more cerebral tone, National Review columnist, Victor David Hanson, admonished his readers to quit the bickering, appreciate a fair and peaceful transference of power, and unite behind [the] new commander-in-chief.”  Such genial platitudes suggest that it’s time for our nation’s healing to begin and for non-Obama voters to pursue the high road, adopt a magnanimous attitude, and let bygones be bygones. 

 

Notwithstanding the perspectives from such enlightened mainstream opinion-makers, the time has come to ignore their platitudes and put into action the rather toothy example bared by Barney, President Bush’s terrier.  During Barney’s stroll the morning after the November 4 debacle, some obtuse reporter reached out to pet him and was promptly bitten on the finger; obviously, the wily canine sensed a threat for any affable gesture offered by a journalist.

 

Barney’s keen sense for identifying a potential threat to his liberty and reacting decisively to combat that threat is an example of an experienced warrior’s strategy for winning on the political battlefield. To combat the advances of socialism and to win the political war, liberty loving Americans must follow Barney’s lead and react promptly to stop the socialist agenda of the progressive Democrats that threatens to destroy America’s electoral process and way of life.

 

Without a free and fair electoral process, a democratic government of the people, by the people, and for the people does not exist. States have established rules to conduct free and fair elections, but as the Wall Street Journal editorializes,  “when elections lack integrity, the people no longer rule.” In Minnesota, Democrat Secretary of State Mark Ritchie is overseeing his party’s apparent theft of incumbent Republican Norm Coleman’s Senate seat for challenger Al Franken.  Bear in mind that Ritchie has summarily dismissed thousands of voter fraud accusations in the wake of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now’s (ACORN’s) filing of 43,000 new voter registration forms in Minnesota. 

 

The tally at election’s end had Senator Coleman leading Franken by 725 votes, but now it has been whittled to 206 and the recount has not even started yet.  Franken’s jackpot of votes materialized when election officials had audited their initial results and discovered that absentee ballots had been left unattended in the back of a car for three days after the election, and that exhausted election clerks had made typos or had accidentally underwritten Franken’s total.  Coincidentally, nearly all of Franken’s increases came from heavily Democratic areas, and many from one small town in particular. 

 

ACORN’s unbridled behavior, scandalous practices, and fraudulent abuses, which burgeoned out of control during the 2008 election cycle, suggest a most unwelcome prospect that America’s democratic form of government shows signs of impending collapse.  America’s government is based upon free and fair elections, and the electorate must perceive them as free and fair.  When the nation’s presidential and congressional election is based upon subverting laws, intimidation, and massive Democrat voter fraud, especially in swing states across the country, the universal proposition of “one person, one vote,” adopted by democracies throughout the world, has absolutely no distinguishing value whatsoever. CNN’s Lou Dobbs put it succinctly, “we have debased our right to vote.”

 

ACORN’s victim culture is extremely illiberal; given that, intimidation is customary, the interests of groups judged powerless (blacks, women, gays) take precedent over those considered powerful (whites, men, Christian heterosexuals), and no dissent is permitted.  Akin with ACORN and the other radical groups funded by the Annenberg Challenge and Woods Fund, Obama and the progressive congressional Democrats judge America at fault for ignoring the advice of the United Nations and blame America for Islamic violence on its homeland and around the world because of its support for Israel.  As champions for victim cultures worldwide, Obama and the progressive Democrats must make America atone for its “sins of slavery and racism, and its … sins against the world of Islam.” 

 

The main purpose for a democratic government is to protect the voter’s right to a free and fair election.  Once a government abandons the ideas and principles of freedom that gird a democracy, and no longer safeguards the voter’s free exercise of these practices and procedures in a fair electoral system, the electorate has both the right and the obligation to rise up against that government. 

 

The enlightened mainstream opinion-makers, who are pining for the non-Obama supporters to get in line with open arms and embrace the Obama presidency, fail to realize the necessity for preserving the nation’s precious electoral process and for protecting its democratic form of government against the socialist agenda of progressive Democrats.  Consequently, it’s time for the non-Obama supporters to follow Barney’s example and obey their native instincts to react promptly when their freedoms and liberties are being threatened by an outstretched hand from a smiling socialist feigning bipartisanship.

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Christopher Buckley: Not Worthy of the Name

Christopher Buckley:  Not Worthy of the Name

By Jerry A. Kane

 

Add the son of the late William F. Buckley, Christopher Buckley, to the growing list of Me-too Republicans who have denounced John McCain and disparaged Sarah Palin. Buckley opted to forgo the National Review and make his mark through cyberspace, releasing the column “Sorry Dad, I’m Voting for Obama” on the Daily Beast (delightfully apropos).

 

In February, the conservative bon vivant was taking the likes of Rush Limbaugh and others to task for saying that McCain is not conservative enough. In an op-ed in the New York Times, Buckley writes, “the sum of Mr. McCain seems … far greater than the parts. … And who among ‘us’ … would not sleep soundly knowing that the war hero was on the job. …” Alas! But that was then. Frailty, thy name is Buckley!

 

Buckley’s Jim Jeffords-moment of clarity came during his realization that the McCain campaign had changed the noble McCain; he became “inauthentic,” “irascible and snarly.” Conversely, the son of a stalwart conservative praised Obama as the “rara avis … politician who writes his own books.” He admits that Obama is left, but his prescience exceeds labels and sees Obama’s potential as a “great leader,” who is “what the historical moment seems to be calling for.”

 

Despite that Obama has been “the most partisan in the Senate,” and his presidency would mean open borders, “higher taxes, larger government, more entitlements” and more leftist Supreme Court judges, the self-proclaimed “conservative” offers “airy-fairy” rhetoric to justify his bandwagon leap.

 

Buckley’s defense is mere pretext. His argument lacks substance and is not persuasive. Yet his reason for endorsing Obama is that “Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that.” Methinks a balmy zephyr has left behind a “foul whiff of aristocratic disdain.”

 

Herein lies the truth behind the snide comments from the silver spoon-fed member of the life-of-the-mind crowd. To this Abbey School sophisticate, Palin is just another ordinary, upstart commoner lacking the social refinements of a first-class Harvard man. Palin belongs to the class of “discontented … rabble,” deemed so by Henry F. Potter, the cantankerous old businessman from “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

 

Yet, the rabble Buckley’s talking about does most of the working and paying and living and dying in this country. WFB knew that about Reagan conservatives and understood they were human beings, not “kooks.” Personally, WFB died a much richer and wiser man than his son will ever be.

 

Buckley said he tried to soften the blow of his endorsement by not publishing it in NR, but location wasn’t the problem for the irate readers who e-mailed the magazine threatening cancellations; therefore, Buckley offered his resignation, and it was readily accepted. Now that all is said and done, Buckley seems thunderstruck with the outrage and its consequences. In what has to be a Dixie-Chick moment, the baffled Buckley said, “It’s an odd situation, when the founder’s son has suddenly become the turd in the punch bowl.”

 

Buckley refuses to accept that along with the wealth, social contacts and membership into the privileged class, he has also inherited the responsibility that goes along with sporting the name Buckley. At such a crucial moment, when the mainstream media manufacture blatant propaganda for the Democratic Party and Obama, and the Republican Party tries to keep the Democrats from gaining super majorities in Congress and absolute power over the republic, all that seems to matter to Buckley is that he has been slighted, and the world should know it.

 

Buckley’s pretentious manner and feckless thinking calls to mind the late Louis Nye, whose best-remembered character, Sonny Drysdale, is the spoiled, sissified, ne’er-do-well son of the Drysdales from the 1960s sitcom “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Sonny is a smug, arrogant, blue-blooded mama’s boy who treats his intellectual and social inferiors with disdain, and never tires of basking in the rays of his imagined self-importance.

 

Unfortunately, Buckley is not the lone elitist political pundit or commentator who belittles Palin in saying that she’s out of her league, a huge mistake and unfit to assume the presidency. The Beltway smart-set, who cannot separate good from evil, right from wrong, or better from worse, include George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, David Gergen, Ed Rollins, David Frum, Peggy Noonan and Kathleen Parker. Brooks compared Palin’s anti-intellectualism to President Bush’s and said that the governor “represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party,” but described John McCain and Barack Obama as “the two best candidates we’ve had in a long time.”

 

This group of snobs knows that Palin is the campaign’s tough, sassy, anti-elite maverick who stands outside the Beltway establishment poised to attack the New York-Washington media elite, the liberal elite and the Anglo-American elite who don’t believe in getting their hands dirty with work; yet, these prominent Republican “conservatives” continue to use such reproachful rhetoric in attacking their own party’s ticket while it is engaged in a political battle for its very existence. Instead, they persist in agreeing with Obama, heaping praise upon the man who, when trying to explain Pennsylvania’s blue-collar working class culture to San Francisco’s upper class culture, said, “it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

 

Again, the answer is as obvious as the elite class they constitute. They are the members of an Eastern establishment who think that anyone outside their circle of social contacts is stupid and should defer to their judgment because they are the entitled, privileged class whose breeding and wealth have determined they deserve to run things.

 

Buckley’s judgment for supporting Obama may be problematic, but it’s consistent with his self-perception. The Beltway elite have far more cultural connections to Obama than they do Palin or blue-collar America whom they ridicule for being intellectually and socially inferior.

 

Should the Republicans lose in November, the fault will not lie with Palin or even the Republican elite, as much as it will with “ourselves, that we are underlings.”

 

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The Obama-Hitler Parallel

The Obama-Hitler Parallel

By Jerry A. Kane

 

Critics who denounce and slander their colleagues for comparing Barack Obama’s meteoric rise to power with that of Hitler’s are out of ideas or have too much time on their hands. They cite Godwin’s Law, “As an Internet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one,” or equate their colleagues’ comments with the left’s ad hominem attacks against the right. However, Godwin’s rule applies only to the overuse of invalid comparisons, not to appropriate ones; and the critics’ comparison to the left’s ad hominem attacks is baseless.

 

Leftist claims that Hitler and the Nazis were capitalist reactionaries and that capitalism and Nazism were ideologically aligned are preposterous. In “Liberal Fascism,” Jonah Goldberg explains how Stalinist propaganda advanced the doctrine of “social fascism” to discredit and delegitimize those who opposed Stalinism for being in league with the fascist far right.

Hitler and the members of the National Socialist Worker’s Party, or Nazi Party, were socialists; albeit, national socialists, but socialists nonetheless. Hitler opposed the communists for power’s sake. The Nazi/communist conflict was a left-versus-left battle to determine which totalitarian system would rule; the Nazis won and controlled the German left. When it comes to advancing the unlimited power of the state over the individual and the society’s means of production, Nazis and communists are soul mates.

 

Totalitarian governments are antithetical to liberal democracies that promote individual liberties, private property rights and free-enterprise systems. Totalitarian governments are outgrowths of fascism, Nazism and communism, the hideous progeny of socialism. For this reason, the label fascist or Nazi applies only to statist and collectivist ideologues; the label does not apply to ideologues on the right who promote individual liberty and limited government.

 

Mainstream media propagandists have gushed over Obama, comparing him to Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and even to Jesus Christ. Conversely, Bush has been synthesized into the most diabolical, devious, dastardly, idiotic, incompetent, illiterate figure to ever walk the earth.

 

The title of the following stream of progressive consciousness marks Bush the most hated man in the history of the world. “I wonder how Hitler’s supporters felt when he was the most hated man. Did they realize they were supporting a monster? … George is not the first ugly, planetary monster to be created. … [W]e should be studying … the lies … that enabled Bush and his malignant predecessors to attain power.” It’s time the critics dismount their high horses and examine the rhetoric they have condemned as “bad taste” and “hysterics on the right.”

 

The cult of personality and hysteria for a charismatic orator are frightening parallels between Obama and Hitler. Like Hitler, Obama too is a phenomenal political figure, extraordinary in American politics. No American politician has made such an impression on Americans. He receives excessive admiration and adoration from his admirers reminiscent of hero worship but with a messianic twist.

 

In addressing a group of young people, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan said that Obama’s ability to interest them in politics was a sign of messianic proportions. “You are the instruments that God is going to use to bring about universal change, and that is why Barack has captured the youth. And he has involved young people in a political process that they didn’t care anything about. That’s a sign. When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking.”

 

Farrakhan is not alone in proclaiming Obama’s messianic eloquence. Ezra Klein writes, “Obama’s finest speeches … elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment. … He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. … Obama is … able to call us … to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal. …”

 

Hitler’s oratory both inspired and elevated the masses. He was not a politician; he was a demigod who would save Germany. The Nazis staged party rallies to create a religious atmosphere, with Hitler’s entrance befitting a god. Through propaganda, he projected himself as the messiah of Germany. An American who had visited Germany at the time of Hitler’s ascendance to power observed, “They think Hitler is God. … [A] German woman sat next to me at the Passion Play, and when they hoisted Jesus on the Cross, she said, ‘There he is. That is our Fuehrer, our Hitler.'”

 

Hitler believed that he was the “Chosen One,” destined to lead Germany to glory and institute a new social order for the world. As Howard K. Smith wrote, “I was convinced that of all the millions on whom the Hitler Myth had fastened itself, the most carried away was Adolf Hitler, himself.”

 

Although Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were outstanding orators and possessed charismatic personalities, they were never messiahs who made audience members swoon. Obama seems to exude the confidence of an anointed one and the certainty of a true believer regarding his own greatness. When asked by an interviewer if he ever had doubts about his foreign policy experience, Obama replied, “Never.”

 

In a speech at UCLA, Michelle Obama told students that she is married to “one of the most brilliant men you will meet in our lifetime,” and the only presidential candidate “who has a chance at healing this nation,” for he understands the need to fix broken souls. Michelle envisions her husband a revolutionary ready to save both America and the planet. “We have a chance, not just to make history, but we can change the world,” she said.

 

Commentators do not say Obama is Hitler, but they do suggest that a dictator can rise in America and bring about a totalitarian state. For that reason, when the leader of the free world possesses a charismatic personality, comes from a socialist background, holds to a progressive worldview, rises to prominence through grandiose speeches, is hailed as the nation’s savior by the masses, is admired by leaders throughout the world, and is elevated to the role of messiah by worshipful followers, it is both reasonable and necessary to wave red flags and sound alarms.

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