Only Ourselves to Blame

I have had a case, Sibley v. Alito et al, pending at the Supreme Court of the United States since January 4, 2008 — some 1825 days.  I think that is the record for a case pending without resolution at the Supreme Court.  I have explained that case in detail before.

My point today is not the merits of that long pending case — though I believe the case has great merit — but rather how can a court refuse to decide a case for over five (5) years?  I fear the answer is that through the collusion of the executive and judicial branches — with the paralyzed legislative branch out to lunch — we now have a system that immunizes its actors from any consequence for misfeasance or malfeasance in office.  In my case, the Supremes can refuse to rule and there is no consequence.  So why would they rule when to do so in my case would expose the very hypocrisy of the judicial system and its actors?  They wouldn’t and thus they don’t.

By Michael Oberndorf · September 10, 2012

http://patriotpost.us/commentary/14689

It has been my experience that conservatives are not stupid. In fact, they tend to be of well above average intelligence, able to grasp complicated issues and understand “nuances.” In addition, they have been a political majority since the 1950s. How then, have we been conned, hoodwinked, and manipulated into letting the Left dictate what is morally right and wrong, what the clear and simple language of the Constitution actually means, what should be taught in our schools, to the exclusion of all else, what constitutes patriotism, the purpose and value of our military, the rights of private property owners, the condition and how we are allowed to use the “environment,” and darn near everything else in the lives of Americans today? How too, have we come to the point where judges legislate from the bench with impunity and regularity? How is it that today we have an executive branch that violates federal laws, and like the courts, does so with impunity and regularity? How is it that the Left has come to dominate so completely that the Attorney General of the United States can be cited for contempt of Congress, and simply thumb his nose and continue his lawless behavior, unchecked? And how can other cabinet secretaries repeatedly lie in public about their actions and policies, again, with impunity and regularity?One also might ask how what used to be a more or less balanced media, with both conservative and liberal newspapers in most cities, turned into a one-sided, far-left driven, character-assassinating propaganda and indoctrination machine, promulgating huge lies, concocting phony polls, and creating “news” rather than reporting it? How did television get turned into a leftist social engineering tool, pushing foul language, promiscuous sex, selfishness and greed, rampant and perverted violence, disrespect for hard work, success, elders and each other, all disguised as “entertainment.” This applies to Hollywood, too.
How did we come to accept that it is beneficial to individuals and society to allow people to get on welfare, in a system that never requires them to get off it, that encourages repetition of the behavior that got them on it in the first place? When did we lose the ability to understand the idea that, “If you give a man a fish, he will eat today. If you teach him to fish, he will eat every day?” And why can’t we grasp that the total lack of self-respect that comes from a life lived with no purpose other than to be taken care of by others leads to the self-hatred and resentment against the providers of that care that underlies the growing crime and mob violence in our Democrat-run urban paradises. And when, exactly, did parents turn over to the far-left National Education Association (NEA) the responsibility for raising their children, teaching them moral values and proper social behavior? This used to be done in the home, by a mother and a father. How did it come about that now the government schools do this, using not teachers, but “educators,” or as the NEA likes to refer to themselves, “agents of change?” How did the schools get turned into far-left indoctrination centers, teaching our children that our country is evil, that humans are bad, that weeds and rodents have more rights than people, that Christianity is oppressive and destructive, that white Europeans are responsible for all the problems in the world? How did we not notice this was happening? A comparison of America today with America of the 1940s and 1950s shows stark, undeniable differences. We are on the very brink of becoming a far-left, totalitarian police state, run by an elitist minority of radical Marxists and neo-fascists. The politicians are just puppets, the well-paid and therefore very willing straw men, for globalist fascists like George Soros and his cronies and minions. In spite of the obfuscation by the media and the hysterical ranting against “Wall Street,” Soros and the global banking cabal have been financing the Left for years, and are behind most of the chaos we are experiencing today. As I noted above, conservatives are a solid majority in America, but we have gotten lax and lazy when it comes to doing what used to be called our “civic duty.” We too were manipulated at an early age to become self-centered to the point that we were more concerned with “getting ahead” than with the eternal vigilance that is necessary to preserve our liberty. This has got to change, immediately.

Regardless of how we feel about Romney, the indisputable fact is that if Barak Hussein Obama is re-elected, America as a free, constitutional republic is dead. However, once we have taken the governing of the country back to We, the People, we must, without hesitation, begin to repeal, roll back, and repair the damage that progressives, liberals, leftists, or whatever they were calling themselves at the time, have done to America. We must stand firm for our principles. No more “compromise.” And we must take no excuses from Congress as to why they can’t.
~     ~     ~     ~MAH in Wisconsin
Monday, September 10, 2012 at 11:32 AM

What is equally disturbing to me is the way segments of our society believe outrageous misrepresentations of the truth without a thought for investigation of the facts, if you can find them. For some reason people think their lives will always go on from day to day, in the same fashion they always have. Younger people know nothing about the atrocities of communism in Europe and the ‘iron curtain’. Those of us who do remember are marked for extermination by the Obama regime as a generation. Extreme? I don’t think so. Even as a child I felt the horror of stories from behind the ‘curtain’ and of people who sought to escape. If we give up now, as a swimmer who has tired of fighting the current and slips quietly beneath the surface, we will not recover our freedom or our constitution.

Gun Rights, Gay Rights, and the Constitution

By Adrien Nash · April 3, 2013  re-posted from patriotpost.us

31 Comments

“Without the Second Amendment we have no right to defend ourselves and our families.”

That is not correct. We have an unalienable right to life and to self-defense, as well as the means of providing self-defense. All the 2nd Amendment does is get in the face of government by ordering it to keep its totalitarian hands off of our rights and our means of self-defense by asserting in the fundamental charter of government that the People possess a right that rightfully goes without saying.

Government is not the source of the right to adequate self-defense, and thanks to the explicit language of the 2nd Amendment, all of those in government and the courts who have a brain and can understand plain language are expected to limit their “right” to abridge or infringe the rights of the People to not only keep but also to “bear” arms, which the Supreme Court has determined does not mean bear arms in one’s home, but in public.

That means that in all those old Western movies in which the town had an ordinance that mandated turning in one’s weapons while in town, the ordinance was an offense and violation of a fundamental constitutional right unless the town was in a federal territory and not a state. Did Wyatt Earp really engage in the shoot-out at the OK corral with the Clancy brothers over their refusal to turn in their firearms? If so, it must have been during the pre-statehood period.

I heard on a history show once that the number of shootings/killing in one western town like Boot Hill or Deadwood was one per day on average. So clearly people kept and carried their arms with them.

An example of the overreach of federal power, one that should give you shivers, is seen in a recent writing about the 122nd anniversary of the massacre of 297 Sioux natives at Wounded Knee Creek. The feds decided they had the right to cancel the Native Americans’ right to possess firearms, and since the natives weren’t keen on surrendering their paid-for property, the were fair game for extermination.

One interesting fact is that at the battle of Little Big Horn, Custer and the 7th Cavalry were killed because the tribes that came together to kill-before-being-killed were armed with better weapons than the cavalry. The cavalry only had single shot rifles from the Civil War era, while the Indians had gotten hold of Remington repeating rifles, making each warrior with one of them as effective as a dozen cavalrymen. So the come-to-kill cavalry got what was come to it.

The right of self-defense is innate to life in this world, along with the right to exercise it via swords, knives, or firearms, as is the right to marry, but as with the right to own arms, there are limitations which protect society and do not violate anyone’s rights because some “rights” have never existed.

Individuals have never possessed the right to own nor use weapons of mass destruction, just as individuals have never possessed the right to marry anyone whom they choose. Throughout history, for much of the human race the choice of a marriage partner was not even a right of the individual but was a right of the parents. But even in societies that didn’t follow such paternalistic regimentation (for better or for worse), individuals have never possessed certain options when it came to marriage.

The right to mate and form permanent unions is a natural right accepted by all societies and nations, but none of them accept it without limits.

The justices of the Supreme Court are being put in a corner and aren’t sure what to do or whether or not to even accept the proposition that the People have a right to defend their state constitution’s amendments or propositions (California’s Proposition 8, the officially recognized definition of marriage) if the political hacks running the state aren’t willing to defend state law before the court. The justices are probably hesitant to impose federal rulings regarding state matters, which marriage inherently is.

The argument that homosexuals are being denied equal rights is absurd on its face because marriage is inherently a discriminating institution being as no civilized society allows one to marry an animal, a child, a sibling or parent, multiple wives or husbands, (or both), nor a member of the same sex, because of scriptural prohibitions and visceral revulsion toward such couplings.

The People decide what state law is and federal judges have no authority under the constitution to override conventional social norms that do not involve being denied a civil or human right.

Marriage is a right only to the extent that society and religion validate it. The State has no moral basis to decide what the morality of the People must be.

The government, judges, governors and legislators do not have a right to tell the People what their religious foundations must be or not be, anymore than the government possesses a fundamental right to ownership of your children and can legitimately take them whenever you fail to carry out its orders and social engineering edits.

But the government acknowledges no such limit on its power and authority as we saw with the Health Care ruling. You must submit as a government slave to coercive federal mandates that require you to accept strong-arm extortion that forces you to engage unwillingly in an involuntary contract that requires a monthly payment to a health insurance company. So much for individual liberty in the land of the once-free.

Under the rule of Law and not men (with their opinions and preferences), to institute a fundamental change in society requires securing the permission of the People via an amendment to the Constitution, state or federal. Since there is no amendment to the Constitution securing the right of homosexuals to marry, the right is not and never has been secured, so how in the world can they claim a right that has never existed?

Their claim to such a right is made in the total absence of any history to support it. The States have always interfered in the legal contract of marriage because of the legal issues involved, even requiring a “license” accompanied by a fee. What “right” requires a license and a fee? Do you have to register and get a license before having a baby? Before buying and owning property? Or food?

Those who qualify for a marriage license fit a criteria decided on by the People or their representatives, not judges. Judges have no moral authority to tell the People what social norms are to be — except when laws are passed that violate human rights, such as would slavery laws, or social disenfranchisement laws that bar some people from voting or mixing equally in society.

Such rulings are fundamental in that they ban discrimination, but the proposition passed by the California voters (Prop. 8) bans nothing. It merely states that the State’s official definition of marriage is that which it has always been since before statehood. It’s like a defense of the English language and the meaning of its words versus a bastardization of the definitions of words (as the Communists engaged in by inserting the word “Democratic” in the name of their oppressive totalitarian regimes). [Pejoration: root of pejorative; in linguistics, a change of meaning, for the worse.]

Calling a dictatorship a democracy is no less illegitimate than calling marriage something other that the union of two consenting unrelated adults of opposite genders. It simply isn’t what it isn’t, so in order to make it what it isn’t requires the consent of the people, just as was needed for changing the law of the land regarding the freedom to make and sell liquor (Prohibition, the 18th Amendment); the unprecedented right of women to cast political votes in elections (the 19th Amendment); and the right of freemen to own slaves and indentured servants (the 13th Amendment).

Fundamental societal change requires an alteration in the fundamental law of the land, and that type of alteration is only legitimately effected via the only means given in our Constitution to achieve it, which is found in Article Five. It spells out the process for passing an amendment to the national charter that binds us all together as a nation.

Without following it, there is no legitimacy to any law passed by Congress which by-passes it. So the question of whether or not so-and-so supports gay marriage should be irrelevant. The only question that should be in the public’s mind is does so-and-so support a constitutional amendment permitting it. So-and-so may be a state or federal politician, or a state or federal judge.

Judges have the authority to declare laws passed by Congress to be unconstitutional, and that might be based not on a law violating the Constitution but rather violating the social norms of the society that ratified the Constitution, making it and the process of amending it, the law of the land. Remember, Congress did not and could not outlaw slavery. That was the prerogative of only the People. Same with same-sex marriage. But not only does the “loyal opposition” not adhere to the constitutional process, they aren’t even aware that they are supposed to. A perfect recipe for disaster.

 

 

 

 

Socio-Political Monkey Business Part 2

Darwin’s Domino Effect
By Debra Rae · February 5, 2013

Scientific Darwinism maintains that, without master design, a single cell is responsible for all of life — this, through a process of random changes over some 4.5 billion years. My intent is not so much to challenge this theory, but rather to dispute its claim to exclusive, uncontestable king-of- the-mountain status.

You know, as do I, that to question evolution “as fact, not theory” is to wallop the wasp’s nest. At increased risk to potentially lethal stings are the purported weak predestined to obsolescence. Presumed-to-be highly evolved elitists within the ranks of academics (both in the scientific community and atop the totem pole of higher learning) afford no room whatsoever for challenge. After all, favored races in the struggle for life naturally know what’s best. For them (and them alone), experiential open-mindedness is unnecessary.
Heads AND Tails? No Can Do

Academic elitists champion what David Horowitz calls institutional leftism (political correctness). Laden with laughable absurdities and ludicrous inconsistencies, politically correct thought serves as umbrella under which many postmodern “-isms” huddle. United causes include civil/ gender/ sexual orientation rights and radical environmentalism.

Problem is, Darwinism and institutional leftism are mutually exclusive. In Darwinian thought, for example, homosexuals fall short of the fittest, favored class because they don’t procreate to ensure survival of “their kind.” Repeat that out loud, and you’re certain to be branded a homophobe. Darwin’s belief system is by no means politically correct.

Ayn Rand accurately identified the racist as a person who, based upon racial origin, ascribes collective qualities to others — precisely what evolutionary-minded Margaret Sanger did upon founding Planned Parenthood. Sanger referred to blacks, immigrants, and indigents as “human weeds” and “reckless breeders”; and she went so far as to advocate extermination of the “feebleminded.” Today, Sanger’s lauded as a veritable goddess of sustainability. Parrot her and see where that gets you!

Darwin likewise embraced the misogynist notion that women are “less evolved” than men. For doling out dated Darwinian dogma favoring the more highly evolved, superior male gender, you’ll likely be tarred and feathered!

My point being, if scientific evolution were indeed settled science, then its promoters could not possibly espouse mutually exclusive precepts of political correctness. Simply put, one cannot win a coin toss by calling both “heads and tails.” But some attempt to do just that by clinging to Darwinism (heads) while, to the contrary, enforcing the conceptual straight jacket of political correctness (tails).
Tolerance vs. “Merciless Hate”

Darwinists applaud man’s maturing vision (i.e., Marxism) toward superior, balanced communities. Their utopian ideal specifically excludes “useless eaters,” “miserable, degraded savages,” and those deemed “unfit and defective.” Accordingly, evolutionary theory has been characterized as an expression of “merciless hate.” Tolerant it isn’t.

Case in point: British economist Thomas Malthus influenced Darwin’s random, unplanned breeding theory. However, Malthusian speculation on dangers of population growth (which since has been soundly discredited) intended to eliminate people. To that end, the “well bred” feel commissioned to target, control, and (when necessary) eradicate “unfit” masses and thereby move the evolutionary process forward.

In Darwin’s world, the weakest links somehow deserve to be expunged as “maladjusted morons and misfits.” This flawed line of elitist thinking is precisely what spawned slavery, segregation, racist immigration laws (to turn away post-war Jewish refugees), the infamous Tuskegee Project, and application of the “one-drop rule” to ensure racial purity/ hygiene.
The Beat Goes On

Make no mistake. Elitism, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and the Culture of Death all are rooted and grounded in Darwinism; even more, the evolutionary theory with all its trappings continues to ransack Western culture. Neo-Nazism, the Aryan Nation, and other eugenic, neo-Nazi groups all take their cues from Darwin. Whether by abortion, infanticide, forced sterilization, euthanasia, “comfort care,” or assisted suicide, “useless eaters” are targeted for extinction; and “the unfit” remain subject to human experimentalism and pharmacological abuse.

Because humans are perceived as mere products of time and chance, it stands to reason that life is devoid of elevated meaning. Rather, Darwinian theory resurrects the non-transcendent, religious expression of social enlightenment and defers to the overriding principle that “ends justify means.”

Marketed to appeal to man’s best intentions (the common good, survival, advanced societies), evolutionary thought instead perpetuates a host of societal ills — e.g., unrestricted freedom in commerce, called social Darwinism. Recall that, when the housing bubble burst, only the “favored fittest” were bailed out.

Accepting as settled science that “the strong” naturally crowd out and kill “the weak” arguably opens the door to anarchy, terrorism, back-to-nature extremism, and perpetual war. When a privileged few (the strong) held sway over emasculated underlings (the weak) in Nazi Germany and Russia, respectively, the Holocaust and communist genocides ensued.
Conclusion

Okay, let’s see if I’ve got this straight. Without challenge, I’m to accept as settled science no other hypotheses than those of a college dropout who borrowed elements of his theory (about which he expressed doubts) from a pseudo-scientist’s poem. Fortuitously, Darwin’s theory validated his “good old boys” network of British elitists; and, arguably, it spawned socio-political atrocities of monumental proportion. Yet, I’m expected to reject Bible belief and personal relationship with my Creator for non-transcendent, seventeenth-century social enlightenment principles with which Darwin identified. Call me ignorant, but I’m not buying it.

Women in Combat

By Walter E. Williams · February 6, 2013

A senior Defense Department official said the ban on women in combat should be lifted because the military’s goal is “to provide a level, gender-neutral playing field.” I’d like to think the goal of the military should be to have the toughest, meanest fighting force possible. But let’s look at “gender-neutral playing field.”

The Army’s physical fitness test in basic training is a three-event physical performance test used to assess endurance. The minimum requirement for 17- to 21-year-old males is 35 pushups, 47 situps and a two-mile run in 16 minutes, 36 seconds or less. For females of the same age, the minimum requirement is 13 pushups, 47 situps and a 19:42 two-mile run. Why the difference in fitness requirements? “USMC Women in the Service Restrictions Review” found that women, on average, have 20 percent lower aerobic power, 40 percent lower muscle strength, 47 percent less lifting strength and 26 percent slower marching speed than men.

William Gregor, professor of social sciences at the Army’s Command and General Staff College, reports that in tests of aerobic capacity, the records show, only 74 of 8,385 Reserve Officers’ Training Corps women attained the level of the lowest 16 percent of men. The “fight load” — the gear an infantryman carries on patrol — is 35 percent of the average man’s body weight but 50 percent of the average Army woman’s weight. In his examination of physical fitness test results from the ROTC, dating back to 1992, and 74,000 records of male and female commissioned officers, only 2.9 percent of women were able to attain the men’s average pushup ability and time in the two-mile run.

In a January report titled “Defense Department ‘Diversity’ Push for Women in Land Combat” Elaine Donnelly, director of the Center for Military Readiness, points to U.S. Army studies showing that women are twice as likely to suffer injuries and are three times more undeployable than men. Women are less likely to be able to march under load — 12.4 miles in five hours with an 83-pound assault load — and to be able to crawl, sprint, negotiate obstacles with that load or move a casualty weighing 165 pounds or more while carrying that load. Plus, there are muscle-challenging feats, even for men, such as field repairs on an M1A1 Abrams tank.

Then there’s the pregnancy issue, which makes women three to four times as likely as men to be undeployable. And once deployed, they often have to be medically evacuated, leaving units understrength. Finally, there’s another difference between men and women rarely considered in deliberation about whether women should be in combat. All measures of physical aggressiveness show that men, maybe because of testosterone levels 10 times higher, are more aggressive, competitive and hostile than women. Those attributes are desirable for combat.

Here are a couple of what-if questions. Suppose a combat unit is retreating in mountainous terrain in Afghanistan, where a person’s aerobic capacity really makes a difference, and the women in the unit can’t keep up with the men. What would you propose, leaving the women behind to possibly be captured by the Taliban or having the unit slow down so the women can keep up, thereby risking causalities or capture? What if a male soldier is washed out of the Army’s Advanced Infantry Training program because he cannot pass its physical fitness test whereas a female soldier who can’t perform at his level is retained? Should male soldiers be able to bring suit and be awarded damages for sex discrimination? How much respect can a male soldier have for his female counterpart, who is held to lower performance standards?

There’s another issue. The Selective Service System’s website has the following message about draft registration: “Even though the Secretary of Defense has decided to allow women in combat jobs, the law has not been changed to include this. Consequently, only men are currently required to register by law with Selective Service during ages 18 thru 25. Women still do not register.” How can that, coupled with differences in performance standards, possibly be consistent with the Defense Department’s stated agenda “to provide a level, gender-neutral playing field”?

COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM

http://patriotpost.us/opinion/16574

Wayne Miller in Hinesville, Ga
Wednesday, February 6, 2013 at 6:58 AM

One of the things never mentioned when talking about women in combat is what happens to the unit when she gets pregnant and has to be sent home. I can tell you that during peacetime someone had to step in and do both their job and hers. In a combat situation that would make the mission more dangerous because of her not being there pulling her weight. 22 years in the Army tells me this is not a good policy change.
Reply | Permalink

fred in oregon
Wednesday, February 6, 2013 at 7:53 AM

geeeze. women in combat. this above most else i read, is by far the dumbest idea yet. dumb dumb dumb. while i cannot speak directly to the subject,as i have not been in the military, i can speak about what i observed at my police accedemy class. we had 5 women in training to be cops.the “standards” in physicle fitness and ability were considerably lower for the “ladies” than the men. the women continually failed in the physicle areas. yet they were given a “pass” through the entire course of instruction. on the last day, before we were to be awarded our diplomas, all of us were required to do “felony” traffic stops on suspect vehicles with hostages in the vehicles. 3 out of 5 of the women in my class, REAPEDLY, after INTENSE INSTRUCTION on who not to shoot, shot everybody in the vehicles. not 1 time, not 2 times but 3 TIMES. the men were not allowed to make a mistake even 1 time. if we shot 1 of the hostages, just 1, we were washed out of the program and did not graduate. now i know shooting people is not the same as “carrying” a combat load, but it did appear that the 3 women that did not graduate became too flustered and confused, and simply eliminated the threat by killing everybody in the cars. and now the government wants women to do combat. if it wasnt so serious, it would be laughable. i was taught that women are special, to be protected, seems that is also gone by the wayside.

fred in oregon
Wednesday, February 6, 2013 at 7:59 AM

pardon me, i forget to add the following. the 2 women that did graduate, did not last 5 years on the job. they wisely decided to get married, have babies and be moms. the women i did work with, were often using excessive force during and after an arrest. and were ALWAYS given a pass. theres something about smacking a guy with your night-stick after hes in cuffs, thats just not right.

rab in jo, mo
Wednesday, February 6, 2013 at 2:23 PM

So, only abstinence is 100% effective – you act as if this is an impossible standard. It is something to consider then, before enlisting and signing up for a combat MOS. Last I checked, the military is a voluntary commitment, don’t like the rules? Don’t enlist. I am not saying men and women both must be celibate, but if a male soldier impregnates a woman, the military does not lose the combat effectiveness of that soldier. If a female soldier becomes pregnant, then that soldier is out of commission for some time and the effectiveness of the unit is impaired. What about all the training time and effort put into that soldier, then when she’s needed for combat, she’s going to call a “time out” for a preventable medical condition? Who takes up the slack then? I’d consider that being derelict.

B. Hall in Harrisville
Wednesday, February 6, 2013 at 1:47 PM

There are many, many ways “to serve your country in the Military” for females, the front lines IS NOT the way to do it ! Take a good look at ALL the countries that our military has a ‘Physical Presence’ in, WHICH, if any, hold their own women up to any respect or importance ? Middle Eastern countries loathe & despise America (except for what $$ they can weasel out of us), if ‘females’ are engaged, WHO DO YOU THINK THEY ARE GOING TO GO AFTER FIRST, TO CAPTURE, RAPE, TORTURE, & KILL ????? Imagine, if you will, the diabolical “Bataan March” or “Hanoi Hilton Imprisonment”, IF THERE HAD BEEN WOMEN IN THE INFANTRIES CAPTURED ?? The Abu-dhabi (sp ?) incidents had female soldiers present when the enemies were “humiliated” & that infuriated & inflamed the exposure & punishing of OUR soldiers. In the Middle Eastern world, to question or infer a lack of SUPERIORITY to the Male Culture of Dominance begs problems & putting women there, only heightens & increases the risks to ALL of our Military Personnel in that part of the world. Yes, the pregnancy issue is one factor, but then I might go on a limb here and suggests that the majority of the females (?) who are pushing for this change are NOT as likely to get pregnant as supposed, and have “butch” partners, or ARE the Alpha partner, & want ‘to prove’ they are as “macho” as their male counterparts. This is REALLY more about getting gay partners on the roles of Military Benefits & Retirements, if the truth be told. The fact that they are already talking about concessions for Physical Fitness, weight loads carried, drafting personnel, etc.says volumes. We are carrying this “Neutral-gender” puke waaaay too far already, just to appease 2 % of the population, (just look at what has been stirred up with the Boy Scouts of America) ! Demi Moore did us no favors making “G.I. Jane”, & considering where her life is right now, she did herself no favor either. (Can you imagine her in the platoon led by John Wayne, invading “The Sands of Iwo-Jima” ?) I just can’t see Martha pushing off in a row boat across the Delaware, or Julia Grant riding to Appomattox, or Beatrice Patton riding in the tank behind George’s, or Jean MacArthur wading onto the beach, or Brenda Schwarzkopf heading out with a “pack” across the sand. When the chips are down, I want a red-blooded American MALE on the front lines as they have been doing since the 1700′s. Don’t “fix” what ain’t broke.

Master Gunny in tifton GA
Wednesday, February 6, 2013 at 3:41 PM

From over 30 years of military service I could recount dozens of stories about why women in combat is just a terrible idea but no one in the fantasy land of liberal thought would listen or understand. It is truly tragic that the people making these decisions have never served a day in the service nor been any closer to combat than the Saturday night fights. They are not just putting our servicemen and women in grave danger they are risking the safety of the unit and perhaps the nation. Liberalism is a mental disorder and sadly seems to be untreatable.

The Tyranny Before Us

Hitler, Obama, tyranny
by Dave Bronson  30 Jan 2013

At a recent dinner party I had the opportunity to ask an elderly acquaintance a question I thought she was uniquely qualified to answer. You see, she grew up in Germany in the 1930’s just as Adolph Hitler came to power. She was injured during the Allied bombing of her home and then married an American soldier whereupon she settled in America.

I asked her, “Katherine, do you see any similarities between Hitler’s Germany in the 1930’s and America today?” My question prompted a swift, if not indelicate, kick under the table from the hostess, a dear friend. Fortunately, Katherine is a bit hard of hearing so my gaffe went unanswered, or at least ignored. The hostess then pulled me aside and began to explain the ‘delicacies’ to me.

You see, to this day Katherine adores Adolph Hitler. Furthermore, many if not most Germans of her vintage do so as well. I was shocked! Didn’t Katherine and her fellow German octogenarians understand that everyone is supposed to hate Hitler… everyone?!

My hostess, now flanked by her husband, explained further. Hitler in the 1930’s, and even after his death, was extremely popular. He did many great and good things for a nation suffering terribly and needlessly under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. He built roads, bridges and hospitals. He put people back to work while he rebuilt the economy. In less than ten years he accomplished the miraculous … even while he began to commit the unspeakable.

With my indiscretion now mercifully behind me I realized I had just experienced a teachable moment. That is, a tyrant so universally reviled for committing such horrific acts could actually be revered by the kind, decent, and normal man or woman next door. But how could they be so fooled? How could they witness such evil and still admire the author of it? Especially with over sixty years of hindsight.

The answer is remarkably simple; Adolph Hitler was not always a tyrant. As he rose to political power his vision for a better Germany lifted his nation from the depths of a severe depression and the humiliation of defeat. But more importantly, he gave his countrymen hope for better future while he returned to them their pride in their homeland, the pride they so passionately desired.

Tyrants are not uniformly evil. They are capable of great good and small kindnesses. They smile, they laugh and they love their children. But eventually they embrace the evil which defines their tyranny, and then those who gave them their power begin to pay a terrible price.
First a tyrant tells you he cares for you, then he presumes to think for you, then he simply tells you what to do. This is the essence of tyranny.

Then, those who presume to question his methods are ridiculed and then silenced. Those who resist his usurpations are imprisoned and finally eliminated… and all for the expressed good of society. Mankind has witnessed this progression time and again since the beginning of time.

No nation, no people are immune to the temptations which empower a tyrant and blind them to his evils. When conditions are ripe the right man with the right image saying just the right things can sweep to power with surprisingly little effort… and even less scrutiny. Indeed, America itself is not immune to the Siren’s call of the ‘Great Man’ promising prosperity ahead in exchange for more power… his power. If Germany, which gave the world Luther, Bach and the most educated citizenry in the world can succumb to the wiles of a Hitler, so too can Americans relinquish just a bit more liberty for the mere promise of security and prosperity.

I believe the potential for tyranny lives in each of us, waiting for opportunity to beckon. That is why it is so necessary for each of us to remain vigilant for the tyrant-to-be walking amongst us. He won’t be sporting horns or a long red tail. He will be handsome to most and charming to the rest. He will be articulate in speech and well dressed. He will always be pleasant to the eye and ear.

And he will be recognized for what he truly is early on by only those few who are inclined to remember history so as not to relive it. Others, less wise, will be deceived immediately and perpetually. They will disregard the harsh lessons of history and cling to the vague promises of the here-and-now.

Now to the question before us. Do I believe President Obama has the capacity to be a tyrant? Most certainly. He is no more immune to the temptations of ultimate power than the rest of us. And as he seeks to find “reasonable” steps to address the ills of our nation, the concerns about his understanding of the Founder’s intent begin to pile up.

This brings me to my conclusion. I am not so concerned here with tyrants themselves but with how they come to be. How did China, with more centuries as an advanced civilization than any other, inflict upon itself, and the world, Chairman Mao? How did Russia permit Stalin as its brutal leader? And Germany… Hitler? Italy, Mussolini?

I believe that a tyrant must have four conditions extant for him to fulfill his ruinous destiny. One, a compliant and sympathetic press. Two, a supportive or subjugated legislative branch. Three, a powerful police force which swears fealty to the tyrant himself. And four, an unarmed or significantly under armed citizenry. Of course, it is critical to note that if the press were to operate unencumbered by its own biased ideology or by the tyrant himself, conditions two through four simply could not survive. Nonetheless, at the end of the the day the tyrant can, and will, permit no meaningful opposition. Thankfully, not all four of these conditions currently exist in America… not yet.

As America struggles through its current crisis the very human hope for a better future becomes overwhelming, sometimes clouding judgment. And it is in this hope that danger for our republic lurks. For when a nation puts its hope in nothing greater than a man that nation stands on the precipice, blind to the danger just one step ahead. That is why America was built not on the personality of men but on the principles good men and women ponder and articulate… principles free men and women cherish and contend for.

America has survived some 240 years through great tragedy and trauma but it has always rested on those principles. But today I worry whether those principles are even recognized let alone exercised, as we sacrifice our citizenship to the lust for cheap labor, our sovereignty on the altar of climate change and our prosperity to our own greed and ignorance.
So then, absent a return to the principles upon which the American experiment was founded, and by which it once flourished, it will continue to flounder and eventually fail, both as a nation and as a people. Then, we Americans will elect a tyrant who promises prosperity even while his tyranny consumes us… and we will have only ourselves to blame.
Read more: http://joemiller.us/2013/01/the-tyranny-before-us/#ixzz2Je7hheuP

Johnny Jones
Geoge Soros is the worst kind of Jew. He collaborated with Nazi’s to exterminate his own people. He’s is a evil, wretched excuse for a human being.

Lloyd Revalee

Oh easily we are fooled and taken in by those kind hearted souls that made up the Germany of the 1930-40′s. I was in Germany immediately after the war had ended, and I found that a lot of the younger Germans did indeed worship Hitler, and some blamed the German people for letting him down. But don’t let ourselves be fooled once again by the German people, and begin to believe that Hitler was a great and good man. Many of those same Germans believed in him, followed his evil plan to make German the ruler of the world. They were quick to persecute those who did not go along with Hitler’s evil plans. They arrested, confined, and even killed dissidents for little or no reason. They allowed personal property to be taken from the rightful owner, so that they could take it over and prosper from someone else’s hard work. Those that adored and supported Hitler were just like him, and followed him in order to enjoy the fruits of his evilness. When it all fell apart, they did not blame Hitler, they blamed the honest Germans that did not support him in his evil plans.

stevenlehar

Interesting story! I knew a French girl years ago who absolutely idolized Napoleon. I was deeply puzzled. Now I begin to understand. Great article! Thanks!

stevenlehar to browning

If you call that greatness, doing an “Adolf Hitler” and preemptively attacking all his neighbors to bring them under French dominion. Predictable but delayed-response consequences — the “allies” (everyone else) belatedly wakes up to the danger and unite, bringing an end to the invasion of “French Greatness”. Happens again and again. Not in America! (Not yet). Our greatness is NOT in our dominion over others. Our greatness is the spread of liberty through the world. Now that’s a greatness to die for!

barbiecakes
At least their dictator created bridges, roads, hospitals and put people back to work. Obama has done nothing but destroy our economy. SEIG HEIL!!

reggiec
What is really frightening is that every tyrant and their followers devoutly believe they are doing the right thing. They do not believe their tyranny is evil. They believe they are combating evil. Such is the warped and corrupted way their minds work.

Lizelot

Excellent analysis and reminder of how easy it is to be fooled by superficial impressions. Also, how quickly that web is spun and how difficult, sometimes almost impossible, it is to escape the trap.

We have already been told to scrap the display of the Ten Commandments and to avoid all public displays of piety, and our judiciary has been complicit. Our women hb given the “right” to kill their unborn, actually their child, and they glory in that right. Our institutes of education are used to teach us the joys of sex instead of the serious study of the classics. EOs are used to bypass our Congress even though that body was meant to advise & consent. Our mainstream press has become an echo chamber of the dominant party, and our opposition is in disarray due to inside divisions. Oh, and we are again faced with far-reaching gun control even though it won’t prevent future mass murder by deranged individuals.
At which point are we on the road to serfdom?

pearl87

Mr. Bronson should not be so credulous. Unless he has proof of this absurd claim that “many if not most Germans of her vintage” “adore Hitler”, such as verifiable studies and/or polls, he shouldn’t try to pass off this entirely false statement as fact. How do I know it is hogwash? Because my mother happens to also be a German war-bride. I’ve known many Germans from this era and, while they may grudgingly concede that Hitler made the trains run on time, NONE of them even like Hitler, much less “adore” him. My mother’s family despised Hitler from the beginning for the same reasons most Americans can relate to: he was an authoritarian tyrant, who sought to destroy the rights of Germans to live their lives according to their own will. When someone mandates that all citizens must display a photo of the “Fuhrer” in their homes and all children must attend indoctrination camps (Hitler youth), you know the citizens are not going to approve.

I don’t know if Dave Bronson is a rogue or a fool, but his claim here is simply wrong.

hassia James Vetzel

In case you could not find the quote in full.

” If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet”.

The Lupine Socialist Dream

January 30, 2013
By Glenn Fairman

“A society of sheep begets a government of wolves.”  — Bertrand de Jouvenel

In his short but profound work, The Ethics of Redistribution, the 20th Century French Philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel uncovered the ontological core of collectivism’s ideological precepts. In the process, he succeeded in ripping off the mask of altruism that accompanies all economic structures that ultimately infringe upon human initiative and freedom in service to a “benevolent and promethean” reordering of human affairs. On the surface, it appears that confiscatory taxation and the distribution of its proceeds are consistent with a theory of justice that elevates “fairness” and demonizes the inequalities that arise from unfettered markets. Yet Jouvenel, with stunning clarity, draws our attention to the true locus of intent that a systematic revolution of economics portends for societies that place their faith in collectivist schemes. Thus, he writes:

The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.

It then becomes apparent that the state worshipping eye, occupied with the misdirection of trumpeted social justice platitudes and the self-interested anticipatory largesse secured through brigandage of the wealthier nodes of society, does not apprehend the subterranean institutions that a regime must set into motion for the mechanics of redistribution to occur. Nor does it readily comprehend that a society’s understanding of liberty, along with its attendant theory of property, necessarily dissolves as the regime accrues power in its own name’s sake.

The expansionist state methodically grows in scope and power into unanticipated nooks and crannies of the private sphere and ultimately metastasizes into a structure where equality not only eclipses negative freedom, but government assumes the gravitas of an avenging angel that rewrites the codes of morality and eventually becomes the arbiter of both success and failure by virtue of its laws, regulatory schemes, and patronage.

As republics inexorably begin their death swoons into full democracies, that great magnetic pull towards equality in all of its forms becomes culturally irresistible, and this degraded form of regime, warned of by Plato and Aristotle, eventually acts as a leveling agent for society. It is but a few small steps from egalitarian collectivist economics to ideological homogeneity. This is not to say that humanity will assume a common face, but that as the incrementally empowered regime reaches its full bloom and ascendency, it by necessity becomes the sole arbiter of moral questions. Since philosophy and the search for transcendent truths are both relegated to a defunct history, the state will countenance and tolerate various modes of being as long as these do not either question the sovereign authority of the regime or declare that their own political expression is categorically superior to the others. It is there that its tolerance bluntly terminates. Jouvenel characterizes the full blown character of the democratic descent:

Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny’s incubation.

It matters not if the tyranny is of the character of Stalin or of a softened rule of technocrats and managers. Once the rights and liberties of a people fall into disuse or are traded for the pledge of economic security, the people’s envy of all distinctions becomes an internal leveler that the regime gives full moral sanction to. This effectively sounds the death knell for individuation, entrepreneurship, and the classical virtues — in effect, the traditional mores of the American dream that are founded in self-sacrifice, industriousness, and self sufficiency apart from the cloying arms of the collective. The transition from citizen to subject proceeds apace as the quality of a Socialist-defined existence grows meager and life itself loses its enchantment and luster while men and women grow smaller.

When the decrepit Twentieth Century dinosaurs of Marxism met their inglorious ends, it was left to the Progressives and Keynesians to soften the gaze of the collectives’ Stalinist façade; and by jettisoning sound fiscal and monetary policy, a clever political elite could spend profligately while postponing the Day of Reckoning. That day is perhaps at hand for the West, and all we have to show for our labors is a gargantuan debt and an edifice of government institutionally entrenched in nearly every aspect of our lives. In retrospect, Jouvenel was prescient in that he foresaw redistribution as the velvet manacles that ushered in an irresistible state power — but he left out one detail. We have not merely sold our own birthrights for boiled cabbage, but we have passed on this crushing debt to our sons and daughters as we have become profligates of the lowest order. And long after we are dead, should America survive so long, those same children will be tied to the burden we ourselves could not face on our own, having lived so lavishly at their expense.

Is there any doubt that our heirs will be facing a bleak and impoverished future as we pass on our very own special incarnation of the Lupine American Dream: having taken every lamb for our own ravenous appetites, while spitting out the bones and scraps for our young cubs to fight over?

Glenn Fairman is retired and masquerades as The Eloquent Professor at http://www.palookavillepost.com and can be reached for therapy at arete5000@dslextreme.com

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/01/the_lupine_socialist_dream.html#ixzz2JY0YN8yp
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VonMisesJr

They should understand what is at stake and this quote from Von Mises sums it up well:
“The state is a human institution, not a superhuman being. He who says “state” means coercion and compulsion. He who says: There should be a law concerning this matter, means: The armed men of the government should force people to do what they do not want to do, or not to do what they like. He who says: This law should be better enforced, means: the police should force people to obey this law. He who says: The state is God, deified arms and prisons. The worship of the state is the worship of force.”

liljenborg

The left loves to warn people about the power and greed of the “rich” and how they might use the power of their wealth to oppress people in their pursuit of more money as if the economy were a zero sum game in which one can only get money by taking, stealing, or cheating it away from someone else. They miss (or ignore) that the truly dangerous and oppressive despots are those greedy for power who use their political power to make themselves and their friends wealthy in their pursuit of ever more power. Because political power IS a zero sum game: whereas you can create new wealth with new ideas, new products, and new resources, you can only have more power by taking power, and therefore freedom, from the people around you.

FactsWillOut

Great article. The Frankfurt School has merely accelerated this process. When one grants coercive power over the individual to a group, as soon as more power rests with a group than with the individual, it will always, sooner or later, devolve into tyranny. The individual must have the monopoly on force, period.

numbatdog

Perhaps a government growing ever bigger is not so much a planned outcome but the natural direction of any human endeavor.

Consider a small business. Once it is running successfully, it begins to expand till it dominates its market and is no longer a small business.
Socialism is simply the easiest and fastest way for a government to expand.

Actually its up to the voters and taxpayers to curb government size.
Normally this is the same person but now half the voters are not taxpayers. Therefore many voters have little interest in smaller government.
The result is it’s now growing in leaps and bounds and will keep doing so till it completely dominates America.

It’s getting really old reading comments that portray America as a single homogenous state when it is a union of 50 states.  If you want to maintain a fantasy of a dictator rising to the use of power previously un-wielded, then you need to start referring to State governor dictators, not a presidential dictator because civil unrest is a state militia matter, not a federal matter

arnash
.  Governors command the state militia not the president.  Get with the reality of your own country for goodness sake.  There never will be and never can be a dictatorial president because he has no such authority over the population of individual states unless there is nationwide martial law due to a civil war.  But that is a chapter that is behind us and won’t be repeated on a national level.
We are all in a lot of individual state life-rafts that are cobbled together in a union.  We can move from one to another and leave the ones that are sinking and disintegrating.  That is a freedom that can never be banned.  So as Detroit is left to its own pathetic fate, so some states may be also, but the nation will continue, and some states will continue to do most things right.  They are the light that will not go out because their people hold to American values.  The hope for a survivable future lies with those states that get and keep their house in order.  It seems that there are more and more of them and that the path forward is one on which states will become more and more polarized toward fiscal conservatism or toward liberal excess.
It would be bad enough if we just have the USA to be concerned about, but the future of Europe seems to be a lost cause as the consequences of their massive debt and deficit spending will  take them down, being as it is far beyond sustainable or repairable.  If just a matter of time because their populations are morally compromised by an incurable case of spoiled selfishness, as are millions of Americans who live by getting something for nothing.

yvette99

Contrary to that overheated “ontological core” nonsense (copy that from an old sophomore essay, did we?), you are describing the what, not the why. I have never seen an explanation of why lefties think and feel the way they do — is it brain tumors, endocrine imbalance, lack of synapses, second hand smoke, what? Put away your thesaurus and simply tell us that.

Glenn Fairman

I have touched on this (pre-political foundations) many times in other essays, as have many writer’s here. Their theory of justice and property (fairness vs. desert); their conception of human nature (fixed vs. plastic); their perspective of temporality over eternal; an emotion-oriented worldview rather than a more rationalist view; a seething covetousness lurking behind an egalitarian mask; a psychological indolence manifesting as a right of entitlement; a general ignorance of the mechanics of wealth creation; an infantilism that seeks succor in dependence rather than autonomy; a culture of learned helplessness cultivated by the state that mines votes like a veal farm breeds tender flesh…..but perhaps this should be elementary by now…..

Bruce_Bishop

yvette99,

I would recommend Evan Sayet’s new book, “The Kindergarden of Evil — How the Modern Liberal Thinks,” for an excellent explanation of the mental process that causes liberals to be as wrong as wrong can be on, literally, every issue.

Sayet was a typical New York/Hollywood liberal who couldn’t understand why, after 9/11, his friends were blaming us for the terrorist attacks. This caused him to undertake a serious study of leftist thinking which culminated in his making a presentation to the Heritage Foundation about five years ago. This 47 minute speech attracted over 650,000 views on Youtube and is entitled “How the Modern Liberal Thinks.”

Sayet’s book is only about 100 pages, but it is well researched and well presented.

For a quick peek at what Sayet found, he quotes Howard Zinn, whose leftist “history” book “A People’s History of the United States,” is widely assigned reading for our children. Zinn’s statement, “Objectivity is impossible, and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable.”

Sayet elaborates on Zinn’s statement, if objectivity is impossible and undesirable, there can be no objective truth. If there is no basis for truth, then there can be no rational judgement to separate what’s better from what’s worse, good from evil, or behavior that leads to success from behavior that leads to failure.

Therefore, success must be the result of cheating and failure must be caused by injustice or societal failure.

Also, Dr. Lyle Rossiter’s book, “The Liberal Mind – The Psychological Causes of Political Madness,” is quite helpful. Rossiter is a clinical psychiatrist who studied liberals for forty years. Dr. Rossiter has at least one excellent article in the archives of American Thinker.

Hal K

The left is always an alliance of the marginal and alienated against the main power base of a nation. Now the left has become dominant because of demographic change. Whites have to wake up and start acting like the minority they are soon to become. This means demanding white identity politics and voting as a self-conscious political bloc just like nonwhites.

Keep in mind that many nonwhites perceive that they have an interest in undermining the white majority. This includes promoting nonwhite immigration and feminism. This strategy has worked spectacularly well. Whites are becoming a minority in Western Europe and the Anglosphere because of immigration and feminism. Note that these days the left is an alliance of nonwhites and women against whites and males.

arnash
A novel thought occurred to me recently, and this is the place to share it.  It’s that liberals are Cats, and conservatives are Dogs.  Each wired differently, with a different nature.  Cats live in the moment, the perennial moment.  There is no future in their consciousness, -like the grasshopper that fiddled all summer in the parable of the grasshopper and the ants, -ants who worked all summer to prepare for the cold winter to come.
Dogs have a consciousness of time; past, present, and future, and whether they contain(ed) reward, punishment, pleasure or pain.  While cats have no such consciousness.  Only the moment exists.  Hence their minds can’t be disciplined or focused on a task.  There will never be such a thing as a guide cat, or bomb-sniffing cat, or combat cat, or guard cat.  That requires thought, concentration, focus, attention to detail.  Cats are incapable of such mental tasks because their minds aren’t capable of thinking in such manners except in the instinctual nature of hunting birds and mice.  But that focus has nothing to do with others, or learned behavior.
Bright dogs, like conservatives, can and do take the future into account, along with consequences, dangers, rewards, and risks.  They learn from their experiences, lessons are remembered and applied in future situations.  Not so with cats. Who’s ever seen a troop of trained performing cats?  That’s impossible.  Learning isn’t something they’re good at because only the moment matters.  That kind of thinking is why liberals think that “we don’t have a spending problem”.  It’s true, we don’t at the moment, but what they are incapable of grasping is that the moment will not last forever, and just over that hilltop ahead there is no road.  Instead there is a deep abyss, and driving down the road at 100 miles per hour is not something that one can do forever because roads end, and some end suddenly and unexpectedly.  But, like brain-damaged toddlers, they can’t grasp that abstract idea.  Tomorrow never comes, it always just today.

Benghazi Footnote

January 31, 2013
By Elise Cooper

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s testimony before Congress regarding Benghazi suggests a revised version of Harry Truman’s great slogan: “The Buck Stops Here,” (Kind of.) It appears that this administration and their supporters have turned the Benghazi issue into a footnote that has no solutions or answers.

Fred Rustmann Jr., a former CIA official, a writer for the online intelligence briefings magazine, Lignet.com, and author of The Case Officer, wishes “people would get stirred up about this. We must keep reporting on it. Watergate was a cover-up and nobody died. This was a cover-up and people died. That is why this is a big deal and the American people have to realize this by becoming informed.”

Yet, in listening to Clinton’s opening statement, Americans would get the impression that she is the carrier of the torch in the fight against terrorism. She duped people by claiming that she moved “quickly in those first uncertain hours and days to respond to the immediate crisis and further protect our people and posts in high-threat areas across the region and the world.” Really?

Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla), former Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and current chair of the subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa, felt that Clinton’s testimony was “not credible in the true sense of the word. It was unbelievable.”

The American people should be outraged and demand answers after the secretary of state’s testimony. Instead, it appears that but for a few, no one cares anymore and have shrugged away the issue. As she brilliantly fudged, dodged, and avoided taking responsibility, the Democrats on the panel uniformly treated her as a celebrity superhero who could compete with Lynda Carter for the role of “Wonder Woman.” The congresswoman’s reaction as she sat there listening to the Democrats: “Wow, they fawned over her. They appear to be drinking too much of the Kool-Aid. Maybe a little bit of probing on their part would have resulted in more answers so this would never happen again. Their attitude of move along, move along was pretty pathetic.”

In dissecting some of Clinton’s statements and answers it appears that this administration has been able to turn the page and get away with incompetence through a complete obfuscation of the facts. Hillary asked, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” going on to say that there is, in fact, no difference between a terrorist attack, or “some guys out for a walk last night who decided to kill some Americans.” How could someone who is America’s face to the world be so callous, ridiculous, and thoughtless?

Then there were the statements she made about Charlene Lamb, the former State Department security official, basically throwing her under the bus. Clinton admitted fault, but did not take responsibility. She claimed that she was not aware of any real time video, which directly contradicts what Lamb testified. Furthermore, Clinton continued to blame the Congressional Republicans for not providing adequate funding even though Lamb testified that there were no budgetary restraints. The congresswoman is angry: “Ambassador Stevens made requests for high level security and that should have been granted immediately. But Secretary Clinton tried to deflect by placing the blame on Congress’ refusal to provide funding. It was never a question of funding. Let them release all those cables. Then we will be able to find out who was really to blame. If the Secretary of Stare was not reading them, then who was? But they hide behind the ‘classified documents’ argument. Yet, when its convenient for them they leak like a sieve.”

Clinton appears to have a case of amnesia from her concussion. She claimed in her testimony, “And I stood with President Obama as he spoke of “an act of terror.” She conveniently forgot that from September 12 -18th this administration maintained that the attacks were likely a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim film. Or when she stood by the caskets of the four Americans killed in Libya she directly blamed an “”awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.” Afterward, she reportedly told the father of Tyrone Woods, the former Navy SEAL who was killed in the attack, “We will make sure the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”

Rustmann Jr. believes the administration narrative, the latest being Clinton’s testimony, is due to their eagerness to pat themselves on the back after getting Bin Laden, and wanting the American people to believe that Al Qaeda was decimated. He is angry that they chose to ignore the multiple requests for more security and that no one has been captured for this horrific event. Clinton testified that there was one person being held in Tunisia. Yet, this administration has not requested an extradition. Once again it falls back to the fact that no actionable intelligence is gained without interrogations; thus, no leads and no names of the terrorists responsible.

Furthermore, the congresswoman told American Thinker, that the Accountability Review Board never interviewed Clinton even though she cited it numerous times in her testimony. “How can the head of an organization not be interviewed when there is an investigation of an operation where she was in charge. The ARB did not find her relevant. If she is not relevant then I do not know who could be. No one has been held accountable.”

Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen is hopeful that the American people will demand accountability by this administration and force them to find those responsible. Unfortunately, as Clinton showed during her Congressional testimony, this administration appears to be getting away with murder. The bottom line is that Benghazi represented gross negligence, a lack of leadership within the State Department, and the denial of available resources. Why? Because they chose to tout their narrative that terrorism is under control, misleading the American people who have pivoted from this incident.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/01/benghazi_footnote.html#ixzz2JXxSonra
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The ‘Diversity’ Movement

 Defeating Itself, Destroying Society

By Jay Haug

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/01/the_diversity_movement_defeating_itself_destroying_society.html#ixzz2JWMQwOxj
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In a large study of nearly 30,000 people across the country, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, has shown some highly negative results from “diversity.”

Michael Jonas, in an article called “The Downside of Diversity,” published in Boston.com in 2007, encapsulated Putnam’s research as follows:

[T]he greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogeneous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

But the diversity-peddlers rarely tell us about any downside.  In the case of gay marriage, is it just a net addition with no subtraction, no negative?  Is it, as some would say, “all good”?  Is this all about reactionaries keeping others from “people they love”?  Or could the issues be real and substantive?

This past week,  the Obama administration has disinvited a pastor, Louie Giglio, from speaking at the upcoming inauguration.  Why?  Because Giglio was discovered to have given an “anti-gay” sermon, and, as the administration puts it, his words “don’t reflect our desire to celebrate the strength and diversity of our country at this Inaugural.”  Have we come to the place in our country where one must toe the line or not be allowed to speak?  By focusing on outward differences in college admissions, are we simply doing the easy work, instead of promoting diversity of background, income, and intellectual perspective?  Are we sufficiently protecting freedom of speech and freedom of religion in the face of the diversity agenda?

The truth is that the diversity movement has problems, and  those who tout it must acknowledge them now — before this invented concept makes us all less free, less honest, and less educated.

Here are a few reality checks for the age of diversity.  It is time to ask: after all the diversity initiatives, what have been the results?

1.College campuses are less tolerant than ever before.

One result is that real debate and dialog suffer.  The Atlantic’s Wendy Kaminer explains why.

One of the ironies of this drive for civility … [is that] you end up encouraging incivility, because people don’t know how to argue. They don’t know what to do when confronted with an idea they really don’t like. They don’t have an administrator they go complain to, and so they just shout it down because they haven’t learned how to do anything else.

Perhaps also due to the like-minded aspects of the blogosphere, people do not know how to respectfully argue their points of view.  Shouting matches are too often the order of the day on the same campuses that embrace “diversity.”  Conservative speakers are often not invited to campus, or else they are shouted down or interrupted.  In fact, in America today, almost all protests that interrupt or shout down speakers are generated by left-wing groups like Code Pink.

Too many campuses choose to wall themselves off from differing ideas through anti-bullying or speech codes that attempt to provide an ipso facto restraint on speech.  As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has put it, too often “speech I don’t like” is translated into “speech that should be outlawed.”

2. People who hold traditional views on marriage and other issues are wrongly dismissed as bigoted, homophobic, or in need of being cured.

This has been the downside to what I call “liberal inevitability” from the start.  Just as the 12 Steps work “sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly,” too many liberals believe we will all come around to their views eventually.  In their view, conservatives ought to be cured and will be eventually.  When looking at Supreme Court justices, liberals could be right.  Most of them do cave in some manner.  But, thankfully, Potomac fever tends to be a local disease, and liberalism has been shown to be far from inevitable in other places.

Unlike today, decades ago, liberals asked to be listened to and given the opportunity to state their case.  When I was a college student, I remember reading the story in our student paper of a gay student coming out about his sexuality.  I remember thinking that writing that article took courage and that I ought to try to understand him.  But now the tables have turned, and anyone who thinks differently from this student is considered an oppressor, ignorant, or morally deficient.

Recently, my alma mater, Williams College, conducted a celebration of one of its most distinguished political science professors, Robert Gaudino, who died at the age of 46 in 1974.  The distinguishing characteristic of Gaudino’s teaching style was the Socratic method — his uncanny and disciplined style of teaching through asking questions.  Another student and I who were both exposed to Gaudino’s teaching methods discussed recently whether Gaudino was a liberal or a conservative.  The truth is, neither of us knew.  The reason is because Mr. Gaudino believed that his calling was to teach and help us to think, not reach certain predetermined conclusions.  This singular commitment made him a celebrated teacher — the kind we find all too rare today.

Unfortunately, too many teachers today use the classroom for indoctrination rather than education.  At our local state university, story after story has come to me concerning professors bashing conservatives in the classroom, politically intimidating students, and even lowering grades for those who do not support politically correct conclusions.  (This is not to be confused with conservative students who simply write bad papers that fail to support their arguments.)

But most disturbing in the light of diversity initiatives are students who view others who disagree as being sick, evil, or homophobic.  A friend of mine has two sons, one of which attended an elite college in the Northeast.  My friend is a tolerant, intelligent, and graceful person who happens to embrace traditional values regarding marriage.  Do his sons agree to disagree with him and keep talking?  No — they somehow believe that his soul must be healed, his reactionary views rejected, and his thinking returned to acceptable norms.  If this is the fruit of “diversity” training, it is bad fruit.  Can a person graduate from an elite college and never learn respect for others who disagree?  Too many do today, and it is a bad predictor for the much-sought after “civility.”

Liberals might make the counter charge that conservatives believe they too are sick and in need of being cured. However, most conservatives seek  to persuade liberals, not cure them. Conservatives want liberals to examine the consequences of their beliefs and policies and reconsider them. Do liberals need to change their minds? Yes. But conservatives are more than willing to debate them on the issues on a level playing field. Too many on the left these days believe they own the playing field.

But it is the colleges and universities themselves who hold up “homophobia” as the problem.  Defined as such, people who disagree with gay marriage are not worthy to be listened to.  Instead, they are in need of a psychological cure.  The word “homophobia” belies liberal tolerance and mocks pleas for “diversity.”  Liberals themselves should get rid of it once and for all.  The fact that they have not done so is testament to their preference for clubs rather than arguments.

3. Embracing diversity in household formation blinds us to the reality that children of lasting man-woman marriages fare best.

The diversity movement will protest that there simply is not enough research on non-traditional families to say what the impact on children might be.  But what we do know is clear.  Gay-parent households deprive children of a parent of the opposite sex.  Children from families where the mother and father stay together are significantly more well-adjusted, confident, and adaptable than those who do not come from these families.  Too often, diversity advocates focus on the well-being of couples while ignoring the impact on children.  If the diversity movement says it wants to empower the powerless, shouldn’t it be concerned about the impact of its policies on children?  Shouldn’t social policy show bias toward what works best and keeps the most vulnerable from being hurt?  Or is the desire for same-sex adults to call their relationship “marriage” more important?

4. The diversity movement confuses rejection of views with rejection of people, shutting off debate.

My niece was fifteen years old.  She had been home-schooled until the time she entered a nearby New England prep school as a day student.  Her parents had taught her how to think.  Soon after she entered the school, my niece was asked to join a group to plan student activities on campus, including the task of deciding guidelines of how debate was to be framed on campus.  Someone put a motion on the table that read as follows: “All points of view are to be respected.”  My niece proposed a change.  “All people are to be respected.”  “Not all points of view are worthy of respect,” she asserted.  Her motion passed unanimously.  Her fellow students immediately appreciated the difference between people and views, and they were right to do so.

Formally, in the days when people knew how to debate, the Oxford-Cambridge style was the order of the day.  Ideas could be mocked, pilloried, demolished, propagated, and prosecuted as self-evident.  People actually learned things.  Nothing was off the table.  After the debate, it was time to head to the pub.

Unfortunately, the diversity movement has wrapped itself in the wrong-headed idea that “I am my views.”  This tends to place people of color, the LBGT crowd, and others claiming non-white ethnic heritage in a privileged position beyond criticism.  In their eyes, everything becomes an ad hominem attack and is therefore out of bounds.  The results are clear: why does one need an argument when, like Senator-Elect Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, demonstrating that one is 1/32 Cherokee is enough?  The result of this has been bad ideas like “black people cannot possibly be racist” and “because I am gay, you cannot criticize gayness in any way.”

Now admittedly, some of this reaction has been precipitated by actual ad hominem attacks.  These have been generated by both sides.  But in any argument, people who are disciplined ought to be ready for these, call them out, and show them the door.  A reasonable audience will support ruling out these attacks in most cases.  But the result of this “I am my argument” false shield has been an irrational cutting off of dialog and reason and learning.  In all debate, thinking must be encouraged while feelings must be controlled.  To do the reverse is to invite ignorance, not clarity.

5. Diversity as it is proclaimed is fundamentally dishonest.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/01/the_diversity_movement_defeating_itself_destroying_society.html#ixzz2JWMJTWUG
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Vennoye

Diversity….how they have destroyed the meaning of the word. What they want is the exact opposite of the definition of the word.

We are called upon to be stones; big stones, little stones, fat stones, thin stones…none exactly alike, all different, all relevant. But, since the Tower of Babel all manmade systems are designed to try to shape mankind into bricks…all alike; herd think so much easier to control. It NEVER works, because that is not the way mankind was/is made. That’s why it never works and so many people have to die to try to accomplish the herd think.

That is why, my fellow stones….we are dangerous to the brickmakers!

lanastaslem

At the college at which I teach, lowlife terrorist Bill Ayers has been paid to come and speak more than once, and at least once as part of the “exemplary lives” program. The small college had a shot at having Condoleezza Rice as the commencement speaker. The college’s faculty senate shot it down. I pride myself on bringing this up any time I hear another plea on the campus for the need to value diversity. Intellectual diversity is to the typical college campus what World Series titles are to the Chicago Cubs.

Jayhawk

I teach at a large university and have been subjected to both well paid anti-Americans, Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright. Both essentially endorse MURDER of their enemies. In one of Ayers rants, he condemned ALL Conservatives as (you guessed it) racists, bigots and homophobes. He clearly stated that when the “revolution” is concluded and we have a “Peoples” government in Washington, it will be necessary to eliminate, either by incarceration or liquidation, “the reactionary elements” in the US. When pressed in the Q & A session, he labeled “reactionaries” as anyone who refuses to accept the doctrines, policies and directives of the “revolutionary government.” Wright, on the other hand, believes in a separate nation for Blacks. A nation supported by the (you guessed it) racists, bigots and homophobes in the other country, the one that will be forced to support the Black nation. These men are considered “progressive” in their thoughts and words. Conservatives, any one of them are considered “Enemies of the People.” Ayers and Wright represent “diversity” at my university.

LeungChiSi

The author has missed – or ignored – an essential element of the faux “diversity” meme – and its would-be elevation to the ranks of core values such as integrity and truth:
“Diversity”, here, very often and very simply stands for “Too many White men” – or, as the case may be, “Too many (East) Asians” or otherwise not fitting into the desired politico-social engineering mold du jour.

Nobody complains when all – or nearly all – are members of the “favoured” or “protected” political class, read “all black” or “all women”…
The ersatz “rainbow” works only when it works in the desired direction…

Pavan

You summed it up well. The actual article was too long and never clearly made this point. The term “diversity” is what Liberals call a “dog whistle”. What they really are saying is that they want to eliminate traditional values and replace them with “progressive” values. Progressives don’t respect traditional viewpoints, but they demand that their views be respected.

Liberals and conservatives both know that the progressive goal is to grow government and shrink the private sector. Diversity is just another mechanism that helps them to accomplish this. Diversity provides the justification to hire and promote people who will support the liberal agenda and ignore those who won’t. It also helps to break down traditional structures and morals that made the old America into the greatest country on earth. Liberals have almost made old America disappear and have replaced it with Amerika.

physicsnut
Pavan – you summed it up well !!! And evidence is on the front page of the NYTimes every day of the week. Too many of us expect a Hitler, when actually it is just Tony Blair, and it just goes under the radar. Then we wonder what happened.

Jacobite2

There are lots of criticisms to make of Hitler, but that’s no reason to accuse him of things he never did, or wanted to do. Hitler and the Nazis were brought to power to defeat the Left and it’s war on everything German (referred to as the hyper-degenerate ‘Weimar culture’). Today it’s referred to as the Hollywood/academia/MSM/Progressive/East-Coast cabal. Interestingly, both movements were initiated, funded, led, and defended by the same people (think CPUSA, ACLU). Hitler was devoted, albeit delusionally at times, to defending and advancing the interests of his people (Germans) against other peoples. Leftists, here, there, everywhere, are always trying to destroy existing societies. Leftists in the US are devoted to abolishing American society, and either killing or subjugating as many Americans as possible. With the examples of the USSR, Maoist China, Cuba, and Cambodia before us, denial of this basic fact cannot be honest.

Dlanor, American

When culture of cancer is the norm, it calls anti agents hyper-phobics. It can’t defend its substance, so it uses the only thing it’s got: toxic spewing and name-calling deconstruction. What will it do when it consumes all its hosts? Well, it has an answer for that: That’s just discredited slippery-slope thinking. How “mean” to be against the progress of the culture of cancer! Cultural cancer is the new power to the people, brought to you by its own secular priesthood for crony, ba*l crunching cannibals.

LeungChiSi

”Diversity” is but another arrow in the leftist/Marxist quiver.

It is a device wielded to destabilise and to debase the traditional order which is based in part on industry and on merit – and to replace this order and its time-honoured, inherited, foundational values with ersatz substitutes which further leftist transformative purposes.

The narrative and the lexicon are commandeered to yield but superficial Skin-and-Gender substitutes – which lead ineluctably and predictably to tokenism, bean-counting and quotas – and to mediocrity.

The ”diversity” meme is part of an invidious and dubious programme which is comprised of strategically crafted constructs and narratives designed to disequilibrate and then to topple our traditionally honoured and time-proven values.

Alej

I don’t think we are allowing our nation to go down the tube. Slowly but surely, the Old America that still lives within us will be re-established in much of the “red states,” geographically and culturally.

“America” won’t look the same on a map, but it will be there. There is an evolutionary process abuilding… it will take a while, but when it’s done, birds of a feather will be flocking together. The recent reaction to tyrannical gun control threats is just another bubble in a pot that will boil over into incipient race/culture war, and when the dust settles, hopefully just short of overt action, boundaries will change, people will vote with their feet, and people of different cultures will feel at home with themselves.

And we won’t be supporting them with our tax money.

Drew

Homosexuality is a psychosexual disability. Our society is kind to the disabled and tries to help them compensate for their bad luck but up to now, it has not done so to the point of harming itself and its young as legitimizing gay marriage does. Society’s error has been accepting the gay activist argument that they are a variant of normal and their civil rights are being violated by denial of legal marriage. They are not a variant of normal but have a disability that impacts on their own lives and society’s.

mark_mywurdz

“diversity” comes from the word diverse. see where we’re going with this? the word “UNITE, MERGE, BLEND, CONVERGE, etc. are not listed as synonyms. … … here are some synonyms right out of a few e-dictionaries: dissimilarity, heterogeneity, variance, … … some more: adverse, antithesis, comparison, contradiction, contradistinction, contraposition, contrariety, differentiation, disagreement, disparity, dissimilarity, distinction, divergence,incompatibility, incongruousness, inequality, inverse, oppositeness, opposition, reverse, unlikeness, variation. … … so what did you faux-guilt-ridden diversity morons expect, kumbaya? … … keep bellowing about your uniqueness and demanding to be celebrated and separated for it and the team, country, and culture crash apart. words matter and actions speak louder than words.

McFire

Last year I was looking up synonyms for “diversity” and the first one that popped up on the Merriam-Webster site was “anti-community.” It has since been removed.

I spent twenty years in the USAF, and over the years, diversity has made the minorities branch off into their own groups. Each month is a celebration of some diversity, such as “African-American Month,” Asian-Pacific Islander Month,” etc. Gone are the days of “ONE Team, ONE Mission.” Now, it’s every group for itself…and hopefully the actual mission may get accomplished.

DoctorDalai

The diversity trap can certainly harm the very minorities it proposes to help. As a Jew, I am saddened by the calls for Jews to “support diversity” by dating and marrying non-Jews. We are disappearing as a people because of this practice. Diversity will eventually consist of nothing more than comparing your distant ancestors. The diversity mocement’s true goal is to eliminate the diversity they trumpet.

atmember

Wodiej, you need to read your Bible once in a while to get God’s opinion and stop promoting your own as God’s….Here is what God has to say about homosexuals and the Kingdom of God:

“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God.” — 1Cor 6:9-11 —

SFLBIB

This desperate quest for diversity has led to the creation of an academic system completely devoid of diversity, if diversity of ideas is what is meant. Unfortunately, it never is [at least I've never encountered one in all the articles I've read]. It uniformly means affirmative action for a diversity of skin color, which gets us nothing but, well, diversity of skin color.

The suppression of ideas other than the approved ones in academia is a tacit claim that knowledge in the social studies is complete, that there is nothing more to be learned beside the current liberal one. So why do we need those professors? Just assign a book to be read by the students.

Professor Lino Graglia of the University of Texas School of Law has provided an insightful comment on why speech codes are necessary on the modern campus: “As it would be self-defeating to permit open discussions of racial preference, ‘hate-speech’ codes will have to be adopted, ‘political correctness’ enforced, and ‘sensitivity training’ programs instituted.”

And from Professor Thomas Sowell – “I have never known a word to become absolute dogma, without a speck of evidence, the way ‘diversity’ has.”

Don+L

“Destroying society?” My goodness, that is precisely their goal. That is the only rational explaination for what they do:economically, socially, and spiritually–and including the emasculation of our military, and the “accidental” support of America’s announced enemies throughout the middle east and Africa.
Perhaps we forgot the socialist default mode of taking over an nation? First, stir the pot, cause conflict and revolution, swoop in and glue the pieces into a Godless socialist utopia(till the next revolution) In short, speak only of wanting good while doing evil!
We have seen the left over decades, deliberately divide and set Americans into hostile opposing groups, prepping the stage by tearing down the institutions and values that held it together, including family, God and His churches (from an ordained mission of individual salvation to one of collectivist social justice), education, and responsibility.

“And this I say, lest any man should beguile you with enticing words. Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.” (Colossians 2:4,8)

JQAdams

abortion, same-sex-marriage, forced contraception, sterilization, government control of healthcare leading to denial of care to the elderly and those with mental disorders. As unpopular as it may sound the original goal of pushing women into the workforce. Was a way to separate women from childbearing and raising a family. Remember the constant refrain from old feminist is that women are not to be treated as just baby factories.When you lump all of the liberal/progressive priorities together all you see is empty futures or death.

Who’s message is the one of love and Life and who is the one who brings death and hopelessness.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/01/chicago_npr_station_issues_bizarre_plea_go_make_babies_today_comments.html#disqus_thread#ixzz2JXqL4SqA
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