Obama's State of Anti-Americanism

President Barack Obama strutted in front of Congress and the nation last night to give his State of the Union address. This time his undeniable oratorical skills simply could not save him from the facts that have become clear in his first full year in office, facts that now have his speeches sounding more and more like skips on a broken record.

Let's start by taking a look at what his programs have actually done over the past year, and see what he said last night. Directly because of the programs and initiatives launched by the Obama administration, our unemployment rate has soared past the 10% mark for the first time in decades and our national debt has been set on course to triple over the next decade.

But what is Obama suggesting that we do as we move into his vision of the future? Spend more, go further into debt, reward cronyism and failed industries. Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress wish to throw massive amounts of good money after excessive and irresponsible amounts of bad.

The President proposed in his speech last night to "take $30 billion of the money Wall Street banks have repaid and use it to help community banks give small businesses the credit they need to stay afloat." So we taxpayers, who did not want to do it in the first place, loaned money to banks. It was repaid, but now we lend that same money back out to banks? So what exactly is going to have been "repaid"?

Why again did I lend money to banks in the first place? Do you know why? To save the financial system from collapse? Really? And why do we taxpayers need to prop up any business that cannot succeed on the strength of it's own hard work, value, worth, and entrepreneurial skills? Businesses large and small have gone under for centuries. Why do we have to save some now with taxpayer dollars?

Next the President said "We can put Americans to work today building the infrastructure of tomorrow...There's no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains, or the new factories that manufacture clean energy products." Really? Why not? What does having the fastest trains in the world have to do with anything at all? If China has a train that goes 200 miles per hour, why do we need one that goes 250?

Has the President even bothered to look at every single study of mass transit in this country? All the studies show that the vast majority of these mass transit systems: buses, trains, trolleys, etc go without ridership for the majority of the day. It is only during certain peak hours that ridership is full. But the trains and buses run all day and night long, running up massive fuel, maintenance, and labor costs. And the vast majority of the public doesn't use these systems on any regular basis at all. Those are the facts.

Why do we need to build new manufacturing plants for business? If a business wants a new plant, and will benefit economically from it's construction, then why doesn't it just build one itself?

Obama then finally spoke a truth, but he spoke it in typically veiled fashion: "The only way to move to full employment is to lay a new foundation for long-term economic growth, and finally address the problems that America's families have confronted for years." Well, first of all, that is not exactly truth. There will never be "full employment", whatever that means. But we get the idea and the goal of creating as many decent jobs for as many people who actually want to and are able to work.

The only proven way to create long-term sustainable jobs that will make a real difference in the lives of the greatest amount of people is to get government out of the way and allow private industry to flourish with minimal restraints. Keep taxes as low as possible across the board, and keep regulation to reasonable levels that are not a result of partisan political studies or a knee-jerk overreaction to occasional errors.

But what Obama and the Democrats want to do is what is known as 'picking the winners', making the decisions as to which businesses and industries are worthwhile and valuable and worth investing in and then forcing Americans to live with their decisions. Rather than leaving the business community alone to develop products and services and allow the American dollar-paying public to decide based on their own desires.

Obama played the scare tactic by mentioning that Germany and China and India were not waiting to pour money into 'clean energy' because "they want those jobs." Which jobs is he talking about? You mean the jobs that they are creating by the pouring in of all that money? Why would Obama possibly compare what the U.S. should do to what these nations are doing? Because they are socialist (Germany), communist (China), or corrupt quasi-socialist economic (India) nations, that's why.

Obama also continues to be shameless in his attempts to embarrass Republicans into 'going over to the Dark Side' and joining with the Democrats in making these changes. He once again mentioned that "saying no" and disagreeing continuously is not a policy idea. The fact is that individual Republican lawmakers and the Republican Party leadership have put forth numerous ideas, only to be ignored or slapped down every time by the Democratic Party-controlled congress.

Republican Party politicans in Congress and the Senate have, in fact, no obligation to blindly follow the President and fall in lock-step with the Democrats to pass laws and bills and enact policies that they know will only hurt America in the long run. They are absolutely supposed to attempt to "say no" to the President and disagree with him when he is wrong, which is on almost every issue.

Republican politicians need to not only continue to stand up to the Obama policies strongly and vocally when warranted, but in fact need to more fully and substantively embrace traditional American ideals and programs which support these ideas themselves, or many will find themselves tossed out of their own offices in the coming primary elections.

Barack Obama's vision for America is nothing short of full-blown socialism. The complete destruction of the capitalist system that elevated the United States to the greatest economic levels in the history of the world and kept us there for more than a century. The reason is simple: the power and control that comes with running a state-controlled economy and a central government.

He will play all of the usual race-baiting and class-warfare games to make this happen, implying or directly saying that those who don't go along are racist or want babies to starve or the elderly to go without medical care. He will use a mass media that has become slowly and surely and almost completely infected by individuals with the same political and social beliefs as his over the last few decades.

He further called for an "investment in the skills and education of our people." What exactly does that mean? There was a time when the American educational system was the envy of the world. What changed all that? What changed it was these very liberal ideals invading the classroom and shifting our students attention away from important learning skills to forced cultural sensitivity.

For generations, American students have been historically and socially indoctrinated in the classroom far more than they have been educated. Because some couldn't or wouldn't keep up, everyone was forced to drag back to their level. And the teaching and enforcing of morality and discipline? Forget about it. If Obama wants to improve the American educational system, he needs to get the government out of the classrooms.

Finally, Obama continued to pour it on for his outrageously enormous takeover of what is already the greatest health-care system that the world has ever known, despite the fact that the large majority of the American public doesn't want any part of a government-run system. Health-care needs responsible reform, not a comprehensive government takeover and the accompanying massive cost to the tax-paying public, as Obama and the Dems are trying to force down our throats.

Right now what Obama and the Democrats have been doing for a year and continue to plan towards the future is the insinuation of the government into effective or direct control of every major facet of our lives. The only way to stop this suicidal power-grab is to reverse the political fortunes of the country as soon as possible, before things get too bad to ever reverse.

As the brilliant economist Thomas Sowell has so perfectly put it "human beings have their own individual preferences, values, plans, and wills all of which can conflict with and even thwart the goals of social experiments." What Obama and the Democrats are advocating is what Sowell calls an "open-ended demand", one that calls for "ever-expanding government bureaucracies with ever-expanding budgets and powers."

We Americans have certainly been getting exactly what Barack Obama promised in his campaign: Change. While I personally did not vote for him, I have a hard time believing that most of those who did so were thinking about fundamentally changing the United States of America from a nation built upon the God-given rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness into a socialist nation that stifles liberty and replaces the pursuit of happiness with your acceptance of whatever the government deems oughta be what you think happiness should entail.

One of today's great scholars, Dinesh D'Souza, a legal immigrant who became a White House policy advocate, stated "America represents a new way of being human and thus presents a radical challenge to the world." In describing "American exceptionalism", D'Souza called it the idea that "Americans have throughout their history held that they are special: that their country has been blessed by God, that the American system is unique, that Americans are not like people everywhere else."

If all of the polls taken in recent months are telling the truth, then the American public is starting to wake up to the fact that Obama and the Democrats are steering us away, far away, from our founding and established ideals and that very "American exceptionalism" that we have always cherished. With the continuing of God's blessings on our special experiment in democracy we can begin to remove them from office as has been happening already all across the country, reverse the damaging course upon which they have set us, and begin to reclaim our national greatness and prosperity.

The Character of Nations

In an age that values cleverness over wisdom, it is not surprising that many superficial but clever books get more attention than a wise book like 'The Character of Nations' by Angelo Codevilla, even though the latter has far more serious implications for the changing character of our own nation.

The recently published second edition of Professor Codevilla’s book is remarkable just for its subject, quite aside from the impressive breadth of its scope and the depth of its insights. But clever people among today’s intelligentsia disdain the very idea that there is such a thing as “national character.”

Everything from punctuality to alcohol consumption may vary greatly from one country to another, but the “one world” ideology and the “multicultural” dogma make it obligatory for many among the intelligentsia to act as if none of this has anything to do with the poverty, corruption, and violence of much of the Third World or with the low standard of living in the Soviet Union, one of the most richly endowed nations on earth when it came to natural resources.

The Character of Nations is about far more than the fact that there are different behavior patterns in different countries — that, for example, “it is unimaginable to do business in China without paying bribes” but “to offer one in Japan is the greatest of faux pas.”

The real point is to show what kinds of behaviors produce what kinds of consequences — in the economy, in the family, in the government, and in other aspects of human life. Nor do the repercussions stop there. Government policies are not only affected by the culture of the country, but can in turn have a major impact on that culture, for good or ill.

Written in plain and sometimes blunt words, The Character of Nations is nevertheless the product of a man whose knowledge and experience span the globe, extending into economics, philosophy, and other fields, as well as encompassing the wisdom of the ancients and the follies of the moderns.

The book is an education in itself, more of an education than many students are likely to get at an Ivy League college. However, its purpose is not academic but to clarify the issues facing us all today when “the character of the American way of life is up for grabs perhaps more than ever before,” as the author puts it.

While nations differ, particular kinds of behavior produce particular kinds of results in country after country. Moreover, American society in recent years has been imitating behavior patterns that have produced negative — and sometimes catastrophic — consequences in many other countries around the world.

Among these patterns have been a concentration of decision-making power in government officials, an undermining of the role of the family, a “non-judgmental” attitude toward behavior, and a dissolution of the common bonds that hold a society together, leading to atomistic self-indulgences and group-identity politics that increasingly pits different segments of society against each other.

Those among the intelligentsia who say that we should “learn from other countries” almost invariably mean that we should imitate what other countries have done. Angelo Codevilla argues that we should learn from other countries’ mistakes, especially when those same mistakes have repeatedly produced bad results in many countries and among many very different peoples, living under very different political systems.

Putting ever more economic decisions in the hands of those with political power is just one of those mistakes with a track record of producing painful repercussions in many countries around the world. These repercussions have included not only serious economic losses but, even more important, a loss of personal freedom and self-respect, as ever-wider segments of the population become supplicants and sycophants of those with the power to dispense largess or to make one’s life miserable with legalistic or bureaucratic harassment.

We in America have taken large steps in that direction in recent years, and are accelerating our moves in that direction this year. Getting some clearer sense of what this risks is just one of many reasons to read The Character of Nations.

WRITTEN by Thomas Sowell at National Review on June 10th, 2009

Unserious Rhetoric on National Security

One of the many signs of the degeneration of our times is how many serious, even life-and-death issues are approached as talking points in a game of verbal fencing. Nothing illustrates this more than the fatuous, and even childish, controversy about “torturing” captured terrorists.

People’s actions often make far more sense than their words. Most of the people who are talking lofty talk about how we mustn’t descend to the level of our enemies would themselves behave very differently if presented with a comparable situation, instead of being presented with an opportunity to be morally one up with rhetoric.

What if it were your mother or your child who was tied up somewhere beside a ticking bomb and you had captured a terrorist who knew where that was? Face it: What you would do to that terrorist to make him talk would make waterboarding look like a picnic.

You wouldn’t care what the New York Times would say or what “world opinion” in the U.N. would say. You would save your loved one’s life and tell those other people what they could do.

But if the United States behaves that way it is called “arrogance” — even by American citizens. Indeed, even by the American president.

There is a big difference between being ponderous and being serious. It is scary when the president of the United States is not being serious about matters of life and death, saying that there are “other ways” of getting information from terrorists.

Maybe this is a step up from the previous talking point that “torture” had not gotten any important information out of terrorists. Only after this had been shown to be a flat-out lie did Barack Obama shift his rhetoric to the lame assertion that unspecified “other ways” could have been used.

From a man whose whole life has been based on style rather than substance, on rhetoric rather than reality, perhaps nothing better could have been expected. But that the media and the public would have become so mesmerized by the Obama cult that they could not see through this to think of their own survival, or that of this nation, is truly a chilling thought.

When we look back at history, it is amazing what foolish and even childish things people said and did on the eve of a catastrophe about to consume them. In 1938, with Hitler preparing to unleash a war in which tens of millions of men, women, and children would be slaughtered, the play that was the biggest hit on the Paris stage was about French and German reconciliation, and a French pacifist that year dedicated his book to Adolf Hitler.

When historians of the future look back on our era, what will they think of our time? Our media too squeamish to call murderous and sadistic terrorists anything worse than “militants” or “insurgents”? Our president going abroad to denigrate the country that elected him, pandering to feckless allies and outright enemies, and literally bowing to a foreign tyrant ruling a country from which most of the 9/11 terrorists came?

It is easy to make talking points about how Churchill did not torture German prisoners, even while London was being bombed. There was a very good reason for that: They were ordinary prisoners of war who were covered by the Geneva Convention and who didn’t know anything that would keep London from being bombed.

Whatever the verbal fencing over the meaning of the word “torture,” there is a fundamental difference between simply inflicting pain on innocent people for the sheer pleasure of it — which is what our terrorist enemies do — and getting life-saving information out of the terrorists by whatever means are necessary.

The Left has long confused physical parallels with moral parallels. But when a criminal shoots at a policeman and the policeman shoots back, physical equivalence is not moral equivalence. And what American intelligence agents have done to captured terrorists is not even physical equivalence.

If we have reached the point where we cannot be bothered to think beyond rhetoric or to make moral distinctions, then we have reached the point where our survival in an increasingly dangerous world of nuclear proliferation can no longer be taken for granted.

WRITTEN by Thomas Sowell as 'Talking Points' at the National Review on May 12th, 2009. As always, the title of this posting is a link to the original article.

SCOTUS Cannot Be Reshaped Overnight

There is a reason why Lady Justice wears a blindfold. There are things that courts are not supposed to see or recognize when making their decisions — the race you belong to, whether you are rich or poor, and other personal things that could bias decisions by judges and juries.

It is an ideal that a society strives for, even if particular judges or juries fall short of that ideal. Now, however, Pres. Barack Obama has repudiated the ideal itself by saying that he wants to appoint judges with “empathy” for particular groups.

This was not an isolated slip of the tongue. Barack Obama said the same thing during last year’s election campaign. Moreover, it is completely consistent with his behavior and associations over a period of years — and inconsistent with fundamental principles of American government and society.

Nor is this President Obama’s only attempt to remake American society. Barack Obama’s vision of America is one in which a president of the United States can fire the head of General Motors, tell bankers how to bank, control the medical system, and take charge of all sorts of other activities for which neither he nor most other politicians have any expertise or experience.

The Constitution of the United States gives no president, nor the entire federal government, the authority to do such things. But spending trillions of dollars to bail out all sorts of companies buys the power to tell them how to operate.

Appointing to the federal courts — including the Supreme Court — judges who believe in expanding the powers of the federal government to make arbitrary decisions, choosing who will be winners and losers in the economy and in the society, is perfectly consistent with a vision of the world where self-confident and self-righteous elites rule according to their own notions, instead of merely governing under the restraints of the Constitution.

If all this can be washed down with pious talk about “empathy,” so much the better for those who want to remake America. Now that the Obama administration has a congressional majority that is virtually unstoppable, and media that are wholly uncritical, the chances of preventing the president from putting someone on the Supreme Court who shares his desire to turn America into a different country are slim or none.

The only thing on the side of those who understand this, and who oppose it, is time. Reshaping the Supreme Court cannot be done overnight, the way Congress passed a vast spending bill in two days.

Replacing Supreme Court justices is something that can be done only one at a time and at unpredictable intervals. What this means is that senators who do not have enough votes to stop an Obama nominee to the High Court from being confirmed nevertheless have an opportunity — and a duty — to alert the public to the dangers of what is being done.

This does not mean turning confirmation hearings into a circus or a kangaroo court with mud-slinging at judicial nominees, the way Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas were smeared. But it also does not mean taking the path of least resistance by quietly voting for people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, who treat the Constitution as a grant of arbitrary power to themselves, rather than a restriction of power on the government as a whole.

It is all too easy to say “A president has the right to appoint the kind of people he wants to the Supreme Court.” He does. But that does not mean that those who don’t have the votes to stop dangerous nominees from being confirmed are obliged to vote for them or to stand mute.

Since Justice David Souter is likely to be replaced by another liberal, it is all too easy to say that it is no big deal. But with all the indications we have already as to how the Obama administration is trying to remake America on many fronts, the time to begin alerting the public to the dangers is now.

Given the age and health of some other Supreme Court justices, more replacements are likely during Obama’s time in the White House. Time gives an opportunity to mobilize public opinion and perhaps change the composition of the Senate that will confirm the next judicial nominees.

But time by itself does nothing. It is what we do with time that matters.

WRITTEN by Thomas Sowell for the National Review as 'Time Is On Our Side' and published on May 7th, 2009