Author: Kevin

Obama’s not a Socialist

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Obama’s not a Socialist

Or so I am assured.

His father was. His mentor was. Several of his “Czars” are/were. His minister of twenty years is:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxfumgUTm5I&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&w=480&h=385]

Judge me by the people with whom I surround myself. – Barack Obama

I do. He is. And so is his agenda.

UPDATE: This video is from the 60th Anniversary celebration of Monthly Review magazine:

The Monthly Review sixtieth anniversary celebration at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on September 17, 2009, was a great success. A large crowd turned out to hear Grace Lee Boggs, John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, Fred Magdoff, Michael Tigar, Toshi Reagon (providing music), and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and to celebrate MR’s birthday. We would like to thank all those who participated in this extraordinary event. Dr. Wright captured the tone of the evening, declaring that: “Militarism, capitalism and racism, domestic oppression, foreign military aggression, victims of neo-colonialism, victims of community and national racism, and the Cold War days in its infancy to the needless war in Vietnam in its [MR’s] second decade, through wars of greed in Afghanistan and Iraq in [its] sixth decade” were all incisively covered by the magazine. He spoke of Monthly Review’s indefatigable insistence on the need to put “people before profits,” and its unflinching criticisms of inequality, injustice, and the realities of capitalism. (See Daa’iya L. Sanusi, Amsterdam News, September 24-30, 2009).

But apparently none of these people are socialists! Hell, apparently there aren’t even any LIBERALS in America!

Quote of the Day – Primary Sources Edition

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“Geek, I am surprised to find that I think I am really a Republican, and this frightens me. It isn’t that the Republicans are scary…well, some of them are, but not the ones I’ve actually seen. The people who really scare the hell out of me are the Democrats. I used to think I was one of them, until I saw how they really behaved once they have power. I can see that they’re just interested in power, and in instituting as much of a Socialist scheme as they can get away with…”

I probed. “Socialist? Really? A lot of people bandy that word about, and a lot of Democrats will tell you that it really doesn’t apply, and its inaccurate and misguided to suggest that’s what they…” Kurt cut me off, with a chopping motion of his hand and annoyance that is very uncharacteristic for him.

“Yes! Socialist! A little bit more and more, every time I look closer!” Kurt stopped to compose himself. “Geek, trust me, I know socialists when I see them. I came here to get away from all that krap in Germany, and I don’t like seeing it here, not one little bit.”

— Musings of The Geek with a .45, 20 Years Ago Today…

And from TSM:

I am a new NRA member. I have been a citizen for only fourteen years. I believe in the Constitution and the Second Amendment, and when I see Obama, I see Communism, and I am afraid.

— Mrs. Ly Chho, quoted 10/10/08.

Quote of the Day – Berlin Wall Edition

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Twenty years ago I breathed a sigh of relief. I honestly thought that with the demise of the USSR and their lackey regimes in East Germany and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, we’d finally secured the world that would be safe and shining bright for my children.

Today I’m not sure at all. It was easier in 1974. There was a fence. One one side was us. On the other side were the enemy. Them. A line. Us. They wore different uniforms to make it easy.

Today, the enemy isn’t on the other side of the line. The shining days I thought I’d secured for my children, those days are being torn away by a socialism administered by elites, as socialism always does. In East Germany, things were pretty darned pleasant if you were at the top, looking down at the people. For the people, though, it was grey, drab and hopeless.

That’s the America that the Left has for us. Oh, you won’t hear them actually SAY that, but that’s because they’re so wrapped up in the layers of sophistry and academic prose that they fail to read history, to see that such is the end of EVERY government that heads down the path our own Leftists are choosing.

I’m sitting here thinking how glad I was that the Warsaw Pact never crossed the line, and I’m doubting that the American Left has that much sense. — Mostly Cajun, Reflections on a wall that isn’t there

[sarcasm] But Dale, this time the RIGHT people will be in charge! [/sarcasm]

Yes, Exactly

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Yes, Exactly

I don’t like to say I told you so, but I’ve been saying for months now that the trick is to drag this thing across the finish line with 50.0000000000001 percent of the vote as soon as possible. From my “Happy Warrior” column in NR back in July:

Obama believes in “the fierce urgency of now”, and fierce it is. That’s where all the poor befuddled sober centrists who can’t understand why the Democrats keep passing incoherent 1,200-page bills every week are missing the point. If “health care” were about health care, the devil would be in the details. But it’s not about health or costs or coverage; it’s about getting over the river and burning the bridge. It doesn’t matter what form of governmentalized health care gets passed as long as it passes. Once it’s in place, it will be “reformed”, endlessly, but it will never be undone.

Right now, they can trade anything — abortion, death panels, whatever. The trick is to plant the seed and let the ratchet effect of Big Government take care of the rest. I said on Rush’s show on Friday that if Barack Obama had been Bill Clinton he’d have woken up on Wednesday morning and begun triangulating. Instead, Obama woke up and figured that he needed more fierce urgency, and right now. The short-term hit in 2010 is worth it for the long-term benefits: Obscure congressmen will be just as happy as obscure ambassadors or obscure chairmen of obscure agencies. And the prize of permanent irreversible statist annexation merits the risk: Governmentalized “health care” puts us on the fast track to Euro-sclerosis and redefines the relationship between citizen and state in ways that make genuine conservative politics all but impossible. — Mark Steyn, National Review Online, If It Were Done When ‘Tis Done, Then ‘Twere Well It Were Done Quickly

(My emphasis.) It’s not about health care, it’s about POWER. It always has been. That’s all it’s ever been.

And Now We Wait for the Imperial Senate

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So Nancy Pelosi, in the dead of night (natch), managed to twist just enough arms – by apparently abandoning support for federally-funded abortions – to squeak the “Health Reform” bill through the House. Just three representatives would have been enough to change the vote from 220-215 to 217-218, but she pulled it off. And it was a BIPARTISAN victory, because ONE (1) Republican – Anh Cao of Louisiana – crossed the aisle and voted “YEA”.

Now it’s up to our Imperial Senate, where the necessary 60 member majority means that the Democrats can pass anything they wish, if Harry Reid can armtwist as effectively as Pelosi. Of course the Senate also contains “Republicans” like Olympia Snowe, Arlen Specter, George Voinovich and others, so it will probably be easier to get the bill passed in the Senate now that it’s gotten through the House.

We have unemployment above 10% for the first time in decades, our government is printing and spending billions of dollars it doesn’t have and no one wants to loan us, and now our Fearless Leaders, after producing a Department of Education that doesn’t educate, “No Child Left Behind” that can’t get out of the driveway, a “War on Poverty” that’s cost trillions but still has millions in perpetual poverty, a “War on Drugs” that the drugs are winning, want to convince us that spending a trillion dollars and forcing thousands of new regulations down our throats will improve “health care” in America.

We should just trust them. They know what’s best, as the oxymoronically titled, but perfectly named “Representative” Massa explains:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXWmVBadWvU&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&w=425&h=344]Once again I will quote Rev. Sensing:

I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free.

Aw, CRAP

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Aw, CRAP

Multiple shooter mass shooting at Ft. Hood.

At least seven dead, 20 wounded. Two, possibly three shooters. Possibly still ongoing.

Dammit.

UPDATE: Current information as of 6:30PM MST: 12 dead, 31 injured. One shooter, Major Malik Nadal Hasan, an army psychiatrist who is reported to be a late convert to Islam, is dead. Two other suspects released, a fourth possibly in custody. Weapon(s) used were handgun(s). Too much still unknown / unreleased.

Contrary to what some think, I doubt seriously that there will be any incidents of whack-a-Muslim over this.

UPDATE, 7:45PM MST: Army denies that the shooter is dead.

Authorities said immediately after the shootings that they had killed the suspected shooter, but later in the evening they recanted and said that he was alive and in stable condition at a hospital, watched by a guard.

“His death is not imminent,” said Lt. Gen. Bob Cone at Fort Hood. He offered little explanation for the mistake, other than to say there was confusion at the hospital.

Good. Now they can hang him.

UPDATE, 7:51PM MST:

Retired Army Col. Terry Lee told Fox News that he worked with Hasan, who had hoped Obama would pull troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Another shattered Hope-n-Changer. Didn’t he listen to the speeches where Obama said that the Afghanistan war was the necessary one? And that he was going to close Gitmo?

Hasan was single with no children. He was born in Virginia and graduated from Virginia Tech University….

So he went to VT, scene of the worst rampage shooting in U.S. history, and goes on a rampage himself in Killeen, TX where the Luby’s massacre occurred. Too weird.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

Found at The Emigré with a Digital Cluebat:

It is obvious what the fraudulent issue of fascism versus communism accomplishes: it sets up, as opposites, two variants of the same political system; it eliminates the possibility of considering capitalism; it switches the choice of ‘Freedom or dictatorship?’ into ‘Which kind of dictatorship?’ — thus establishing dictatorship as an inevitable fact and offering only a choice of rulers. The choice — according to the proponents of that fraud — is: a dictatorship of the rich (fascism) or a dictatorship of the poor (communism). That fraud collapsed in the 1940’s, in the aftermath of World War II. It is too obvious, too easily demonstrable that fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory — that both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state — that both are socialistic, in theory, in practice, and in the explicit statements of their leaders — that under both systems, the poor are enslaved and the rich are expropriated in favor of a ruling clique — that fascism is not the product of the political ‘right,’ but of the ‘left’ — that the basic issue is not ‘rich versus poor,’ but man versus the state, or: individual rights versus totalitarian government — which means: capitalism versus socialism.

— Ayn Rand

I may not be an Objectivist, but the old lady was right far more often than she was wrong. Interesting that she says here what it took Jonah Goldberg an entire book to say.

But she was wrong. The rival gangs are at it again, by all appearances, else Jonah’s book would have been unnecessary.