Tag: politics

I ♣ Moral Equivalence

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I was listening to the morning AM talk show today, and the topic (of course) was Ayers, since Sara Palin brought the subject up again in her speech in Clearwater, FL this morning.

The show takes a lot of calls from the audience. The Call came in, just about the way I expected it to. “David” proclaimed that Ayers wasn’t a terrorist, he was a Vietnam war protester, and the McCain/Palin campaign were just trying to make him look like an Islamic terrorist.

If Ayers was a terrorist, “David” proclaimed, then so was George Washington!

RCOB™

I got on the phone and got in queue. There were about six respondents in total, and I was the last before the show ended, but I got my $6.95 in (my 2¢ with inflation, value added tax, sales tax, excise tax, luxury tax, FICA witholding and fuel surcharge).

“David” is the successful end result of the de-moralization, the “ideological subversion” Yuri Bezmenov described in such detail. He’s a “useful idiot,” and he’s not alone. As I explained to the host, “David” is the product of decades of our “education” system, and what better way to illustrate that than through Barack Obama himself?

When questioned by George Stephanopoulos about his relationship with Ayers during the primary debates, Obama’s response was

This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, uh, who I know, and who I have not received some official endorsement from – he’s not somebody I exchange ideas from(sic) on a regular basis. The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts forty years ago when I was eight years old, ah, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.

No. Ayers is a professor of EDUCATION. In other words, he teaches future teachers.

And that ought to frighten the almighty PISS out of you.

Ayers doesn’t just live in Obama’s neighborhood, they’ve worked together – ON AN EDUCATION PROJECT.

And THAT ought to frighten the almighty piss out of you.

Mr. Ayers’ agenda is open for anyone to see. He’s written 15 books, most on the topic of teaching, and in particular the teaching of that wonderful all-encompassing “progressive” phrase, “Social Justice.”

Ayers is so enamored with the idea of using the schools to promote “social justice” (rather than, you know, teaching kids how to read, write, and do math) he even recently traveled to Argentina where he stood next to Hugo Chávez and proclaimed:

This is my fourth visit to Venezuela, each time at the invitation of my comrade and friend Luis Bonilla, a brilliant educator and inspiring fighter for justice. Luis has taught me a great deal about the Bolivarian Revolution and about the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution, and I’ve come to appreciate Luis as a major asset in both the Venezuelan and the international struggle—I look forward to seeing how he and all of you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.

I have to ask, if Bill Ayers is so certain that “capitalist education” is failing, just what is he teaching our future teachers?

As Sol Stern says in his City Journal piece today, “Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer.”

Obama pulled the “moral equivalence” bit himself in that same debate:

The fact is I’m also friendly with Tom Coburn, one of the most conservative Republicans in the United States Senate, who during his campaign once said that it might be appropriate to apply the death penalty to those who carried out abortions. Do I need to apologize for Mr. Coburn’s statements because I certainly don’t agree with those either.

That’s moral equivalence. Coburn thinks that the power of law perhaps ought to be applied against an act he believes to be the murder of innocents. Coburn works within the system to try to implement his beliefs. Coburn makes statements.

Ayers was involved in a group that detonated bombs.

Obama works in the Senate with Coburn. He doesn’t have a choice. He worked with Ayers voluntarily, in both the Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Fund. Ayers is far more than just “a Professor of English in Chicago” who just happens to live in the same neighborhood as Obama. Ayers has described himself as a communist (“small ‘c’ “), and by his appearance in support of Chávez, he still is. From the same speech quoted above:

I began teaching when I was 20 years old in a small freedom school affiliated with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. The year was 1965, and I’d been arrested in a demonstration. Jailed for ten days, I met several activists who were finding ways to link teaching and education with deep and fundamental social change. They were following Dewey and DuBois, King and Helen Keller who wrote: “We can’t have education without revolution. We have tried peace education for 1,900 years and it has failed. Let us try revolution and see what it will do now.”

I walked out of jail and into my first teaching position — and from that day until this I’ve thought of myself as a teacher, but I’ve also understood teaching as a project intimately connected with social justice.

Ayers too is a “useful idiot,” fitting perfectly into the description Yuri Bezmenov gave. Sol Stern warns us in his City Journal piece:

Ayers’s school reform agenda focuses almost exclusively on the idea of teaching for “social justice” in the classroom. This has nothing to do with the social-justice ideals of the Sermon on the Mount or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Rather, Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children with the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive. As a leader of this growing “reform” movement, Ayers was recently elected vice president for curriculum of the American Education Research Association, the nation’s largest organization of ed school professors and researchers.

William Ayers is one of those responsible for our George Orwell Daycare Centers. And Obama works within and is comfortable within groups that think Ayers is a fine and wonderful human being.

Because he’s the moral equivalent of George Washington!

Where’s my club?

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have legislatures that bring a higher price than any in the world. – Mark Twain

But it’s the American Taxpayer who foots the bill, eventually.

Dissention in the Ranks!

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Dissention in the Ranks!

Wizbang reports:

“America, this is what a feminist looks like”

Who said that about Sarah Palin? Would you believe the president of LA’s National Organization for Women, Shelly Mandel? Amazing! This is quite a moment for her to push back against the pressure from the feminist groups who see Sarah Palin as a traitor because she’s a Republican and pro-life who actually lived her principles.

There’s video. The Wizbang post concludes:

Shelly gave a wonderful endorsement. I’m thrilled to have her as a fellow Sarah Palin supporter. If other feminists and NOW presidents come out and trash Shelly, we need to stand behind her and give her a lot of support.

I was talking to my husband about this and told him that this is probably the reason why she went to California. The endorsement of the president of one of the largest chapters of NOW is huge, which explains why the MSM isn’t reporting it.

A quick Google News search comes up with three (3) stories on Shelly Mandel. Story #1, MSNBC:

Palin Repeats Ayers Line in CA

CARSON, Calif. — Last night, Palin reiterated her claims that Obama “sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who target their own country.”

“Turns out one of his earliest supporters is a man, who according to the New York Times, was a domestic terrorist,” Palin told about 10,000 supporters at a rally at the Home Depot Center. She was referring to William Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s, which sought to bomb the Pentagon and US Capitol.

“No, this is not a man who sees America as you and I see America,” she said of Obama. “We see Americas as a force for good in this world. We see an America of exceptionalism.

“Our opponent is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who target their own country.”

Eighth paragraph down in the piece:

Palin was introduced by Shelly Mandell, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women.

Update: Note that slight error. Mandell isn’t the President of the LA chapter of NOW, apparently she’s the entire membership!

Mandell said she was supporting Palin as an individual; NOW’s national political action committee has backed Obama.

The other two links are from September.

Yahoo News? Nada.

CNN? “No Results”

Fascinating!

ONLY 59%?

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ONLY 59%?

Rasmussen reports:

59% Would Vote to Replace Entire Congress

Congress was front and center in the national news last week and the American people were far from impressed. If they could vote to keep or replace the entire Congress, 59% of voters would like to throw them all out and start over again. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 17% would vote to keep the current legislators in office.

Today, just 23% have even a little confidence in the ability of Congress to deal with the nation’s economic problems and only 24% believe most Members of Congress understand legislation before they vote on it.

As others have said, “So much for taxation without representation.” We’re getting representation without representation.

Despite these reviews, more than 90% of Congress is likely to be elected this November due to an electoral system designed to benefit incumbents. The biggest advantage offered those in the House of Representatives is a process known as Gerrymandering where Congressional Districts are loaded with friendly voters from Representative’s own party. In effect, Members of Congress—working through their state legislature–get to choose their voters rather than letting voters choose their Congressman.

Also aiding incumbents is high name recognition from news coverage, large staffs funded by taxpayers, and other perks. While the staff positions are technically excluded from politics, the constituent services they provide in a Congressman’s name are among the most effective of all campaign techniques.

Not to mention the McCain-Feingold Incumbent Protection Campaign Finance Reform Act.

This doesn’t surprise me, though:

While unhappiness with Congress cuts across partisan and demographic lines, Democrats are a bit less unhappy than other voters. Seventy-four percent (74%) of Republicans would vote to throw out the entire Congress as would 62% of unaffiliated voters. Only 43% of Democrats go along. Still, just 25% of those in Barack Obama’s party would vote to keep the entire Congress even though it’s controlled by Democrats.

However, there is agreement across party lines when it comes to whether or not most Members of Congress understand legislation before they vote on it—25% of Democrats say yes along with 24% of Republicans and 24% of unaffiliated voters.

Apparently 57% of Democrats polled are fine with that.

When the Constitution was written, the nation’s founders expected that there would be a 50% turnover in the House of Representatives every election cycle. That was the experience they witnessed in state legislatures at the time (and most of the state legislatures offered just one-year terms). For well over 100 years after the Constitution was adopted, the turnover averaged in the 50% range as expected.

In the twentieth century, turnover began to decline. As power and prestige flowed to Washington during the New Deal era, fewer and fewer Members of Congress wanted to leave. In 1968, Congressional turnover fell to single digits for the first time ever and it has remained very low ever since.

Thank you Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Thank you so much.

Quote of the Election Cycle

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Quote of the Election Cycle

The story is old news in the new media. Left-leaning Slate.com called it “a nasty and untrue rumor.” National Review’s Jim Geraghty, who has written exhaustively on the story calls it “unsupported by the facts.” But at the Obama-Uber-Alles Boston Globe, they call it “news.”

We have come to the point in the media’s treatment of Gov. Sarah Palin where even the fig leaf of pretense is gone. The press has openly chosen sides and has stopped apologizing for it. – Michael Graham as quoted at Instapundit.

Only the “stopped apologizing for it” part is new.

I Almost Forgot

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I Almost Forgot!

In all the excitement over the House defeating the $700,000,000,000 bailout, excuse me, rescue bill, it almost escaped my notice that the same August Body also failed to reauthorize the offshore drilling ban.

The 27 year-old ban is now dead. According to the linked story,

The ban was not a prohibition on drilling per se. Rather, it was a ban on appropriating money for the Interior Department to process of new drilling leases. With the beginning of the new fiscal year, that prohibition will end, once Congress passes a budget resolution that restores the funding. After years of opposition to increasing domestic supplies of energy, a full year of fighting House Republicans on the issue, and a summer of defending itself against a vocal Republican minority and overwhelming public support for increased oil drilling, Congressional Democrats agreed last week to allow the ban to lapse this year.

Drawing as little attention to themselves as possible.

Now the question is, will a Democrat-majority legislature actually appropriate funds so the Interior Department can process new drilling leases? Or, like the funding for the BATF to review appeals to restore firearms rights, will this be a line-item that never makes it into any appropriations bill?

Anybody taking bets?

It Fits All the Available Evidence. . .

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Reader/commenter DJ provided a link to a video interview of Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov from 1985 on the topic of “ideological subversion,” in his words:

To change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of their balance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.

It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slow, and it is divided in four basic stages. The first one being demoralization. It takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years it takes to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy.

—

In other words, Marxism-Leninism is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged or counterbalanced with the basic values of Americanism, America patriotism.

Not everywhere, obviously, as evidenced by my April 2006 post RCOB™, but equally obviously Nina Burleigh was a victim of such an education, and shocked, shocked that her son wasn’t getting the same in Narrowsburg, NY.

Mr. Bezmenov’s piece is, now 23 years further on, and in the shadow of what could possibly be the next Depression, deeply, coldly frightening – because we did not listen.

Watch the video. Listen.

[dailymotion id=k6ZQSKfqoJClqdlBt1]

Especially this part:

The timebomb is ticking. With every second the disaster is coming closer and closer. Unlike myself you will have nowhere to defect to, unless you want to live in Antarctica with the penguins. This is it. This is the last country of freedom and possibility.