Monty Pelerin ~ EconomicNoise.com
It only stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master. Ayn Rand
Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them. Aldous Huxley
Matters are becoming especially nasty in US politics as we approach a seminal election.
The country is irreconcilably divided between hard-core liberals and conservatives. Fortunately, there are enough independents that neither hard-core can muster a majority without modifying, to various degrees, their views. At least that is the way that elections worked before this one.
President Obama sees within his reach his dream of transforming the country. Unfortunately for Obama, his failures are apparent to growing numbers of citizens, many of whom supported him the first time around and are now suffering “buyers remorse.”
He is so close to what he planned, yet it is slipping away and his desperation is showing. Apparently in an effort to prevent this from happening, he is willing to employ his community organizer skills on a national level. These Marxist-Leninist-Alinsky tools were not planned to be unveiled until after his re-election. Now that this occurrence is at risk, he appears to be willing to use them as tools for re-election. This strategy reflects either desperation or misjudgment.
What do I mean by Marxist-Leninist-Alinsky tools? Quite simply, they are practical tools designed to accomplish an objective without regard to the legality or morality of the means. Obama has committed all out to an “ends justifies the means” campaign. Here, for example, are instructions from Lenin on power:
Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. …
1. Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers.
2. Publish their names.
3. Seize all their grain from them.
4. Designate hostages in accordance with yesterday’s telegram.
Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: “they are strangling, and will strangle to death, the bloodsucking kulaks”.
Telegraph receipt and implementation.
Yours, Lenin.
This telegraph appeared in an article by James Lewis on American Thinker. Mr. Lewis in his article likens current Democrat behavior to that of Lenin. He does not suggest that hanging is a part of that strategy, although other thug-like behavior is. When one’s pedigree includes the likes of Marx, Alinsky, Ayers and others of that ilk, thug behavior as a part of politics is the norm.
The bizarre and nearly unprecedented recent political behavior on the part of the Obama Administration results from the recognition that the election is slipping away. Some of the headwinds Mr. Obama faces are the following:
- The economy is not improving (nor will it before the election).
- Government stimulus is increasingly seen as political favoritism and a waste of taxpayer money.
- Government continues to spend money that it doesn’t have, leading the nation closer to bankruptcy.
- Voters understand that this spending has mortgaged the future of their children and grandchildren and may destroy the country.
- The centerpiece of Obama’s economic program, green energy initiatives, produced no new energy and a track record of failing companies. It was nothing more than political payoffs to Democrat supporters.
- Gas prices are at record levels and expected to soar upward from here while Obama plays politics with an important pipeline.
- President Obama’s Democrat-controlled Senate refused to pass his requested tax hikes on oil companies.
- The Supreme Court has exposed Obama’s crowning domestic achievement, ObamaCare, for its legal absurdities (which does not mean they will overrule it). The CBO estimates have more than doubled, casting doubt on the integrity of the President’s cost estimates.
- President Obama’s proposed budget did not garner one Democrat vote in the House.
Mr. Obama has no achievement to run on and many negatives to overcome. Furthermore, his once perceived mystical qualities are no more. Most of what he has done has been a failure. Everything he has touched has become worse.
There is no way to intellectually defend his failed policies, but then that holds for much of liberalism in general. Liberalism is not based on reason but on “caring.” If you are not liberal, then you must be mean and uncaring. But what happens when you have been in charge and gotten all of your programs put in place and they don’t work? Under such circumstances it is hard to blame others for the problems. That is precisely the quandary in which Obama finds himself.
He cannot be re-elected running on his pitiful record. There is no way to defend it theoretically or empirically. “Caring” is not an asset when incompetence overrides prevails. The only strategy left is the Leninist-Marxist politics of destruction and coercion. Hence, we see the beginnings of classic mob politics, madness passing off as idealist causes or movements. We saw it when Obama tacitly or overtly (take your pick) approved of the Occupy Wall Street mobs. Before that we saw the antagonism surface when Obama inserted himself on the side of Henry Louis Gates against the Boston Police Department even when he had no knowledge of what had transpired. Now we a similar insertion into the tragedy of the Trayvon Martin shooting.
The facts of this case were not known when the great ambulance chasers of the race industry (Sharpton and Jackson) began to spin their version of what had happened. (As more information leaks out, this duo appears to be as unreliable as ever.) That President Obama involved himself and encouraged this racial unrest is downright shameful and dangerous. He jumped in despite any knowledge of what had happened yet he remained conspicuously silent when the Black Panthers placed a bounty on Zimmerman, the alleged shooter.
Race-baiting by the country’s premier race pimps who pose as reverends is bad enough. It is disgusting and dangerous when the similar taking of sides occurs from the highest office in the land. The President is expected to adhere to the law and not encourage what appears to be misguided vigilante justice.
The position of President Obama is unprecedented. It demonstrates extreme misjudgment or an attempt to capitalize politically by pandering to a set of his constituents. Regardless, it is not a good sign for the country.Doug Ross offers the best advice for the country:
All Americans — citizens of every race, creed, religion and color — should reject the Democrat Party and its vicious marketing of racial hatred.
Protein Wisdom opines on Obama’s blatant practice of identity politics:
That our President and members of his party have not only allowed the racial demagoguery to continue, but have in fact participated in it (and intend to extend its rhetorical reach), should be a chilling reminder that — even in the most sophisticated societies, under the stewardship of the most enlightened laws — the controls we place on government are, in the end, merely words. Once an anti-foundationalist ideological movement like the progressive left has decided it no longer has to abide by legal restraints should the context arise where they are “morally bound” to “resist” laws — that is, once they declare that law is man-made and thus contingent and not binding in particular contexts of their choosing — there is nothing left but force and the will to power, which become the de facto ruling conditions of society (albeit, these will be disguised and qualified with propaganda attempts to hide their baser imulses under the rubric of “social justice” and “civil disobedience, ” etc.).
In a society truly governed by the rule of law, Congressmen and Justice Department officials would be calling for a respect of due process and reinforcing the integrity of states and local law enforcement. Instead, we have members of Congress — and members of the media, like MSNBC race pimp and host Al Sharpton — essentially trying to lead a lynch mob based around public pressure, scapegoating, rank racialist politics, and the kind of bullying typical of identity politics reinforced by the social taboos long set in place by adepts of political correctness.
What we are witnessing is truly outrageous. And it is disgusting. And it has been cheerily manufactured by those who presume to rule over us by promoting various forms of tribalism to keep as at each others’ throats.
The President’s re-election effort, despite compliant support from the media and the Federal Reserve, appears to be in serious trouble. To most, the re-election is all he is interested in and he will stop at nothing in that pursuit. This situation is increasingly recognized by Democrats who see him as willing to sacrifice his own party to achieve his personal objectives. Look for more Democrats to decide the best way to protect their own careers is to distance themselves from this failed president.
It appears as though mob tactics may be the only viable strategy for this President. When one is unable to defend one’s record either theoretically or empirically, what else is left? You can try to buy votes by playing Santa Claus but the government is out of money and that would only anger the electorate more. In this position, you either recognize that you have failed or you resort to guerrilla politics. President Obama’s ego and arrogance does not allow the former, so brace yourself for a “scorched earth” election unlike anything seen in our lifetimes.
Protein Wisdom describes the point at which the country has reached:
We either fight back or we don’t. But the days of sitting quiet and hoping it all blows over are no longer a legitimate option. Because that maneuver has led to a kind of tacit complicity, and we have, as a nation, reached the tipping point where, if we don’t push back now, we will find ourselves living in democratic despotism — without the recourse of a stable set of laws to save us from the will of a political consensus born of propaganda, misinformation, intellectual laziness, and the deconstruction of every last tenet of classical liberalism institutionalized at our founding and framing.
This election will likely be a preview of what it will be like to live in a Banana Republic with no Rule of Law.