Trump’s 'lack of decorum, dignity, and statesmanship'

Marshall Kamena is the mayor of Livermore, California:

Trump’s 'lack of decorum, dignity, and statesmanship' By Marshall Kamena, Mayor of Livermore, CA.

My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.”

Here’s my answer: We Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency.

We tried statesmanship.

Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain?

We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney?

And the results were always the same. This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.

I don’t find anything “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper” about Barack Obama’s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party.

I don’t see anything “dignified” in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks.

I don’t see anything “statesman-like” in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent.

Yes, Obama was “articulate” and “polished” but in no way was he in the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”

The Left has been engaged in a war against America since the rise of the Children of the ‘60s. To them, it has been an all-out war where nothing is held sacred and nothing is seen as beyond the pale.. It has been a war they’ve fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one – the violent take-over of the universities – till today.

The problem is that, through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war. While the Left has been taking a knife to anyone who stands in their way, the Right has continued to act with dignity, collegiality and propriety.

With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America ’s first wartime president in the Culture War.

During wartime, things like “dignity” and “collegiality” simply aren’t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors. Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming.

Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today.

Lincoln rightly recognized that, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”

General George Patton was a vulgar-talking.. In peacetime, this might have seen him stripped of rank. But, had Franklin Roosevelt applied the normal rules of decorum then, Hitler and the Socialists would barely be five decades into their thousand-year Reich.

Trump is fighting. And what’s particularly delicious is that, like Patton standing over the battlefield as his tanks obliterated Rommel’s, he’s shouting, “You magnificent bastards, I read your book!”

That is just the icing on the cake, but it’s wonderful to see that not only is Trump fighting, he’s defeating the Left using their own tactics. That book is Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – a book so essential to the Liberals’ war against America that it is and was the playbook for the entire Obama administration and the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis.

It is a book of such pure evil, that, just as the rest of us would dedicate our book to those we most love or those to whom we are most indebted, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer.

Trump’s tweets may seem rash and unconsidered but, in reality, he is doing exactly what Alinsky suggested his followers do. First, instead of going after “the fake media” — and they are so fake that they have literally gotten every single significant story of the past 60 years not just wrong, but diametrically opposed to the truth, from the Tet Offensive to Benghazi, to what really happened on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri — Trump isolated CNN.. He made it personal.

Then, just as Alinsky suggests, he employs ridicule which Alinsky described as “the most powerful weapon of all.”... Most importantly, Trump’s tweets have put CNN in an untenable and unwinnable position. ... They need to respond.

This leaves them with only two choices. They can either “go high” (as Hillary would disingenuously declare of herself and the fake news would disingenuously report as the truth) and begin to honestly and accurately report the news or they can double-down on their usual tactics and hope to defeat Trump with twice their usual hysteria and demagoguery. The problem for CNN (et al.) with the former is that, if they were to start honestly reporting the news, that would be the end of the Democratic Party they serve. It is nothing but the incessant use of fake news (read: propaganda) that keeps the Left alive.

Imagine, for example, if CNN had honestly and accurately reported then-candidate Barack Obama’s close ties to foreign terrorists (Rashid Khalidi), domestic terrorists (William Ayers & Bernardine Dohrn), the mafia (Tony Rezko) or the true evils of his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright’s church.

Imagine if they had honestly and accurately conveyed the evils of the Obama administration’s weaponizing of the IRS to be used against their political opponents or his running of guns to the Mexican cartels or the truth about the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the Obama administration’s cover-up.

So, to my friends on the Left — and the #NeverTrumpers as well — do I wish we lived in a time when our president could be “collegial” and “dignified” and “proper”? Of course I do.

These aren’t those times. This is war. And it’s a war that the Left has been fighting without opposition for the past 50 years.


So, say anything you want about this president - I get it - he can be vulgar, he can be crude, he can be undignified at times. I don’t care. I can’t spare this man. He fights for America!

A Vision 0f 2016?

I was originally emailed this back in 2010. After this re-election, it bears repeating:

This belongs in the "Email Hall of
Fame"

How's this for apocalyptic literature. This was written by a pastor's wife in biblical prose as a commentary of current events. It is brilliant. And it came to pass in the Age Of Insanity that the people of the land called America, having lost their morals, and their initiative, and their will to defend their liberties, chose as their Supreme Leader that person known as "The One". He emerged from the vapors with a message that had no meaning; but He hypnotized the people telling them, "I am sent to save you." My lack of experience, my questionable ethics, my monstrous ego, and my association with evil doers are of no consequence. I shall save you with Hope and Change. Go, therefore, and proclaim throughout the land that he who proceeded me is evil, that he has defiled the nation, and that all he has built must be destroyed. And the people rejoiced, for even though they knew not what "The One" would do, he had promised that it was good; and they believed. And "The One" said "We live in the greatest country in the world. Help me change everything about it!" And the people said, "Hallelujah! Change is good!" Then He said, "We are going to tax the rich fat-cats." And the people said "Sock it to them!" And He added, "And redistribute their wealth." And the people said, "Show us the money!" And the he said, "Redistribution of wealth is good for everybody." And a man called "Joe The Plumber" asked, " Are you kidding me? You're going to steal my money and give it to the deadbeats??" And "The One" ridiculed and taunted him, and Joe's personal records were hacked and publicized. One lone reporter asked, "Isn't that Marxist policy?" And she was banished from the kingdom! Then a citizen asked, "With no foreign relations experience and having zero military experience or knowledge, how will you deal with radical terrorists?" And "The One" said, "Simple. I shall sit with them and talk with them and show them how nice we really are; and they will forget that they ever wanted to kill us all!" And the people said, "Hallelujah!! We are safe at last, and we can beat our weapons into free electric cars for the people!" Then "The One" said "I shall give 95% of you lower taxes." And one lone voice said, "But 40% of us don't pay ANY taxes." So "The One" said, "Then I shall give you some of the taxes the fat-cats pay!" And the people said, "Hallelujah! Show us the money!" Then "The One" said, "I shall tax your Capital Gains when you sell your homes!" And the people yawned and the slumping housing market collapsed. And He said, "I shall mandate employer-funded health care for every worker and raise the minimum wage. And I shall give every person unlimited healthcare and medicine and transportation to the clinics." And the people said, "Give me some of that!" And so the employers decided to leave the nation. Then "The One" said, "I shall penalize employers who ship jobs overseas." And the people said, "Where's my rebate check?" Then "The One" said, "I shall bankrupt the coal industry and electricity rates will skyrocket!" And the people said, "Coal is dirty, coal is evil, no more coal! But we don't care for that part about higher electric rates." So "The One" said, Not to worry. If your rebate isn't enough to cover your expenses, we shall bail you out. Just sign up with the ACORN and your troubles are over!" Then He said, "Illegal immigrants feel scorned and slighted. Let's grant them amnesty, Social Security, free education, free lunches, free medical care, bi-lingual signs and guaranteed housing..." And the people said, "Hallelujah!" and they made him king! And so it came to pass that employers, facing spiraling costs and ever-higher taxes, raised their prices and laid off workers. Others simply gave up and went out of business and the economy sank like unto a rock dropped from a cliff. The banking industry was destroyed. Manufacturing slowed to a crawl. And more of the people were without a means of support. Then "The One" said, "I am the "the One"- The Messiah - and I'm here to save you! We shall just print more money so everyone will have enough!" But our foreign trading partners said unto Him: "Wait a minute. Your dollar is not worth a pile of camel dung! You will have to pay more..." And "The One" said, "Wait a minute. That is unfair!!" And the world said, "Neither are these other idiotic programs you have embraced. Lo, you have become a Socialist state and a second-rate power. Now you shall play by our rules!" And the people cried out, "Alas, alas!! What have we done?" But yea verily, it was too late. The people set upon The One and spat upon him and stoned him, and his name was dung. And the once mighty nation was no more; and the once proud people were without sustenance or shelter or hope. And the Change "The One" had given them was as like unto a poison that had destroyed them and like a whirlwind that consumed all that they had built. And the people beat their chests in despair and cried out in anguish, "Give us back our nation and our pride and our hope!!" But it was too late, and their homeland was no more. You may think this a fairy tale, but it's not. It's happening RIGHT NOW...

The Obamunist Budget Lie, redux

More debunking:

Obama Spending: The Big Leftist Lie

The apparatchik media just can't tell the truth, can it?

To say nothing of all the Obamunist spending programs that are set to kick in Fiscal Year 2013, but were passed and approved in 2009 and 2010.

A Political Tribute To Amy Winehouse

And they still call her "stupid"....

And they still call the petulant man-child of a president "smart":

          After listening to the President’s press conference today, let’s keep in mind the following:

This is the same president who proposed an absurdly irresponsible budget that would increase our debt by trillions of dollars, and whose party failed to even put forward a budget in over 800 days! This is the same president who is pushing our country to the brink because of his reckless spending on things like the nearly trillion dollar “stimulus” boondoggle. This is the same president who ignored his own debt commission’s recommendations and demonized the voices of fiscal sanity who proposed responsible plans to reform our entitlement programs and rein in our dangerous debt trajectory. This is the same president who wanted to push through an increase in the debt ceiling that didn’t include any cuts in government spending! This is the same president who wants to slam Americans with tax hikes to cover his reckless spending, but has threatened to veto a bill proposing a balanced budget amendment. This is the same president who hasn’t put forward a responsible plan himself, but has rejected reasonable proposals that would tackle our debt. This is the same president who still refuses to understand that the American electorate rejected his big government agenda last November. As I said in Madison, Wisconsin, at the Tax Day Tea Party rally, “We don’t want it. We can’t afford it. And we are unwilling to pay for it.”

Now the President is outraged because the GOP House leadership called his bluff and ended discussions with him because they deemed him an obstruction to any real solution to the debt crisis. 

He has been deemed a lame duck president. And he is angry now because he is being treated as such.

His foreign policy strategy has been described as “leading from behind.” Well, that’s his domestic policy strategy as well. Why should he be surprised that he’s been left behind in the negotiations when he’s been leading from behind on this debt crisis?

Thank you, GOP House leaders. Please don’t get wobbly on us now.

2012 can’t come soon enough.

I couldn't have said it better myself. How does it feel for the Demunists to be "pwned" by a snowbilly?

But I must also give credit to House Speaker John Boehner for standing firm and not going wobbly. I think he has *finally* figured out that the last time he tried to negotiate in good faith with the Obamunist and the Commiecrats, he got boned over the FY2011 budget.

Remember that fiasco? Cutting a relatively trivial $100 billion from a budget with $1.5 trillion of deficit spending wouldn’t have been particularly impressive, but John Boehner let himself be bargained down to $38 billion, and then had the Congressional Budget Office estimate that those “unprecedented” and even “draconian” cuts actually amounted to a mere $352 million.

For the Demunist Commiecrats, racking up massive debt is a feature, not a bug, in their social(ist) (computer) programs. it justifies more confiscatory taxation and accordingly more nanny state control over us kulaks and petty bourgeois.

Independence Day?

Mark Steyn points out how we are losing ours, as the Obamunists push us toward becoming another banana republic:
....in America "Independence" seemed as much a statement about the character of a people as a designation of jurisdictional status. The first Americans were British subjects who had outgrown a British king as benign and enlightened as any ruler on the planet. They demanded "independence" not from foreign rulers of another ethnicity but from their own compatriots with whom they had a disagreement about the nature of government. Long before the Revolutionary War, small New England townships governed themselves to a degree no old England towns did. "Independence" is not about the replacement of a king in London with a president in Washington but about the republican virtues of a self-reliant citizenry free to exploit its own potential.

Please, no snickering. The self-reliant citizen? In the damning formulation of contemporary American vernacular, he's history — as in over and done with, fuhgeddabouttim. What's left of that founding vision on this less than Glorious Fourth of July 2011 in the Brokest Nation in History? "You go talk to your constituents," President Obama taunted Republicans on Wednesday, "and ask them, are they willing to compromise their kids' safety so that some corporate-jet owner continues to get a tax break?"

In the Republic of Brokistan, that's the choice, is it? Give me safe kids or give me corporate jets! No corporate aviation without safe kiddification! In his bizarre press conference on Wednesday, Obama made no fewer than six references to corporate-jet owners. Just for the record, the tax break for corporate jets was part of the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009" — i.e., the stimulus. The Obama stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Democratic-party stimulus that every single Republican House member and all but three Republican senators voted against. The Obama–Corporate Jet stimulus that some guy called Obama ostentatiously signed into law in Denver after jetting in to host an "economic forum."

Charles Krauthammer did the math. If you eliminate the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Corporate Jet Tax Break, you would save so much dough that, after 5,000 years, you would have clawed back enough money to cover one year of Obama's debt. Five thousand years is the year 7011. Boy, our kids'll really be safe by then. I see some leftie at MSNBC has just been suspended for characterizing the president's performance on Wednesday as that of a demotic synonym for the male reproductive organ. So I shall be more circumspect and say only that even being a hollow unprincipled demagogue requires a certain lightness of touch Obama can't seem to find.

Speaking of corporate jets, did the president fly commercial to Denver? Oh, but that's different! He's in "public service." A couple of weeks before he flew Air Force One to Denver, he flew Air Force One to Williamsburg, Va. From the White House (well, via Andrews Air Force Base). That's 150 miles, a 30-minute flight. He took a 747, a wide-bodied jet designed to carry 500 people to the other side of the planet, for a puddle-jump across the Potomac.

Oh, but it was for another "economic forum." This time with House Democrats — the ones who voted for the Obama Corporate Jet Tax Break. "Economic forums" are what we have instead of an economy these days.....And the least the beneficiary of such decadence could do is not condescendingly lecture those who pay for their own transportation. America's debt is an existential crisis, and playing shell games with shriveled peas of demonizable irrelevancies only advertises your contempt for the citizenry.
(...)
What else isn't "the same for everyone"? A lot of things, these days. The president has a point about "tax breaks." We have too many. And on the scale of the present tax code that's a dagger at the heart of one of the most basic principles of free societies — equality before the law. But, of course, the president is not opposed to exemptions and exceptions and special privileges on principle: After all, he's issued — what is it now? — over a thousand "waivers" for his own Obamacare law. If you knew who to call in Washington, maybe you got one. If you didn't, tough.

But that's the point. Big Government on America's unprecedented money-no-object scale will always be profoundly wasteful, stupid, and arbitrary (as in those waivers). But it's not republican in any sense the Founders would recognize. If (like Obama) you're a lifetime member of the government class, you can survive it. For the rest, it ought to be a source of shame to today's Americans that this will be the first generation in U.S. history to bequeath its children the certainty of poorer, meaner lives — if not a broader decay into a fetid swamp divided between a well-connected Latin American–style elite enjoying their waivers and a vast downwardly mobile morass.

Obama Press conference: Speak slower, be condescending

How about that Obama press conference? So far Obama's major nod to defeat the other night is to speak slower as if we are all too dumb to understand his awesome statism.

Beyond that? He says he's looking forward to hear ideas from Republicans. Yeah, right. Just like when he said, "I won", and shot any GOP proposals about health insurance down. Difference this time...he didn't win.

He says answers aren't to be found on bumper sticker. THIS, from the Guy who coined "Yes we can".

Big Takeaway...Obama rejects notion that his policies were rejected by voters last night. Says his policies are not moving the nation backwards, rejects notion that was message of last night. It would have been much shorter and much more honest if he just said what he really wants to say, "Let me be clear, I'm still awesome. If you aren't smart enough to get that, it's on you not me."

He's not going the Clinton way. After the Great Political Upchuck of 1994, Bill Clinton realized that the Far Left Way wasn't going to work. He sacked the most leftist of his advisers (does anybody remember the radical Ms. Achtenberg, Mr. Cisneros, Ms. Elders, Mr. Reich, Ms. Shalala? All of whom had to leave under clouds of scandal and disgust) and Billy Jeff put in pragmatic types as replacements. In the end, although loathsome to many Conservatives on a personal level, Billy Jeff did a couple of downright Conservative acts: (1) welfare curtailment and reform, and (2) cutting the capital gains tax rates in half, from 28/20% short/long to 15/10%, fueling the investment boom of the mid to late 1990s. The Obamunists have undone the former under ARRA, which extends unemployment and other benefits indefinitely, and the Obamunists are poised to undo the latter next year.

But Bill Clinton wasn't all about Leftist Marxism. Bill Clinton was all about--Bill Clinton.

Obama at 1:20: "Let's not relitigate the past." Obama at 1:24: "We already had a large deficit, which I inherited." (and which Obama octupled!)

2nd question..."Hey, you're really not taking any responsibility here. Should voters think you "don't get it"???". Here's where the Obamunist petulance starts to show. He's basically saying, "aw, it was tough and people don't get how awesome I am". He also said they did so much because it was an emergency. Gee, governments never justify power grabs under the guise of an 'emergency' or anything.

3rd question...About that repealing health care thing and starting over. Obama says, let's not re-fight the last two years, let's move on to more awesome stuff. Yeah, good luck with that. Shockingly, he just doesn't get it.

4th question...You know that more big spending for jobs is history, right? So what are you going to do? Answer...pretty much the same as what he did before. He's just running down his same old list of projects for like the 5th time. He just doesn't get it....taking from the productive to make work for the unproductive *still* doesn't work. 
 
There was more, but I stopped watching.

Obama's Immigration Speech: Empty Platitudes

President Obama *could* be cutting through the red tape that is halting oil spill cleanup and plugging efforts in the Gulf of Mexico. But what is he making a speech for now? Amnesty for illegal aliens! Oh, I mean, "An Earned Path To Citizenship."

Like illegal aliens, who saw how they were allowed to stay anyway, will bother to comply with an "earned path to citizenship"? Especially when ACORN and other liberal groups will register them to vote anyway, and when bilingualism allows them not to learn English anyway, and when President Obama will allow the "unscrupulous employers" he talks about to get away with hiring them anyway?

And if they don't comply and don't earn their path, what then? Is any advocate of 'legalization' suggesting jail or deportation? Ineligibility for benefits and educational opportunities? A fine for not paying the fine? A sternly worded letter? What incentive is there for current criminals to take this magical yellow brick road of legalization? We've already been told that any sort of incarceration and then deportation is inhumane. And we've been told that enforcement of existing laws is impossible. But if this new, new monstrosity is passed, magically this will be enforceable?

Drew M. at AOSHQ nails it:

Obama just said something to the effect of 'illegal immigration makes a mockery of those going through the legal process'. Um, so the answer is to jump the illegals ahead of those playing by the rules? I guess my pants aren't sufficiently creased to understand that thinking.

Remember when Obama was considered a great orator? Why was that again?

My God, this is a speech filled with warmed over ideas, straw-men and catchphrases. At least it's being delivered in a low energy, stumbling manner.

I can only hope that this is Obama's "Malaise" speech, revealing the inept policies and empty rhetoric of this Administration. It certainly abounds with enough Obamunist Straw Men.

He says we're missing out on more Einsteins with our current laws. Yeah, that's what we're getting on the southern border. Millions of Alberto Einsteins. Of course, the liberal dupes will call the previous statement "hate speech". Like I am supposed to pretend that at this very minute, a truckload of people, each carrying a knife and a couple pounds of cocaine, are *not* making their way somewhere across the Mexican border.

I suppose he could be talking about the H-1B indentured servants for the tech industries. These are skilled and far better than illiterates (often in Spanish, let alone English) from south of the border.

However, what is happening in technology industries is the upper-class and white-collar version of what is happening in construction and agribusiness. In the tech field, the discouraged mostly white middle class workers have their potential wages bid down by H-1B's and so they leave technology and go work in accounting, finance, business, or now, given the liberal expansion, governmental bureaucracy. New immigrants from Asia, not culturally fluent in Americanisms or well spoken in English, can't follow them there.

In construction, manufacturing and agribusiness, the discouraged mostly black lower class workers have their potential wages bid down by illegals and so they leave that work and head off to welfare and drug dealing.

"Crime along the border is down", the Obamunist says. "It's more secure today than 20 years ago." Wow, news to those of us who live in Cali, let alone Arizona. All that was missing after that statement was a sitcom audience laugh track.

"Illegal immigration makes a mockery of those going through the legal process." Yes it does--and the answer is to make a further mockery of the legal process???

And then he brings up Straw Woman Emma Lazarus. Let us paraphrase it for the 21st century liberals:

Give me your criminals, your pushers, your huddled slavers yearning to run brothels, the wretched refuse of your failed state. I'll give them welfare checks!

In the absence of sensible border controls, that's exactly what we will be getting.

And, speaking of Emma Lazarus, let's remember what Ellis Island -- the Temple of the Immigrant -- really was. It was a processing center, holding facility, temporary jail, and quarantine. If you didn't qualify, you got sent home. Your name was processed through a bureaucrat who only spoke English. If you had any number of diseases, you were locked up until they could either send you home, you died, or you were no longer communicable. Ditto for Angel Island here on the West Coast.

And the biggest straw man of all -- "doing the jobs we won't"! The Obamunist actually has a self-fulfilling point here. If you go to Oak Park or Del Paso Heights around Sacramento here, or any other California ghetto for that matter, and offer the able-bodied high-school dropouts minimum wage plus room, board, and transportation to and from the farms and fruit orchards of "Apple Hill", let alone the orange groves in the San Joaquin Valley for the season, away from the drive by shootings and the violence, they're going to sneer at you. They already get room, board, and some spending money (as well as any drug money they can hustle) for sitting around with their friends and family. They're making a rational economic decision. And you can thank the very same Barack Obama and his fellow travelers for that.

The problem I have with those who spout off about "jobs spoiled Americans won't do" is that when they say that, they are sneering at those of us who *have* worked to get skills and/or education to do more than pick fruit. If they really *believed* that rhetoric, they would be changing welfare benefits and shaming the ghetto underclass so that their rational economic decision is not to sit around the ghetto getting high all day.

(And of course, it's called "racist" to ask able bodied African American Oak Park dwellers to move a short drive out of town to pick fruit, but it's somehow not racist to expect illegally-entrant Mexicans to move a thousand miles or more to pick said fruit).

With the liberals here, the game is "heads they win, tails we lose". They carp about the need for "a living wage", and then they import a massive underclass to drive the wages down. And to vote for more liberal Democrats.

The Obamunist Economic Goal

Eurostagnation. Dick Morris explains:

When Obama took office, he had one paramount goal in mind — to increase the size of the federal government....

Socialism is not an epithet or even an economic philosophy. Whether a nation is socialist or not is determined by a single, simple statistic — what percent of the economy (GDP) goes to the public sector? When Obama took office, the U.S. public sector (federal, state, and local) spent about 30% of GDP. Now it is 36%. If Obamacare lives to be fully implemented, it will pass 40%.

The United Kingdom has a public sector that accounts for about 40% of its economy. Germany is at about 48%. France is at 50% and Sweden at 54%. If Obama is allowed to let the public sector expand to 40% of our GDP, we will become a European socialist democracy, to our everlasting detriment. We will thereby inherit the sclerosis that afflicts Europe — permanently high unemployment and low economic growth. (Again fully documented in our book 2010).

But after his swearing-in, President Obama couldn't say that he was going to raise taxes to move us toward socialism. So, instead, he raised spending to do it and borrowed the money to pay for it. Now, with interest rates set to rise (because the Fed is not printing money as fast as it was), our debt service burden will be so onerous that it will become obvious to everyone that the deficit Obama has created is unsupportable.

Now, we pay an average of 3.5% interest on our $12 trillion national debt. That works out to an annual debt service bill of about $400 billion. While large, it's not impossible. Defense spending, for comparison, is $550 billion, Social Security is $400 billion, Medicare is $300 billion, Medicaid about $200 billion. 

But, when interest rates rise to 7-8 percent — as they must now that the Treasury cannot just borrow newly printed money but must get real loans from real lenders to finance its deficit — the burden will grow to close to $1 trillion, about a quarter of our budget. Put differently, the entire take of personal income taxes in the United States comes to about $900 billion. All of it will go to debt service.

The United States will become just like the subprime mortgage holders who borrowed at low teaser rates only to see their interest grow until they had to sign over their entire paychecks to the mortgage company.

Obama has been expecting this outcome all along. It is how he will achieve socialism in the United States. He will use the pressure his deficit creates to force higher taxes that will permanently expand the public sector.

Reagan increased the deficit to force liberals to stop spending. Obama has increased it to force conservatives to vote for higher taxes.

Once a spending increase is matched by a tax increase, it lasts forever. That is how Obama plans to move the government's share of the GDP permanently over 40% — into socialist territory.

But the Republicans can and must stop him. By refusing to vote for a tax increase and cutting back Obama's crazy spending, slicing his stimulus package and ratcheting back federal Medicaid payments (by zero funding the increases built into Obamacare), Republicans can cut the deficit without higher taxes.

Indeed, the party should commit to lowering taxes by cutting Capital Gains levies to stimulate investment, jobs, and revenues. The only tax that works economically is a tax cut!

Such a defiant stand, in the face of withering criticism from the media, economists, and the Federal Reserve, can only be made by hardy souls. Indeed, such a stance by a Republican Congress will lead to exactly the same sort of government shutdown — when Obama vetoes the budget — as discredited the GOP in 1995-1996 and led to Clinton's re-election. 

Obama's legislative process

The Left's mantra is that: "Bush was running one of the least accountable and most duplicitous administrations in history! Doing things with extraconstitutional means! Waah!"

But this doesn't seem to bother them at all:

That's from Americans for Prosperity, an advocacy group. Check them out. 

Despite blunders like Amnesty and Medicare entitlement expansion, yes, I guess I do.

Socialist Health Care: The Left on a suicide mission?

Why are the Demunists still pushing this wretched "health care" bill, even when it is clear that the consequences are *not* well thought out ("We have to pass this bill to find out what is in it..."), the American public clearly does not like what they see so far, and corporate donations are falling off?

(Contrary to Left belief, the corporations make peace offerings to whomsoever is in power, and in fact have donated heavily to Obama, and not only because many of them are in bed with Obama on certain "green energy" and "stimulus" programs.)

The answer is that the Left understands that this issue is for all the proverbial marbles. If some of them have to fall on their swords politically to push The Big Agenda, no big loss, they will be back in the massively expanded bureaucracy if not in office:

Why let "health" "care" "reform" stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?

Because it's worth it. Big time. I've been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally "conservative" parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (Let's not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a "conservative").

The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

Republicans seem to have difficulty grasping this basic dynamic. Less than three months ago, they were stunned at the way the Democrats managed to get 60 senators to vote for the health bill. Then Scott Brown took them back down to 59, and Republicans were again stunned to find the Dems talking about ramming this thing into law through the parliamentary device of "reconciliation." And, when polls showed an ever larger number of Americans ever more opposed to Obamacare (by margins approaching three-to-one), Republicans were further stunned to discover that, in order to advance "reconciliation," Democrat reconsiglieres had apparently been offering (illegally) various cosy Big Government sinecures to swing-state congressmen in order to induce them to climb into the cockpit for the kamikaze raid to push the bill through. The Democrats understand that politics is not just about Tuesday evenings every other November, but about everything else, too.
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Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily "compassionate conservative" statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect "conservatives," as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who, for tuppence-ha'penny or some such, would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.

Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV, crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it's so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.

OK, then what? You'll roll it back – like you've rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you've undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel'n'dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter? Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus:

"Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?"

Indeed. Look at it from the Dems' point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That's a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.

I've been bandying comparisons with Britain and France, but that hardly begins to convey the scale of it. Obamacare represents the government annexation of "one-sixth of the U.S. economy" – i.e., the equivalent of the entire British or French economy, or the entire Indian economy twice over. Nobody has ever attempted this level of centralized planning for an advanced society of 300 million people. Even the control-freaks of the European Union have never tried to impose a unitary "comprehensive" health care system from Galway to Greece. The Soviet Union did, of course, and we know how that worked out.

This "reform" is not about health care, and certainly not about "controlling costs." As with Medicare, it "controls" costs by declining to acknowledge them, or pay them. Dr. William Schreiber of North Syracuse, N.Y., told CNN that he sees 120 patients per week – about 30 percent on Medicare, 65 private on private insurance plans whose payments take into account the Medicare reimbursement rates, and about 5 percent who do it the old-fashioned way and write a check. He calculates that, under Obamacare, for every $5 he now makes, he'll get $2 in the future. Which suggests now would be a good time to retrain as a realtor or accountant, or the night clerk at the convenience store.
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Because government health care is not about health care, it's about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.

Is Obama Socialist?

A column by Robert Ringer that bears repeating:

After more than a year of lies, deception, corruption, heavy-handed tactics, bribes, threats, bailouts for privileged corporations, government takeover of two of the three largest automakers, and nonstop attempts to force government-controlled health care on people who don’t want it - among other abominable actions – The Big Question about the Duplicitous Despot has become: “Do you believe Barack Obama is a socialist?”

Gosh, that’s a real toughie. You’ll have to give me a couple of seconds to think about it. Whenever I hear this question posed on television, I wonder to myself, “Are you asking if the person thinks he’s a socialist as opposed to a communist? You certainly couldn’t be asking whether he’s a socialist or just a misguided moderate.” Please, let’s get real here.

I would say that the squirming in response to this absurd question would be humorous if it did not have such far-reaching implications. When confronted with The Big Question, it’s fascinating to watch people become tongue-tied and incapable of uttering a straightforward response.

As is only fitting, Mush McCain’s recent reaction The Big Question reinforces his claim to the title of Liberal Democrats’ Favorite Republican. With that sly little grin and “Aw shucks” chuckle of his, McCain coyly muttered : “That’s for others to decide.”

Huh? You wanted to be president of the United States, and you want to leave it up to others to decide? Have you no thoughts of your own? Your hero, Teddy Roosevelt, would be very disappointed in your lack of courage. As one of the elder statesmen of the Republican Party, when someone asks for your opinion, for goodness sakes, man, speak up and tell them what you think.

The phenomenon of conservative politicians and media types becoming tongue-tied over an easy-pitch question like this has broader implications than most people might suspect. What it demonstrates is (1) how intimidating the far-left has become over the years and (2) how lacking in courage and candor so-called conservative politicians and media pundits are.

If a conservative politician doesn’t have the courage and honesty to define what his opponent stands for, how can anyone possibly believe that he’ll fight to overturn that opponent’s socialist policies? It’s not surprising, then, that so many conservative politicians repeatedly say things like, “We all agree that health-care reform is needed” or, worse, “Let’s slow down and work on fixing health care one step at a time.”

Once and for all, let’s get this straight: Everyone doesn’t agree that health-care reform is needed – unless by reform one means getting the government totally out of the health-care business. Which, of course, would include the removal of state borders as a barrier to free competition.

The only crisis in health care is government’s current involvement. Instead of giving government more power, we need to take away the unconstitutional powers it has already grabbed for itself.

When conservative politicians talk about solving a nonexistent problem one step at a time, it’s code for, “We’ll continue to move the marker to the left. We just want to do it more slowly than the progressives.”

Hey, if your intention is to continue to aid the progressives’ hundred-year march to fundamentally change the face of America, why drag things out? If socialism is a good thing, let’s bring it on quickly. I can’t wait to enjoy the benefits.

I rarely compliment BHO, but I’m obliged to say that I respect him for his unwavering Marxist beliefs. His nonstop lying about those beliefs should not be held against him. It’s just part of the Marx-Lenin-Alinsky “ends-justifies-the-means” philosophy of bringing about the loss of liberty that all of them sincerely believed was a moral objective.

I know, I know … it sounds crazy. But that’s what they truly believed, and, giving BHO his due credit, I have no doubts that he, too, sincerely believes this stuff. Even with his college papers sealed, the man’s public statements (and his own books) make it clear that he has been consistent in his Marxist beliefs. You don’t hang out with Marxist professors in college if you’re a believer in freedom and free markets and love the American way of life.

So, yes, I’m sticking up for the Duplicitous Despot: He is consistent. When he told Joe the Plumber that he thought the wealth should be “spread around” more, he was merely echoing his on-record complaints that the Constitution doesn’t provide for “redistributive change.”

I mean, how dumb could the Founding Fathers have been not to have thought about redistribution of the wealth? Isn’t that what liberty is all about? Where’s the “social justice?” Where’s the “shared prosperity?” And how about “the common good.” Don’t these phrases just make your leg want to tingle?

If you’re perplexed as to how BHO can still have a 44 percent approval rating after the most cataclysmic one year in office for a president, the answer lies in the same mind-set that causes media pundits to ask, “Do you believe Barack Obama is a socialist?” Both items underscore the reality that people do not love truth; instead, they try to make true that which they love.

My estimate is that about 30 percent of the population wants the U.S to be completely transformed into a socialist country, and that’s fine. They’re honest about it, so they’re easy to identify as the enemy. In the words of John Stossel, they like free stuff! I get it. I get it.

But the other 15 percent or so who still view BHO favorably are simply self-delusive folks who refuse to let go of their fairy tale that a black family in the White House is, of and by itself, a great thing for America. That kind of thinking is what got us into this mess in the first place.

Geraldine Ferraro had it right when she opined that BHO never would have been in a position to run for president had he not been black. More than anything else, white guilt is what landed him in the White House.

No, of and by itself, a black family in the White House is not a great thing. What would be great is to have a family – black … or white … or Asian … or Latino – in the White House that believes in freedom, free enterprise, and Western values. And that is not the family that now resides there.

It’s really not that hard to answer The Big Question once you get the hang of it. All together now … one, two, three: SOCIALIST!