ricketyclick

Scott Johnson’s “Ten Theses on President-Elect Obama”
Mostly the things that Obama did right in his campaign — right, at least, from the tactical standpoint.

These four points, however, need to highlighted:

7. The campaign gave new meaning to the term “hoist on his own petard.” Obama’s incredible fundraising prowess outside the system of public financing should kill McCain-Feingold on practical grounds after it should have been killed on constitutional grounds.

8. Despite his thoroughgoing liberalism, Obama did not run as a liberal. Liberals can run successfully for president under camouflage donned for the occasion. The camouflage will be accorded respect and deference by the press like that accorded the Emperor’s new clothes.

9. Senator McCain ran a flawed, weirdly constrained but honorable campaign against Barack Obama under circumstances that were aggravated from the difficult to the impossible. No other Republican candidate could have overcome them or run a more successful campaign.

10. The substantially enhanced Democratic majorities in Congress stand poised to pass a raft of legislation that ranges from the destructive to the abominable and the tyrannical. It will serve as an early challenge to the judgment of President Obama, and to the efficacy of the loyal opposition.

[I've fixed two or three typs.]

About Number 9:
Jennifer Rubin’s “Top Thirty Errors That Doomed McCain”

Johnson’s Point Seven, about McCain Feingold, belongs on Rubin’s list as well, so make that “Thirty One Errors”.

The Geek With A .45 lays it out:

Entire Societies Can and Have Gone Stark Raving Batshit Fucking Insane.
…
We know the stakes: it is nothing less than the soul of the Republic itself.

Right now, the Gods of the Copybook Headings are inking up the rubber stamp that says “Epic Fail”, and at some point on Wednesday morning, that stamp will come down on either Barack Obama’s head, or on We The People as a whole.

If our inner thirst for the false promises of a Philosopher King has finally weighed heavier than our memory of freedom, we will well and truly get what we deserve.

[Emphasis and link mine.]
Yeah, yeah, read the whole thing.

We have been warned.

When I was younger and even more foolish than I am now, I professed myself terrified by Presidential Candidate “Ronald Raygunz”, as I called him in hip disdain.

When he was elected, I thought about leaving the country to escape the inevitable police state, but it was too much trouble.

Amazingly, the result was that a real police state, East Germany, fell, along with The Wall. I was too hipply ignorant at the time to realize how profoundly ironic that was.

This time, though, I think I really am…deeply, deeply troubled. The difference is that in Reagan’s case, I was only afraid of a man about whom I knew almost nothing. This time, I’m afraid not only of Obama himself (and I know much more about him, and about politics and history generally), but I am also terrified by his parents, his teachers, his friends, his wife, his preacher, and his political backers. Most of all, though, I’m afraid of the news media that has relentlessly hounded his enemies while jealously protecting him. And I’m afraid of his worshipers, the likes of which I have never seen in any political movement in my entire life. Faint shadows of it in Bobby Kennedy, perhaps, but…faint. No one else even comes remotely close.

This time, even if Obama loses, I will still be afraid, because the fact that he is even on the ticket shows how profoundly the American people have abandoned their dream.

No matter what happens today, folks, it’s going to be a long four years.

I have one hope: I hope that if Obama ascends to the Oval Office, he finds the Levers of Power to be so unwieldy, so jammed, so filthy and crusted, that he can do little or nothing with them. Many of the most impressive will turn out to be for show only, unconnected to anything. Many of the most important will be insignificant, hidden, mislabeled.

I think his own inexperience will work against him here; he really does not know how to run an operation the size of a state, much less a country.

Most of all, I do not think the press will shield the Man in the White House, not even the One they have anointed. The Press Room is a shark pit, they will not be satisfied with scraps. They’ll want, and need, live meat. And Obama has never suffered any scrutiny at all, nothing more than fawning adulation. I seriously doubt he will be able to handle real teeth, real fire.

So, here we go:

The amazing thing is, that although reporting has been overwhelmingly favorable for Obama, although even comics are profoundly pro-O and anti-America, although Obama has enormously outspent McCain, the polling is still running neck and neck.

That means two things:

First, a huge chunk of the American people are not buying the hype, and are deeply suspicious of The One, because many of the folks who will be voting for McCain regard him as a left-wing Democrat. They (we) long for a real small-government Republican. I mean, our rallying cry has been “McCain -08: because I love my Country more than I hate John McCain.” If there were a real SGR candidate, and a real open press, Obama would have already conceded.

Second, the other huge chunk of the American people are, in Stalin’s immortal phrase, “useful idiots”. The worst thing is, the very worst thing, is that many of them are well educated, well-meaning people whom I deeply respect and even count as friends in other ways.

I’m sorry, folks, but even if McCain wins, this last indicates that the American body politic is rotten. There is no way, no way in hell, that Obama should ever have made it to the national stage. One of Daley’s Congresspuppets, yes. Beyond that — The American people have shown, conclusively, that they bloody well deserve whatever happens next.

John McCain wants you to give him the oar to the canoe. He plans to use it to fend off some of the big rocks along the way, but he’s not really going to paddle, and we’re going to continue to drift downstream towards the roaring waterfall of socialism.

B. Hussein Obama also wants the oar. He plans to paddle like mad for the waterfall, because, he says, that will get us away from those rocks as quickly as possible.

The idea that anybody should paddle us towards the shore, so that we can get out and buy our own canoes from that canoe store and paddle them ourselves, or stand in the shallows and fish, or open up our own store, or go to the lodge for a hot shower and a nice steak, or go hiking or god forbid hunting, is apparently totally out of the question.

[Moved to its own post from the entry below.]

“In what kind of nation, do the media investigate critics more than candidates?”

Rick at Classical Values investigates the media’s investigation of, yes, Joe the Plumber. Plenty of links, all the best quotes.

Rick asks a lot of great questions, including:

…Why is [the] private life of an aspiring small business owner of more interest than Barack Obama’s drug dealer?

Or for that matter, B. Hussein Obama’s political mentors, teachers, and associates?

Rick comments:

The way they have done a complete, invasive background check on this citizen is shocking. While few of us would withstand close scrutiny, what annoys me the most is that the dirt-digging has been done by the news media, and they have now essentially sicced the bureaucrats on this guy.

Rick ends with another question:

Well then, suppose I were to ask a question about my inability to ask a question? Something like this:

Senator Obama, if I were to ask you a tough question, why would my personal lifestyle be considered more worthy of investigation than yours?

Nah, I’d better not ask.

Wouldn’t want to be subject to an investigation.

Read the whole damning thing. Follow Rick’s links.

And ask yourself the question, “Why should I want this guy and his friends to be in control of my life? Why should I want to give this guy and his friends my banking and health care records? Why should I have to hesitate for even a second as to whether or not it’s safe to ask B. Hussein Obama what he plans to do with my life, once I hand him the keys?”

McCain gags and appears to grab at Hussein's ass.

This is a frame grab from this video, which makes it clear that the apparent ass-grab is a result of camera angle. The expression, however, appears to be authentic.

Via Pharyngula, whose readers seem to think McCain is expressing his uncontrollable man-lust.

I am generally not a fan of this kind of shot, in service to any candidate, because if you continuously photograph anybody who is not a corpse or a robot, you will catch them out in embarrassing poses and expressions. Nevertheless, funny is funny, fair is fair.

Here’s my other favorite untended self-cartoon, of the glueball-wormening Goreacle His Own Self:

[Via Uncyclopedia, although at the time, this image was everywhere. Speaking of the Uncyclopedia, read this on Political Advertising.]

Over at American Thinker, an excellent history lesson, and how it applies to Obama:

The only way to explain this disinterest in Obama’s past and its relationship to his present is that Americans no longer consider the label “socialist” to be a pejorative. To them, it’s just another content-neutral political ideology. In our non-judgmental age, it falls into the same category as Liberal vs. Conservative, or Left vs. Right. To most people, it just means Obama is a more liberal Liberal, or a leftier Lefty, and they already knew that.

In order to stir ordinary Americans to the sense of outrage those of us in the blogosphere feel, we need to remind them that socialism is not simply a more liberal version of ordinary American politics. It is, instead, its own animal, and a very feral, dangerous animal indeed.

It helps to begin by understanding what socialism is not.  It isn’t Liberalism and it isn’t mere Leftism.  Frankly, those terms (and their opposites) should be jettisoned entirely, because they have become too antiquated to describe 21^st Century politics.  The political designations of Left and Right date back to the French Revolution, when Revolutionaries sat on the Left side of the French Parliament, and the anti-Revolutionaries sat on the Right.  Terms from the internal geography of the French parliament as the ancient regime crumbled are striking inapposite today.

Likewise, the terms Liberal and Conservative date back to Victorian England, when Liberals were pushing vast social reforms, such as the end of child labor, while Conservatives were all for maintaining a deeply hierarchical status quo.  Considering that modern “liberals” are seeking a return to 20^th Century socialism, those phrases too scarcely seem like apt descriptors.

If it were up to me to attach labels to modern political ideologies, I would choose the terms “Individualism” and “Statism.”  “Individualism” would reflect the Founder’s ideology, which sought to repose as much power as possible in individual citizens, with as little power as possible in the State, especially the federal state.  The Founder’s had emerged from a long traditional of monarchal and parliamentary statism, and they concluded that, whenever power is concentrated in the government, the individual suffers.

And what of Statism?  Well, there’s already a name for that ideology, and it’s a name that should now be firmly attached to Sen. Obama:  Socialism.

[Emphasis mine.]

I swear, I’ve been thinking about writing this same thing, inspired by F. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, which I am now almost two-thirds of the way through.

One of the most frightening things about Serfdom, which was written in the opening years of WWII, is that Hayek identifies the socialist sources of so many ideas, memes, if you will, that are simply passed on as assumed fact, the intellectual water in which we swim.

My previous notes on this subject:

Why I am not a Conservative

The Kiln of Free Thought

Capitalism and evolution.

Classical Values asks us to compare the hatred and intolerance displayed by supporters of McCain and Obama:

First, an Obama supporter braves a McCain mob to ask the questions, “Do you think Obama is a terrorist? Why did McCain stand on a stage with him?” :

[YouTube link.]

My questions: “Do you think McCain is a racist warmonger? Why did Obama share a stage with him?”

[If there is any one notable characteristic of the effort to discredit McCain among his own supporters, it's the utter failure to recognize that every criticism raised by Obamites applies ten or hundredfold to their own candidate.]

Next, a video that’s been going around of rowdy McCain fanatics disrupting the lives of peaceful, tolerant Manhattan dwellers:

[YouTube link.]

Bloodthirsty Warmonger McCain with sharp teeth, bloody mouth.

More anti-McCain/Palin violent outrage at Michelle Malkin.

Vanishing Point:

[Youtube link.]

Thelma and Louise:

[YouTube link.]

In one, a loner who’s never hurt anyone rams a bulldozer blockade set up by the very authorities who have given him no other choice but abject surrender, and dies in a huge fireball witnessed by dozens of fans.

In the other, two women who have killed a man [admittedly in self defense], blown up an oil tanker, and robbed a convenience store, drive off a cliff, witnessed only by the one law officer on their side and a few of his colleagues. Rather than showing us the crash, the screen fades to white, leaving us the illusion that they are flying to freedom.

Essay question:
Which ending is emblematic of the fate of the nation if John McCain is elected, and which belongs to B. Hussein Obama?

Bonus Question:
Is it better to end up like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, two handsome and charismatic murdering robbers who charge out into a hopeless gun battle with the Bolivian Army? [Embed disabled.]

Yesterday, I mentioned the Cloward-Piven “strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis”, and “[hastening] the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse”.

Today, Myrhaf cautions that we should remain skeptical of thinking Obama is “The Cloward-Piven Candidate“:

Simpson’s theory reminds me of the John Birch Society’s old ways of finding a communist conspiracy behind, well, everything. As Ayn Rand wrote, the Birchers don’t understand the role of philosophy. Those who hold the same philosophic premises will tend to want the same political policies. Those who do not understand the role of philosophy in man’s life think conspiracy theories are at work.

None of my reservations refute the idea that there are radical groups out there that want to replace capitalism with socialism. No question, these leftist radicals exist, they have infiltrated to the heart of the Democrat Party, and Obama has had connections with these groups all his life, starting with his hard-line communist father. But the goals and machinations of the radical left are not the fundamental explanation of America’s stumbling from crisis to crisis toward socialism. No, at the root of the problem is the philosophy of altruism, which leads to government intervention in the economy to help the “little guy,” and which — rather conveniently for the acolytes of Cloward-Piven — does not care if its programs make the world actually better. With altruism, intentions are always more important than results.

[My emphasis.]

Read the whole thing, and read the comments as well.

What I’m taking from this, aside from a bracing hand against my chest, preventing me from leaping off Conspiracy Cliff, is that McCain will not save us from socialism, either. He, too, has bought into the altruistic philosophy, as have most voters since FDR, and therefore the entire government. The debate is no longer whether or not, but how much and where.

This is extremely depressing: it means that we can’t expose the conspiracy, root it out, and save ourselves. It means that we’re swimming in it, that it’s endemic, that we ourselves are members.

That there may, in short, be no way out.

We’re not talking here about personal altruism, meaning you’re willing to help others at your own expense.

We’re talking about government altruism, meaning that you know who the disadvantaged are and what they need better than they themselves do, you’re going to give it to them whether they want it or not, and you’re willing to take as much money from everyone else as necessary to make it happen.

No good. No bueno por ca-ca.