Redistribution of wealth? Been there, done that pretty darned well

It strikes me that one has to be willfully dishonest - driven, I can only conclude, by a profound antipathy toward America - to argue that this country needs to embark on a government-enforced policy of wealth distribution.

Why dishonest? Because few things in this world are more apparent to the honest observer than that the US has proven to be the most effective wealth-redistribution system ever devised by the mind of man. No where at no time on the planet have more goods and services been spread more effectively across a broader swath of the population than in the US. It's just a fact. And it's no accident. The country's prosperity is a direct result of the limitations placed on government by the very constitution our soon-to-be president publicly disdains.

Let's not be blind or dishonest ourselves: there is still human suffering in this great and still-free country. When we can do something to genuinely assuage that suffering, we must try to do so. Where government policy traps people in poverty, we must fight to change that policy. Where government policy, union corruption, and political cynicism combine to keep people trapped in poverty, we need to fight for justice for the poor. But let's be clear: the poison policies and practices I'm talking about here are the very policies, the very medicine, the socialist doctors want to prescribe on a wider and wider scale. Only more poverty and despair will follow.

And let us also be honest and mature enough to understand that much of the poverty and despair that occur in our communities is the result of bad, selfish, self-indulgent, self-destructive choices. The result, in other words, not of a failed society but of human failings, character flaws. The problems of endemic poverty and despair will not be solved by a redistributionist government. Our trillion-dollar investment in our inner cities over the past two generations is testament to that.

Again, the US is the greatest distributor of wealth in the history of the world. If the millions of people who clamber for our shores can see this so clearly, why cannot our socialist so-to-be overseers? And again, one can only conclude they view this nation through a lens of utter animosity and desire at a deep level to see us undone, unmade, unraveled.

The Obama Base

So far we have the Iranians, al-Qaeda, the Palestinians, and Louis Farrakhan all making public statements to the effect that they are rooting for Obama, not to mention the entire Muslim population of Kenya.

A Collaborative Effort

For twenty years after Ronald Reagan left office, we've basically held it all together, somehow. Now, it appears we're ready to drive full speed off the cliff. What happened?

Of course, the socialist demagogues in the Congress deserve much of the blame. The enablers who continually, and sometimes perpetually send them back to Washington are a big part of the problem. These enablers have shrugged their shoulders as, piece by piece, our civilized society has been dismantled. Many millions of Americans have acquiesced, if not participated in the coarsening of our culture and the degradation of our values. They have consumed the vile television shows and insipid, violent, propaganda-filled movies pushed out by Hollywood. They have neglected their children and addicted them to video games. They have sat and watched as avowed communists, anarchists like William Ayers "promote" education by destroying it. Popular culture, public education, a business sector infected with political correctness, the legal system, our political system--all have become so rotten that one need only kick out the rotted timbers so that the whole thing will come crashing down, to be rebuilt by the likes of Barack Obama and William Ayers.

In his famous "Time for Choosing" speech, given during the 1964 presidential election campaign, Ronald Reagan told a story of a Cuban immigrant who told his story to two friends of Reagan's. One friend said to the other, "We don't know how lucky we are." The Cuban responded incredulously, "How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to." Reagan went on to explain that America is the last stand on earth. There is nowhere else to go, nowhere else to escape to. God help this country if we are foolish enough to elect a determined, cold-blooded, soulless communist as president.

But where have the protectors of the nation's dignity, our Constitution, and our cherished traditions been while all this has been occurring? Where has the conservative party been? The sad answer is that they have lined up right behind the socialist left, raiding the treasury, disregarding the Constitution, establishing gigantic new entitlements, and now, worst of all, buying up entire industries with money that we don't even have. Not only do we not have it, we can't even borrow it anymore. We're looking like some banana republic, run by demagogic socialists, followed and supported by a bunch of stupid, greedy dolts. The last resort of a country in such a condition is simply to print money, thereby cheapening our currency, like Weimar Germany of the 1920s, or Zimbabwe of the present.

Regardless of who wins the presidency, we in the sane minority, the "rump" United States, have a lot of work in front of us, because we have nowhere to go, and we won't give up or give in.

My address is the bench at 5th and Maple.

In the beginning, the Founding Fathers agreed that only men who owned property would be entitled to vote. That concept was tossed out the window a long time ago. Today, however, we have reached all the way to the opposite extreme as a federal judge in Ohio has ruled that counties must allow homeless voters to list park benches and other locations that aren't buildings as their addresses.

Hold my nose? No!

Rather than offer a comment to the posts below about “holding my nose” to vote for McCain, let me launch this as a new post. Not only will I not hold my nose, I will vote with my fingers crossed, my lucky rabbit’s foot in my pocket, and my nose – or at least my chin – held high.

John McCain is not the perfect candidate. Far from it. Indeed, he’s been a nuisance and often a fool throughout his career. Indeed, that career has done nothing to endear him to Republicans, let alone conservatives. One has often had the sense – arrived at fairly – that McCain has always considered the good favor of the New York Times to be more important than the good favor of The National Review. He has very much earned the scorn that conservatives have heaped on him.

In the primary campaign, it was perfectly understandable that conservatives voted for ABM – anybody but McCain. That’s all past us now. Because of the flawed rules of the nominating process – which allow independents and even democrats to have a voice in the selection of our Republican candidate – McCain divided and conquered a flawed field of candidates and emerged as the nominee.

Today, he is what we have standing between us and the Democratic People’s Republic of the Americas. For all his flaws, McCain demonstrably loves his country. For all his flaws, McCain has already shown that he will not betray this country – even when hanging from a meat hook, he will be true to America. He doesn’t blame America for the world’s ills; he doesn’t believe that half this country’s people – the most generous and magnanimous people in the history of the planet - are racists. He does not believe the Constitution is fundamentally flawed. He does not believe America needs to be remade from the ground up. He does not believe infants should be flushed away into the nation’s s sewage system. John McCain has plenty of flaws; others have detailed them elsewhere. I’m not interested in those flaws just now. Just now, I don’t care that he doesn’t measure up to my idea of the perfect candidate.

So, no, I will not hold my nose when I vote for John McCain. I’ll hold my breath.

The Ayers coup

As the inevitability of an Obama presidency becomes increasingly apparent, we must understand and acknowledge what the elevation to the highest office in the land of this hardcore leftist activist represents. In plain and simple terms, what we are seeing played out right before our eyes is a coup d’etat by William Ayers. And George Soros. And all those who joined in on the Long March Through the Institutions.

40 years ago, the broad mainstream of the American people rejected the revolution these repellant monsters, these spoiled Trustafarians, were peddling. (Ayers was the son of privilege; when he wearied of his life on the lam, in true revolutionary form, he had his daddy, a powerful and influential figure in Chicago’s corrupt public square, help him cut a sweetheart deal.)

Even though their campaign of violence proved counterproductive, the radical new left vowed it would carry on its war by other means. And for these 40 years, we’ve yielded ground — good ground, high ground — to them at every turn. The Ayers brigade — or should I say brigada (viva la revolucion!) has been firing shots; we at first hunkered down, then just chose to run away.

We yielded the academy — the academy that for generations had taught our kids the meaning of citizenship and the global necessity of American exceptionalism — we gave up the academy without a fight.

We yielded the media — our precious and beloved free press, the fourth estate that had served as proxies for the regular citizens of this country, who held the high and mighty accountable for their actions — we yielded the media with hardly a whimper.
We yielded the churches — the one place where, in a troubled and overly politicized world, we could ponder the deeper meaning of existence and our very reason for being here — we yielded the churches so thoroughly that in most mainstream churches, the Sunday sermons heard by a dwindling body of the faithful could have been written by William Ayers himself.

We yielded the entertainment industry — an industry that once saw stars like Jimmy Stewart, Tyrone Powers, Clark Gable, and countless others practically begging to serve their country — we yielded the entertainment field to the Ayers brigada.

We yielded the courts. We allowed scores of honorary — and active — members of the la brigade de Ayers to decide unilaterally on fundamental questions of life and death, on justice and due process, on matters of self-defense, on the very institution of marriage itself. We allowed the courts to throw out thousands of years of hard-won human wisdom in the name of . . . what?

We yielded on the fundamental matter of patriotism. We allowed the Ayers brigada to assert, without reasoned opposition, that they love America, when they demonstrably do not. To the contrary, they hate America and have said so many, many times. The Ayers brigada clearly blames the ills of the world on America; the Ayers brigada sees American “greed” and “imperialism” and “racism” as the source of poverty and suffering the world around. The Ayers brigada believes that the fundamental structure of American society — free market capitalism operating within the framework of a popularly enacted constitution — is fatally flawed and must be radically altered. Yet we yielded to them on the matter of patriotism.

William Ayers and his minions vowed 40 years ago they would seize control of this nation — and they are now one week away from making good on that promise once and for all.

And let us not kid ourselves — this has not been a bloodless coup. Not by any means. Bodies — or should I say body parts — are strewn across the countryside, the necessary collateral damage Ayers, his wife, and their fellow revolutionaries left in their wake. And they are ready and even eager to see the bodies pile up, if such is needed to realize their revolutionary ambitions.

We have allowed the coup. Now what?

Principle vs "the lesser of two evils."

In his debate with Ralph Nader, Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin asserted that conservatives should vote for him as a matter of principle and not yield to the "lesser of two evils" doctrine. Let me first say that I really like the principles of the Constitution Party and intend to consider getting involved with them after this election. I also believe in the principles of our Founders as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Yet one of my principles has to do with evaluating each political choice within the framework of the current reality. In other words, I don't see the guiding principles of conservatism as operating in an idealistic vacuum but rather in the political realities of the real world.

I have no objection to the idea of a third or fourth party, but only once have I voted for a third party candidate and that was in a governers race here in Pennsylvania (she was the only anti-abortion candidate). Even though this candidate did not win, she did get about 15% of the vote, which had the effect of holding the feet to the fire of the one who did win (at least for a little while). So I can understand voting for a third party candidate as a means of sending a message to the winner, especially if that winner is the lesser of the two evils. But if the lesser is not assured of victory and the greater presents a genuine assault of evil against the principles our nation was founded upon, then I must disagree with Mr. Baldwin and vote for the lesser.

I may have voted for Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, but I only would have been helping Wilson get elected. If I had voted for Perot in 1992, I only would have contributed to the victory of Bill Clinton. The truth is, those liberals who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 may be the reason George W. Bush made it into the Oval Office. These are political realities. Next Tuesday, at least in the swing states, a vote for Baldwin is tantamount to a vote for Obama. My conscious and judgment just won't let me go there, irrespective of how attractive the Constitution Party may be. Maybe in four years, but not this year. The stacks are too high. When the choice is between a RINO and a Marxist, the RINO must win.

The de Tocqueville Dictum

When a young college student tells Barack Obama how she is struggling to pay for her college education, instead of commending her for her industry and hard work, and telling her how much the experience will benefit her for the rest of her life, he tells her that when he becomes president, he will help her out (i.e. a $4000.00 tax credit for college tuition, which presumably means a person must owe at least that much in taxes, but with Obama who knows?). This is the fulfillment, right before our eyes, of the de Tocqueville Dictum, which states, "The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money" (Alexis de Tocqueville). What Obama is telling this young woman is that he will take some of the hard-earned money of her friends and family members and give it to her to help cover the cost of education. He calls this fairness. I call it legalized theft and/or the redistribution of wealth and/or pandering to the "what's in it for me?" spirit. Or as de Tocqueville so insightfully called it over 150 years ago: bribing the public with the public's money. Once the de Tocqueville Dictum has become the standard political currency of the day, is it possible for a nation to ever go back? I am beginning to doubt it.

What's Past is Prologue

“Barack was only eight years old when Ayers did his bombing,” they childishly parrot. So what? I was a year old when Castro seized control in Cuba and started killing people who disagreed with him. If, when I was thirty-five years old, I travelled to Cuba, had an audience with Castro, went on a Potemkin-Village tour, and then came back to America singing the dictator’s praises, reasonable people could say that I was an admirer of the communist dictator and probably a fellow traveler. If, at Castro’s invitation, I joined a board on which he sat in order to promote education or anything else, for that matter, one could reasonably conclude that I was comfortable sitting on a board with a murderous, communist dictator. And if I am a moral, freedom-loving human being, why would I want to associate with a murderous, communist dictator? Even if the mass-murderer utterly renounced his past, I would not have anything to do with him. The same would be true with regard to a neo-Nazi figure or board, or one dedicated to Nazi principles.

Obama’s political life has consisted of a series of associations with communists, communist sympathizers, and radical black nationalists. Frank Marshall Davis was a communist. Bill Ayers is an admitted communist who is sworn to the destruction of the American system. Extreme leftist Alice Palmer, Obama’s predecessor in the Illinois senate, travelled to the Soviet Union to attend a Communist Party congress and came back with an admiring report about the Soviet system. Jeremiah Wright is a vicious, venomous, hateful, racist extremist who blames “white people” for all the ills of black people. Davis was Obama’s mentor and confidant. Ayers was Obama’s board-mate and hosted Obama’s political “kick-off” in the home he shares with fellow notorious bomber and terrorist Bernardine Dohrn. Palmer was Obama’s political mentor and benefactor, and endorsed his candidacy for her seat. Obama sought out a church, and deliberately joined Wright’s, allowing Wright to marry him and “baptize” his children. Obama spent at least 18 years listening to Wright’s frenzied, hateful tirades. These are the people with whom Obama associated himself; not with capitalists, free-market proponents, or lovers of the American founding documents and individual liberty. As Mark Levin points out, Obama never talks about individual or property rights, free markets or entrepreneurism.

You don’t associate with people like this because you abhor their deeds or principles. In Obama’s “Philadelphia” speech, he refused to disown Jeremiah Wright, and threw his much ballyhooed “white grandmother” under the bus. Later, when he yielded to overwhelming pressure and quit Wright’s hateful church, Obama made a statement filled with outright lies that only a fool would fail to recognize.

This incontrovertible case is laid out for anyone who cares to look at it. Obama himself has admitted it in his books and in his public statements. Now, what kind of fool would vote for this despicable, dishonest, malevolent figure to be president of the United States?

Celebrity Over Personality Over Character

In his book The Seven Habits..., Stephen Covey asserted that up until around 1950, Western society functioned under what he called the Character Ethic. Then, with the advent of television, we moved into what Covey calls the Personality Ethic. This, in my opinion, is reflected in the way so-called presidential debates are now conducted (compare them to the Lincoln-Douglas Debates). The purpose of debates has changed from a detailed discussion of substantive issues to the staged, glossy exhibition of human personality.

Dwight Eisenhower was the last Character Ethic president we have had. People didn’t vote for him because of how he looked or spoke. They weren’t overly concerned about his personality. He was elected on the basis of his proven character and accomplishments in, and after, WWII. Immediately after him we had the Kennedy-Nixon debates where Nixon lost due to his five o’clock shadow, which gave him, in the opinion of many, a sinister look. Kennedy became our first Personality Ethic president, and no one would deny that he had an extremely charming and engaging personality. Johnson won the next election on sympathy, but Nixon won twice, at least partly because his personality trumped that of his opponents (Nixon was full of personality, he just didn’t have enough to beat Kennedy.)

Think of the next seven elections: in every case the one with the most engaging personality won. Carter over Ford (at the time, Carter’s down-home persona seemed more appealing than the mid-western personality of Gerald Ford, which came off as rather staid and boring). Reagan, with his sparking personality, then toppled Carter for obvious reasons. He also trounced the rather bland Mondale. Now, no one could accuse Bush I of being overflowing with vivacious personality, but even he had more personality than the diminutive Michael Dukakis. Of course, it wasn’t enough to thwart the power of the highly personable Bubba (arguably the greatest triumph of personality over substance and experience). Clinton also had enough to utterly trounce the respectable but monotoned Bob Dole. Then came Bush II, who is only slightly more of a jewel than his father, yet seems utterly dazzling when compared to the wooden Algore and snobbish Kerry.

I believe that we have now moved as a society into the era of the Celebrity Ethic. In other words, a person no longer needs even an attractive or provocative personality, much less a thoughtful position on the key issues of the day (e.g. Algore, Hillary, Paris Hilton, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, etc.). The only thing a person needs is that vacuous attribute called celebrity. Remember those shows like Hollywood Squares. Who were some of those people in those little boxes? What had they ever done? The answer is, nothing. They weren’t in there because of the quality of their character and usually it wasn’t even because of a sparkling personality. What they had is celebrity!

The Celebrity Ethic is now playing itself out in the presidential race. Barack Obama’s personality is bland and pundit-like. Sure, he comes off as cool and self-assured, but those are not qualities that engender warm feelings and cause us to enjoy being around a person. No, Mr. Obama is not where he is because of his arresting personality. And it is certainly not because of his proven character (which has not been proven) or because Americans have taken a hard look at his proposals and find them to be admirable and worthy of implementation. No, Mr. Obama is where he is because somehow, in the process of this interminable election process, he became a celebrity!