"Junta?" Try "Socialist Dictatorship": The Media's Myanmar Ideology Coverup

Now Playing: "Go For Soda" by Kim Mitchell

The Associated Press and the rest of the major (i.e., leftwing,) media seem to be having considerable difficulty in identifying the nature of the Myanmar government - those considerate folk who, in the wake of a catastrophic cyclone are forbidding the delivery of most disaster relief and unceremoniously confiscating the rest, while tens of thousands lay dead and tens of thousands more face death by disease and/or starvation.

Though one would never know it from reportage in the wake of the Myanmar disaster, that country has been ruled over by socialist military dictatorships since 1958.

If you're a vestigial, recidivistic collectivist in the employ of a large news organization, this fact presents a problem in reporting the disaster, and in identifying motives in the bizarre, monstrous position that government has taken in its wake. 'Can't allow the reputation of Glorious Socialism to be tarnished, folks. Unh-uh!

What to do, what to do...

So in the last week we've seen the bizarre spectacle of news report after news report after news report after news report - most of them reprints of the Official Line from the Associated Press, but with CNN, Reuters and Agence France-Presse performing a similar ideological blackout - that refer to Myanmar's socialist regime as, simply, a "junta."

Yes, apparently that southeast Asian country is now a part of Latin America.

Who knew?

To be fair, "military junta" is the generic description used by the State Department but...since when have intrepid "investigative journalists" been content with vague official terminology in reporting events in which ideology plays the essential role in otherwise inexplicable atrocities?

Veddy, veddy odd, Keptin.

Pay No Attention To That Klan Behind The Curtain: Obama, Wright, and the Poison of Collectivism

Now Playing: U. Shrinivas' Samjanitha

In Asimov's Sci-Fi classic "Foundation," a great mathematician develops a science of predicting the future using mathematical probabilities involving vast numbers of people over vast periods of time. In the real world we only have that kind of certainty in hindsight, but philosophy performs a similar role in the forward direction.

It certainly did after the Reagan-engineered collapse of Soviet Socialism ca. 1989. We saw in vivid detail the practical expression of something philosopher Ayn Rand had told us repeatedly a full quarter-century before that collapse: Ideas shape the course of people and of nations, and the mere absence of an evil regime does not imply the automatic rise of a good one. The Russian Federation had a promising start on the road to a free society under Yeltsin, but there was never an explicit rejection of Russia's collectivist culture, much less an embrace of an explicitly individualistic one. The result has been Russia's descent, following the death of Yeltsin, into a neo-authoritarian regime under Putin. A vacuum does not make for a solid foundation.

It's taken longer in America, but the same philosophic void exists here. Perhaps due to the gulf between the rank-and-file American and the Ivory-tower intellectual with regard to individualism vs. collectivism, respectively, we haven't slipped into a Putin-type quagmire. It's been more of a study in "wishy-washy," under the back-to-back vacuity of the Clinton and Bush Administrations. We've bumped along more or less intact, government of course has continued its unchecked growth in size, expense and its progressive elimination of rights (pun intended,) but we've maintained a kind of uneasy continuity. Rand identified that phenomenon as: coasting along on the principled structures of the past. Also not much of a stable foundation for a robust civilization.

But 2008 is a Presidential election year, and this time a situation exists that America hasn't faced before: Our only viable (electable) alternatives for President are three committed collectivists, and at least one of them is steeped in an intellectual sewer of virulent, frothing hatred for the very country he seeks to lead.

By now the rants of Jeremiah Wright are a matter of public record, as is Obama's initial attempt to sweep his twenty-year association with Wright and his church under the rug as a "distraction" over someone he "stands behind." That attempt failed miserably, so following a series of public appearances by Wright over the weekend that culminated in his finding a new 'deep end' to go off of, Obama on Tuesday tried some stronger wording, which got rave reviews from the media (what a shock!) but not quite the same reaction from less-incestuous quarters.

At this point I think we can accurately categorize Wright as an Afro-neo-Nazi and Obama one of his followers, and if that sounds like hyperbole try the standard substitution test:

Imagine a GOP Presidential candidate, say Sam Brownback, having been found to have attended one of those creepy white supremecist churches for twenty years with his family. Imagine him suddenly, after those 20 years, finding reason to denounce that church - at a time that just happens to be seven months before a contentious election. What would you say about his apparent worldview, folksy public persona aside? What would you say about his fitness for the Presidency?

Imagine that same GOP candidate's wife going on record expressing the sentiment that she had never been proud to be an American before "appearances" within a Presidential campaign required it.

Imagine news reports surfacing that that candidate had surrounded himself with violent domestic terrorists - as close personal friends - who for forty years had maintained an explicit hatred of America, a stated desire to destroy it, and who made their names via deadly terrorist bombings committed in the attempt. Imagine that those domestic terrorists had reaffirmed that hatred of America and that commitment to its destruction as recently as a year ago.

Taken as a whole, what would you say about this hypothetical Sen. Brownback's suitability for the position of American President?

So...what of Obama's?


What we have in Obama is a stark contrast between words and deeds, and I don't think it's necessary to spell out which is the indicator of a given person's core beliefs.

He says he is "outraged" and "angered" and "saddened" by Wright's "wrong and destructive" comments. Even if we take him at his word, one inescapable fact looms over the carefully-chosen public pronouncements:

Obama has only found this "outrage" and "anger" and "sadness," has only recognized Wright's neo-Nazi rhetoric as "wrong and destructive," a paltry seven months before a Presidential campaign, only after sustained political backlash, and, again, after a full twenty years of uncritically accepting those same "wrong and destructive" ideas.

Obama can't have it both ways: He is a highly-educated graduate of a presigious law school. Either he is a closet adherent to the Wright school of racism and hatred of Western Civilization and is lying to the world about his "not knowing about" Wright's message - or he is, frankly, far too stupid to be holding the post of County Alderman, much less the President of the United States. Again: We are talking about two decades of chosen intellectual immersion in Jeremiah Wright vs. a sudden, pre-election stab at damage control.

Here too is another place where conservatism falls on its face:

The world of conservative punditry has generally granted to Obama the rather absurd leap that he doesn't really agree with anything in Wright's worldview - they're essentially taking him at his word.

I think that the duration of attendance at Wright's institution argues that Obama's worldview corresponds to far more of Wright's spew than he desperately hopes we will believe. His personality is as mild-mannered, guarded and reserved as Wright's is exhibitionistic and bombastic, but a thinking human being does not spend ten minutes in the audience of someone screaming "wrong, destructive and outrageous" neo-fascism. Obama clearly embraced Wright's raving as a deep, "spiritual" element of his family life. Else why, how, could he remain a part of that noxious community?

The philosophic link connecting Obama's strident hard-left worldview and ominous paeans to "change," Wright's (and presumably Obama's,) strident racism, and the broader Left's strident hatred of America and of Western Civilization, is: Collectivism.

That toxic philosophy's sole antidote is: Individualism.

Too bad we don't have an individualist candidate to support.

HO-LY ****!

Now Playing: Down, Down, Down by Frank, from "Tales of the Unexpected," 1979

This just in, courtesy of Logan Clements:

The House of Representatives, under a bill authored by Democrat-Socialist James Oberstar of Minnesota, is poised to seize control of all land in the United States of America. That's: All land.

Per a summary by Don Parmeter, Executive Director of the American Property Coalition:

"In May of last year, the new Chairman of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Rep. James Oberstar of Minnesota, introduced H.R. 2421 with 158 co-sponsors. Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin subsequently introduced a companion bill, S. 1870, with 20 co-sponsors. The bill has two provisions that expand federal jurisdiction beyond anything previously seen in Congress: (1) The term ‘navigable water’ would be replaced with ‘waters of the U.S.,’ including wetlands, mudflats, sandflats, playa lakes, prairie potholes, intermittent streams, ponds, sloughs and meadows; and, (2) Adds ‘activities affecting these waters,’ a land use control provision that appears to be without limits."

Read through that list again. What it says, essentially, is that any land that has water on it at any given time, would belong to the government, not its rightful owner.

This is Kelo on steroids. What it signifies, perhaps even more than Kelo, is the end of private property in the United States of America. The end of private property rights inescapably implies the end of rights per se in America. A man with no right to the material goods he has earned, is a de facto serf with no rights and no means of continued survival. HR 2421 must be stopped, now, at all costs.

Contact your Representation, NOW. Demand that HR 2421 be obliterated immediately, and that Congress immediately pursue official censure of Rep. Oberstar - for gross dereliction of his sworn duty to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. This fascistic creep needs to discover what his parents apparently never taught him - about respecting the right of others to live, thrive and prosper.

This is an activist moment, folks - get up and flood your elected officials' email inboxes, voicemail and phone lines with opposition to this noxious, gargantuan power-grab by the eco-wackos in government, HR2421.
 

Eco-Fascism as a Corruption of Causality

Now Playing: Red Barchetta, the tale of a post-industrial future from Rush, 1981 - based on the short story "A Nice Morning Drive" by Richard S. Foster.

A few years ago the whole New Age / Environmentalist / Mystic / Totalitarian axis regurgitated a bit of intellectual fraud going by the name of "The Butterfly Effect," which originated as a theory of that name in the early 1960s. It has since spilled into pop culture in dozens of books, films, television shows, "infotainment" and "reality"[sic] programs - and most significantly, into government policy under the aegis of the environmental cult.

It takes a supposed truism about cause and effect, obliterates all contextual - indeed, causal - requirements and declares every minute, inconsequential act as a causal wild card and assumes it to be an imposition on others. This assumption, in turn, is used to "justify" any arbitrary, coercive act government decides it wants to impose.

The concept of an isolated event setting in motion a chain of events that is utterly unexpected, is a tried-and-true formula in fiction - an entertaining example being the recent film 11:14. Causality is certainly a given in life, but it is constrained by the same contextual limits implied in its definition. In short, it requires proof of a cause-effect link - which is singularly, often boastfully(pg. 5,) lacking throughout the entire corpus of "environmentalist" dogma.

The eco-totalitarian cult has seized upon the "Butterfly Effect"'s conceptual elasticity - not to mention the collapse of rationality within American government and law - to extrapolate negative, usually catastrophic, "externalities" for the most innocuous of human actions. The causal wild card proclaims that, since the most subtle of actions, from moving about within the fluid of atmosphere to respiration itself, allegedly "impacts" others, then every human action - indeed, our very existence - is fair game for coercive control by government.

Thus we have seen the standard - even justifiable, on occasion - laws governing tangible externalities of heavy industry, expanded through the realm of the ridiculous into the area of the openly arbitrary (read: fascistic.) It's the same deterioration we've had as a kind of preview in the last two decades, in the Litigation Lottery phenomenon.

The cause (pun if you want one,) is the same for each: the ejection of reason from law.

The litigation lottery stories are infamous: $3 million awards for "inadequate warning" that...coffee might be hot; the judge who sued his drycleaners for $67 million for...misplacing his pants; the phone company sued by an accident victim who happened to be in one of their phone booths when a car crashed into it; the suicidal New Yorker who sued the city for the subway's failure to kill him after he jumped; the New York snakebite victim who narrowly avoided a suit by "environmental authorities" for killing the snake that bit him, etc.

Eco-fascists are busily integrating that same lunacy into laws purporting to "protect the environment":

- In January of this year, the State of California Energy Commission inserted a shocking bit of Orwell into an obscure section of the California building codes. It would mandate, by 2009, something called a "PCT" or "Programmable Communicating Thermostat" in all new residential buildings. What that device would do is place the control of your home's temperature in the hands of State bureaucrats. That's right: picture a DMV employee remotely controlling how much air conditioning you'll get in July, and how much heat you'll get in mid-January. As Joseph Somsel puts it:

"In other words, the temperature of your home will no longer be yours to control. Your desires and needs can and will be overridden by the state of California through its public and private utility organizations. All this is for the common good, of course."

Jon Christian Ryter elaborates:

"It turns out the PCT is a universal thermostat. Not only will it regulate the temperature in the home, it can also determine when power is allocated to other receptacles in the home—appliances the State doesn't think you need to run during peak hours—your water heater, washing machine and dryer, and your dishwasher. Big Brother, after all, always knows best."

So far I've been unable to find information as to whether or not this thing has actually passed into law. Update feedback encouraged.

- Los Angeles' corrupt city officious are boasting loudly about their plans to impose an entire new layer of Orwellian regulation to all new development, under the breathless headings of "Historic Front" in the "Battle Against Global Warming." Yesterday, LA Mayor Antonio VivaLaRaza loudly and proudly signed into law a new ordinance that will force all new development to conform to a "standard" cooked up by something called the "US Green Building Council," listed simply as "a Washington-based nonprofit organization." Rest(?) assured, similar laws are being developed across the country for imposition on your town, which means: on you.

- The European Union, that Petri dish of toxic political atrocities, has announced it will apply the all-purpose abracadabra of "carbon emissions" to the problem of sparse funding, via an imposition of quotas on carbon dioxide emissions on airlines. If standard trends apply, the same will happen in America shortly - and inexpensive air travel, not to mention half a dozen current airline companies, will be things of the past, or of "A better, vanished time," as Professor Peart once put it.

- The incandescent light bulb has been officially driven into Black Market territory, at least as of 2014. At that time light bulb manufacturers will be required, at gunpoint, to curtail production of incandescent bulbs, and we will all be forced to use flourescent tube bulbs that a.) give off harsh yet weak light that most of us would deem unsuitable for a garage, much less living areas, and b.) which contain toxic substances like mercury - a bizarre irony that belies the "environmental" agenda's ostensible concern for "the environment" and indicates, rather, the priority of stomping on capitalism and individual liberty. Is it too much of a stretch to assume that by 2024 the same eco-totalitarians will have banned electric light altogether, in favor of "wholesome, organic candlelight?"

- They have already intruded all the way into our restrooms - "low-flow" toilets were mandated by government in 1992 and that mandate is now a reality, admirable attempts to abolish it notwithstanding; Last year erstwhile singer and "environmental activist" Sheryl Crow...ermm...floated the idea of "a limitation...on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting."

- As economist George Reisman has reported, in addition to all of the above, the environmental cult now has clothes dryers, hot water, central heating, lawn mowers, elevators and who knows what else in its crosshairs.

The equation is simple and deadly: If anything and everything human beings do in the course of ordinary life can be defined as harmful to others, with no proof required in support of the proposition, then coercive government control of any and every aspect of human life can be justified in binding law, arbitrarily.

The environmentalist cult, in short, is a watershed in the imposition of neo-fascism. It must be opposed - openly, unapologetically, vigorously, and relentlessly. Our lives literally depend on it. As Rand once pointed out, it is often enough simply to register opposition in any situation in which your silence can be construed as acceptance. The simple assertion of disagreement confers a vital judgment on the corrupt idea and plants the seed of self-doubt in the mind of that corrupt idea's supporters. Just do it.

Happy Industrial Revolution Day 2008!

Now Playing: Voyager by RonMon, from the Gamma 2 album - a must-listen after finishing an episode of the excellent "Deadliest Catch" from Discovery - a celebration of productivity, as it happens...

Just the facts, Ma'am:

1. If you didn't have access to a.) your kitchen, b.) a grocery store, or c.) a restaurant, for something like three weeks, you'd starve to death. Think about it and test the theory - just stop eating for a day or two and see how long you can stand it.

2. Every living entity faces the constant alternative of remaining alive or dying, every waking and sleeping moment.

3. Every living entity has a means of survival that is specific to its nature; if it wishes to remain alive, it must take action to do so in a manner that is consistent with its nature.

4. No living entity can survive on a consistent basis by using the means of a lower creature - a moth can't survive by the same means as a paramecium; an aardvark can't survive by the same means as a moth.

5. Man's specific method of survival is: Reason applied via production. Man survives precisely by taking what he finds in nature and altering it to suit his needs, via a process of reason.

6. A systematic destruction of man's freedom to alter nature, logically and practically means the destruction of man's ability to remain alive.

The systematic destruction of man's freedom to alter nature is a basic but accurate description of the operative principle behind something called the "environmental" movement.

Its most recent tool in destroying man's means of survival is a hypothesis called "global warming," which predicts a rise in global temperatures that is allegedly the result of human activity, and which will allegedly result in worldwide catastrophe.

Various scientists have both promoted the hypothesis and refuted refuted refuted refuted refuted refuted refuted it. (Stuck keys - 'sorry.)

What is clear, beyond the utter lack of consensus on the hypothesis, is that it has already been employed in the drastic confiscation of man's freedoms to act in the furtherance of his life.

- As you read this, the price of petroleum, the lifeblood of industrial civilization, has been driven through the roof by a de facto grant of non-competition in perpetuity by the United States to the OPEC monopoly - which latter has been documented as having transferred oil sales proceeds into the bank accounts of the Islamic terrorists who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, and who have been at war with America and Western Civilization ever since.

That constriction of oil production throughout America is the consequence of legislation that essentially transforms the natural resources of the North American continental shelf into a kind of de facto, quasi-religious shrine to the "environmental" movement.

The explosion in the cost of fuel has in turn driven up costs in virtually every aspect of every economy worldwide, driving those economies into recession.

- Countless proposals are being hatched, also as you read this, to impose a blizzard of coercive government controls, regulations, restrictions and bans on countless elements of human life - from the vehicles we use for transportation, to the foods we eat, to the very dwellings in which we live, to the electric light bulbs we use, to the to the planes we fly, to the way wash machines wash our clothing (we're already forced to marinate it in the previous person's waste water,) to the quantity of toilet paper we ought to be "allowed" to use(!)

The "global warming" hypothesis has also opened the floodgates for a deluge of "justifications" for new taxes. Since the Climate Armageddon hypothesis states that the 5% of "greenhouse gases" that is carbon dioxide will nonetheless be labeled the primary cause of the hypothetical "warming," carbon emissions are to be taxed. Not coincidentally, emitting carbon is a natural, inescapable byproduct of human life - of all mammalian life, for that matter. There are currently no proposals to impose taxes on non-human gas emitters however, to the vast relief of the world's herbivores...

So what the Climate Armageddon industry represents, in vivid yet somehow overlooked clarity, is merely a post-Soviet political repackaging of anti-capitalism, and more deeply, an assault on humanity per se.

And that is all that it is.


So today on Industrial Revolution Day, say a silent "Thank You" - to every smokestack, power plant, steel mill, railroad, tailpipe, logging crew, oil tanker, fishing fleet, 18 wheeler, airliner, family farm, factory farm, oil refinery, offshore platform, gas pump, power line, freeway, SUV, cow pasture, skyscraper, fast-food joint, television set, backyard barbeque, incandescent bulb, tobacco field, ski resort, subdivision, McMansion, and, oh yes: kitchen, grocery store and restaurant that's keeping you alive and thriving as a human being.

And tell any starry-eyed, greenshirt neo-totalitarian that goose-steps across your path today, to go straight to hell.


Further reading:

"The Arithmetic of Environmentalist Devastation," by Pepperdine University economist George Reisman, Ph.D.
 

Tax Slavery Day vs. Tax Freedom Day - April 23

Now Playing: Nothing - Oh-dark-hundred again and can't sleep

Today is officially the day we all line up and pay our forced homage to that vast, bloated, slobbering, oppressive pig that our once-limited government has become - no thanks to President George "W-for-What's-A-Veto?" Bush, the RINOs ousted from Congress in '06, and of course the ever-constant Democrat-Socialists. As we sit here, two of the latter are struggling for the power to impose an even heavier load on the already-crushing burden we're paying today, while the alleged Republican candidate is poised to dump repackaged Marxism on us in the form of the faith-based "global warming" ideology.

According to the Tax Foundation, this year's Tax Freedom Day - the day at which your annual Indentured Servitude to the IRS ends and you officially start keeping what you've earned - falls on April 23, a week from tomorrow. The celebrated - and mostly meaningless - tax rebate checks have reportedly pushed the date up three days from the 2007 date. That's cold comfort in the face of 113 days - nearly four full months - of what is essentially slavery imposed on us annually.

Contemplate that fact in context of alleged "Republican" candidate John McCain's constant, career-long agitation for mandatory "national service" and his campaign's regurgitation of the socialist ethic of "serving a cause greater than yourself."

Note to candidate McCain: Read the Declaration of Independence. You know, that important-looking sheet of old paper they have under glass at the National Archives. In it, you'll discover an ideological mandate for a complete break with the centuries of self-sacrificial muck that had preceded it - and toward which you seek to drag us by force. We're currently your slaves for 113 days out of the 365/6 every year. How many more would be "enough" self-sacrificial duty in your eyes?

The individual's right to his life, to his liberty, to the pursuit of his happiness (i.e., the right to produce and to keep, by right, the property that is the consequence of production) ...in context of politics, there is no cause greater than this. At least not according to this nation's Founders.

Self-sacrificial duty to some "cause greater than yourself," on the other hand, has been the ethical foundation for every single one of the most evil and deadly collectivist regimes in human history. Pick your "greater cause": For the Bolsheviks, it was "the dictatorship of the proletariat"; for the Nazis it was "der Volk" and "Common Good Before Individual Good"; for today's Islamofascists, it's "submit or die"; for today's Ecofascists, it's "Are you ready to change the way you live?" - with the unspoken implication "If not, we will make you." Not surprisingly, McCain has officially drunk the "global warming" Kool-Aid.

What America's political climate (pun if you want one,) desperately needs at this point in history is a reaffirmation of individualism - of the sovereign rights of individuals to their own lives - and of a government limited to the just role of defending that right.

As opposed to violating it with impunity while clamoring for yet more loot.

Black Supremecism and the Obama Implosion

Now Playing: Run, from Darby Mills' Don't Look Back

As of last week the racist cat had been let out of the bag, and his name is Jeremiah Wright, preacher and 20-year intellectual mentor to Democrat Presidential candidate Barack Obama. Wright's frothing, racist anti-American rants are a matter of record, a record many on the neo-fascist Left would dearly love to obliterate as dearly as they'd love to silence their opposition on talk radio and the 'Net. Sadly for them, the First Amendment is, for the moment, still intact, and the cat, again, is forever out of the bag. We have all just gotten a horrific glimpse into the intellectual toxin behind Obama's slick façade of mild-mannered all-American Presidential candidate.

No, Obama is not Wright, and yes, he's issued a speech intended to distance himself from Wright's black supremecist rot. His campaign has hastily removed from its official website an endorsement of Obama by the militant racist group the "New Black Panther Party"; all major leftwing media have unceremoniously Spiked reporting on the endorsements of Obama by Daniel Ortega and Fidel Castro; and wife Michelle Obama's open contempt for America has been similarly swept under the rug. Ditto Obama's connection with indicted Syrian developer Tony Rezko and the disturbing financial relationship between the two. Pfft! Gone.

But there is nothing Obama - nor his supportive, cheering-squad media - can do to erase the last twenty years of his religious life. Every week for the last two decades Obama has taken his family to absorb the fascist vitriol of Jeremiah Wright and the black supremecist church he runs. Obama chose Wright and his church; he's clearly accepted what he has been hearing there; he chose Wright to conduct his marriage and to baptize his kids; his two daughters have grown up with that racist, anti-American drool as their formative intellectual backdrop.

The rationalizations to the effect that Obama "doesn't necessarily agree" with the black supremecist ideas dished out at Trinity United Church of Christ are powerless to sweep away an, er, inconvenient truth: Most people of sound, ethical mind would have been making for the exit doors on the day twenty years ago when they heard the very first racist, America-hating sentence - whether spewed by a Wright or a Farraklan or a David Duke or a Tom Metzger. Obama, having heard the Afro-Klan rantings of Wright, not only did not ditch Trinity church, but rather affirmed his tacit approval by remaining a devoted member of its congregation for twenty years and counting. Well, right up until the moment, roughly a week ago, when it became politically expedient to feign surprise and disapproval.

My question to the Obama camp and to the Democrat-Socialist Left: Granted your guy is in a rough spot of his own making, but...do you really think we're that stupid?

Ordinarily I would say that the Obama run for the Presidency is now effectively over. A twenty-year acceptance of violent hate-speak against America and against...every ethnicity that is not of African derivation, is an instant disqualifier for the Presidency of the United States - or of any country that wishes to continue its existence.

But this is not an ordinary Presidential campaign season. Obama is running against two opponents who are virtual carbon copies politically, and who, along with the media and broad swaths of both Parties' "leadership," have taken a "kid gloves" approach to any discussion of Obama.

Historically, every Presidential candidate has been vetted for suitability for office through the (now-endless) campaign season. Politicians who have been on the national scene longer than...two years...add the scrutiny of their prior public record to that vetting process. Barack Obama has with few exceptions been treated as being somehow exempt from such scrutiny. Why?

There is a bizarre dynamic going on with Obama's candidacy, due to a.) his race and the historic implications of that race vis á vis the Presidency, b.) the fact that ideologically he's a hardcore but well-concealed socialist, and complicated by c.) the entire problem of Hillary Clinton's ambitions.

Since Obama is ethnically black - well, one-half black - hordes of people to whom the wavelengths of pigment-reflectivity are important are trumpeting his potential to become "the first black American President" as a significant milestone. Indeed, a black Presidency would eliminate the last remnants of the whole racial "ancestral victimization" lunacy that comedian Bill Cosby took so much heat for debunking before the NAACP on May 17, 2004. Since Obama's race is of prime importance to so many among the Demo-Socialist Left, and since vestigial Leftwing ideology is inherently impossible to defend in rational debate, Obama's supporters, predictably, have labeled anyone who attempts critical scrutiny of his radical-Left politics as someone attacking his race. It's a blatantly racist attempt to use race as leverage in securing a wildcard-type exemption from ideological scrutiny, indeed even the most rudimentary vetting for the office of United States President.

Try to imagine how long that kind of ploy would work if the candidate were Walter Williams, Janice Rogers Brown or Clarence Thomas. Well, we don't really have to imagine in Thomas' case, do we? Nor in Brown's case, for that matter.

In simple terms, if you are a Leftist and also member of an ethnic "minority," your race is deemed sufficient by the Left to exempt you from critical scrutiny of ideology or character; if you are a member of an ethnic "minority" but are a non-Leftist, you're fair game.

I think some people need to be reminded that this is the office of President of the United States at stake here, and that it is perfectly rational to question the fitness for that position of someone who for twenty years has had no ethical, social or political problem with Mr. "God Damn America."

Leftists Gone Wild

Now Playing: Marathon, from the Rush "Power Windows" disc - a song about...life...with some clever, moving, play-on-words-laced lyrics

As you can see from the post dates here, I'd gone into one of my periodic, recuperative withdrawals from the sewer that is contemporary American politics over the last couple of weeks. But recently the hard-left Democrat Party has erupted with scandals all over the place, in a way that's becoming quite entertaining. It's really too bad that collectivists are running uncontested in this year's Presidential race...

* Last week an Obama advisor had to backtrack hastily, then resign, after calling Hillary Clinton a "monster" in an interview for a Scottish paper;

* Today former Democrat vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro (a.k.a. Zaccaro) stepped down from Hillary Clinton's finance team after telling a Torrance, CA newspaper last week that "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position";

* At 8 o'clock this morning Democrat New York governor ELIOT SPITZER, WHO, BY THE WAY, IS A DEMOCRAT, (for the benefit of those who get their news from the "mainstream" media,) announced his resignation from office after having been caught in the thick of a high-dollar prostitution ring - after a career of high-profile prosecution of...high-dollar prostitution rings;

* On a virtual daily basis the swamp...er...wetland...surrounding Obama's sweetheart real estate deal involving shady Syrian contributor Tony Rezko deepens, though I don't think we can expect the eco-fascists will be demanding that this one be turned into a nature preserve;

* A report today from Jeff Goldblatt says that Jeremiah Wright, Jr., the leader of the black supremecist church regularly attended by Obama since the late 1980s, may be in trouble with the IRS over political advocacy of the Obama campaign from the pulpit. In other...interesting moments from that speech, delivered on January 13, Wright said "Barack knows what it means living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people. Hillary would never know that... Hillary ain't never been called a nigger."

This frothing racist's video can be seen here, if you don't mind a little nausea. (Keep in mind that this is what the Democrat-Socialist Party's Presidential frontrunner has been listening to every week for the last twenty years, with approval.)

As a footnote, recall that both racism and sexism, like the fascist/socialist strains of public policy being pushed by Clinton, Obama and McCain, are variants of collectivist philosophy - a.k.a. group-think. It's interesting that it's taken this long for those particular chickens to have finally come home to roost in the appropriate coop.

It's always edifying to watch the political opposition self-destruct before one's eyes. But again, it's really too bad the Republicans aren't fielding a candidate for President this year.

Umm, Nader Ain't It.

Now Playing: Pluie de Etincelles - the late Mr. Lane's 1995 piano jam

Sorry,'couldn't resist.

America's Core Conflict in Ethics

Now Playing: "Easy Blues" from Message From Nine To The Universe - just sublime...

As I've alluded here previously, we the people of the United States of America have been locked into a Presidential contest that, due to the politicians placed in front of us as "choices," guarantees that the next American President will be a hardcore statist. It is inescapable, barring some thoroughly improbable Douglas Adams-type upset in which an improbable number of American voters writes in an improbable candidate who, improbably, has a brain between his/her ears, at an improbability ratio of, roughly, 16,438,951,238 to 1 against.

As I've also suggested, the situation dictates (pun if you want one,) that principled, individualist Republicans dedicate themselves to "Alternate Plan B": focusing on non-Presidential electoral races, especially Congressional ones, for the long haul. Since we're doomed to having a committed enemy of individual liberty in the White House for the next four years, it is essential that Congress be bolstered this year, in 2010 and in 2012 with more people willing and able to counter his (or her) collectivist lunacy. The GOP's "leadership" sure as hell aren't going to step up to the plate on this.

Just this week the GOP gained a narrow recovery from disaster in the reversal by John Shadegg(R-AZ) of his Feb 8 announcement of retirement from Congress. Shadegg, recall, is one of the handful of Republican Congressmen that typically stands on principle against big government, out-of-control spending, "earmarks" corruption and generalized statism. Shadegg needs company; let's try to find similar people and work to get them elected, in positions from Congressman down to County Alderman.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Anyway, fresh in mind are soundbites from last night's Clinton/Obama debate, from recent speeches by each, and from the McCain/NeoCon/RINO wing. All three candidates are spewing brazen demands for "national service" and "self-sacrifice" and "giving back" and "duty," etc. ad nauseam, and most tellingly (pay attention here,) for a veritable avalanche of statist proposals based directly on that foundation of self-sacrifice.

In the wake of the recapture of Congress by the Democrat-Socialist Party in the 2006 election, I resumed frequent listening to conservative talk radio programs - 'cause those guys are at their best when they're in the opposition - and none of them have had much of anything to say against the Three Stooges' self-renunciation sermons, rather only against those consequential policy proposals.

Well, consequences do indeed have ideas behind them.

The phenomenon immediately calls to mind something I read in Leonard Peikoff's seminal 1982 work "The Ominous Parallels", the smarter older brother of Jonah Golberg's new book "Liberal Fascism". Funny how the observations of sound philosophy are bourne out in practice, consistently. Actually there's nothing funny there at all - just logic at work.

Something that cannot be stated often enough nor strenuously enough - particularly to today's conservatives (the Demo-Socialist Left are mostly beyond the reach of reason in any case,) is that:

a) economic liberty is an inescapable pre-requisite of political liberty, and

b) economic liberty is inherently - inescapably - egoistic.

In other words, economic liberty's core motive power is the individual's drive for personal self-betterment, personal innovation, personal enterprise, personal achievement, and for personal profit. The benefits derived by others - Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" - are secondary, as are decisions by individuals to engage in charity. In a meta-ethical sense this is an extension of man's inherent nature and inherent requirement for survival: Man is either free to think and act (i.e., to produce,) or he dies.

This, in turn, is why capitalism, and ONLY capitalism, is the politico-economic system perfectly in tune with the requirements of human survival and flourishing, and why capitalism walks hand-in-hand with human liberty - the two live or die together. Political and economic liberty are, in a word, inseparable; you simply cannot have either without the other. The argument for economic liberty - i.e., capitalism - is therefore primarily ethical, not merely pragmatic.

It is a fact that people the world over derive their ethics from religion of one sect or another. Virtually every religion's ethical credo is some form of codified altruism: Self-sacrifice for others is considered the unquestionable, highest virtue; self-interest (such as the entire drive for personal advancement, achievement and profit,) is considered as an unquestionable evil, or at best as something low and base.

Since philosophy is inescapably hierarchical in its structure and ethics is an antecedent branch to politics within that hierarchy, one's ethics - or a nation's ethics - will always inform and/or determine its politics.

A nation ostensibly dedicated to political freedom must, by that fact, also be a nation dedicated to economic freedom; a nation dedicated to economic freedom must, by that fact, also be a nation dedicated, at root, to egoism, the recognition of self-interest and individual sovereignty as moral and practical primaries.

If that nation instead embraces the opposite ethical credo - as in Clinton/Obama/McCain's fetishistic preachments that self-interest is "narcissistic greed" and that altruistic sacrifice to others constitutes "virtue" - and simultaneously attempts to retain its economic and political liberty, the result is an inescapable conflict.

It is precisely that conflict, the implicitly egoistic system of the Founders' conception vs. the explicit altruism being pushed aggressively by today's politicians and intellectual establishment, that has brought the United States to its present chaotic state - and the nightmarish Hobson's Choice of three committed statists as our only Presidential options. Again, it is flatly impossible to square a commitment to self-sacrificial duty within ethics with a political agenda of eliminating the dizzying array of altruistic government programs, agencies, entitlements, allocations, regulations, restrictions, bans, taxes, fees, licenses, permits, directives and bureaucracies to administer and enforce them.

If this conflict is not resolved, and resolved in a specific way - namely, the restoration of egoism as the appropriate moral credo of a free society - then a slide into freedom's antithesis: collectivism, can only be a matter of time. As to the practical mechanism by which that slide occurs, I will refer you to Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises' Planned Chaos.

 

Hobson's Choice '08: Second Thoughts

Now Playing: Lip Service, from Max Webster's Mutiny Up My Sleeve

I can't do it. There remains no power in the universe that could compel me to cast a vote for McCain, and that situation will not change, ever - but neither can I actively support the election of a Clinton or an Obama. Though I understand perfectly the argument for voting for the Demo-Socialist - a dual vote, essentially: one withheld from McCain and another given to whichever candidate has the best chance of beating him - I could never live with the knowledge that I had consciously voted for any of these people - McCain, Clinton or Obama. They're intellectual clones and antithetical to everything I value. We've been given the Hobson's Choice between: the GOP's hardcore statist or the Democrat-Socialists' hardcore statist.

Sorry, but that is a contemptible charade, not a choice, and I will be voting "None Of The Above," likely via a throwaway write-in - Judge Janice Rogers Brown or George Reisman or Walter Williams or maybe T.J. Rogers.

Every time I reconsider Ron Paul, even as a throwaway vote, he...opens his mouth. And I'm once again running through creative combinations of harsh language in as many languages as I can access. A man who thinks Islamofascism is the fault of America is no better in practice than an al-Qaida propagandist - not to mention a walking, talking suicide pact.

I try and I try not to wax pessimistic, but to my mind the Elian Gonzales atrocity of Y2K was a chilling indicator of the degree to which Americans have lost their respect for the concept of individual liberty.

[Which brings up another tangential implication of the upcoming election, one that nobody is talking about: It is not just several Supreme Court Justices that will likely be replaced during the next Presidential term. Try "one Cuban dictator." When Castro finally does us the favor of assuming room temperature, the fate of Cuba will rest in no small part with the occupant of the White House.]


The Bright Side: (Oh damn - Monty Python! Sorreee...)

Given the horrible situation the Party powers-that-be have dumped in our laps, what individualist Republicans can focus their activism on is: everything else. We need to shift our focus to every other elected office besides the Presidency - Congressional seats, governorships, State legislatures, right down to city politicians. We need to seek out and promote solid GOP candidates and weed out RINOs at all costs. We, not the recidivistic Left, have the valid arguments; we have the best "product," as Logan Clements puts it. It is only with candidates steeped in the philosophy of American individualism and capable of articulating it clearly that entrenched statists can be dislodged. Above all, this needs to stop:



Another vital point: We non-leftists have always been spectacularly inept at political activism. This too must change.

Maybe it's complacency; definitely it has to do with being productive and therefore having far less time to be stomping around in street demonstrations. In any case, we need to be more willing to get off of our duffs and engage in activism on behalf of our values, consistently and long-haul-permanently.

It may be something as simple as hammering out a periodic letter to the editor of a local newsrag, starting a blog (though they're admittedly a dime a thousand these days,) organizing or joining a simple street corner demonstration on a specific issue, and of course the imperative of frequent phone calls, letters and emails to our elected officious. To paraphrase something rocker Ted Nugent said in a 2005 LibertyFest speech, if you are not in contact with your elected officials at least quarterly, you're a chump - so don't be a chump.

With the ascendancy of John McCain the battle for liberty has taken a major blow, and it's happened for the same reason it always happens: Default on the part of liberty's defenders.

Time to get active and stay active on the promotion of individualism and freedom. At this point it's the only political option we have left to us.

Cut to the chase: GO HILLARY. Rah.

Now Playing: Umm, three guesses.

"...then he woke up and, to his utter horror, discovered that he'd been turned into a card-carrying Democrat." Yeah, my life as a cheesy Stephen King novel - tell me about it. In the grips of yet another
- type moment, Joe Verbose here is not feeling in a particularly talkative mood...

So I will defer to two of the clearest analyses of Tuesday's implications that I've yet seen anywhere.

First up is Robert Tracinski's Jan. 22 article "Why McCain Needs to Be Stopped", a far more eloquent (not to mention concise) enumeration of McCain's record and what it implies for principled, individualist Republicans than my preceding post.

Second is Robert Bidinotto's excellent Election Night entry "Will Super-Duper Tuesday anoint the new "progressives"?

With conservative radio pundit Hugh Hewitt already having pledged to fall in line behind McCain despite prior opposition to him, and the likelihood of party heavyweights like Rush Limbaugh and National Review following suit later in the election season, it looks to be a long, lonely road with some unsavory traveling companions for us individualist Republicans. Maybe we could all move to France for some better political representation.

Yes, Hewitt's points about national security and several likely SCotUS vacancies are well taken, but RJB is right: McCain must be defeated at all costs if this country's intellectual catalyst for liberty is to be preserved.

Anyhoo, though she's got my vote she will never have my respect - I've already swapped out my "RUDY" bumpersticker with a new one:


 

Addendum: A Vote for Paul, Huckabee, etc. is a Vote for McCain

I have a lot of friends who have talked themselves into the Paul camp, and I've heard lots in media - though thankfully I know not a single one personally - who are marching in lockstep behind Huckabee oblivious to the world around them, just like those two linear-obsessives in Dr. Seuss' "The Zax."

Allow me to amplify unapologetically that nagging little voice that's likely been flitting around your mind for some time now:

There is not a proverbial snowball's chance of Ron Paul nor of Mike Huckabee getting anywhere near a GOP primary win in the year 2008. Period, full stop, everyone out of the pool.

Read that again.

Got it?

Good, that means we've both got hold of the reality of the situation. And don't let's be blabbering about "Oh, well, with that defeatist attitude, of course nobody could win."

Hey, not all the Power of Positive Thinking nor Strenuous Media Spin nor Irrational Exuberance nor Drunken Unison Caterwauling nor Mystical Incantations By Firelight on behalf of those guys will alter reality. "You can twist perceptions/reality won't budge," as the Professor has written. (There is a Rush lyric for every situation in life, but this one works overtime...)

So, given the fact that the guy you're planning on voting for remains without...the proverbial snowball's chance of winning so much as the presidency of an ant farm, what would casting such a vote mean in practice?

Simple: It means a vote for John McCain.

And that, in turn... To recap in as much depth as my current supply of Pepto-Bismol will allow:

-> This is the same John McCain whose "Campaign Finance Reform" (read: Political Censorship,) legislation has run the priceless First Amendment of my Constitution and yours through the equivalent of a fine-pitch industrial paper shredder;

-> This is the same John McCain who once openly, now quietly (for some reason) has pledged his sycophantic fealty to the Climate Armageddon Industry and its faith-based "global warming" construct, at precisely the time when it is crucial we have at least a modicum of opposition to them.

-> This is the same John McCain who straight-facedly compared drilling for oil in a tiny sliver of the ANWR wastelands to drilling for oil in the Grand Canyon - at a time when every barrel of oil that McCain-type environmentalists force American producers not to produce means yet more oil revenue to OPEC. You know, to those kind folks who're fond of al-Qaida, Hugo Chavez, and the public torture of teenaged girls as punishment for being rape victims;

-> This is the same John McCain who in 2006 led the infamous "Gang of 14," siding with Democrat Patrick "WherrrzMyDrinkhh" Leahy & Co.'s filibusters of Bush Administration judicial appointments. This was, recall, at a time of an unprecedented quantity of judicial vacancies during rare GOP control of the Presidency and both Houses of Congress. Thanks to Traitor McCain, most of those vacancies remain...vacant, with both Houses of Congress now controlled by Democrats and the very real possibility of a White House presided over by a Democrat - or that very "Gang Of 14" leader himself. Imagine the militant lunacy that is the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals, expanded across courtrooms nationwide;

-> This is the same John McCain who for years has fought for higher taxation, who has parroted Marxian class warfare lingo in his virtually every statement on tax policy, and who as recently as last week voiced the contemptible dichotomy of " patriotism over profits."
This while he dares compare himself to President Reagan, no less.

Need I go on?

-> This is the politician to whom a Paul vote or a Huckabee vote goes, inescapably. As I've indicated clearly in a number of posts over the last year, Romney is far from being anything better than a placeholder in my book, and was at least three notches down on my ordered list of the original ten GOP candidates.

But if you take Michael Hurd's August 2004 article "Election 2004: Looking Ahead While Living Today" and apply it to the present situation with the particulars substituted, you have essentially the same argument in favor of voting for Romney, not just in the general election but in tomorrow's primary. Only in this case the primary opponent is a militant authoritarian-collectivist calling himself a "Republican," adding a whole new dimension of intellectual perversity to the mix.

Finally, if arch anti-Republican McCain is somehow jammed into the Republican nomination, the only principled choice left will be to pull a Peikoff - i.e. vote for whichever Democrat has the best chance of defeating him - in this instance with ample justification.

'Gonna be an interesting 24 hours - hopefully not in the 'Chinese' sense...

 

Giuliani's Wimp-Out Leaves Romney As Clear Choice

Now Playing: "I Won't Mind" from Uriah Heep's Wonderworld - Mick Box in a particularly snarly mood...

In a thoroughly inexplicable move, Rudolph Giuliani dropped out of the GOP primary race on Thursday, leaving Mitt Romney as the sole choice for Republicans.

I say "inexplicable" because of my difficulty in believing that the man couldn't have stuck around a lousy five more days 'til "super Tuesday," in which he was expected to make his leap to the head of the pack with delagates from New York, New Jersey and California. Though his campaign was reportedly broke, and with a fatally-botched strategy in the early primaries, his early pullout is nonetheless bizarre. Presumably his poor choice of strategic advisors was matched from the outset by a lack of will to win.

At any rate, Romney is now the only actual Republican candidate in the GOP primary race, though that insufferable traitor John McCain, propped up with the vigorous and near-continuous campaigning by the major - read: leftwing - media, entertains himself with delusional self-stylizations as a "Reagan conservative." Methinks he's in for a large surprise come the wee hours of Wednesday morning. The leftwing-wannabe Huckabee too is trotting along in the dust, presumably out of some warped species of religious vanity.

This Tuesday's voting is a crapshoot, also a true test of what today's GOP is made of. I think of it as an intelligence test: Will the rank-and-file Republican voters close their eyes to McCain's atrocious record on virtually every key element of Republicanism throughout his political career, and buy into his threadbare "war hero" schtick? A bright nine-year-old can grasp the fact that a McCain vs. Clinton or Obama race would dump on America the first single-Party "election" in its history - a Party which is most accurately described as Fabian Fascist.

At a time when America is in a battle for the very survival of Western Civilization, the transfer of American government into the clutches of any of those megalomaniacal statists would be an unmitigated disaster.

Like him or not, Romney is our only rational choice in the GOP primary race.

 

"Global Warming" My Ass

Now Playing: Nine to the Universe, from Jimi's "Message From Nine to the Universe," just arrived on CD - sounds great after 26 years...

Just a quick note about that vast neo-collectivist fraud called "global warming":  This morning (well, yesterday morning - it's oh-dark-hundred,) I had to scrape ice off of my car before I went to work.

Yes, it's January but...



I live in sunny Los Angeles.

Ten years ago in January I was getting sunburned by the pool.

Then there's this...

and this...

and this...

And those are just what's happening here. As Robert Bidinotto has reported, the weather is roughly the same in China.

And in the Middle East...(!)

As a matter of fact - "inconvenient" for some, I suspect - temperatures over the last year have been colder than hell all over the planet.

Noticeably muted has been reportage among major media of this; conspicuously silent too these last couple of months have been the Climate Armageddon faithful. As Mr. Bidinotto pithily observes, the eco-faithful's terminology of "global warming" is at max volume in the dog days of summer, but mysteriously transforms itself into "climate change" when people worldwide are up to their hairy eyebrows in Winter Wonderland.

Generally speaking, people with respect for and rudimentary grasp of science don't try to extrapolate incidental weather into broad, epochal climatic shifts, but the Climate Armageddon faithful have never been particularly fond of scientific rigor (pg. 5.) So when their own logic is bounced back at them courtesy of this inconvenient blizzard of...blizzard reports from around the world, their response is a uniform "Well, cold weather, too, is caused by...global warming."

Ah.

It's a neat trick, the non-falsifiable concept. Sews everything up and preserves the myth for the devout, and wipes out all of that tedious mucking about with...proof.

By the time I'd gotten halfway into Michael Crichton's excellent thriller State of Fear," I knew that I wouldn't be able to keep a straight face ever again upon hearing some breathless new media splash about "global warming." Yet there are people who persist in buying into that fraud, all around us.

What I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall some 250 years from now, at a gathering of historians and cultural anthropologists looking back at early 21st-century politics. Those guys are going to be clutching at their sides, hooting in laughter.

For those of us in the here-and-now, the primary question (pun if you want one,) is: How much of our lives and of our livelihoods will be destroyed, how much economic and social wreckage will come about, as a result of this collective lunacy going by the name of "environmentalism?"
 

Annual Political Theater - Instant Impressions

Now Playing: The 2008 State of the Union address

Our annual exercise in cheesy political theater is under way, and I'm here to provide some initial impressions.

Once upon a time I'd go through the text of SotU addresses line-by-line and take them apart, but it's long since become clear that that is a colossal waste of time and threat to sanity. Better to do some more generalized observations - plus the task of posting here while watching will make anything more in-depth impossible.

First off, there's the Grand Entrance, in which camera-whores Congressional members line up along the aisle and, as the Cabinet and President pass, they struggle to grab hands, pat backs, and most importantly, get their smiling mugs on camera - including the ones who hate the President's guts and who have never given him the time of day, much less cooperation on vital issues. Maybe they had a sudden change of heart.

- The President just announced his full-on attack on earmarks, and Herr Pelosi looks like she's fighting back tears...; Speaking of Pelosi: If she slides any farther to the right to get better camera position she'll be in Cheney's lap...

- Fast-forward to education: Some proposal to help children get better grades, but not a peep about...getting government out of education. Which means: Status Quo Pablum;

- A call to improve trade with a number of South American countries and South Korea - clearly a veiled proposition to compete against China head-to-head...

- The rundown of energy proposals, and Pelosi sits motionless during applause for nuclear power, the cleanest and most technologically-advanced source of raw energy available. An eco-fascist to the end...

- Oh, a cut to Hillary: She's got a weird, dreamy look on her face, and it's hard to avoid the assumption that she's daydreaming about one day being in Bush's place. Maybe when she grows up?

- Now that's strange... the Republican side of the aisle is on its feet applauding advances in stem cell technology, and the Democrat-Socialists are motionless...

- D'OH! They're showing their unanimous approval of Bush's idiotic, Medieval proposal to ban "buying, selling, patenting or cloning of human life." Just what an emerging, vital and potentially history-altering technology needs - government stomping on its economic component at square one...

- Anybody keeping an eyeblink count on Pelosi? It went crazy when Bush read the line about "evil people who despise freedom and hate America." Hmmm...

- Ahh, "Our military and civilians in Iraq...deserve the gratitude of the whole nation." Can nauseating, self-serving hypocrisy get any worse than those contemptible Democrat pacifists jumping to their feet after that line? Do they think we haven't been keeping tabs on their behavior? Arrrrrghh...

- Funny, they're all sitting motionless after Bush's call on Congress "to fully fund our troops." Hmph. Now I'm all confused...

- Still on Iraq... Interesting but in no way surprising to see the further reactions of the aforementioned Democrat-Socialist hypocrites members; nothing new from the President - 'likely he's reasserting his policy on that country with as in-your-face an attitude as he can muster, which is to say: not much...

- Uh-oh...talk of "compassion" and the "call of our conscience" - not a good combination to be hearing from a government official. Which means we're moving into a litany of welfare programs?

- We oppose genocide in Sudan and support freedom in Cuba (tick!tock!tick!tock!,) Zimbabwe, Belarus and Burma (Rambo - go see it, if for no other reason than to tweak the sensibilities of Hollywood's leftists.) That's all good...

- "Fight against global hunger" and "humanitarian assistance" and "education initiatives..." Yeah, let's internationalize American welfare, that's the ticket. Sheesh...

- He's wrapped it up, surprisingly with no smarmy and overt religiosity - rather with a decided focus on liberty as a beacon of hope. So...why did he wait until his last SotU speech for that?

- More copious theatrical hand-pumping, back-patting and autograph-scamming, from both plausible members and blatant hypocrites. *sigh* Could future productions limit camera coverage to the actual speech? Unlikely.

Bottom line: Pretty standard GW Bush fare - the only standout moment was when he basically declared war on "earmarks," something that, again, should have shown up at least five years ago. Never better than late, as the GOP "leadership" would say. Or something.

We can be fairly certain, unfortunately, that aside from his promised vetoes - assuming they actually, finally show up - his sudden conversion to fiscal responsibility won't amount to much in the way of government downsizing.

'Guess Rudy'll have to tackle it.

Thompson's Lesson to Giuliani

Now Playing: Brush With The Blues (the Master at work,) originally recorded on Who Else?, 1999

Johnny-come-lately GOP Presidential contender Fred Thompson officially bowed out of the race today, bringing to a close a near-perfect exposition of the GOP "leadership's" philosophical vacuity.

Recall that less than a year ago we heard breathless talk of Thompson being "the keeper of the Reagan flame," a candidate who "...like Ronald Reagan, is a man of tremendous substance" sure to champion the same brand of (relatively) principled Republicanism and sweep his way to the GOP nomination.

Our first clue that something was seriously amiss with this appraisal came in the form of a purely strategic error that can only be defined as "boneheaded." Thompson stayed out of the early stages of the GOP primary season, even to the point of missing several of the early debates - a move that saw him transformed in both street buzz and media from "eagerly-awaited" to "indecisive and lazy." In short, he entered at least two months later than he ought to have.

The second clue came right at the end of Thompson's candidacy announcement speech of September 6, 2007: "We are steeped in the tradition of honor and sacrifice for the greater good. ...That's the belief that this campaign is based upon." As you can see and hear, there isn't a word in that speech related to individual rights as a foundation for changes to government policy. "Sacrifice for the greater good" was elevated to the status of core principle, while man's right to live for his own benefit - America's political First Principle - was not worthy even of passing allusion.

John Locke wrote these magnificent words in his Second Treatise:

"Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself."

Thompson, evidently, has never read them.

Our third clue arrived at Thompson's first debate showing on Oct. 9, 2007. The burst of proudly-professed Reaganism eagerly awaited by the GOP rank & file was...a no-show. What we heard was lukewarm, visionless pragmatism, a stark contrast to Reagan's emphatic and urgent assertions of the need to control and shrink, drastically, an out-of-control government. Thompson's campaign moved into a more or less continuous downward spiral thereafter.

So...why, after all the buildup, did Thompson's campaign fizzle, sputter and die like a post-Nanny-State firecracker?

Simple: There was a gaping void where, at the very least, an aggressive commitment to individual rights and to strictly-limited government should have been.

The reason for that void? Unquestioning acceptance of altruism as a foundational principle. As I wrote to the Thompson campaign's website on September 25, 2007: "How do you propose to effect any significant Reaganesque downsizing of that bloated, slobbering, oppressive pig that is our government, if your ethical credo is precisely the same as that used to bring it to that condition in the first place?... 'Sacrifice for the greater good' is the flipside of 'It Takes a Village.'"

It's no wonder Thompson had such a hard time mobilizing enthusiasm for his message, even within himself - it was anchored to a large dinosaur carcass.

Note to Mayor Giuliani: If you want to win this thing, familiarize yourself with the proper principles, and fight for them as though they matter. Your reading list could start with Capitalism, economist George Reisman's 1996 treatise. Or maybe just a certain 1957 novel.
 

Michigan Primary Caveat: "Open"

Now Playing: One Note At A Time by the immortal Shawn Lane - playing all instruments...

The Michigan primary has officially been called - Romney for the Republicans and Clinton for the Democrat-Socialists. This is pretty much as expected, and given the fact that no one person has yet won two GOP primaries in a row, any prognistications are pure speculation. While I'm normally loath to engage in guessing on political matters and even less fond of "spin," the exception in this case is that this is getting fun, and I'm a big fan of fun.

So what's my angle?

First, an essential attribute of the Michigan primary is that it's an "open" primary - which means that anyone can cast a vote for anyone, regardless of party affiliation. Secondly, Hillary Clinton was the sole candidate on the Democrat ballot due to the DNC's penalizing the state for holding its primary earlier than that party's rules allow. For once the Demo-Socs get something right - bravo!

Thirdly, though there's no positive confirmation that this actually took place, leftwing activists were urging Michigan Democrats to monkeywrench the GOP results by picking up Republican ballots and skewing the vote to their liking. Given the total absence of any appreciable stake in the Democrat contest, it's likely that a large percentage of votes on the Republican side were actually cast by hardcore leftists from the dark other side

One leftwing blogger had argued for Democrats to cast votes for Romney, on the theory that Romney's continued presence in the race would dilute the perception of any clear GOP frontrunner, thereby benefiting (somehow,) the Demo-Socialist Party. Umm, I always say "there's a Rush lyric for every situation in life," in this case it's: "You can twist perceptions / reality won't budge." If the Demo-Socs think they're going to get some kind of tangible uptick in November from that</