The New Clarion

Miss California, Carrie Prejean, and Senator Arlen Spector both learned the same lesson in the last few weeks: you can disagree with the right, but the left demands ideological conformity. If you disagree with the left, you are judged not only as wrong, but as a bad person.

John McCain, who often disagrees with the right wing of his party, is hailed by the media as a “maverick,” and even gained the Republican presidential nomination. Joe Lieberman, who dares to suggest that maybe America should not commit suicide abroad, is reviled by the left.

All my adult life I’ve been hearing about the “adversarial” role of the press. The role of the press is to challenge the state, to keep it honest, etc. With the election of Obama we have seen that this idea is and always has been a lie. Now we have the press acting like courtiers in the Renaissance, with Chris Matthews even declaring that it was he job to see that Obama succeeds. The media are liberal advocates; when conservatives are in power, they use the “adversarial” pose to rationalize their liberal advocacy. Watergate was not about the pursuit of the truth by noble watchdogs in the press; it was about destroying a Republican president.

Robert Tracinski has characterized the Obama presidency as an “onslaught” on liberty. The word is not an exaggeration. It’s an onslaught, an all out attack on hundreds of fronts, too many for the media to keep track of — not that the media are particularly interested in doing anything but cheerleading. The only thing that compares is Roosevelt’s New Deal.

It’s been said that Americans created Rock’n’Roll and the British perfected it. FDR created the welfare state. Obama is perfecting it, if you will. I guess that makes FDR oldies and Obama classic rock. Okay, this metaphor is exhausted.

The depressing thing about watching Obama’s destruction of liberty, prosperity, individual rights and rule of law is that, at the age of 52, I don’t think I will see America get better in my lifetime. As my body ages and falls apart and I near the grave, I will watch my country decline and head toward its grave. The most frustrating thing is that I am fairly certain that if America were a laissez-faire capitalist country, I would live longer, possibly much longer. Perhaps more important, the quality of my life would be better. Capitalism creates wealth, and the more wealth that exists, the more that can be put into medical research, science and the arts. But instead we have two-bit Robespierres like Barbara Boxer, Barney Frank and Barack Obama consuming our wealth in order to buy reelection and maintain their grasp on power. This is the golden age of injustice.

And another thing: as I age, I might very well find myself denied medical treatment that I would have gotten in a free system because of socialist rationing. Old people are not as useful to the collective as young people, you see.

Socialism uses egalitarianism to justify its crimes, but it ends up creating a system that is more class rigid than capitalism. The elite in the Soviet Union, called the Nomenklatura, led privileged lives. The other 99% functioned as their slaves. Do you think the elite and the politically connected will be denied the same medical treatments that I won’t get? It adds a new urgency to the American quest for wealth and fame: now it’s a matter of life and death. The rich and famous will get that heart transplant that you and I will have to do without.

And they say they want to help the little guy. What an obscene joke.

Arthur Laffer said the age of prosperity is over. This graph shows he is probably right:

The deficit is some four times bigger than it was last year. Only higher taxes or inflation can pay that debt. What should we call the age we are now entering?