1. Obama loses election
2. Republicans take Senate and add to House
3. ObamaCare repealed
4. Dodd/Frank repealed
5. Sarbanes/Oxley repealed
6. Departments of Education and Energy to be phased out/privatized
7. Fannie Mae,  Freddie Mac and TSA to be privatized
8. Community Re-investment Act repealed
9. Federal Reserve mandate to provide full employment repealed
10. All bureaucracies to be examined for initiating force thus violating rights
11. Eric Holder under investigation for crime of aiding and abetting public enemies (drug cartels) by arming them against american citizens
12. George Soros under investigation for ties to election fraud activities. 
13. (Bonus headlines)

•  NYT and WAPO losing more readers
• MSNBC bought by conservative publisher and revamped or shut down due to lack of viewers
• Well that’s it for this year’s hopeful headlines. You can add yours in the comments of course.

And another point of their ignorance is: what is the distinguishing attribute of the 1% who aren’t innocent? That 1% isn’t the biggest 1%. It isn’t the richest. It’s the group that are in bed with the government; that use government power rather than free market acumen to gain their wealth.

This, then, leads to the third question they are blind to: who is ultimately to blame for this? When a man with a gun and a man with money make a deal, who is wearing the pants?

And, then, one last question I’d like to highlight, that goes unasked by OWS: Who put that man with the gun in power? They won’t ask this because it is them. THEY put a government in power that meddles in the free market. They got exactly what they asked for; they’re just ignorant of the implications of what they’d asked for. And now they’re screaming for more. MORE! MORE OF THE SAME!

If the Tea Party confines itself to fighting consequences instead of their causes, it will be fighting an enemy it cannot see. If it can’t see and clearly identify its enemy it cannot defeat it. The movement may win a few battles here and there but will be doomed to lose the war.

I agree that the recent agreement of the debt limit is probably the best we could hope for given the small number of constitutionally committed reps in the House. They need help in 2012. But the help needs to be principled help. The main principle they need to commit to is in the Declaration of Independence, “to protect these rights governments are instituted among men.” This means that if an action violates or threatens to violate a citizen’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness congress shall address it. Conversely, if an action does not violate or threaten to violate those same rights, CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW. I screamed those last four words to emphasize that this is what the founders intended. Any potential candidates need to intend it also. This is the particular flame to hold at their feet.

Capitalism is a social system based on individual rights including property rights where all property is privately owned. Not just some of it. The concept of inalienable rights is a moral principle as well as a practical political one. As the most moral system ever devised, it deserves nothing less than a morally principled defense.

The way for the Tea Party to win the public over is to appeal to their rational self interest. It’s what our founders did. The words ‘inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ are words of rational self interest. They are not words of self sacrifice or any kind of sacrifice. The candidates of 2012 and beyond need to understand the political principle of individual rights and the moral principle on which it is based, rational self interest.”

Embroiled by legal battles for more than 25 years, two U.S. Navy ships are finally headed to the scrap heap without ever having sailed and despite the fact that they’re almost completely finished.

According to Hampton Roads, the USNS Bejamin Isherwood and the USNS Henry Eckford were commissioned in 1985 at the Pennsylvania Shipbuilding Co. to carry fuel to the Navy’s fleet around the globe.

When the company defaulted on its Navy contract in 1989 the 660-foot ships were sent to Florida for completion, but cost disputes terminated that contract in 1993.

Since then, the vessels have sat 95 and 84 percent complete at the mouth of the James River as part of the mothballed ghost fleet.

Do you think any private shipping company would let two ships sit around almost complete for 18 years? This is a good example of the difference between bureaucracy in the public sector and profit-seeking companies in the private sector. And the statists want to turn every aspect of our lives over to bureaucrats — from health care to carbon dioxide emissions to the stock market to the banks to car companies to workplace rules to how much fat we can eat to where we can smoke a cigarette (until cigarettes are banned altogether).

Now imagine a middle aged man who drives his Cadillac Escalade around the railroad crossing arm with its blinking red lights and parks on the train track. The train’s whistle screams at the man to drive off the track. The laws of physics won’t let the train stop in time. There’s no arguing with F=MA.

The man has time to drive off the track, but he does not. If there were something wrong with his SUV, he could jump out and run away, but he does not.

What do you conclude about the man in the Escalade? He wants to die. In a dramatic, violent and irresponsible manner, the man is committing suicide.

What are we to make of a political party that does nothing to stop the coming fiscal crisis in America?

The Republicans are inept, but they seem to understand, however vaguely, that there is a problem. They want to cut spending; well, at least they talk about it. If it were not for the Tea Partiers the Democrats wouldn’t discuss fiscal solvency at all. Just two years ago they passed a stimulus package that added almost a trillion dollars to the debt.

How do we explain that Obama governs as if he were out of touch with reality?

Obama borrowed more in the month of February alone ($223 billion) than did the spendthrift George W. Bush during the entire 2007 budgetary year ($163 billion). Obama recently asserted that not authorizing a lofty new national-debt ceiling would be partisan recklessness. He should know. In 2006, then-senator Barack Obama voted not to raise the debt ceiling and railed against out-of-control government spending under the Bush administration. But then, the annual deficit was one-fifth of what it is today. Apparently President Obama lives in an alternative universe from the one Senator Obama used to inhabit.

Obama and the rest of the Democrats care so little about the coming crisis that they can see it only as an opportunity to demagogue their opponents. The left is scoring cheap points while America is careening toward the abyss.

At what point do we conclude that the Democrats are like the man in the Escalade? They do nothing to head off the coming crisis because they want it.

Rahm Emanuel:

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

Hillary Clinton:

“Never waste a good crisis.”

If you want freedom and prosperity, then a crisis is disastrous. Any great destruction of wealth or breakdown of order is bad if your goal is the greater production of wealth.

But if your goal is to destroy the remnants of capitalism in our economy and replace it with state control in the name of egalitarianism and altruism, why wouldn’t you want crisis? Robert Higgs shows in Crisis and Leviathan that the state flowers in crisis. Peace and prosperity are bad for the growth of the state.

Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand:

“Don’t bother to examine a folly—ask yourself what it accomplishes.”

(I’m careful to attribute that to Toohey rather than Ayn Rand because she did bother to examine follies, and she did so magnificently. I think it was Yaron Brook who mentioned this recently.)

If politicians always had good intentions, then socialism would have been cast away in 1920 when Ludwig von Mises’s Socialism demonstrated how a planned economy can only lead to chaos. Socialists didn’t care then that their planning doesn’t work and they don’t care now.

Leftists don’t want a prosperous economy, they want a fair one. And equality of outcome can only be achieved by destruction. You can’t order a poor man to go out and be a productive genius, but you can take money away from the rich and redistribute it.

We are heading for destruction because the left wants destruction.

UPDATE: Slight revision.

UPDATE II: Don’t forget this tape of leftists discussing ways to use violence to change the system. At the end an academic brings up Cloward-Piven’s theory about creating “conditions of ungovernability.” The left very much wants to wreak destruction — on principle. As a former community organizer, Barack Obama was probably aware of Cloward-Piven, unless he was too lazy to read his own side’s literature.

Hey, you really screwed the government, huh?

Shmuck. The IRS loves to “give” you that money. Every refund represents a happy sheep.

It’s the First Law of Parasites: Don’t kill the host. That refund check is emotional fuel that keeps the producer working while the government bleeds him drop after drop, month after month…

Politicians love to give money away (not their money, yours). That’s why deductions are so complicated. All those deductions represent different pressure groups.

My California taxes include a category called Turkish Ottoman Empire Settlement. I didn’t take that deduction. I’ve always been cool with the Ottoman Empire. If a politicians suggested doing away with this category — because, you know, California is broke — he would lose Armenian-Americans. No politician wants to anger a pressure group.

The state is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else. — Frederic Bastiat

Deductions are also social engineering. You thought that was just something that happened in horrible totalitarian states like the USSR? Comrade, we must create Homo Sovieticus! All those housing deductions come from some idea that every American should own a home. Homo Americanus.

Somewhere, dead or alive, is the statist genius who thought up payroll tax withholding. If Americans had to write a check on April 15th for the full amount of the taxes they pay, there would be blood on the streets. Instead, with payroll tax withholding, they never see the money. They don’t miss the money because they never get it. The blood stays off the streets, and drips instead to the IRS. The man or woman who invented payroll tax withholding deserves a spot in the Wesley Mouch Bureaucrat Hall of Fame.

What does the worker see every year? A big fat refund check! The government gave me money! Oh, happy happy joy joy!

So go ahead, be happy to get your refund. It’s your money, you worked for it. But spare us the Happy Sheep Dance.

Take the Department of Agriculture. When I blogged about this department in 2007 the budget was $20 billion. Now it spends $142 billion! Most of this explosive growth comes in food subsidies (but even if you don’t count food subsidies, the department’s budget has doubled in four years). The DOA now gives out food stamps, school meals and WIC. If you tried to stop these programs, leftists would wail about starving po’ folk. Do we want to take the milk from babies’ mouths just to give money to greedy corporate fatcats? (How many people are still moved these days by such arguments?)

How about the Department of Commerce? Of its $17 billion budget, $1.9 goes to the census, which we’ll assume is legitimate since it’s in the Constitution — although I suspect it could be done cheaper. 45% of the department’s budget goes to subsidies, meaning the state takes money from some people and gives it to other people. Is this just? Why don’t we let the free market decide what businesses get money?

Department of Education: $109 billion.

Department of Energy: $38 billion.

Health and Human Services, which includes Medicare and Medicaid: $869 billion. You could cut the National Institute of Health alone and save $33.2 billion. Why not privatize health care? The market is more efficient than the state, even in medicine.

Housing and Urban Development: $63 billion. $15 billion for community development? Do we need to take money from Peter to develop Paul’s community? Let’s get the government out of real estate.

Department of Transportation: $91 billion. Let’s sell all the federal highways to the highest bidder and let the market determine transportation costs. Somehow I think it would work out to less than the current $770 per U.S. household.

If we got rid of all this, we’d cut $1.33 trillion a year in federal spending, but the benefit to the economy from getting rid of regulations and introducing competition would be far greater. Not only would we be a richer nation, we would be a freer and more moral nation because the state would not be dictating every individual’s life so much.

Right now Congress is arguing over the equivalent of an accounting error: do we cut $31 billion? $39 billion? We need a radical rethinking of the role of government. The protection of individual rights should be the only standard, and the rest should be repealed. Obviously, the current politicians — “Socialists of all parties,” as Hayek put it — lack the correct premises. The spread of those premises depends on the spread of Ayn Rand’s philosophy.

…I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.

The prospect of emotionally wrenching pictures of suffering was too much for the President. Obama is not worried about logical arguments, but the emotionalist thinkers who look at pictures out of context and ask, “Why didn’t we do something?”

Take this passage:

Now we saw regime forces on the outskirts of the city. We knew that if we wanted — if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.

It was not in our national interest to let that happen. I refused to let that happen. And so nine days ago, after consulting the bipartisan leadership of Congress, I authorized military action to stop the killing and enforce U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973.

He asserts that a massacre in Libya is not in our national interest, but gives no reasons. Why does he think Americans will accept a non sequitur? He expects his audience to think emotionally rather than rationally. A fuzzy thinker listening out of focus would feel bad about the massacre, and therefore agree that it’s not in the national interest to let it happen.

Here is another incoherent passage:

Moreover, America has an important strategic interest in preventing Gadhafi from overrunning those who oppose him. A massacre would have driven thousands of additional refugees across Libya’s borders, putting enormous strains on the peaceful — yet fragile — transitions in Egypt and Tunisia. The democratic impulses that are dawning across the region would be eclipsed by the darkest form of dictatorship, as repressive leaders concluded that violence is the best strategy to cling to power. The writ of the United Nations Security Council would have been shown to be little more than empty words, crippling that institution’s future credibility to uphold global peace and security. So while I will never minimize the costs involved in military action, I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America.

Now, just as there are those who have argued against intervention in Libya, there are others who have suggested that we broaden our military mission beyond the task of protecting the Libyan people, and do whatever it takes to bring down Gadhafi and usher in a new government.

Of course, there is no question that Libya — and the world — would be better off with Gadhafi out of power. I, along with many other world leaders, have embraced that goal, and will actively pursue it through non-military means. But broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.

So we don’t want repressive leaders to conclude that violence is the best strategy to cling to power, but we’ll let Gadhafi cling to power.

Others, such as Thomas Sowell and Melanie Phillips have written about Obama’s incoherence.

The more I read the more I’m struck by how half-assed this kinetic military action is. We could end up with jihadist regimes in Egypt and Libya, with billions of dollars in oil money — not to mention foreign aid dollars from American taxpayers — at their command to fund terrorism against us. What then?

Further half-assedness from the Obama administration:

Challenged on whether Obama overstepped his constitutional authority in attacking Libya without congressional approval, Clinton told lawmakers that White House lawyers were OK with it and that Obama has no plans to seek an endorsement from Congress, attendees told POLITICO.

Allahpundit muses on this,

Isn’t he required under the War Powers Act to seek congressional authorization after 60 days of hostilities? Or is this guy so intent on waging war whether Congress likes it or not that he’d go to court to try to have the WPA ruled unconstitutional? Normally I’d dismiss that possibility as insane given that he did, after all, run in ’08 on his anti-war cred and that not even a Republican president would dare pull a move like that amid bipartisan clamoring for accountability, but I don’t know that anything can be safely ruled out at this point.

The half-assedness is not just in America. Over in France,

Sarkozy won a fair measure of praise for being the first leader to recognize the Libyan opposition as the legitimate leadership of the country – but even that may come back to haunt him if things go wrong. Sarkozy’s decision was taken almost on the spur of the moment, and under the spectacular brow-beating of mediagenic philosopher Bernard-Henri LÉvy, who decided to make crusading to protect the Libyan opposition a re-make of his 1990 campaign as the savior of the Bosnians during the Balkan war. Sarkozy reportedly did so without even consulting his newly-named Foreign Affairs Minister Alain Juppe (who was said to have been both hostile to the move and aghast that a media star had taken his role as France’s top diplomat). “There may heavy consequences,” says Bitar, “when a president makes decisions based on input by celebrities.”

(Emphasis added.)

This whole thing was started by a French philosopher? If I believed in God, that would be enough bring me to my knees in prayer.

And that’s why building this international coalition has been so important because it means that the United States is not bearing all the cost. It means that we have confidence that we are not going in alone, and it is our military that is being volunteered by others to carry out missions that are important not only to us, but are important internationally. And we will accomplish that in a relatively short period of time.

(Emphasis Preston’s)

The Obama Doctrine restated in plain spoken clarity (which politicians never come near) is: America will not assert its national self-interest, but if other countries want to volunteer us to sacrifice for the rest of the world, we will be glad to serve.

(HT: Contentions)

Michael Hurd explains Charlie Sheen.

Evan Sayet looks at how leftists portray themselves in movies and TV. I think the explanation is that the left accepts the mind-body dichotomy, which is as old as Plato. The moral ideal is altruism, they believe, but in the reality of the flawed world we live in, everyone is petty and selfish. Comics like Larry David understand that there is more comedy in cynicism than in the left’s moral ideal.

If you like Classic Rock, Gary Moore gets quite a tone on “Red House.”

Spending cuts in perspective.

This piece in the New York Times about pharmaceutical companies is depressing. Government intervention is destroying the drug industry. And it will only get worse:

The new law also contains a major threat to drug industry profits in a little-known section that would allow centralized price-setting. Beginning in 2015, an independent board appointed by the president could lower prices across the board in Medicare unless Congress acted each year to overrule it. Medicare pays more than 20 percent of the nation’s retail drug bills.

First from Michael Moore:

“They’re sitting on the money, they’re using it for their own — they’re putting it someplace else with no interest in helping you with your life, with that money. We’ve allowed them to take that. That’s not theirs, that’s a national resource, that’s ours. We all have this — we all benefit from this or we all suffer as a result of not having it,” Michael Moore told Laura Flanders of GRITtv.

“I think we need to go back to taxing these people at the proper rates. They need to — we need to see these jobs as something we some, that we collectively own as Americans and you can’t just steal our jobs and take them someplace else,” Moore concluded.

And from Robert Reich:

…so many middle-class people, lower middle-class people, working-class people, are frustrated. They are anxious, they worry about paying their bills. They see people at the very top getting away with, well, the equivalent of murder: look at what happened on Wall Street. There’s not a single Wall Streeter that’s actually been indicted or brought to justice after that huge implosion on Wall Street. And people get cynical and they get angry.

And then they see, uh, Republicans are very good at channeling that anger toward what? Government, immigrants, public employees. Well, an angry population and an angry populace could just as easily turn their anger toward the very rich. Again, it is in the interest of the people at the top to actually call for a more equitable distribution of the gains of economic growth and a better tax system: a tax system that is fair.

Wehner analyzes these statements well:

If you listen to both men, you’ll gain a fairly good insight into the modern liberal worldview.

It consists of several elements. The first, as articulated by Moore, is that money you earn is not really yours; it’s a “natural resource” that belongs to others. That is the basic starting point for those like Moore. Second, the collectivist impulse among the left is extremely powerful. Third, higher taxes have almost talisman-like powers. Regardless of our economic circumstances — whether we’re experiencing strong growth or a nasty recession — higher taxes are always called for. Fourth, liberals view higher taxes first and foremost as a matter of “fairness” rather than growth. One cannot help but conclude that many liberals would accept lower growth rates and fewer jobs in favor of more redistribution of income. And fifth, America is a nation seething with class resentments. “An angry population and an angry populace could just as easily turn their anger toward the very rich,” according to Reich. “Again, it is in the interest of the people at the top to actually call for a more equitable distribution of the gains of economic growth and a better tax system: a tax system that is fair.”

I would add that Moore justifies theft, whereas Reich justifies paying protection money to keep the thieving mob from attacking. Moore is the more consistent and radical leftist: he wants the state to take wealth from the rich. Reich seems to want to maintain some facade of decency by having the rich sacrifice their wealth instead of outright appropriation by a state acting to soothe the anger of the masses.

There is an emotion at work in the statements of both Moore and Reich, the ugly emotion of envy. Moore’s statement drips with outright hatred of the wealthy. Reich wants the wealthy to buy protection from the envious mob.

Why is it that sophisticates and moderates are shocked when we call these leftists the socialists that they are? Democrats are socialists, but it’s considered bad form to say so. To say the truth in America today is to risk being smeared as an “extremist.”

Wehner goes on to compare their statements with an excellent passage from Lincoln that I’m surprised I had never before read. (Read the whole thing.) But then, considering that the left has written the history books for the last century, I shouldn’t be surprised.

As Wehner notes, the contrast between these leftists and Lincoln is that of the equality of outcome vs. equality of opportunity. Equality of outcome — egalitarianism — is the lever by which the left is moving the world. Wehner thinks more Americans would agree with Lincoln; I’m not so sure at this point. But I do believe that if egalitarianism can be discredited by the new intellectuals, then restoring limited government will follow with ease.

There’s been virtually no reliable information coming out of Tripoli, but a source close to the Gaddafi regime I did manage to get hold of told me the already terrible situation in Libya will get much worse. Among other things, Gaddafi has ordered security services to start sabotaging oil facilities. They will start by blowing up several oil pipelines, cutting off flow to Mediterranean ports. The sabotage, according to the insider, is meant to serve as a message to Libya’s rebellious tribes: It’s either me or chaos. . . .

My Libyan source said that Gaddafi has told people around him that he knows he cannot retake Libya with the forces he has. But what he can do is make the rebellious tribes and army officers regret their disloyalty, turning Libya into another Somalia. “I have the money and arms to fight for a long time,” Gaddafi reportedly said.

As part of the same plan to turn the tables, Gaddafi ordered the release from prison of the country’s Islamic militant prisoners, hoping they will act on their own to sow chaos across Libya. Gaddafi envisages them attacking foreigners and rebellious tribes. Couple that with a shortage of food supplies, and any chance for the rebels to replace Gaddafi will be remote.

My Libyan source said that in order to understand Gaddafi’s state of mind we need to understand that he feels deeply betrayed by the media, which he blames for sparking the revolt. In particular, he blames the Qatari TV station al-Jazeera, and is convinced it targeted him for purely political motivations. He also feels betrayed by the West because it has only encouraged the revolt. Over the weekend, he warned several European embassies that if he falls, the consequence will be a flood of African immigration that will “swamp” Europe.

If this is true — that Gaddafi is willing to see Libya turned into Somalia — then he is an evil man. Instead of stepping down with some shred of decency, he wants to flame out in a senseless, nihilist apocalypse. He manages to make Mubarak look good.

This demonstrates that dictators don’t “love” the people they control, despite their propoganda to the contrary. They love power and power only, and if that power is threatened they will destroy their country in spite.

Would America be morally justified in taking out Gaddafi? Yes. If he is releasing from prison terrorists who would kill foreigners, that’s reason enough.

But would it be practical? Probably not. An American attack on Gaddafi would make him a martyr in the Arab world. Any regime America put in place would be seen as illegitimate.

Anyway, with Obama as president, such speculation is a waste of time. No way Obama interferes in Libya. He has made it clear that he believes America should not consider itself better than any other country, and has no right to meddle in the affairs of other states. Obama would only act to stop the creation of a Somalia on the Mediterranean if it were clear that America had nothing to gain in its self-interest. There’s too much oil in Libya to pretend American intervention is purely altruistic.

UPDATE: Like Hitler?

It’s fashionable these days for anyone to compare his political enemies to Hitler. But as I watched Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi give his 75 minute speech on Tuesday on Al-Jazeera, all I could think was that Hitler had been resurrected. Gaddafi is truly a psychopath, and feels no guilt for the atrocities that he’s launched against his own people.

I assume that comparison also crossed the mind of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom Reuters quotes as saying, “The news we’ve had from Libya yesterday and today is worrying and the speech by Colonel Gaddafi this afternoon was very, very frightening, especially because he virtually declared war on his own people.”…

Here’s one more quote from the speech, where he referred to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre by the Chinese: “People in front of tanks were crushed. The unity of China was more important than those people in Tiananmen Square. … When Tiananmen Square happened, tanks were sent in to deal with them. It’s not a joke. I will do whatever it takes to make sure part of the country isn’t taken away.”

This is the first time, as far as I can recall, that I’ve ever heard anyone, even the Chinese, speak of the Tiananmen Square massacre in a positive, approving manner.

I wish I could convey in words the screaming, ranting man that I saw. This is a guy who is capable of anything, without remorse. He’s already using outside mercenaries to kill protesters, since he can’t count on his own police to kill their fellow Libyans. Some commentators said that they feared that he might turn to poison gas to stop the protesters. The best thing that can happen is for someone close to him to put a bullet in his head.

And after all the blather about crosshairs on pictures, you’d think the Democrats in Wisconsin would avoid this:

It’s interesting that the media is obsessed with right-wing rhetoric when there is actually very little violence on the right. But you can watch left-wing violence with your own eyes. (Please click the link, as I can’t seem to embed the video using BlogDesk.)

So there is a leftist criminal conspiracy afoot in the land that has a record of committing violence against the right. If there were such a gang on the right, you know it would be HUGE news. The MSM would work to establish a connection in everyone’s mind linking those who oppose statism with violence.

The MSM is not about reporting the news, but advancing a political agenda. It’s not just that the personal is the political; on the left everything is political. The truth is sacrificed for political ends.

I hope I never lose my amazement at the cynicism and dishonesty of the left. When we yawn at lies, the liars have won.

Actually, the opposite is true. If the USA is not the least violent country in history, then it’s one of them. This country was founded on the principle of individual rights, which is the means of shielding people from violence from the state. The history of the world before America is the history of unchecked violence from church and state wreaked upon anyone who got in their way.

To give just one example, I’ve been reading about Queen Elizabeth, whom people romaniticize hopelessly. The woman was a tyrant. Merry Old England had no civil rights. The Queen could have someone thrown into the Tower of London if she suspected he was conspiring with Catholics to overthrow her. And you didn’t want anyone whispering you were an atheist.

Aside from state violence, Elizabethan culture was brawling and violent. The playwright Christopher Marlowe was killed by a stab in the eye during a bar fight (that might have been the assassination of a spy who knew too much). The playwright Ben Jonson killed an actor (and has been the hero of playwrights ever since). The playwright John Marston pulled a gun on Jonson; Jonson grabbed the gun and beat Marston over the head with it. (You did not want to mess with Jonson.) And that’s just the violence among playwrights!

Throughout history might has made right. What constitutional rights had the Huns, the Vikings, the American Indians or any other pre-capitalist society?

The notion that America ranks high in violence historically is laughable. How does America rank today among the rest of the world? A study from the mid-90′s shows America to rank 36th in suicides and 24th in homocides. That’s with over half the nations in the UN, including the former Soviet Union and many nations in Africa and Asia reporting no data at all. A complete, unbiased study would probably show America further down the list.

America did have a higher homicide rate than any Western European nation in that study. But the rate since then has trended down dramatically.

Wikipedia shows American homicides trending way down since the 90′s.

Although there are still far more homicides per capita than France, violent crimes there surpassed the US in 2001.

That shocked the French, who tend to refer to high-crime areas with such phrases as “a real Bronx,” or “a Chicago” — a crime-as-Americana vocabulary common across Europe.

Violent crime in the UK has soared.

We also suffer more violence than people in the US or even SOUTH AFRICA, figures show.

A shocking 2,034 per 100,000 people suffer violent crime in the UK, compared to 466 in America and 1,609 in troublespot South Africa.

Britain’s damning figures far outstrip those of second-worst EU country — Austria, with 1,677 violent crimes per 100,000 people.

And the UK rate has increased by a shocking 77 per cent since 1998.

The numbers were released by the European Commission.

They also tell how Britain has the second highest OVERALL crime rate in the EU.

I’m not sure why violent crime is rising in Europe, but I doubt that it’s because European kids are watching too many American movies and video games, as some Europeans think.

Some blame the United States outright, saying it exports gun-driven violence as blithely as it does software and Boeings. Calls for banning blood-soaked video games, Hollywood movies and hip-hop music videos are just as loud as calls for gun control; this week the German government proposed restrictions on violent computer games.

I would guess it has more to do with changing demographics.

America has more homicides than many nations, but Spike Lee’s statement just shows his ignorance and his anti-American bias.

Michael Medved, with whom I often disagree, made an interesting observation on his show, that these smears are aimed at recapturing women voters to the Democrat side. They have not been appealing to strictly logical thinkers among either sex, but hoping to establish a vague emotional connection linking murderous violence to the right. Those who are swayed by feelings without subjecting them to reason will be fooled — but then, those people will always fall victim to demagoguery.

Here are a few last thoughts on the issue.

1. It looks like the left is still very much afraid of Sarah Palin, the Tea Party Movement and talk radio. These forces hurt them in the 2010 election, and must be destroyed by any means necessary. No lie is beneath the left in this war.

(By the way, so far in this post I have used the words campaign, aimed and war. It’s impossible to write about politics without using violent imagery and war metaphors.)

2. Although the left’s smears come from cynical, Alinsky-like tactics meant to delegitimize their opponents, I think leftists believe what they say. When they lie they think they have a moral right to lie.

As the party of modern philosophy, the left has no confidence in the power of reason to know reality. Radical subjectivism teaches them that there is no truth, only competing narratives. Words are nothing but weapons to be used either by the greedy capitalists in pursuit of profit or by the disinterested philosopher-kings of the left who just want to help their fellow man. When you hold these premises, lies come easily and with smug self-righteousness.

3. It’s not working.

Most Americans, 57 percent, believe the tragic shooting in Arizona isn’t connected to politics. That’s the result of a new CBS News poll which found only 32 percent of respondents aid the harsh political tone had something to do with the shooting.

In the new media world of talk radio and the internet, the left is having a hard time selling their “narrative.” Who knows, someday they might give up character assassination, smears, lies and demagoguery because those tactics have grown so stale they earn nothing but yawns and laughter. At that point they will have two options: an honest debate of ideas or violent revolution. They’re not that desperate yet.

Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland, has moved from Majority Leader to Minority Leader in the House of Representatives because of the 2010 election. Here is his explanation of the Tea Party movement:

There are a whole lot of people in the Tea Party that I see in these polls who don’t want any compromise. My presumption is they have unhappy families. All of you have been in families: single-parent, two-parents, whatever. Multiple parent and a stepfather. The fact is life is about trying to reach accommodation with one another so we can move forward. That is certainly what democracy is about. So if we are going to move forward compromise is necessary.

Sean Higgins writes,

So, there you have it. The Tea Party movement is not motivated by, as its members claim, record-high levels of spending and debt by the federal government and the possible economic consequences of that. It is not upset by the various federal bailouts of recent years. It is not riled up by a stagnant economy with 9.8% unemployment. No, they go to rallies because it is easier than going home apparently.

Warner Todd Huston notes,

This is the arrogance and cluelessness we are up against, people. According to Hoyer his polices and those of the far, far Democratic left of which he represents under Nancy Pelosi, those polices couldn’t possibly be wrong. You couldn’t possibly have actually cast an informed vote against him. No way. It has to be because you are psychologically damaged by your Mother. You MUST be a mental case.

This quote is just the latest example of the mentality we are up against in the welfare-regulatory state establishment. These people cannot be persuaded or changed; they can only be replaced. It won’t happen overnight.

Charles Krauthammer calls the deal “the swindle of the year” that will “blow another near-$1 trillion hole in the budget.”

At great cost that will have to be paid after this newest free lunch, the package will add as much as 1 percent to GDP and lower the unemployment rate by about 1.5 percentage points. That could easily be the difference between victory and defeat in 2012.

Obama is no fool. While getting Republicans to boost his own reelection chances, he gets them to make a mockery of their newfound, second-chance, post-Bush, Tea-Party, this-time-we’re-serious persona of debt-averse fiscal responsibility.

And he gets all this in return for what? For a mere two-year postponement of a mere 4.6-point increase in marginal tax rates for upper incomes. And an estate tax rate of 35 percent – it jumps insanely from zero to 55 percent on Jan. 1 – that is somewhat lower than what the Democrats wanted.

Chris Kobus says Krauthammer falls into the liberal trap of arguing that tax cuts “cost the government.”

Rep. Paul Ryan is for the deal, but Senator Jim DeMint opposes it:

I’m glad the President recognizes that tax increases hurt the economy. I mean, I guess that’s progress. But frankly, Hugh, most of us who ran this election said we were not going to vote for anything that increased the deficit. This does. It raises taxes, it raises the death tax. I don’t think we needed to negotiate that aspect of this thing away. I don’t think we need to extend unemployment any further without paying for it, and without making some modifications such as turning it into a loan at some point. It then encourages people to go back to work. So there’s a lot of problems with it. I mean, and frankly, the biggest problem I have, Hugh, is we don’t need a temporary economy, which means we don’t need a temporary tax rate. A permanent extension of our current tax rates would allow businesses to plan five and ten years in advance, and that’s how you build an economy.

Dick Morris says President Obams has surrendered and looks weak. Matthew Continetti says it’s a good deal.

When I hear about deals with the Democrats called swindles, I think of Reagan’s famous deal in the 1980′s. He gave the Democrats a tax rise in exchange for $2 of spending cuts for every $1 in tax increase. America got the tax increase; the spending cuts never came. By the end of the Reagan presidency federal spending had doubled.

In the current deal Republicans don’t even ask for the promise of spending cuts.

All my life government spending has only grown. Somehow these compromises always work to the advantage of the statists. The Democrats say, “Let’s do X.” The Republicans respond with, “Let’s just do half an X.” They work out a compromise and we end up with less freedom.

As I see it, this deal probably is the best the Republicans could manage with a leftist president, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good deal. It’s pretty much more of the same. We need a 180-degree change in direction: cut spending, cut taxes, cut regulations, cut the size of government. That’s just for starters.

The left is screaming about this deal because Obama gave up a tax increase on the rich. What we need is a deal that would turn their screaming up to 11. We need a deal that would not only bring back their fantasies of moving to Canada, but would actually make a good lot of them move there.

I’m disappointed to see the Democrats continuing to cash in on the false notion that the people on Wall Street are the enemies of the people on main street. This ad represents all that is wrong with Michigan (and national) politics. Readers are presumably supposed to be relieved that these Democrats are anti-wall street. It is blatantly anti-business in tone. And yet it is only businesses that can create productive jobs. Government cannot create jobs. All government has to offer is force and the threat of it. And for decades government has used this power to chase businesses out of Michigan.

It’s time to get government out of the way and let business do what it does best: create prosperity. We’ll have to see if the new republicans are up to the task. The Democrats sure aren’t.

The next paragraph contains another mention of common good: “The American people are speaking out, demanding that we realign our country’s compass with its founding principles and apply those principles to solve our common problems for the common good.” Sigh. Actually, the people want the government to apply those principles to solve our individual problems for our individual good. One more.

“We pledge to uphold the purpose and promise of a better America, knowing that to whom much is given, much is expected and that the blessings of our liberty buoy the hopes of mankind.” Wow again! ‘Given’ by whom? This is the collective notion that one’s freedom and prosperity is given by society or the state or god or some such external source and must be paid back lest one be condemned as an evil taker. Completely missing from this introduction is any idea that freedom and prosperity are earned by creating values and trading them for individual mutual benefit on a free market.

This is only the first 3 pages and we see that such statist concepts as ‘common good’ ‘national purpose’, polarizing environment’ and required duty to society–longstanding tenets of the leftist Democratic Party–are shared by the Republican Party. It’s plain to see that the Republican party does not understand our founding principles. In fact, these three pages tell me that the entire document will be an epistemological disaster because they list many noble sounding ideals and generalizations which are treated as if they were concrete bound particulars unrelated to each other.

This short introduction is dissuading me from reading the rest but I shall take two aspirins and plod on perhaps posting on it later. I don’t see the Republican party changing its stripes anytime soon but I’m hopeful that this new crop of winners in Nov can filter into the leadership and bring a few rational thinkers with them. I’m not holding my breath though in the knowledge that this Introduction to Horror was written by some of these same newcomers. Yikes!

What often gets lost in all this, largely due to the utter implausibility thereof,  is that the Left in America also makes these claims on occasion.  Since their followers have been almost completely weaned away from the knowledge of what Americanism actually is, it is usually not necessary for them to do so.  Such efforts are without exception laughably weak, plainly meant for internal consumption as a means for modern “liberals” to reassure themselves and each other that they are still, somehow, “liberals” in the grand American meaning of the term.  That these efforts are so fleeting illustrates how insubstantial are the last remaining links of the modern American Left to its victim, the hollowed-out shell of what was once liberalism.

I offer as a case in point, the following article by Michael Lind, which attempts to deflect the ever-accurate charge that American “liberalism” has been on an anti-American road since FDR by the incredibly thin means of attacking the charge as “Straussian”.  Below is the fisking I posted in his comments. Passages in italics are Lind’s, and items in [] are corrections I added here that are not in the original comment, with the exception of the “[citation needed]” references to Wikipedia.

———————————
Will and Voegeli repeat two now-familiar claims of Straussian propaganda.

[citation needed]

The idea that this idea of modern liberalism repudiating Americanism originates with Leo Strauss destroys your credibility completely, right off the bat.

Strauss, as an admirer of Carl Schmitt, was one of the anti-liberal reactionaries of the Weimar Republic that attacked liberal American principles for, among other things, resulting in a materialistic society of “entertainers” (see C. Bradley Thompson, “Neoconservatism” An Obituary for an Idea” for a detailed study of Strauss and his influence on the neoconservative school).

The rest [of Lind's article] is just the usual menu of careful assembly of lookalike concretes and connections drawn in crayon, for the benefit of that shrinking audience of Leftists who still insist on an increasingly untenable claim of fealty to Americanism. I’ll shred a scattershot few right here:

Will and Voegeli repeat two now-familiar claims of Straussian propaganda. First, FDR, LBJ and modern liberals have rejected the idea of “pre-existing and timeless natural rights.” Second, they have favored putting as many people as possible on the dole. The historical record makes it clear that both accusations are libels.

The fact that you are evading is that what they *intended* and *where they are going* are two different things. The logic of the welfare state idea contains no limits. Moreover, it does contain the inevitable driver of expansion, to wit: there are always going to be wounds for altruists to lay their hands on. And, in light of the lack of any constraints on what constitutes “wounds”, the inevitable result of *that* is that any inequality — if this guy has a buck more than that one — must eventually become a fresh “wound” that the welfare state must address.

Of course, [many of] the fathers of the American welfare state didn’t mean for it to grow as it has (though the case can be made that Bismarck, the political forerunner of Hitler who invented the welfare state, knew full well what he was doing.). It would be a fair cop to say that even FDR would be aghast at how large it has grown.

That’s what establishes my point and disproves yours, here: it doesn’t matter what you intend, it matters what you actually do. Ideas have a logic of their own, and so long as you accept certain ideas, you are committed to arriving at their logical end-of-road — no matter where you insist you “meant” to go — and you are morally responsible for knowing where that road ends.

And when you get there and start screaming “but I didn’t mean THIS!” you will not be absolved.

Was Roosevelt repudiating the American Founding when he told Democrats in Philadelphia in 1936: “This is fitting ground on which to reaffirm the faith of our fathers; to pledge ourselves to restore to the people a wider freedom; to give to 1936 as the founders gave to 1776 — an American way of life.”

There’s so little meaning in those words, it would be hard to say he was repudiating anything — but even so, he was wrong: by no rational measure did he “restore to the people a wider freedom”. See above; what he said pales compared to what he actually did.

Like his mentor Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, who headed the National Youth Administration work program in Texas in the 1930s, supported workfare, not welfare, for the able-bodied poor.

“Workfare” is welfare with a pretense of work. That you think there’s a moral difference is laughable. That’s like saying that if I force a homeowner at gunpoint to let me paint his house and then pay me $100 for the job, it’s somehow morally different from simple robbery.

Hint: it’s not the money. It’s the principle. You know, that one called “consent”.

And no, the vote is not a consent.

Roosevelt argued that small-government Jeffersonianism made sense in a society of farmers:

Yup. And aren’t we lucky that he didn’t attempt to argue that the First Amendment only made sense in a society of movable lead type, quills and parchment scrolls, too.

The clue you are missing here: individual rights are not contingent upon time or technology. The rights to life, liberty, and property do not come with a “Best by” date.

The goal of the New Deal was, among other things, to save the relatively recent innovation of large-scale corporate capitalism, which was unknown to the Founders:

The Internet was also unknown to the Founders. See above.

Contra the spectre of popular fascism (i.e. of a government takeover of everything) often invoked by fearful New Dealers, the government takeover of some things is not an antidote thereof.

Besides, the Founders were much more epistemologically advanced than you give them credit for. They knew that they could not possibly imagine all the things that human beings may yet do; that’s why they included a “catch-all” provision in the Constitution, in the form of the Ninth And Tenth Amendments. These were specifically intended to ensure that the scope of individual liberty was to be understood as open-ended — that the default for anything they didn’t address, was: government can’t touch it.

Unfortunately, that’s one key point where Leftists and conservatives are united in their opposition to the Founders.

The Straussian claim that American liberals since the New Deal have repudiated the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, then, is nothing more than a smear, like calling Barack Obama a socialist or fascist.

[citation needed]

Until you supply one, *this* is the smear — and an ironic one, as you ascribe to Strauss a viewpoint that should properly be credited to Ayn Rand.

What accounts for the infatuation of conservatives like Milton Friedman and Charles Murray with giving cash to the poor instead of providing them with public works jobs like the WPA job that rescued Reagan’s father from unemployment in the Great Depression?

The fact that conservatives and Leftists are not as opposite as they insist they are.

…announced by FDR in 1933: “No business which depends for its existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.”

Ah, so FDR said that any business that does not conform to his idea of “a living wage” does not have the right to exist in America?

There’s your repudiation by FDR of the founding American principles right there. The Founders would be aghast at a President dictating terms to free men, let alone enforcing it against them.

America does not need to choose between James Madison and Woodrow Wilson. But it does need to choose between Franklin Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover

And that’s your cashing in… to push the debate back into your little box of false alternatives, one where actual “Americanism” is not represented and does not exist.

You are wrong, sir. The alternative remains: the morally sovereign individual versus the authoritarian collective — or the Founders on one hand, versus FDR, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Croly, Leo Strauss, Russell Kirk and ultimately yourself, on the other.