The US Election

“Democracy has to be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.”
--James Bovard, "Lost Rights"

With the US elections five days away, and if the polls can be believed, it looks like a Democrat sweep. This is as I predicted in November of 2006, although I had Hillary as the President. In my own defense as a prognosticator, Obama was not even on the radar at that time. Recent reports affirm that he set up a Presidential campaign committee in Iowa (the first caucus state) almost immediately following his election to the Senate, suggesting he had big plans from the start. Aided by a cheerleading media, and one remarkably disinterested in his questionable qualifications, links to unsavory individuals, massive fund raising and flip-flops on issues, he seems certain to carry the day. A massive turnout of minorities and young voters enthralled with this charismatic “messiah” should overcome the skeptical.

Obama’s unlikely rise to the pinnacle of power in this campaign marks a dramatic shift leftward in American politics for with his victory he will join a seriously left leaning Congress led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. There is an even chance that the Democrats will have a filibuster proof majority in the Senate rendering any check on Democrat legislation moot.

Democrats are drooling at the prospect of a filibuster proof Senate so they can pass The Fairness Doctrine. This is designed to simply put talk radio out of business. In other words, the Hell with free speech. With the main stream media essentially the public relations arm of the Democrats and gleefully cheering on Obama, shutting up the contrary voices on talk radio and Fox News would give the Democrats a clear monopoly on information. The First Amendment? An outdated concept. Think PBS all day, all the time.

So, what should we expect from a decidedly liberal President and Congress? Well, for starters your taxes are going up. Yeah, yeah, I know. BHO has said (endlessly) that 95% of Americans will get a cut. Of course, this is mathematically impossible since about 40% of Americans do not pay any taxes whatsoever. He finesses this problem by calling cash payments to people who pay NO taxes “tax cuts”.

Cute. He also calls various tax credits for child-care, purchase of a fuel-efficient car, etc. tax cuts.

Obama has certainly learned from Bill Clinton to parse his words carefully. (Remember: “It all depends on what the meaning of “is” is”?) He said, “I” will not raise taxes on the middle class.” The key word here is “I”. Congress would do it in any case, but more importantly, if Congress does nothing, the Bush tax cuts expire and taxes are automatically raised. Gottcha!

BHO and the Dems have convinced a lot of people that the Bush tax cuts screwed the middle class and only favored the “rich”. Wrong my liberal brethren. Here are a couple of examples. (If you want the entire list and the link where you could check this out yourself, send me an email without too many cuss words in it and I will send it to you.)

Under Clinton a single taxpayer earning $30K paid $8,400. After Bush’s cuts: $4,500.
A taxpayer under Clinton earning $75K paid $23,250. Under Bush: $18,750.
A married filer under Clinton earning $60K paid $16,800. Under Bush: $9,000.
Bottom line: If BHO and the Dems let the tax cuts expire as they have promised, the middle class will take a big hit. As to Obama’s promise not to hit the middle class… Bill Clinton made the same promise and two months into his term he raised them. Of course, “things had changed” and he was “forced” to do it. Given the (at minimum) $400 billion in additional spending he has promised….

Obama has also stated he wants to raise the rates on capital gains and dividends back to where it was during the Clinton Administration. Apparently he is so disconnected that he thinks only the wealthy own stocks. Millions of Americans have stocks in their IRAs, 401Ks or in various union and company retirement programs. This threat and the likelihood of an Obama victory are already driving the stock market down.

The US corporate tax rate (35%) is among the highest in the industrialized world. The liberals cannot conceive of reducing this tax to be more competitive and stop jobs from moving to friendlier environments. In fact, they have proposed windfall profits taxes on the oil industry (profits 9%). Carter did this and, predictably, it backfired. Remember the gas lines and oil going up 60%? No? How soon we forget.

Death taxes too are to revert to 55% after 2010; right back to where they started before the staged reduction. Same deal. Congress does nothing and bingo, you get a massive increase. BHO can still say “I” didn’t do it and besides, we need the money to put “fairness” back into the system. Sure, let’s screw the guy who spent a lifetime working his ass off.

Basically, BHO wants to increase the percentage of people who pay no taxes from 40% to 49%. This half of the American populace would have a big incentive to keep voting for the party that insures that their goodies keep flowing. (See “two wolves and a sheep” above.)

So what else? (To keep this from becoming book length I will try to be brief).

· Obama want to pass the “card check” law that would eliminate the secret ballot in whether or not a company would be unionized. Unions love this because it makes it far easier to organize a union and for this reason unions have given millions to BHO and the Democrats. Here’s how it works. “You want to join the union or would you like your legs broken? Sign here.” Even George McGovern hates this one.

* Democrats dislike free trade agreements. Obama let it slip early in his campaign that he would cancel NAFTA and force the Canadians and Mexicans to renegotiate. The Obama campaign was forced to send a guy to Ottawa to convince the Canadians that it was just campaign BS. Yeah? Pelosi has refused to even allow a vote on the Columbian Free Trade pact even though it would primarily help American manufacturers. Hoover passed the Hawley-Smoot protectionist legislation during the Depression. Unemployment went from 9% to 25%. Seem like a good idea now? (It’s a World Economy stupid.)

· Democrats have floated the idea of nationalizing IRA and 401K accounts and merging them into social security. They would guarantee you a rate of 3% on your investment. Whoopee. Argentina just did this.

· Obama has promised to eliminate missile defense. Does this sound like a great idea with an aggressive KGB controlled Russia and with Iran on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons? He also wants to get rid of all nuclear weapons. Hopefully some cooler heads will slow him down there.

· Obama likes the idea of making illegal immigrants citizens. I guess he figures since we already spend some $90 billion supporting them with welfare, food stamps, free education and medical care, not to mention the cost of their crime, that we might as well make them Democrat voters. (See “wolves and sheep” above). More stats can be seen here.

· Our Dear Leader also likes the idea of cutting carbon emissions by 80%. Adding the prohibitive burden of a cap and trade program on to an economy in recession can only be described as suicidal.

· The next president will appoint at least a couple of Supreme Court justices. Obama has already said he finds the constitution an impediment to good social policy (socialist). He wants judges with a “social conscience”. Justice Hillary?

· Obama has made some stupid comments about Iran. However, the Iranians have come out in support of his candidacy. That in itself scares me. He’s also made some conflicting comments about Israel. I’m betting that if Iran decided to attack Israel CINC Obama would not lift a finger. This may indeed be what Biden was talking about when he let it slip that “Obama would be tested in his first six months and that we should stick with him even if we did not understand his actions.” Or, words to that effect. In case you missed it… Biden is an idiot.

· Obama hates guns. Anyone who believes in 2nd Amendment rights should be prepared for an assault on those rights in BHOs first term.

· BHO will owe a big debt to the teachers unions. Don’t look for any advances in charter schools or constraints on this obscene monopoly.

· He will also owe the trial lawyers big time. Figure on them continuing their predations on the economy.

· Drilling for more domestic oil and gas under a Obama, Pelosi, Reid power lock? Forget it.
And nuclear power? Not a chance.


I guess from the above you might conclude that I am not enthusiastic about an Obama Presidency and a Democrat majority in Congress. A hard yaw toward socialism will fail as it has in the past…. Think Carter, LBJ’s Great Society and FDR’s miserable record. But, the starry-eyed youth wetting their pants over Obama were not yet born when Carter screwed things up. And, nobody bothers to teach history anymore. So, we’ll get to learn this lesson all over again. Good luck.

PS. If McCain should somehow pull this out, I suggest you invest in a firearm and plenty of ammo. The race riots will make the aftermath of MLK’s death look like a peace march.

The Politics of Personal Destruction

The recent vicious attacks and ridicule of VP candidate, Sarah Palin, sent me trundling down memory lane to the Clinton Administration where Hillary coined the above phrase. She was attempting to deflect moves by Republicans to impeach Bill for perjury and numerous charges of sexual harassment. While not as famous as her “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” quote, I found the “politics of personal destruction” line to be particularly ironic and even humorous considering she and her mates developed and perfected the technique.

Hillary’s team became quite adept at dealing with “Bimbo Eruptions”, women who came forward with charges of sexual harassment and rape. Remember Gennifer Flowers, Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick and of course, Monica of blue dress fame? Hil and her BU team set out to publicly destroy these women using private investigators and by leaking false or misleading information to their friends and allies in the media. Trash them! That was the goal.

Hillary and her liberal-left fellow travelers in the media and Hollywood had already honed this skill in previous battles. She was, you may remember, one of the prosecutors in the Watergate trials that forced Nixon out. Later their techniques came to full flower in the fight over Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court, giving rise to a new verb for the English language… “borking”. Bork had only one failing, other than being intelligent and principled, he was a conservative. They trashed the guy and it worked. They tried the same thing with Clarence Thomas and only failed because he stood up in front of the Senate hearing and called it what it was, “a high tech lynching”. An embarrassed Senate confirmed him… barely.

Of course, for the last eight years there has been a steady drumbeat of attack and ridicule on George Bush from the left, the media and entertainment figures. “Bush is stupid” is the mantra, although he has a degree from Yale and an MBA from Harvard and had better grades than either Kerry or Dean. (Bill, Hillary and Obama have never released their college records). The hatred is quite amazing and cumulatively effective. Bush has the lowest approval rating of any President in recent history. Only two institutions have lower public approval ratings: Congress and the media. Hmmmmm?

Where does this hatred come from? The technique of teaching hatred is as old as Marxism itself. Karl Marx once boasted that “he was the greatest hater of the ‘so called positive’.” Lenin said, “We must teach our children to hate.” Bill Ayers, founder of the Weather-men, sixties bomber and admitted Marxist said, “Bring on the revolution, kill your parents, teach hatred.” He also is quoted as saying, “… the community organizer must first rub raw the resent-ments of the people and fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression.” I wonder if this is what famous “community organizer”, B. Obama was doing in Chicago? Just a thought.

Dr. Mark Hendrickson in a Townhall.com piece opines that while it’s a hate crime to express distain or denigrate gays and minorities, it is not to show outright hatred for people on the right who disagree with you politically. He also points out that the flip side of hatred is inflated self-love and self-righteousness so extreme that respect for other human beings diminishes and feelings of moral superiority allow for any tactics.

The tactics employed by the liberal-left are credited to the late Saul Alinsky, the philosophical guru of the radical movement in the late sixties. Alinsky wrote an extremely popular book called The Rules for Radicals. He said, “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away."

A brief summary of Alinsky’s rules clearly demonstrates that today’s leftists are operating right out of his handbook.

The only question about means is, do they work?
· Attack multiple issues.
· Target the middle class rather than the poor.
· Decisions are not necessarily driven by the good of mankind.
· Pretend morality
· Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
· Lead people to class based interpretations of their own grievances.
· Use the church to further your agenda.
· Pick a target, freeze it, and polarize it.
· Ridicule is the most powerful weapon.

Hillary was a big fan of Alinsky while at Wellesley and wrote her senior thesis on his book. Her paper entitled, “There is Only One Fight… An Analysis of the Alinsky Model” was kept under wraps while the Clintons were in the White House. Written in her senior year, 1969, it only became public in 2001. In her 92 page paper she made it clear she found much to admire in Alinsky’s work and at the same time was already thinking ahead. One observation that stands out was that “politics needs an enemy to mobilize against.” Or, as Amanda Carpenter pointed out in “Human Events”, “the village needs an enemy.”

If you look at the last two rules on Alinsky’s list you get a pretty good feel for what has been going on in the last eight years and during the current Presidential campaign. The liberal-left, including their allies in the media and Hollywood have selected targets and polarized them and using ridicule and fueled by hatred tried to destroy them. The list is long: Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rice, Gonzales, Karl Rove, Halliburton and Big Oil, Wall Street and “The Rich”.
It explains how, acting in lockstep, they can ridicule Palin and attack anyone as “racist” who questions Obama’s relationships with Ayers, Reverend Wright, Syrian convicted felon, Tony Rezko or Jew hater, Louis Farrakhan. Ayers, Hillary and Obama were all fans of Alinsky. BHO even worked for the Industrial Area Foundation, an organization founded by Alinsky and financially supported by Clinton. Saul can certainly be credited with originating The Politics of Personal Destruction. Today’s leftists only perfected it.

Americans need to think carefully before putting Obama, clearly a radical and likely Marxist in the White House.