One of the biggest whacks upside the head of the local blogging/trivia community this past year was the Met Council’s ruling that bars that’d established “smoking patios” outside their premises had to pay fees on that extra square footage as if it was indoor, year-round revenue-generating space.  This has forced Twin Cities’ bars to shut down the practice of having special patios for smokers, especially cigar buffs.

Of course, it’s been a bigger whack upside the head for the bar owners themselves.  Already on the ropes from the smoking ban, the extra smack to their summer revenue (summer is already a slow time for most bars) has pushed many Twin Cites establishments up to and in some cases over the edge.

And in a rare move for a bureaucracy, the Met Council seems to be considering responding to the pressure from bar owners and their patrons.  There’ll be a hearing this coming Tuesday afternoon to reconsider the fee structure.  I’m not sure if there’s time to salvage the summer (or if the provision will be lifted in time to set up a patio for the MOB party)…

…but I am sure that the region’s anti-smoking gestapo will take a break from whinging about the “orchestration” of town-hall meeting outrage over healthcare to organize plenty of people to come to the meeting to bitch about secondhand smoke.

This is where you come in.

Bureaucrats take phone calls seriously.  They – the smart ones, anyway – know that every phone call represents 100 people who didn’t call them.  One call represents 100 like-minded people; it’s public relations truism.

And so it’d be great if you could take a moment to contact the members of the Met Council.   Here they are.  Please take a moment and leave them polite, reasoned messages asking them to reconsider their policy; it’s killing bars, putting people out of work, and playing into the hands of chain restaurants and establishments.  Phone is better than email, but either is vastly better than letting the other guys have the stage to themselves.

Of course if you are free on Tuesday, here are the details:

Proposed Changes to the Service Availability Charge (SAC)Rules Regarding Outdoor Spaces Public Information Meeting: 1 p.m., Chambers

I might…just…be able to make it.  Fingers crossed.

So as I was on my way home from work last night, I was listening to “Marketplace Money” on MPR last night.  The interminably smug Khai Riszdahl teed up a story about the town hall protests:

“Protests this big have to take a lot of money to coordinate.  Find out who’s paying the bill, up next on Marketplace Money.”

“Hmmm”, I thought.  “Maybe, after all these months of hearing lefties yapping about how grassroots conservatism is really all coordinated from “faux” news and asking for some actual names and proof and evidence and stuff, we’ll get some actual names!”

So I listened.

And learned that “as many as 3/4 of lobbyists don’t have to be registered”, and that “you don'[t have to be a registered lobbyist to arrange demonstrations”.

Registering as a lobbyist to arrange demonstrations?  So the problem, according to the relentlessly left-leaning Marketplace Money, isn’t that they have proof that Richard Mellon Scaife is paying big money to bring people out to demonstrate against Obama’s agenda.  It’s apparently that the Administration doesn’t have a written record of who its critics are.

Yet.

Question, lefties:  What if a conservative organization were ponying up to help channel populist anger against Obama’s minions?  ACORN pays for mobs; Citizens for a Supine “Safer” Minnesota pays for tiny demonstrations; Media Matters manufactures outrage; the Center for “Independent” Media supports “grassroots” lefty media and tells them what to write, and resists disclosing that it’s financially related to all the above.

Even if it were true that some Rove-ish figure on the right is providing financial and logistical support to these demonstrations, how is that any different?

At any rate – the left wants it to be true.  Which is all that matters to the likes of Khai Ryszdahl and “Marketplace Money”.

A year ago, Obama was being hailed as a “light worker”, the salvor of our nation’s soul; a man, but not just a man.

Today, of course, his poll numbers are gratifyingly human:

The nation is close to evenly split in its assessment of the president’s policies to date, and there is great intensity on both sides of the debate with dwindling numbers in the middle.Those are the chief findings of the latest NPR poll of 850 registered voters conducted nationwide Wednesday through Sunday by a bipartisan team. The pollsters found 53 percent approving of the president’s handling of his job, while 42 percent disapproved — the narrowest gap of the Obama presidency to date. Most of the approving group said they approved strongly, and an even greater majority of the disapproving group said they disapproved strongly.

Poll respondents liked a Democratic statement on solving health care problems better than a Republican statement (51 percent to 42 percent). However, when asked about the plan now moving through Congress, a plurality of 47 percent was opposed and 42 percent said they were in favor, based on what they had heard about the plan so far.

Presidential poll numbers are the most fungible transient asset in American politics, of course; Ronald Reagan’s numbers were abysmal in 1982, but jumped enough to give him re-election in 1984 and a Republican house of Congress in 1986.  So don’t start writing Obama’s political epitaph yet.

Because poll numbers aren’t forever.

I’m not so much saying this to the Republican and Conservative readers, though.  It’s not them I’m worried about.

No, it’s the readers on the left that concerned me.  Because while poll numbers change with the breeze, hatred just smolders on; Eric Kleefeld is finding racists under rocks.

He addresses the “racism” between the lines (it must be between the lines) from, in this case, Rush Limbaugh (with commentary inset):

So let’s take a look at some of those recent racially-charged attacks that have circulated against Obama, both right before and after the Gates incident.

• Above all others, the real celebrity here has been Rush Limbaugh. He’s done this kind of thing before — remember the “Barack, The Magic Negro” song? [which, while un-PC, was a takeoff on a line by a liberal commentator; certainly not a commentary on Limbaugh’s approach to race – Ed.] But in the wake of the Gates incident, he’s managed to become even more hard-edged about it. “Here you have a black president trying to destroy a white policeman,” Limbaugh declared this past Friday. [which would have been pretty below-the-belt, had it not been for the fact that that’s exactly how Gates played it – as a racial issue- Ed.] Yesterday, he shared a dream he’s had about the dangers to capitalism: “I had a dream that I was a slave building a sphinx in a desert that looked like Obama.” [Remember when dissent was the highest virtue?  Now, it’s apparently “racist”- Ed.] And he joked that food-safety advocates will go after all the unhealthy foods people like to eat, one by one — but they’ll have to wait until Obama is out of office to ban Oreos. [I suppose it would have been safer to say “Starbucks” or “Volvo” or “Patagonia”…- Ed.]

How much intellectual seed corn is the left willing to burn to prop up The One?  Poll numbers come and go,  but assaults on the integrity of half of ones’ fellow countrymen – defamatory, specious, intellectually vacuous attacks, of course – are gifts that just keep on giving.

Every truly repulsive trend has a nadir, eventually, something that makes even fans and participants sit up and go “oh, good lord, is this what we’ve sunk to?” 

For Britney-watching, it was the 24/7 coverage of her complete meltdown, after which the nation engaged in a sober debate on the ethics of milking celebrities’ difficulties for ratings, and then went looking for nude pictures of Vanessa Hudgens.

For daytime TV, it was “Jenny Jones” and her attempt to out-Springer Springer which went horribly awry, ending in murder.  It served as the high-water mark on the loathsome tide of daytime talk shows in the nineties.

With hair-metal, it was Winger.

With the plague of people posting videos on themselves talking onto Youtube, it was Chris Crocker, who singlehandedly breathed new life into the “ex-gay” movement.

And, maybe, please dear Lord, the Gosselins and their full-contact french kiss with Faust will do the same for “reality” TV.

Personally, I would have been more surprised if they announced that they were ending the show to save their marriage, but after watching them bicker through this season, that probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. Some people just aren’t meant to be together forever, and these two have seemed to have some issues for a long time. But now the big question is what will happen with the TLC series “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” and what will happen with the kids.I would hope that this means the show would be over, but now we apparently get to watch not only the dissolution of their marriage (and have to see their faces on every gossip columns that stalks their future relationships) but we get to watch as the kids try and cope with this on TV. Those poor kids. I get that this is reality, but it’s just not a fun show about the chaos of eight children anymore. It’s uncomfortable to watch.

So don’t.

I mean it.  Everyone.  Stop!

Happy Father’s Day, everyone!

Father’s Day is one of those holidays that I’m very ambivalent about.  Not because it’s a Hallmark Holiday, per se – but much more because of the way fatherhood has been devalued in our society.

At the core, of course, I have little to complain about. I grew up not only with a father, but a really great one, the kind that, for whatever his shortcomings, was the kind of father any kid should have, someone who passed along not only genes, but values and traditions and the little things that helped him in his own life.  Dad wasn’t like a lot of dads in my neighborhood; he couldn’t tear down an engine, and he didn’t hunt.  A lot of that, of course, comes from his own childhood; his father, my grandfather Oscar, died when he was a toddler, long before I was born.  So Dad didn’t learn a lot of that kind of stuff.  And his love of sports certainly didn’t rub off on me.  But he was a speech teacher – as noted in this space many times, one of the best teachers ever – and his love of the craft and art of giving a great speech, and of writing, and communication, certainly did.  Although he only really held two jobs in his adult life (teaching with two different districts), and always had a hard time relating to my post-industrial, new-job-every-year careers, it was the skills he gave me – communicating, reading other people, knowing that making an impression on people was a matter of careful planning and not happenstance – made my career(s) possible.  I despair, at times, of being able to do as well with my own kids; but having my own, I suspect he must have felt the same way at least once or twice.

Anyway – thanks, Dad.
Not everyone is so lucky, though.  24 million Americans are growing up without fathers.  Some of it is due to cultural shifts; big swathes of our society are being born into “fatherless” families; “Urban” culture in this country exalts skipping out on ones’ kids; it sounds tragic, and it is, but it’s a natural offshoot of the devaluation of men, and fathers, left over from slavery and the matriarchal nature of most African societies (which was, in return, reinforced by the rootlessness and destruction of families under slavery).  Marriage is an otion rather than the expectation for many in our society – in some quarters, most of our society.

Madison Avenue doesn’t help.  The standard archetype of the father in American advertising is the bumbling, inept,. schlubby oaf who’s lucky to be saved by his gorgeous, competent wife (and children – usually girls, of course, since the boys are going to grow up to be fathers one day, too – right?).  And if the schlub and Mrs. Fix-It break up?  The nation’s family courts systematically undercut the rights and value of fathers in divorce and custody settlements nationwide.

I’ll chalk this one up for President Obama; he’s not much of a President, but when it comes to fatherhood’s meaning and value, he knows a thing or two:

The president showcased fatherhood in a series of events and a magazine article in advance of Father’s Day this Sunday. He said he came to understand the importance of fatherhood from its absence in his childhood homes — just as an estimated 24 million Americans today are growing up without a dad.

A Kenyan goatherder-turned-intellectual who clawed his way to scholarships and Harvard, Barack Hussein Obama Sr. left a family behind to get his schooling in the United States. He started another family here, then left his second wife and 2-year-old Barack Jr. to return to Africa with another woman.

His promise flamed out in Africa after stints working for an oil company and the government; he fell into drink and died in a car crash when his son was 21, a student at Columbia University.

“I don’t want to be the kind of father I had,” the president is quoted as telling a friend in a new book about him.

And in an interview Friday with CBS News, Obama said: “It was only later in life that I found out that he actually led a very tragic life. And in that sense, it was the myth that I was chasing as opposed to knowing who he really was.”

His half-sister, Maya, called his memoirs “part of the process of excavating his father.”

Obama now cajoles men to be better fathers — not the kind who must be unearthed in the soul.

Which is certainly something to strive for – not only as individuals, but as a society.

What precisely is the ethical difference between the statement that got the loathsome Don Imus fired (calling the Rutgers women’s hoop squad “Nappy Headed Hos”)…

…and Letterman’s (that Bristol and/or Willow Palin are promiscuous little tramps)?

Other than the mainstream media and liberals in general not believing that conservatives deserve anything they get, I mean?

Have you ever wondered what it felt like getting your skin peeled off you body in one long painful strip – rhetorically speaking?

Just try and pin yesterday morning’s tragic, stupid murder of an abortion doctor on all of conservatism using your usual, predictable, deeply-stupid, slack-jawed, straight-from-Media-Matters talking points.

Again – speaking rhetorically.

Dr. George Tiller, one of the nation’s few providers of late-term abortions despite decades of protests and attacks, was shot and killed Sunday in a church where he was serving as an usher.

I join with every credible conservative in condemning this sort of violence. The anti-infanticide movement is winning this fight without the need for violence;  indeed, these stupid, violent atrocities benefit the pro-infanticide crowd; as long as they can keep the people and the media focused on their own victimhood, then the focus is off the real victims, America’s “tissue masses”.

So think carefully, lefties.

Long, thin strips.

Again – speaking purely rhetorically.

I know, I know.  Barney’s irritating.

My apolitical friends hate Barney because of his relentless, up-beat cheeriness and, of course, the voice.

My “conservative” friends – or at least some of the ones that look too hard to find political significance in life’s pettiest minutuae – detest him because of his cushy, relentlessly PC world.

And truth be told, there’s much about Barney, the long-running PBS show for toddlers and pre-toddlers, that’ll drive you nuts. The music is relentlessly simple.  The supporting cast – Baby Bop’s voice and sing-song delivery will drive you to cheap liquor, and the kids at the fictional daycare are, let’s just say, not gifted actors.

But my various friends and I all have one thing in common.  We’re not two years old.

Too obvious?  OK.  Most of my Barney-hating friends and acquaintances had never spent a day at home with a pre-toddler.

It’s hard to explain to them; I owe that purple dinosaur my sanity.

Let me explain.

Years ago, when Bun was a baby, I was working nights.  Her mother worked days.  So during the day, I watched the baby.  Indeed, Bun was a pretty active baby – so I didn’t do a whole lot but watch the baby.  Bottles, diapers, doing stuff – there wasn’t a whole lot of time for luxuries and dissipations like going to the bathroom.

But every day, I could count on two half-hour breaks in the action, where baby Bun would be glued so firmly to the screen (also strapped so firmly into the Snugli) that I could go grab a glass of water and a quick (quick!) trip to the bathroom without fear of getting jolted to reality by a squall of screaming. Bun was mesmerized, which was thirty minutes of being tethered to the baby by 25 foot cable, rather than a three foot leash.  Barney was on twice a day back then, and those two showings were my little rewards to myself that kept me going through the day.

So yep.  I owe that dinosaur.  Bigtime.

And whatever you want to say about the tone of the show (as an adult, and not the show’s audience), the theme song was the first song Bun ever learned.  And there’s nothing in the world more cute than a toddler singing her or his first song – it wouldn’t matter if it were a Throbbing Gristle song.  Although thankfully it wasn’t.

So anyway.  Step off the dinosaur.

In seven years of blogging, I’ve been linked a lot of places; the San Jose Mercury, both the Twin Cities dailies, Instapundit (about 15 times), Lileks and Powerline and Hot Air, and even the Freep and the DUh.

But Friday was a first; the NYTimes.

Thanks, Old Gray Online Lady!

Gallup poll shows, for the first time since the poll started, that “Pro-Life” Americans outnumber “Pro-Infanticide” ones.

Read the whole, detailed thing.  The most interesting part to me is the crosstab on gender polling (emphasis added):

A year ago, Gallup found more women calling themselves pro-choice than pro-life, by 50% to 43%, while men were more closely divided: 49% pro-choice, 46% pro-life. Now, because of heightened pro-life sentiment among both groups, women as well as men are more likely to be pro-life.

Men and women have been evenly divided on the issue in previous years; however, this is the first time in nine years of Gallup Values surveys that significantly more men and women are pro-life than pro-choice.

The Gender Identity feminists have long hitched their wagon to the idea that abortion is the “women’s right”.  Indeed, their behavior in recent years has confirmed that, given a choice between applauding (much less supporting) any other area of female achievement, the sorts of things that real feminists throughout history would have celebrated as major victories, and supporting white, male, establishment politicians who happened to be pro-“choice” – well, there’s no suspense in that, is there?  I’m fairly convinced that, given a choice between a pro-life woman President and a pro-infanticide white male caricature, the “feminist” “movement” today would not only take “b”, they’d do their best to destroy the woman.  It’s hardly conjecture; it’s recent history.

It’s also good news in that as the American public swings toward support for life, it’ll be less a political issue; Life has been a social-conservative litmus test issue that’s made the Republican Big Tent a contentious place for the past few decades; if we can declare victory one of these days, it’ll make that job a lot easier.

And the fact is, while “victory” is years, maybe generations, away, this is the sort of thing that conservatives need to pat themselves on the back over; along with the erosion of support for Victim Disarmament, it’s a testimony to the grass-roots efforts of millions of workadaddy, hugamommy pro-lifers, winning people over one person, one ultrasound, one day at a time.

…when “swagger” was a bad characteristic in a president?  Why, it doesn’t seem so long ago.

But everything has, apparently, changed; CNN has apparently hired a Swagger (or, as the stupid kids are spelling it today, “swagga”) consultant to analyze Obama’s…well, you know where this is leading, right?

Evidence of “swagga” offered by the panel included: Obama being corrected by his wife during an interview and accepting it graciously; and, Obama hugging people.

After the segment, fellow CNN anchor Heidi Collins Kyra Phillips (who’d teased the segment by telling viewers, “If you look closely, you might notice the commander in chief has more swagger than Mick Jagger…”) asked Holmes whether any white American president has had swagger, to which Holmes replied:

Maybe it’s one of these things you’re not supposed to say, but you can go from Billy Dee Williams to Shaft to whoever you want to talk about and there’s just a bit of a swagger that we associate with them…

After which Collins Phillips and Holmes (really!) “hug it out” and exchange a “fist-bump.”

 In the meantime, Mark Hemingway at NRO also asks:

A reader asks, “Wasn’t it just yesterday that a swaggering president was a bad thing?” The answer to that is clearly yes:

White House Watch: Bush swagger could crimp domestic agenda

Obama rejects swagger of Bush for a sober analysis of economic crisis

Republican Convention Turns on the Macho Swagger, Misrepresents Bush Legacy

Bush’s Iraq swagger a distant memory

A Bit Too Much Texas Swagger

Lame Duck Bush Has Swagger, Not Waddle: President Continues To Do As He Pleases

Swagger to the center: Bush is in danger of leaving the country in far worse shape than he found it. It’s time for a new direction

How to Swagger and Bully Your Way to Disaster: Bush’s Foreign Adventurism

. . . and etc. There’s much more where that came from.

So let’s try to keep track of things, here:

Out: Tingly legs, the rule of law.

In: Swagger, McCarthyism.

Do try to keep up.

That is all Word.

Starting about November 5, I figured that Obama, and especially the Congress’ Democrats, after being thwarted for almost thirty years, would not be able to resist overreach.

Hugh Hewitt, writing from the road on his “100 Days Tour”, writes:

The energy of the tea parties and which we see on our tour of the country may not be a majority movement yet, but it clearly indicates that the new president has blown off the idea of a new politics and a new bipartisanship, and that the signal has been received loud and clear. The unaligned voters of America thought they might be electing a post-partisan, post-ideological president but already know –and will learn again and again– that what they actually got was a hard left ideologue with a wonderful reading voice. Bait-and-switch has never gone over very well with Americans.

By the way – do try to make it to the “Obama’s First 100 Days” get-together at the Convention Center, a week from tonight.  Go here for details.  I hope to see you there.

MLP at Casual Sundays notes

Note to Perez; Miss California, Carrie Prejean is not a stupid bitch.  You are.
That is all.

Oh, MLP.  When will you learn; people are indistinguishable from their politics!

Perez Hilton says so!

(And, to be fair, so does much lf the rest of the cultural left).

Remember the old book “Black Like Me?”  It’s the story of a white journalist, John Howard Griffin, who pharmacologically dyed his skin black to pass as Afro-American; the book relates his experiences.

I knew it was only a matter of time until someone tried it with Christians.

Peter Roose, an undergrad at Brown University, went “undercover” to “infiltrate” Liberty University.

And he found out that fundie Christians are…

…well, basically human:

Roose had transferred to the Virginia campus from Brown University in Providence, a famously liberal member of the Ivy League. His Liberty classmates knew about the switch, but he kept something more important hidden: He planned to write a book about his experience at the school founded by fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell.

Each conversation about salvation or hand-wringing debate about premarital sex was unwitting fodder for Roose’s recently published book: “The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University.”

“As a responsible American citizen, I couldn’t just ignore the fact that there are a lot of Christian college students out there,” said Roose, 21, now a Brown senior. “If I wanted my education to be well-rounded, I had to branch out and include these people that I just really had no exposure to.”

How little exposure?

Roose’s parents, liberal Quakers who once worked for Ralph Nader, were nervous about their son being exposed to Falwell’s views.

See Berg’s Seventh Law; when libs babble about conservative provincialism, they’re projecting.

He was determined to not mock the school, thinking it would be too easy — and unfair. He aimed to immerse himself in the culture, examine what conservative Christians believe and see if he could find some common ground. He had less weighty questions too: How did they spend Friday nights? Did they use Facebook? Did they go on dates? Did they watch “Gossip Girl?”

It wasn’t an easy transition. Premarital sex is an obvious no-no at Liberty. So are smoking and drinking. Cursing is also banned, so he prepared by reading the Christian self-help book, “30 Days to Taming Your Tongue.”

The “Story” involved a lengthy interview with LU founder Jerry Falwell, I wonder what Roose’s parents think about the his conclusion?

Roose said his Liberty experience transformed him in surprising ways.

When he first returned to Brown, he’d be shocked by the sight of a gay couple holding hands — then be shocked at his own reaction. He remains stridently opposed to Falwell’s worldview, but he also came to understand Falwell’s appeal.

Once ambivalent about faith, Roose now prays to God regularly — for his own well-being and on behalf of others. He said he owns several translations of the Bible and has recently been rereading meditations from the letters of John on using love and compassion to solve cultural conflicts.

Perhaps someday they’ll try having a third-rate comic impersonate a caricatured blowhard conservative talking head…

…er,no.  That’d be too stupid.

The editors of the National Review break the ice and reach the decision that for three generations dared not speak its name; the “War on Drugs is Lost”:

We have found Dr. Gazzaniga and others who have written on the subject persuasive in arguing that the weight of the evidence is against the current attempt to prohibit drugs. But NATIONAL REVIEW has not, until now, opined formally on the subject. We do so at this point. To put off a declarative judgment would be morally and intellectually weak-kneed.

Things being as they are, and people as they are, there is no way to prevent somebody, somewhere, from concluding that “NATIONAL REVIEW favors drugs.” We don’t; we deplore their use; we urge the stiffest feasible sentences against anyone convicted of selling a drug to a minor. But that said, it is our judgment that the war on drugs has failed, that it is diverting intelligent energy away from how to deal with the problem of addiction, that it is wasting our resources, and that it is encouraging civil, judicial, and penal procedures associated with police states. We all agree on movement toward legalization, even though we may differ on just how far.

The NR’s current editors- Buckley Jr, Szosz et al – weigh in on the subject.

The big point: the War costs us more in terms of lives, civil liberties and diversion of effort from dealing with addiction than it could ever be worth. In the past forty years, more people have died in the War on Drugs – 90-odd deaths from turf wars and habit-feeding robberies for every one to overdose – than died in Vietnam and Korea, and we’re farther from “victory” now than ever.  The “war” has taken much of Central America down with it; the turf wars for those feeding America’s jones kill many more people in Mexico than are dying in Iraq or Afghanistan right now.  And the worst part is, allof that sacrifice – every neighborhood destroyed, everyone killed in every botched drug-mugging, every cop caught in every gang-war crossfire, every broke dealer murdered for falling behind on his payments or tripping his capo’s suspicions – is in vain.  Every one.  None of them will lead to anything better.

It’s time to look into ending this particular “war”.

After eight years of dubbing non-Klansman John Ashcroft “AshKKKroft”, comparing emphatic non-Nazis George Bush, Dick Cheney and Arnold Scharzenegger to Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich, and calling every economic downturn on a Republican’s watch “The Worst Since The Depression (TM)”, some lefties have found accuracy they can believe in.

“Comparing the Tea Parites to the Boston Tea Party is historically inaccurate”, I’ve heard more than a few lefties insist. “They were protesting against taxation without representation”.

Well, true, as far as it goes.  Of course, the “Tea Party” idiom has grown over the centuries to mean – in regular conversation – any kind of blow against arrogant, wastrel authority, but no matter.  The interesting bit for me is “what did the forefathers of these suddently-accurate lefties do when it was their turn to strike a blow for strict, pointillistic accuracy?”

So I dug through the archives.

May 8, 1945, New York (AP): Bob DeGrasse is having nothing to do with “VE Day”.

“We haven’t defeated Europe”, DeGrasse emphasizes, nervously twisting the ends of his stylized van dyk beard. “we defeated Germany, which in German is called Deutschland.  This observance should be called “VD Day” or, to be completely accurate, Sieg Trotz Deutschland, or “STD”, Day.

“There really is no honest alternative”.

———-

January 31, 1999, Seattle (UPI) – As the world awaits the historic, and possibly fraught, switchover to the new millenium, many worry about possible terrorist strikes expanding on the confusion.

Phoebe Napolitino disagrees.

“The new Millennium”, she enounces carefully, “doesn’t begin until January 1, 2001”.  She perches her horn-rimmed glasses on her nose.  “By which I mean, the first of January, 2001, or New Years day of 2001”.

“Terrorists wont’ strike ’til then”.

———-

June 9, 1933, Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine (Tass) – Dmitri Holodomoriuk has had it up to here with Soviet prosecutors.

“All these people being taking away for “right-wing activity”, Holodomoriuk muttered under his breath “are mostly just peasants who never had a political thought in their…”

Holodomoriuk’s sentence was intewrrupted by being grabbed and thrown into a Black Maria, never to be seen again.

Peoples’ Commissariat spokeswoman Zhanina Napolitanska has not returned comment.

History shows the importance of accuracy.

Yesterday and Tuesday, we noted that the left, locally and nationally, is engaging in class-action slander, based around getting people to believe that:

Conservative dissent equals murder.

It’s not an isolated trend.

It’s not new.

And it’s not an accident.

———-

“The dangerous right” is a well-worn trope in American political/media history.  It is also – to invoke Orwell’s aphorism about dictators needing enemies – entirely predictable.

Three weeks ago Philip Jenkins wrote an excellent history about the “Dangerous Right” media meme in American Conservative.  It’s an oldie, all right (emphasis added):

From 1938 through 1941, the media regularly presented stories suggesting that the U.S. was about to be overwhelmed by ultra-Right fifth columnists, millions strong, intimately allied with the Axis powers. (Actual numbers of serious militants were in the low thousands at most.) Reportedly, the militant Right was armed to the teeth and plotting countless domestic terror attacks—bombings in New York and Washington, assassinations and pogroms, the wrecking of trains and munitions plants. Plotters were rumored to have high-placed allies in the military, raising the specter of a putsch. The ensuing panic was orchestrated by newspapers and radio and reinforced by films, newsreels, and comic books. Historians characterize these years as the Brown Scare.

In other words, standing in the way of FDR, the New Deal and the dawn of enlightened “liberalism” and Hope and Change itself was a shadowy, secret army – why, one might almost call it a “vast, right-wing conspiracy”!

And when liberals come to office with big, sweeping, “transformative” plans?  Well, the “enemy among us” needs to be trotted out as well:

After JFK’s election in 1960, the devoutly anti-Communist Minutemen took first place in liberals’ demonology. As in the 1930s, the far Right was supposed to be closely tied to out-of-control military officers. Remember fictional treatments of the time like “Dr. Strangelove” and “Seven Days in May”? Once more, too, the supposed threat from far-Right extremism surfaced in mainstream politics, especially during the 1964 elections…As in the 1930s, the extremists existed, and some hotheads contemplated violence. But once again, a yawning gulf separated the reality of the threat from the public perception.

In our lifetimes – so far – the worst fell during the Clinton years:

Between 1995 and 2001, America suffered the Great Militia Panic, when exposés of ultra-Right violence became a media staple. For liberal press outlets, America was facing a clear and present danger from the militias, from Nazis and skinheads, and even from dissident elements within U.S. Special Forces. Liberals accused the anti-Clinton Right of providing extremists with ideological aid and comfort. An impressive outpouring of books—peaking in 1996—warned of an imminent terrorist disaster. Typical titles raised the shadow of America’s Militia Threat, Terrorists Among Us, or The Birth of Paramilitary Terrorism in the Heartland. One book warned of the Harvest of Rage: Why Oklahoma City is Only the Beginning.

I always found it ironic how lefties accused conservatives of “wetting their pants in terror” about islamic terrorism after 9/11, after living through the waves of “mommy, there’s a militiaman under my bed!” that swept the nation during the Clinton years

The news media was open to the most improbable charges of right-wing atrocities. In 1996, television news shows discovered a (wholly spurious) wave of arson attacks in which white extremists were allegedly wiping out the nation’s black churches.

As recently as a decade ago, “terrorism” in the American public consciousness meant, almost entirely, domestic right-wing activism…by far the worst consequence of the Militia Panic was the massive underplaying of Islamic terrorism in U.S. public discourse and the disproportionate focus on the domestic far Right. Liberal columnists scoffed knowingly at terrorism experts who warned about foreign militants like al-Qaeda, when every informed observer knew that the real menace was internal.

I remember lefty pundits on about 9/13 furrowing their brows and warning us that right-wing domestic terror was still the “real danger”, as the Twin Towers still burned.  They were – it is hard to remember – that deluded.

By the way – does any of this sound familiar (emphasis again added)?  Elements of this phenomenon anticpate blogging itself by about sixty years:

If the more bizarre accusations sound like the common currency of the show trials in Stalin’s Russia in these very years, that is no coincidence. The main exposés of fascist conspiracy emanated from Communist Party journalists like Albert Kahn and John Spivak. (Spivak himself was an operative for the Soviet NKVD.) Charges circulated through Kahn’s newssheet The Hour before being picked up in the liberal press. The Red agenda was straightforward in that the Brown Scare allowed the Left to discredit any opponent of radical New Deal policies. Scratch the surface of any enemy of the Left, they claimed, and you would find a fascist spy, a lyncher, a storm trooper.

Or a member of a “vast, right-wing” and now “eliminationist” “conspiracy”.
The conclusion is near the beginning, and it is damning (emphasis added):

Based on the record of past Democratic administrations, in the near future terrorism will almost certainly be coming home. This does not necessarily mean more attacks on American soil. Rather, public perceptions of terrorism will shift away from external enemies like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah and focus on domestic movements on the Right. We will hear a great deal about threats from racist groups and right-wing paramilitaries, and such a perceived wave of terrorism will have real and pernicious effects on mainstream politics. If history is any guide, the more loudly an administration denounces enemies on the far Right, the easier it is to stigmatize its respectable and nonviolent critics.

Like me.

Like Representative Bachmann.

Like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt, Bernie Goldberg.

Like you, you bitter, gun-clinging Jesus freak, you.

———-

When I’d heard that the DNC had hired linguist George Lakoff, I openly worried that the left was embarking on a campaign of violence – violence against the language. It would be a campaign to control how the language itself imparts perceptions about politics.  It’s a battle the Democrats have been winning for decades, if only because they’re the only ones that show up.

The parallels with Orwell’s 1984, where language was being systematically engineered to reflect first political orthodoxy and, eventually, nothing at all, are impossible to miss.

In Mike Judge’s overlooked classic movie Idiocracy, society falls because idiots outbreed smart people.  Despots and demigogues have long known that the best way to take over a society is to win over the thugs and the dolts; the pen is, at least in the short term, not mightier than the sword or, in this case, the truncheon. Noriega had his Dignity Battalions; Mugabe, the Gukurahundi; Hitler and Mao and Stalin, the Sturmabteilung and Hitlerjugend, the Red Guards, the Komsomol, the legions of dedicated true believers who didn’t have to think, just do; to smear the Jew, the Bourgeois, the Wreckers today, and to beat, imprison and kill them tomorrow.  For society’s own good.

And the Big Left today has, on a rhetorical plane, the same basic thing; the legions of the ingenuous, the dedicated but not-excessively-bright, the people who are willing to suspend the rules of civility and decency in service of…

…what?  The meme that “Some of your fellow citizens’ beliefs will lead to mass murder!”?

I’d like to think that continuing to take the high road is the right response to this class-action slander.  I’m less confident in this all the time. Indeed, as I noted yesterday, DHS Secretary Napolitano has tipped the left’s hand.

Let’s try to roll it all together tomorrow.

PRE-POST NOTE: I actually wrote this series last week, when the “annoying trickle” of pointless,mindless, baseless slander of conservatives was pretty much background noise.

Of course, since I wrote the first three parts of the series, Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security – which would seem to have become completely politicized in the past three months – has essentially declared all conservative thought and dissent (not to mention military service) as probable cause for government suspicion.

My friend and radio colleague John Hinderaker at Power Line, shreds this report in one of the essential fiskings in recent blog history; I’m sure it’s just the beginning.

But the extent of the defamation of all conservative thought in this country goes way beyond a witless bureaucrat and her minions, and won’t end in the unlikely event Napolitano is fired in the disgrace she deserves.

My timing, sadly, could not be better.  Or worse, depending on your point of view.

———-
As I noted yesterday – the usual annoying trickle of leftybloggers and “alternative” media types grasping onto examples of bad behavior by conservatives or (more usually) inflating off-handed remarks into “evidence” and outright mangling of context has turned into a babbling runoff-swollen brook of cultural defamation.

Few brooks babble more than local leftyblog icon Mark Gisleson, who wrote last week:

On Sunday’s The UpTake live news show [no archive available], host Tom Elko’s conservative blogger guest Mitch Berg turned to the camera and implored his 2nd Amendment buddies to not get crazy. No clue if JammieWearingFool listens to Mitch’s radio show or reads his blog.

Now, haven’t seen the video of the Uptake appearance – if there’s anything I hate more than listening to my voice, it’s seeing myself on TV – but I’m pretty sure the subject was the nutcase in Pittsburgh who shot the three cops, due to (he and the media claimed) his fear of Obama’s anti-gun proposals.  Now, despite that fact that most of us Second Amendment/Human Rights activists deal with this by joining the NRA (and  you’ll note that there have not been four million of these incidents), I was urging fellow human rights activists to not panic; we’ve beaten back worse than this, and done it not only by civil means, but means we can be proud of a civil Americans.

It’s hilarious, of course – this is the same Mark Gisleson who five years ago earned undying infamy for pining for armed revolution, in the Twin Cities’ Reader’s late, unlamented “Babelogue” (whose archives have perhaps mercifully gurgled down the memory hole):

In my heart, I still believe in revolution. In my heart, I still think I have the ‘nads to put my life on the line for a cause. In my gut I think this is the only way we’ll ever achieve our goals of economic and social justice. But in my head, I want to win the next election so we don’t have to have a revolution.

…and who’s boasted about a purported past as a “labor goon”, has suddenly gotten the vapors over the odd bit of (let’s take him at his word, by which I mean “humor the delusion”) borderline-militant rhetoric.

Vapor-y enough to refer us to…:

And TBogg has more on the eliminationist Right.

Ah. TBogg.  Well, if TBogg says it, it’s…

…well, it’s someone else’s talking point, only lobotomized.  TBogg is the ultimate metastasization of the anonymous leftyblogger; intellectually vacuous, given to broad sweeps of cultural group slander (while shielded from accountability by his precious anonymity) and waves of nasty, petulant, juvenile snarkiness, and…

…well, pretty much everything that the local anonymous leftyblog community aspires to.

But is the right “eliminationist?” Wow.  That’s a word you don’t see every day; Daniel Goldhagen used the term “eliminationist anti-semitism” to describe the German people before and during WWII – but he took a whole book to do it, in which me laid out a case that German society had in it a long tradition of a desire to, y’know, kill Jews.

So since it’s such a big word, curiousity triumphed over experience. I read “TBogg”, wondering as to the “evidence” of the “eliminationist right” that apparently lurks outside the gates of our civilization.

Read it if you feel compelled to do so; it tries to link the story of James Adkisson, the deranged Knoxville man who, let it be known, really really did hate liberals (WARNING! PDF FILE! GIVE UP ALL HOPE OF USABILITY OR PERFORMANCE!), and followed up on that hatred by killing two people at a Unitarian Universalist church.

Mr. Bogg (and the various leftybloggers who are his only real sources) ties Adkisson to Timothy McVeigh, which is trite and facile but not uttelry inaccurate, and thence to “Right-wing hate radio”, the diabolical cabal of Limbaugh/Hannity/Bernard Goldberg (?), who we are assured are really behind it all.

And there, in the bleatings of a gutless anonymous blogger and his dotzy fanboy in Saint Paul and of a thousand similar intellectual copulations, is the nucleus of the real story; the left wants you, and the population at large, to make the following leap:

Conservative dissent leads to murder.

More tomorrow.

EPILOGUE:  Again – I wrote the above late last Friday.  I’ll write more about Secretary Napolitano’s slander on Friday.

Last week, Iowahawk did a hilarious send-up of JournoList, the hush-hush list-serve for liberal “deep thinkers”:

JOSH MARSHALL: How about we do something about how wingnut bloggers live in an echo chamber

JESSE SINGAL: sweeet!!!! gmta

MICHAEL COHEN: ya its like those f*****z are in a echo chamber or something

CHRIS HAYES: gmta

JONATHAN CHAIT: ya total echo chamber

BRAD DELONG: echo-o-o-o-o-o-o cha-a-a-a-mber-er-er-er

ISAAC CHOTINER: lols

EZRA KLEIN: ok,,, we agree. Yglesias its your turn to write it

MATTHEW YGLESIAS: cant, I have h/w assignment due for rahm emanuel

OK, that’s a spoof – but I have a hunch I know what one of the recent topics must have been. There’s been such a wide-spread synchronicity of – for lack of a better word – “thought” among so many regional and national leftybloggers, I can’t help but think it’s not only no coincidence, but in fact a symptom of the most caustic initiative on the part of the American left.
———-

Before we get to the story, let’s talk aphorisms.  Aphorisms can be taken way too far – but they can be useful memes for categorizing things like human behavior.
One of my favorites I get from watching the odd episode of House.  In and among all the glib causticness, House trips upon the odd ingenious bit of human nature.

Many of those bits tie back to his main rule – his Prime Directive, if you will – for human nature; everybody lies.  It’s true, really; at some point or another, everyone finds it in their self-interest or sense of emotional self-preservation to bend the truth.

I’m positing that this rule as a corollary when it comes to the left-leaning “alternative” media.  Indeed, let’s call this “Berg’s Second Law of Leftyblogging”:  whenever liberals toss out defamatory generalizations about conservatives, they are projecting. (Classic example comes about 1:04 into this video).

You can pretty much name your slur; the party that yaps about “fatcats” is the party that owes its soul to plutocrats.  The party that whinged about Bush’s record on civil liberties has always been the party that actually did crush civil liberties (see the ’94 Crime Bill, the ’96 Counterterrorism Act, and the various Dem plans on the “Fairness” Doctrine, bank takeovers and the ). The party that complains about violence, corruption, wastrelcy and incompetence is violent, corrupt, spendthrift and incompetent.

It’s a theory, but I’ll stand by it. Indeed, you’ll see why as this piece continues.

There’s one more aphorism.  It’s George Orwell’s note that dictators always need enemies to keep the people occupied.

They don’t even need to be dictators!

———-

It’s a running joke among conservatives; if you order a pizza, and a lefty hears about it, it’s an example of extremism.  Pushing to liberalize charter-school laws and vacant-housing ordinances? Activism for the Second or Tenth Amendments?  Extremism.  To paraphrase the old drill sergeant aphorism, “everything you do can get you labelled an extremist, and everything you don’t do can get you labelled an extremist”.

I started seeing little trickles and dribbles around the regional Sorosphere a couple of weeks ago: references to “right-wing extremism” (this in reference to a quip by Michele Bachmann that uses some kind of guerrilla warfare reference to refer to conservatives in Minnesota), usually with more-than-muted warnings about “militancy” and “violence”.

It’s tempting (and in the case of the link above, accurate) to write it all off as examples of intellectual laziness, of the febrile thrashings of inferior minds.  Indeed, both of these play into the larger point.

But there is a larger point. The leftybloggers involved in these casual, petty, paranoid defamations are unwitting tools in a long-running campaign to control the English language, if necessary by devaluing it to uselessness.

More tomorrow.

Angie Harmon, the model and former Law and Order star and “out” Republican in Hollywood, said something the other day that started me thinking.

She was decrying the impulse among Obama’s supporters in Hollywood to brand criticizing the President as “racist”.  Of course we’ve seen this before; during the campaign, countless Democrat activists tried to position “not voting for Obama” as “racism”.

But he won!

But the dynamic continues:

Here’s my problem with this, I’m just going to come out and say it. If I have anything to say against Obama it’s not because I’m a racist, it’s because I don’t like what he’s doing as President and anybody should be able to feel that way, but what I find now is that if you say anything against him you’re called a racist,” Harmon told Tarts at Thursday’s Los Angeles launch of the new eyelash-growing formula, Latisse. “But it has nothing to do with it, I don’t care what color he is. I’m just not crazy about what he’s doing and I heard all about this, and he’s gonna do that and change and change, so okay … I’m still dressing for a recession over here buddy and we’ve got unemployment at an all-time high and that was his number one thing and that’s the thing I really don’t appreciate. If I’m going to disagree with my President, that doesn’t make me a racist. If I was to disagree with W, that doesn’t make me racist. It has nothing to do with it, it is ridiculous.”

These are many of the same people who whinged that their “patriotism” was being impugned over the past years (although none of them can ever show an example of this when asked.  Never). 

Harmon’s remarks brought to mind an appearance I had with Rep. Phyllis Kahn of Minneapolis on Marty Owings’ “Radio Free Nation” a few weeks ago.  The topic was gay marriage.

Now, gay marriage isn’t exactly my hottest-button issue; if we don’t win the War on Terror and save the economy from the ravages of a decade of government/market cronyism and the canoodling of a neo-socialist administration, then gay marriage will be the least of the stresses facing the traditional family.

But I asked Kahn, a gay-marriage supporter: “What do you make of the fact that voters have categorically rejected gay  marriage, even in liberal bastions like Oregon and California?”

Her response: “There’s a survey that shows 60% of voters today would vote against the Bill of Rights!”. 

I ignored the irony that this was a woman who’s spent a career going above and beyond the DFL’s drive to flense the Second, Fifth and Tenth Amendments, and who’s spent 36 years in the Legislature serving as a front-woman for an educational-industrial complex that’s dumbed down Minnesota students to the point where I’d be surprised if a tiny minority could recite the Bill of Rights in the first place.  But I did point out that even if I accepted the accuracy of that “survey” (or its existence – and I accept neither, but I digress), it’s a non-sequitur; specific states in all their diverse glory did vote, repeatedly on on the record, in states conservative, liberal and whackdoodlesque, to reject the idea.

And yet she repeated that exact refrain several more times during the appearance.  “You can reason with Lufthansa; you can also reason with livestock, for all the good it’ll do you”, PJ O’Rourke once wrote.  I thought of that as I listened to Kahn repeat the meme over and over – and then shook it off.  This was not bovinity.

It was part of the Dems’ attempt to control the language.

If you dissent from The One, you’re a racist.  There’s no nuance asked or granted; your motives are no different from a Klansman’s.

Have a principled objection to the notion of Gay Marriage? Your nuances – wanting to separate religion from contract law, your actual beliefs – are of no interest.  You are no different than people who want to beat protesters or burn heretics at the stake.

And of course, this follows nearly a decade of “them” accusing “us” of…well, you know.

Dissent isn’t patriotic.  It’s a sign of moral turpitude.

Oh, yeah – and don’t you dare call them unpatriotic!

Was I the only one who saw Sen. Gregg’s denunciation of Obama’s budget – it’ll bankrupt the United States…:

The top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee says the Obama administration is on the right course to save the nation’s financial system.But Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire also says President Barack Obama’s massive budget proposal will bankrupt the country.

Gregg says he has no regrets in withdrawing his nomination to become commerce secretary. He pulled out after deciding he could not fully back the administration’s economic policies.

…and thought about Evita?

The Perons – Juan and Evita – were Argentinian Socialists who, between ’em, spent years as (depending on who you ask) charismatic saviors of Argentinian society or tin-pot strongmen/women who sold Fabian Socialism using callow but easy-to-digest populism, who repeatedly bankrupted a nation that, by all rights, should be the wealthiest and most prosperous in all of Latin America, getting elected repeatedly through a combination of anger at sitting administrations and what we call “star power” today.

Just you watch; Andrew Lloyd Weber (or someone very like him) is going to write a musical about The Obamas.  I say it as a joke now – but it’s one of those jokes that seems to come true for me lately.

…is that The One is doing his homework with the guy who came in second in the Cold War:

U.S. President Barack Obama has held talks with Mikhail Gorbachev, a spokesman for the former Soviet leader said on Monday, in the latest sign of Washington’s efforts to “press the reset button” on ties with Russia.

The Good News:  There is none.

The Good-News-That’s-Really Bad News:  We have no wall to tear down.

Ron Silver has passed away at 62.

Silver was a capable actor who became, arguably, more famous for bucking Hollywood’s dominant liberalism after 9/11, fighting a war of conscience that consumed his acting career but brought him new appreciation from a different breed of fans.

Little did anyone know until very recently that, as Roger L. Simon notes, that battle was just a piker. Silver has had stomach cancer for several years:

Somewhere around a year ago we were having breakfast in New York. He wasn’t looking good, hair thin from chemo, sallow complexion, etc. His energy, however, as always, was spectacularly high and he was filled with plans for his new Sirius radio show. But something was wrong. It wasn’t just the cancer, but it was related to the cancer. Ron was, above all things, an actor, a fantastic actor. And the cancer made him unable to do that work. He told me he had just been offered the lead in Coriolanus at the Long Wharf, but didn’t think he could do it. He would be too tired with his illnes to play a Shakespeare lead. His artistic work was all over for him. It was the one time in all the recent years I saw him on the edge of tears.

I’m starting to cry myself as I type this, so I’m going to shut up. What a great man.

Simon’ll be back with more.

 Compare and contrast:

A) Liberal pro-“choice” blogger voluntarily posts ultrasounds of her “fetus” (now a toddler, and congrats, by the way) on blog.  Conservative blogger heists photo for (tasteless, but valid) satiric purposes.  Liberal bloggers declare world coming to end, demand answers, wonder why people don’t respect others’ privacy.

B) Liberal group “finds security hole” – and, oops, releases scads of private information along with a manifesto declaring that no, “Wikileaks” doesn’t give a rat’s ass that they’re involuntarily splashing information that a bunch of eeeeevul Republican donors had intended to be private all over hell and half an acre? Liberal bloggers declare “can’t you all take a joke?  It’s for your own good” (and “suck it, stoopid ReThugliCons, it’s all your fault anyway – which we normally call “Blaming the victims”).

It’s hard to run a civil society when one side’s idea of “civil” is “we can do whatever we can tell ourselves is OK”.

Are the situations the same? Of course not.  Show me any of the Coleman donors who put their credit card numbers out there in public and said “don’t you dare do anything with this!”.

The lesson from this:  if it’s a Republican candidate or donor, all rules of basic decency are suspended.

Four years ago, I and most thinking Americans had a field day, roundly ridiculing a couple of risible strains of “liberal” whinging:

• Stars who claimed they’d “move to France” if George W. Bush won the election.
• Vacuous lefty blog-gerbils who yapped about the Blue States seceding from the union and joining to form “The United States of Canada”, and leaving the red-voting “Jesusland” states to themselves (I had particular fun with this, as well as pointing out the political and historical illiteracy of the idea; most of Canada west of Ontario is as red as Montana).  I had extra-special fun with these morons.
• Acres of “He’s Not My President” bumper stickers.

These were many of the same people, by the way, who tearfully demanded that conservatives “stop questioning their patriotism”, by the way.

But I digress.  The vacuous snivelling hamsters got their president finally.

It’s the other side I’m concerned about now.

We got a call on the show last Saturday from a guy who’s question echoed one I’d heard from not a few people on blogs, on Twitter, and around about in recent months – itself a reprise of something I heard a lot back in the seventies and, just a bit, in the early nineties.

“When should we stop talking and start the active resistance?”

I often ask these people – why?

“It’s never been worse than this!”

I’m starting to lose patience with some of them.

Whenever anyone says anything is “the worst ever”, they’re almost always wrong.  They almost always really mean “the worst I’ve seen”.

Politics is not the dirtiest and nastiest it’s ever been (that’d be the Jackson/Adams contest in 1828, or any election where the Hearst papers uncorked their smear machine); this is not the worst unemployment since World War II (not even close, not yet)…

…and if you’re a freedom-loving American, the Obama administration is shaping up to be a bad one, perhaps a horrible one.  But it’s by no means the worst we’ve seen on any count.

Spending?  Roosevelt’s New Deal was worse.  So far.

Gun control?  While Obama’s record is bad, he hasn’t done anything yet; Democrats from FDR through Clinton all took their swipes at the Second Amendment, from Roosevelt’s prohibitory taxes on automatic weapons (which eliminated gang warfare!) to Clinton’s “1994 Crime Bill”, which did for many less-fashionable liberties what Bigfoot does to junked cars.

Civil Liberties?  Three words; J. Edgar Hoover.  FDR, Truman, Kennedy and LBJ got away with things that’d make any of the ofay gerbils that were protesting George W. Bush’s “Abuses” gag up their skulls.  Nixon invoked executive orders that gathered unprecedented “emergency” powers unto the executive – which has had libertarians chattering amongst themselves for almost forty years.  Obama bears watching; the Dems in Congress bear even more of it.  But so far, the threats are minimal (while still intolerable).

Repackaging vacuity as “change” and “audacity?”  OK, there Obama’s in a league of his own.

Overall demoralization of the parts of this country that matter?  The seventies were worse.  They had everything we have today and more – instability, out-of-control government, the Middle East going nuts, stagflation, Jimmy Carter – and a nation that was coming off of Vietnam, which, if you don’t remember it (and I only do through the prism of a 12 year old’s memory) was the most demoralizing thing to happen to this nation since the mid-thirties.  I don’t know if anyone ever ran the numbers, but Carter’s “Malaise Speech” must have prompted more population-wide suicides than any other single event in American history (shaddap about Oberlin undergrads popping too many Valium after Kerry lost).

And even that wasn’t the worst it’s gotten.  In my father’s lifetime – well within my grandparents’ early adult lives – there were those in the mainstream who seriously considered socialism, communism, even pre-war Naziism viable models with much from which we could learn, even much to emulate for our own good.  There were those in positions of great power who actively sought to incorporate “the best” of these ideologies into our own.

The point being that, so far, the Obama Administration isn’t the worst thing our constitution, our economy and our society has faced – yet.  And while the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and the Founding Fathers well-recognized the possibility that Americans might need to throw off another tyranny someday, this isn’t it.

Not yet.

It’s a big government, and it’s getting bigger.  It’s a not-ready-for-prime-time government, run by a lot of very canny people who buffaloed a lot of our nation’s not-too-bright with a lot of breezy platitudes, and which rode to office on an almost-but-not-quite-unprecedented wave of discontent with the status quo.  It’s a government full of poltroons and ideological three-card-monte sharks.  But it’s not a communist dictatorship.

It was elected, for better or worse.  And we have three years and eight months to make the case that it should be thrown out of office and – this is the important part – nobody’s changing that.

If they do?  Well, get back to me then; it’ll be then you should think about putting on the camo and grabbing Grampa’s Garand and heading into the north woods.

Until then?  It’s still America.

As Douglas Adams said, “Don’t Panic”.