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.

Remember like 25 years ago,when Hollywood was portraying Vietnam Veterans as one of three things; homeless bums, psychos and dangerous psychos (with the sole exceptions of “The A Team” and “Rambo”)?

Vietnam vets’ groups complained; the vast majority of ‘nam vets were adjusted to civilian life just fine at that remove, and they were not especially more likely to have crippling psychological problems than the general population.

You’d think the left would learn from their mis…

…er, never mind:

The US Homeland Security Department, under fire for saying US forces returning from the Iraq and Afghan wars were potential right-wing extremist recruits, said Wednesday it honors US veterans.

Honor, slander – tomayto tomahto.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano sought to douse anger among conservatives and veterans groups like the American Legion over a report from her department warning of a rising threat of right-wing extremism.

“We are on the lookout for criminal and terrorist activity but we do not — nor will we ever — monitor ideology or political beliefs,” Napolitano said in a statement amid charges that the department had done just that.

Well, to be fair to Napolitano’s critics, the anger is more about the report’s rolling slinky of casual defamation, covering virtually every conservative constituent in the United States, not about allegations of monitoring.

Yet.

American Legion chief David Rehbein on Tuesday blasted the report as “incomplete, and, I fear, politically-biased” and took special aim at its warning that returning veterans having difficulties reintegrating society could be recruited by right-wing groups for possible terrorist attacks.

In a letter to Napolitano, Rehbein underlined the document’s mention of Oklahoma City bombing author Timothy McVeigh’s US Army background and called it “as unfair as using Osama bin Laden as the sole example of Islam.”

And it’s not just veterans, of course; the DHS report slanders the gun, life, tax and property rights movements.

Indeed, it follows tacitly through on the campaign-era slur that voting against Obama was a sign of racism.

There is no way a responsible Administration would let Napolitano survive this.

Well, there’s your answer, I guess.

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.

Whenever liberals can’t take you on the facts – and let’s face it, they very rarely can – they go below the belt, literally or figuratively.

Jeff Rosenberg reprises a zillion lefties going after a zillion conservatives in a lefty tradition dating back to the Daisy Ad in going after Represenative Michele Bachman, the second-term Rep and unapologetic conservative from the Sixth District.

She doesn’t fit the template of what a woman is supposed to be (zealously pro-abortion, mindlessly subservient to the party on all else), so – just as with Margaret Thatcher and Linda Chavez and Condi Rice before her, and Sarah Palin after her, no insult, degradation or slander is off-limits.  Nothing pisses a liberal off like an “apostate”, even if the betrayal is only against their parochial notion of a policital gender role.

Just think about some of her recent rhetoric. During the election, she called for an inquiry into whether members of Congress had “anti-American views.”

She didn’t “call for an inquiry”.  She said the media ought to report on some of the less savory views of some of her colleagues.

Recently, she’s called herself a “foreign correspondent behind enemy lines”

An outspoken conservative woman in Minnesota’s browbeaten, lumpen liberal feminist culture? I’d say she’s more of a commando on a mission in an enemy headquarters.

But wait – we of the “Northern Alliance” use the same precise rhetoric every week! Are we not traitors to the glorious Minnesota motherland too?

and called for Minnesotans to be “armed and dangerous.”

Law-abiding Minnesotans should be armed, and dangerous to criminals.  It is, in point of irrefutable fact, the duty of every law-abiding Minnesotan who does not wish to be,at least ethically, a drag on the rest of society to be proficient with firearms, and to carry a firearm about their daily busiess.

She seems unable to control herself.

Now, Jeff is not one of the creepy, bottom-of-the-barrel leftybloggers that clog this state.

But, er, Jeff?  “She seems” is what we call “weasel words”.

Now she sees even the most benign Federal programs in stark, revolutionary terms. Here’s what she said about a proposed expansion of the AmeriCorps service program:

I believe that there is a very strong chance that we will see that young people will be put into mandatory service. And the real concerns is that there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums.

Increasingly, Bachmann seems unable to focus on her day-to-day responsibilities to her district and her country.

Well, actually, calling out the abuses and overreaches of our current liberal overlords is  part of her job; it’s certainly what she ran on, and what her constituents sent her to do.

Oh, and as re: proposals to morph Americorps into a compulsory social service program?  She’s right. Oh, yes she is.

The real question, given the orgy of spending and social tinkering the Democrats are committing to, is “who are the real crazy ones?”

In the previous two postings, I wrote about the dangers of facile populism and the “Evita” phenomenon (people valuing charisma over results).

Last week, of course, the most immediate and least-rhetorical danger of Obama’s policies – scapegoating, simplistic appeals to mob passion via a one-party Congress – will have to our society; immense economic dislocation:

The dangerous consequences of slapping punitive taxes on Wall Street bonuses are becoming clearer in the ashes of Washington’s AIG bonfire.President Obama and cooler Senate heads must apply reason amid hysteria to avoid damaging the economies of New York and America.

The tax plan approved by the House as revenge against a handful of obscenely greedy AIG executives would slam tens of thousands in the financial industry, many of them New Yorkers, who have nothing to do with AIG or any other wrongdoing.

And that would be just start of the collateral damage.

The levies are so draconian that major banks that took bailout money are threatening to give it back – defeating the purpose of jump-starting the economy with an influx of cash.

Businesses with so-called TARP money in their accounts would also be put at a great competitive disadvantage to firms that have none. Those include foreign banks that will poach top Americans with higher pay.

One the great dangers of the current wave of populist scapegoating is the idea that CEOs don’t deserve all the money that many of them get; many float the fiction that Japanese CEOs get a vastly smaller multiple of workers’ salaries than they do in the US (it’s partly true, partly derived due to different means of measuring compensation,and partly due to the sampling on boths sides of the Pacific).  Many CEOs fail, of course – the chief executives of AIG, Fred, Fannie, Bear Stearns, Citibank and many others might deserve some scrutiny.  But the idea that the Chief Executive Officer of a publicly-held corporation is a simple job requiring no more talent than any other employee has is lunacy; running a company in a competitive market is like Alec Baldwin’s scene in Glengarry Glen Ross; “‘re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize? [Holds up prize] Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.”  And not just you, but dozens, hundreds, thousands of others.

I used to think people couldn’t appreciate good CEOs until they saw a bad CEO.  Now, I’m starting to think most of the opinionmakers (to say nothing of the mob) are either so insulated from the world of business, or just ignorant of it, that they are impossible to teach.

As the financial capital of the world, New York would take the hardest hit. The city and state stand to lose millions in needed tax revenues.

The bill passed by the House of Representatives would essentially confiscate bonuses paid out by firms that have accepted $5 billion or more in bailout funds – a category that includes major employers such as Citigroup, JPMorganChase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

Let’s not forget – bonuses aren’t just for execs: lots of people get ’em.  They’re one of the key motivators for many people far from Mahogany Row.  The phrase “…we’ve paid 15% bonuses the last four years” has turned many a job interview into a hot pursuit:

Last year in New York, 168,000 workers collected bonuses – ranging from top execs to receptionists. Many would see their incomes evaporate, barring a wholesale change in the way banks pay their people.

Also caught in the whirlwind is General Motors. Does it makes sense, as blogger Nate Silver asked, to take the bonus of an engineer who dreams up an energy-saving car? No. Meanwhile, Merrill Lynch bonuses are exempt because they were paid before Jan. 1.

No matter.  The mob must be appeased.  The mob, in this case, is the “best and brightest” that we send to DC:

It’s insane that New York officials, including Rep. Charles Rangel and Sen. Chuck Schumer, have joined the mob. A better example was set by Staten Island Rep. Michael McMahon, one of only six Democrats who had the courage to vote no in the House.

Populist outrage is the opposite of the “nuance”.

So what major industry are you willing to do without to satiate the mob?

Any dictator can get some soldiers and shoot their predecessor and get into power, and then spend his term waiting for the next goon with soldiers to repeat the process.

For a dictator to get elected, they need large mobs of uninformed but inchoately angry people to put them into office.

But the mobs are like the soldiers in the first example; the dictator has to keep looking over his shoulder in case the mob turns on him.

So the dictator keeps the mob occupied.  Hitler pointed them at the Jews; Kristallnacht sent mobs of young Nazis into the streets to harass Jews, destroy their businesses, and make their lives miserable.  91 died.  Stalin kept the mob busy denouncing each other.  Hugo Chavez and  Ayatollah Khomeini and Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein all found boogeymen, internal and external, to keep the mob from turning their wrath on them.

Now, Barack Obama is not a dictator.  He’s a democratically elected president. In 2012, when he loses in an electoral landslide (provided the GOP can get its act together) he’ll hand power over.

But Obama – the least-vetted, most inexperienced president in American history – was elected by a huge popular groundswell, animated by fatigue with the sitting administration and actively disinformed by a media whose legs tingled at the thought of The One taking office.

That “groundswell” has to be kept occupied during the dismal business of actually trying to run a government.

Last weekend on Marty Owings’ Radio Free Nation I noted that the “protests” we see carrying people to the homes of AIG executives to “protest” the giving of perfectly-legal but shamefully tone-deaf bonuses had echoes of the sort of populist mob action that led us to Kristallnacht.  The show’s liberal commentator threw a fit, of course; since 91 executives haven’t died, there are no parallels whatsoever (only liberalsl get nuance.  Did you know that?)

But even Kristallnacht didn’t spring fully-formed from nowhere.  It was part of an endless wave of legalized violence against those the regime needs to demonize to keep the mob occupied (and we all know where that wave ended, don’t we?)

Waves of eliminationist violence – the Holocaust, Rwanda, Darfur, the Holodomor – all start small.  And they all start somewhere.

At any rate,  today “the rich” – bankers, insurance executives – are the scapegoat.  And it’s starting:

…in Scotland, an “anti-capitalist” group attacked the home of Sir Fred Goodwin, former CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland, smashing several windows and vandalizing a car parked in the driveway. Goodwin had been demonized in the press and attacked by British politicians, much like AIG’s management.

The reactions of bystanders are rather appalling. A neighbor “said she was surprised that [Goodwin’s home] had not been attacked before.” Others seemed understanding of, if not sympathetic with, the vandals.

No, Obama’s not chartering this sort of violent lunacy. But he, and his compliant media, are setting up “the rich” – today it’s AIG execs – as scapegoats for an economic downturn that has plenty of parents.  Mobs love scapegoats.  Scapegoats are bright, shiny things to keep mobs occupied so they don’t get cranky and turn on their leaders out of boredom.

In the meantime, look for the media and their less-bright cousins to focus obsessively on “right-wing violence”, no matter how hard they have to imagine it.

This crisis will not be wasted – especially since he created it.

I can’t even pretend to be surprised by these scumbags’ designs to socialize America any more:

In comments before testimony from both Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Fed chief Ben Bernanke Tuesday, Frank said he wants to regulate pay on Wall Street — even for companies that aren’t getting bailouts.

Frank, one of the chief architects of the housing mess that’s brought us so low, isn’t satisfied merely with pretending he and his Democratic pals aren’t to blame for all this. No, exploiting voter anger over the now-infamous AIG bonuses, he also wants to dictate to American capitalism what it can earn and what it can’t.

This is the kind of thing that normally happens in Third World countries ruled by tinhorn dictators, or in fascist states, where the democratic rule of law has collapsed. Not the U.S.

Yet, that’s where we find ourselves today, isn’t it? Democrats in Congress, who steadfastly rejected virtually all efforts to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as they went on the wildest, most irresponsible lending binge in the history of finance, now pose themselves as the saviors of fallen capitalism.

The hypocrisy is nothing short of stunning.

Click through and read the whole thing. Liberals are doing everything they can to destroy our country from within.

Americans are pissed – and rightfully so – that taxpayers got shafted in the AIG debacle, 90% tax rates and givesies backsies notwithstanding. Wait’ll ya see what happens when there’s a burglar outside or a fire burning inside their home…

…and no one shows up.

…we are just starting to see the unraveling of public pension systems that could well shake some of society’s basic foundations. Policemen, policewomen, firefighters, teachers and other public employees form the backbone of society. Many of these people happily take jobs offering lower wages in return for the psychic income of public service and, of equal importance, the financial income of a generous pension when they retire.

…expect a wave of [municipal] bankruptcies over the next decade as municipal pension plans get washed away by a tsunami of demographics and breakthroughs in longevity. In New York City, the average policeman retires at full pension at 48 years old and can expect to be paid over $2.1 million during the remainder of his life. In Houston, city workers can retire at full pension at 45 years old.

A generation of politicians agreed to absurd promises to public workers because they knew it would be some other politician’s problem.

And to whose feet shall we lay the blame for this?

Conservatives?

Not so much. Try again.

Ed and I will be talking with Ezra Levant about his battle with the Alberta “Human Rights Commission“, and its’ portents for Western civilization.

Levant’s battle with the “Human Rights” police and the Canadian left (motto: “What the American Left wants to be! – ed.) foreshadow what faces every voice of conscience in a place run by the untrammeled left.

Tune in.  If you’re not outraged, you need to check for a pulse.  And if that outrage doesn’t lead you to action, you’ll need to check for a conscience.

Spend a hundred hears arguing about the stupid hamfistedness of most anti-trust legislation?

Crickets.

But let an institution that supports liberal politicans feel the pain, and suddenly every liberal demigogue is a hardened free marketeer:

In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, released by Pelosi’s office late Monday, the San Francisco Democrat asked the department to weigh the public benefit of saving The Chronicle and other papers from closure against the agency’s antitrust mission to guard against anti-competitive behavior.”We must ensure that our policies enable our news organizations to survive and to engage in the news gathering and analysis that the American people expect,” Pelosi wrote.

Deep down inside, I think this statement is hilarious; the American people “expect” that newspapers will buff Nancy Pelosi’s toenails for her.  It’s one of the reasons they’re voting with their feet; it’s one of the reasons conservative talk radio is thriving as newspapers are dying.

And I wonder if some congressional bureaucrat was going for laughs when he or she named this subcommittee (emphasis added):

The speaker said the issue of newspapers’ survival and antitrust law will be the subject of a hearing soon before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy, chaired by Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga.

Some yuks just come to you.

Why do I suspect the committee’s recommendation will be “while we’re trying to clamp socialism’s lumpen gray veil down over the the rest of the country, we need to make sure reflexively liberal-leaning institutions get the blessings of free enterprise”.

One of the most pleasant diversions the Twin Cities offer in the summer is a night out on the back patio at Keegans in the summer, playing trivia and torching up the odd cigar.

Y’see, while Minneapolis and then Minnesota banned smoking in bars, establishments that had outdoor space were able to have smoking patios – sort of like those miserable outside-the-office smoking areas, only with tables and chairsand waitresses and booze.

And when Minneapolis sees opportunities for the people to have fun that is not strictly regulated, it gets jealous.

According to Terry Keegan, the Met Council is driving the various city agencies to try to consider cigar patios as expansions to the bar, meaning they’d get charged full square-footage fees.

It’s an absurd interpretation, of course; the cigar patios are where people inside the bar go to grab a cigar and sit.  This is a baldfaced attempt to squeeze money out of bar owners, themselves caught in a double-whammy of tough economic times and times that were already straitened by Minnesota’s smoking ban, as well as continue the DFL’s attempt to regulate behavior.

So what is it going to take to get people to storm the barricades (rhetorically speaking, at least)?

With Nancy Pelosi now firmly esconced in power over these United States, it’s really only a matter of time until Americans will have to confront the notion of civil liberties, European-style; i.e., having them doled out to us by authorities who know best.

Which is bad enough. 

And then you add in “some of those who “know best” really are insane”, and…

…well, you know where I’m going with that.

All by way of introducing a German pol’s novel proposal for raising revenue; building a database of dog doo:

A German lawmaker proposed on Monday a novel and high-tech way of dealing with the menace of dog poo on the streets: DNA testing to identify the canine culprit and fine its owner. Peter Stein, a conservative politician in eastern Germany, told AFP that under his proposal, officials would test the excrement and then match it up to the offending dog using a DNA database of all pooches.German dog owners are fined 30-40 euros (40-50 dollars) if they fail to clean up after their pets, but very few are caught, with only four fines given out in Stein’s hometown of Rostock — human population 200,000 — last year.

“Just saying ‘it wasn’t my dog’ will not wash any more,” Stein said.

On the one hand; I suppose it is one of those things that’d be “reserved to the States” under the Tenth Amendment, technically.  I’ll wait for the SCOTUS case on the subject.

On the other hand – ew.

And on the third hand, five’ll get you ten that maintaining the database will be another of those jobs that “you can’t pay Americans to do”. 

A few weeks ago – while some “conservative” Americans were phumphering about over idiotic ephemera like Obama’s birth certificate – I predicted that the turmoil in Northern Mexico would lead the Obama Adminstration to drive head-first back into gun control, for the Mexican children.

As Kevin Ecker notes at True North and Eckernet, I was right – not that it’s hard to be right when trying to plumb the depths of Democrat depravity on civil liberties issues.

Ecker:

Attorney General Eric Holder has announced that one of those “common sense” measures on gun-control is that they’d like to bring back the Assault Weapons Ban and goes on to explain why. If the issue weren’t so serious, the statement would be hilarious. His rationale for such a move is a bold combination of self-defeating rhetoric, outright falsehoods and just plain paranoia.Holder said that putting the ban back in place would not only be a positive move by the United States, it would help cut down on the flow of guns going across the border into Mexico, which is struggling with heavy violence among drug cartels along the border.

So because of the ineptitude of the Mexican “government” and our inability to build something as complex as a fence, American citizens are being asked to give up some of their rights? At what point was our national sovereignty officially handed over to Mexico? I didn’t realize their needs superceded my rights. Was that part of Hope™ and Change™?

No, Kevin.

It’s a part of being good “citizens of the world”.

I hope all of you who stayed home because McCain was mushy on immigration are happy; not only are we not building fences, we’re importing Mexican laws and government attitudes into the US.

I’ve joked about it in the past.  Since rabid, corrosive sexism became vogue-y during the election in response to Sarah Palin, it seems only reasonable that if Bobby Jindal becomes a serious contender for President, “Apu the Convenience Store Clerk” japes will be declared completely politically correct, and South-Asian Americans will become the left’s new racial kicktoy.

Pinky swear, it was a joke.

Until yesterday, apparently.

(Note to Allahpundit: your post’s headline, “The obligatory “Helen Thomas makes nasty crack about Jindal?” post” contains the words “Helen Thomas” and “crack”, three words that should never appear in a sentence in any context.  Please see to this). 

Remember when allowing for indefinite detention of terror suspects without access to American constitutional legal protections was the greatest moral crime of all time?

No worries:Either does the Obama administration:

In Holder’s view, then, we are engaged in a war that started years before we noticed it and may never end, at least not in any definitive way. The enemy is not simply the guy who shoots at you on the battlefield, who can be readily identified; he can be anyone, anywhere who helps anti-American terrorists. He could be a guy captured in the Philippines suspected of funneling money to Al Qaeda, or (presumably) he could be the employee of an Islamic charity in the U.S. that is accused of sending money to Hezbollah.

He even brings new meaning to the “Fairness” Doctrine:

Given Holder’s invocation of cyber and mental battlefields, the enemy could even be someone accused of fomenting terrorism through incendiary online criticism of the U.S. government. The implication is that any of these people could be held in military custody without trial until the cessation of hostilities, i.e., indefinitely.

Remember when Mark Gisleson and Steve Perry fretted that the Bush Administration was going to toss them all into re-education camps by the end of his term?

As with much lefty projection, it looks like it’s a possibility – now that they are in power.

Since the Heller decision last summer, pride of place as the second-most-misinterpreted and underenforced part of the Bill of Rights has devolved to the Tenth Amendment.

That looks like it could change, with eleven states proposing laws that’d nullify federal trespasses onto powers reserved to the states – tresspasses that are part and parcel of The One’s plan so far:

State governors — looking down the gun barrel of long-term spending forced on them by the Obama “stimulus” plan — are saying they will refuse to take the money.  This is a Constitutional confrontation between the federal government and the states unlike any in our time.

In the first five weeks of his presidency, Barack Obama has acted so rashly that at least 11 states have decided that his brand of “hope” equates to an intolerable expansion of the federal government’s authority over the states. These states — Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, California, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas — have passed resolutions reminding Obama that the 10th Amendment protects the rights of the states, which are the rights of the people, by limiting the power of the federal government. These resolutions call on Obama to “cease and desist” from his reckless government expansion and also indicate that federal laws and regulations implemented in violation of the 10th Amendment can be nullified by the states.

As befits a states’ rights issue, the issues are very different:

For example, Family Security Matters reports that Missouri’s “House Concurrent Resolution 0004 (2009) reasserts its sovereignty based on Barack Obama’s stated intention to sign into law a federal ‘Freedom of Choice Act’, [because] the federal Freedom of Choice Act would nullify any federal or state law ‘enacted, adopted, or implemented before, on, or after the date of [its] enactment’ and would effectively prevent the State of Missouri from enacting similar protective measures in the future.”

The resolution in Montana grew out of concerns over coming attacks on the 2nd Amendment, thus its preface describes it as, “An Act Exempting From Federal Regulation Under The Commerce Clause Of The Constitution Of The United States A Firearm, A Firearm Accessory, Or Ammunition Manufactured And Retained In Montana.”

New Hampshire’s resolution actually references certain federal actions that would be nullified within that state were they pushed by Obama’s administration, according to americandaily.com. Among these are “Any act regarding religion; further limitations on freedom of political speech; or further limitations on freedom of the press, [and any] further infringements on the right to keep and bear arms including prohibitions of type or quantity of arms or ammunition.

Absent from the list:  Minnesota.

I suppose that’d require us to be controlled by a party that was more attached to the Constitution than to the thrill of being in power.

For now.

As predicted here, the liberals are using Socialist Mexico’s (motto:  “America 3.0 Obama Beta”) inability to govern itself as a pretext for ratcheting up gun control:

More than 50 U.S. lawmakers sent a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to enforce a ban on importing assault weapons, saying many such guns are later smuggled south to arm Mexico’s ruthless drug cartels.

“They come to the United States from Europe and other places, and they make their way down to Mexico,” Rep. Eliot Engel, a New York Democrat, told reporters in Mexico City on Wednesday.

The ban was implemented under the administrations of President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton, and the U.S. government can enforce it under provisions of the 1968 Gun Control Act.

And if Mexico is overrun with bandits wearing Randi Rhodes t-shirts, we’ll have to repeat the First Amendment to prevent all that nasty talk from further eroding the failed state to the south, right?
(Via Carnivore)

To:  The 40% of Americans who will pay no income tax under the Obama “stimulus”

From:  The other 60% and I

Re: The Future

Dear Deadbeats:

Well, you went and did it.  You voted yourself a President and Congress who promise to give you goodies and make someone else pay for it.

All the rest of the Someone Elses and I need to ask you, though; what if we just decide to quit?  Quit working, quit ponying up and paying the freight for ourselves and, with all due respect, your freeloading asses?

What’ll happen to your entitlement to our tax money?

By the way, “But you have to keep working and paying!  It’s not  your money, it’s taxes” is not an answer.

Think about it.

That is all.

Look – “Obamessiah” was just a figure of speech; a reaction to some of his more overwrought, hyperbolic (?) supporters.  To stuff like Michelle Obama saying he was the only thing that could save this nation’s soul – that kind of thing.

So try to track me here:  Just because we joke about something doesn’t mean you have to live down to it.

Please tell me it’s a fiendishly-effective photoshop.

Please.

That is all.

What Britain said in 1940: when given a choice between acquiescen\ce to authoritarianism and resistance:

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender,

Answering the same question today:

Britain’s Home Office, which is responsible for immigration issues…said it “opposes extremism in all its forms” and would work to “stop [the producer of a movie critical of Islam] from coming to our country.”

A time for choosing, indeed.

When the subject of the “Fairness” Doctrine comes up, Democrats respond “Obama’s said he won’t for it”.  It’s both correct and irrelevant; Obama doesn’t need to do a thing; the cynical among us believe he knows that full well, and that he’s got henchpeople to do that hyperpartisan, not-so-hopey-changey work for him.

And they are doing it:

Another Democratic U.S. senator has gone on record as supporting the reinstatement of the so-called “Fairness Doctrine,” adding, “I feel like that’s gonna happen.”

Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., told radio host and WND columnist Bill Press yesterday when asked about whether it was time to bring back the so-called “Fairness Doctrine”: “I think it’s absolutely time to pass a standard. Now, whether it’s called the Fairness Standard, whether it’s called something else – I absolutely think it’s time to be bringing accountability to the airwaves. I mean, our new president has talked rightly about accountability and transparency. You know, that we all have to step up and be responsible. And, I think in this case, there needs to be some accountability and standards put in place.”

Did you catch that?

We need “Accountability” and “Standards” for free speech?

Can you imagine if, at any point in the past eight years, any Republican had suggested we needed “standards” for any First Amendment liberty?  He’d have been tarred and feathered…no, he or she’d have been pilloried in the media, and quietly shuffled off the stage.

Of course, no Republican suggested doing any such thing to the civil rights of Americans in the past eight years.

Asked by Press if she could be counted on to push for hearings in the Senate this year “to bring these (radio station) owners in and hold them accountable,” Stabenow replied: “I have already had some discussions with colleagues and, you know, I feel like that’s gonna happen. Yep.”

I have felt that the Democrats were going to use Obama’s anointment and coronation as an excuse for overreach; in their decades on the intellectual margin, they have become brittle, shrill, dogmatic…

…and I guess, given these proposals, “authoritarian”:

“For many, many years, we operated under a Fairness Doctrine in this country,” Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., told Albuquerque radio station KKOB last year. “I think the country was well-served. I think the public discussion was at a higher level and more intelligent in those days than it has become since.”

It was not.  It was dreary, monochrome, and nobody cared, because nobody listened to it.

And yes – behind the shaking heads and the solemn assurances, the Dems have been lining up behind the proposals.

And, lest we forget, the Dems don’t need Obama, or Congress, or the title “The Fairness Doctrine” to ram this piece of garbage through:

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, a Bush appointee whose term runs through June, however, warned that Democrats may be adopting a stealthier approach to shutting down conservatives on talk radio.

In a speech to the Media Institute in Washington last week, Multichannel News reports, McDowell suggested there are efforts to implement the controversial policy without using the red-flagged “Fairness Doctrine” label.

“That’s just Marketing 101,” McDowell explained. “If your brand is controversial, make it a new brand.”

Instead, McDowell alleged, Democrats will try to disguise their efforts in the name of localism, diversity or network neutrality.

McDowell further suggested that the FCC may already be gearing up to enforce the “Fairness Doctrine” through community advisory boards that help determine local programming. While radio stations use the boards on a voluntary basis now, McDowell warned if the advisory panels become mandatory, “Would not such a policy be akin to a re-imposition of the Doctrine, albeit under a different name and sales pitch?”

I warned you about this months ago. The Dems have been preparing the ground for this fight for quite some time.

And while Republicans’ prediction of “Fairness Doctrine” legislation remains unfulfilled and highly speculative, a WND investigation has revealed that McDowell and Walden aren’t just fear-mongering, as some have suggested. A think tank headed by John Podesta, co-chairman of Obama’s transition team, mapped out a strategy in 2007 for clamping down on talk radio using language that has since been parroted by both the Obama campaign and the new administration’s White House website.

In June of 2007, Podesta’s Center for American Progress released a report titled “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio,” detailing the conservative viewpoint’s dominance on the airwaves and proposing steps for leveling the playing field.

I worked this report over when it came out. Please read that piece – it’s one of the better pieces I’ve written.

To borrow a phrase from Reagan, we do have a time for choosing, here.  After eight years of whinging endlessly about Americans’ civil liberties that were never in the faintest shred of danger, we now face a genuine threat to the First Amendment, intended purely to stifle debate in this country.

Part of me hopes the Democrats try.  They’ve overreached badly in Obama’s first two weeks; this would be the mother lode.
(Coming soon – Fairness Doctrine FAQ)

The DFL wants to ban smoking in cars.

For the children, naturally:

…[U]nder a bill expected to be introduced today at the state Capitol, lawmakers will consider extending that prohibition to your ride.Backed by the same groups that helped enact the statewide ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, the new bill would prohibit smoking in cars when children are present.

“It’s our children who are breathing this air,” said Rep. Nora Slawik, DFL-Maplewood, chief author of the bill in the House. “That is a concern for all of us.”

So given that so many peoole start smoking so very young, what if it’s the kid doing the smoking?

Why does the left hate Limbaugh so much?

It’s not just that he eats their lunch in the marketplace (markets have no meaning to the left); it’s not that he “dumbs down” the American people (a Pew study last year showed that…:

…Limbaugh’s audience is often underestimated by critics who don’t listen to the show (only 3 percent of his audience identify themselves as “liberal,” according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press). Recently, Pew reported that, on a series of “news knowledge questions,” Limbaugh’s “Dittoheads” — the defiantly self-mocking term for his faithful, supposedly brainwashed, audience — scored higher than NPR listeners.

So intelligence doesn’t matter to them either.

No.  It’s because Limbaugh is the one nationally-prominent ideological conservative who is unapologetic on the subject,and has the capability of leading people – as opposed to the party – back to where it belongs.

Todd Huston notices just how wrong that is:

I am through with Limbaugh’s supporting the long tradition of rugged American individualism, done with his harping on free trade, and up to here with his going on about the Founders and our American character. I am worn out with his bellicose talk of stopping terrorism, and so done with Limbaugh’s high profile as one of the most listened to conservative advocates in the country that I could just spit. I simply don’t want this Limbaugh character to be the sole voice of the GOP. Stop it now. Make it go away.Instead, it would be nice if just ONE of our actual, purported Republican politicians would be the voice of the GOP espousing all the conservative ideals that Limbaugh so eloquently expounds upon day in and day out. Wouldn’t it be grand if just one guy with the guts to back up the rhetoric with a voting record would become the voice of the party of conservatism?

Liberals have their Ted Kennedys and Nancy Pelosis that do no compromising. They have their “Baghdad” Jim McDermotts that cavort across the globe advocating for murderers and tyrants the world over. They’ve had their presidential candidates “reporting for duty” that have in the past been key members of committees advocating for putting our own soldiers in jail and indicting Americans for faux war crimes. For that matter, the left even has an actual ex-president that runs to the support of every tin-pot dictator in the world pretending at being a diplomat.

The left is unapologetic for its support of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, the biggest mass murderers in history. They are resolved to turn our foreign policy over to foreign bodies like the UN. The left is four square against freedom of religion and keen to remove uncounted numbers of our Constitutional rights from us. They hate capitalism, property rights and are against open debate in our schools… yet they say so proudly and their politicians cultivate voting records that reflect those beliefs.

There’s no “compromise” there. The left knows that politics ain’t beanball.

The Obama Administration is just like Lori Sturdevant; they want their Republicans to be nice and wishy-washy and pliable.

They want a party full of Chuck Hegels and Ron Erhards – worthless “moderate” vermin (politically speaking) who are of no use to dissenting from the majority agenda.
I figured before the election that Obama would overreach on things like the “Fairness” Doctrine, measures to silence opposition.

In my wildest dreams, I didn’t think he’d do it this fast.

I hope he continues.  He’s clearly been reading his own press; he thinks he’s invincible; that he can get away with anything.
Good.

Obama’s wants to do to American conservatism with Rumsfeld tried to do to Iraqi Ba’athism; cut off its head using.

After picking a public fight with Rush Limbaugh, the White House is now begun to actively move to censor conservative talk radio:

The White House is promising new reviews of the “obligations” to the government by broadcasters who “occupy the nation’s spectrum” just as the president has targeted conservative talk radio icon Rush Limbaugh for a public attack, raising concerns over the possible restoration of the “Fairness Doctrine,” a policy that failed as unneeded and unconstitutional two decades ago.

Paul Ibrahim of NorthStarWriters.com cited Obama’s warning to congressional Republicans that “you can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done” in suggesting the president has become the “driving force” because a new “systematic” plan to “intimidate and demonize Obama’s opponents.”

Prediction:  Obama will declare the nation “hopes” for censorship to “change” the political landscape.

That such a campaign was launched only days after Obama’s inauguration is “tremendously perturbing,” he wrote.

“Welcome to the politics of hope ‘n’ change. Obama’s startling attempt to hang Limbaugh’s scalp on the wall is a warning that the new ruler does not want unity – he demands it,” Ibrahim wrote.

Question, all you lefties out there:  feeling “chilled” yet?

And when I asked you yesterday if “dissent was still patriotic” – how many of you and your friends have used the phrase “Rush Limbaugh is unamerican” in the past week?