“Liberalism: Where everything that isn’t mandatory is banned”
— Unknown
One of liberalism’s most noxious traits is its tendency – indeed, its almost inevitable need – to support and enforce “liberal” (big and small “L”) policies with authoritarian means.
This tendency is expressed through means both moderately civil and benign (the European mania for larding every step of the production and distribution process with Value Added Taxes, or VATs, which make enterpreneurship so very horribly difficult and so terribly inpinge the profit motive where they’re applied) to big and ugly (Nancy Pelosi’s plan to build concentration camps for people who don’t buy healthcare, Obama’s fistful of czars and his executive pay boards and the enforcement arm behind the “Stimulus”).
There is history for this, of course; it was during America’s most unfettteredly-“liberal” era, from the thirties through the early seventies, that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, and the CIA, carried out abuses against American civilians that would have made Bush-era liberals lose bladder control, if their masters told them to think about it they thought about it all that hard. Under Roosevelt, Truman, the relatively liberal Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnsion, domestic surveillance was common; the FBI and CIA kept dossiers on American citizens.
“War on communism?” Sure.
But even after the so-called “McCarthy” era – and remember, while the left to this day jumps up and down and invokes “Joe McCarthy” with the same thoughtful consideration of monkeys flinging poo (as if a Senator from Wisconsin controlled all the levers of the federal government), there was plenty of bipartisan, transpartisan and non-partisan support for the so-called “witchhunts” in the post-New-Deal executive branches of the day.
And after the “Red Scare?” When Jimmy Carter’s version of “hope and change” was stymied by the “lynch and terrorize” counterpolicy of Ayatollah Khomeini, he not only launched a rescue mission that’d make Jack Bauer blanche at the unreality of it all; he also founded the “Joint Special Operations Command” (JSOC), the organization that controls the Army’s “Delta” and the Navy’s SEAL “DevGru”, which reports directly to the Secretary of Defense and the President as opposed to the regular military command, which undertakes all the serious “black bag” dirty work with only the highest level of oversight. The left and media, naturally, only paid attention to it during the Bush Administration – and seems not to have any actual evidence of actual abuses during that time – but it was a creature of the Carter years.
And it should go without saying that after eight years of lefty whinging about nonexistent or overblown excesses in the Bush administration, it’s the Obama Administration and its allies that are actually seriously discussing censoring and gutting freedom of speech. Because Hope and Change must be unanimous!
At any rate, the main point is this: behind the “carrot” of hopey-changey big-L Liberalism – the programs, the entitlements, the goodies under the government tree every morning – there is a big, ugly, authoritarian stick. They go together like horse and carriage.
So after putting up with eight years of lefty whinging about the Bush Administration’s alleged, largely nonexistent abuses of the Constitution, and a year of watching the Obama administration undergird its “hope and change” with enemies lists, with official paranoia aimed at American citizens, I’ll make this prediction:
If Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is sprung from his public show trial by fair means (unlikely) or foul (also unlikely, but then so is every jailbreak that has ever happened), it’ll be the Obama Administration that authorizes covert hit teams to prowl the globe killing people beyond the pale of any law, oversight or accountability.
as another example of how electing the wrong sort of person as President can cheapen the public discourse, the first thing I thought of when I saw the post title was “it’s a good thing Bill Clinton didn’t have those when he was dating Monica”
“which make enterpreneurship so very horribly difficult”
Not so difficult that Europe can not kick our ass in terms of small businesses.
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/int-comp-small-business
“Contrary to popular perceptions, the United States has a much smaller small-business sector (as a share of total employment) than other countries at a comparable level of economic development”
“it’ll be the Obama Administration that authorizes covert hit teams to prowl the globe killing people beyond the pale of any law, oversight or accountability.”
“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before. “ – Rahm Emanual
I don’t think your prediction is likely. 1) it would require The One to actually make a decision, 2) it would involve some of those nasty folks at the intelligence or military agencies that we cannot trust to kill people in a nice way, and 3) it would tarnish the great Peace Prize recipient by doing something unpeaceful. Not that any of this solid thinking would prevent the supreme hypocrisy that comes so naturally to this self-aggrandizing show pony, but it probably would.
Leftists have McCarthy’s later excesses to successfully cloud the fact that the majority of the people fingered by HUAAC were, in fact, Communists or fellow travelers.
Red diaper baby, David Horowitz’s biography Radical Son” is a fascinating, behind the scenes look at what was going on from the Communist POV.
McCarthy was a hero.
A-boy, touting Europe’s small business dominance doesn’t help your cause. Eurosocialism has beaten big business to it’s knees, and keeping below the radar is the only way an entrepreneur can find any measure of success.
Small business is all well and good….until you need to build a dam, or a power plant, or an airplane, or a space vehicle.
There is a reason that the transister wasn’t created in Germany, and it ain’t lack of brains.
Remember when FDR sent a tailor in NJ to prison because the small businessman gave his neighbors a 10 cent discount on dry-cleaning of their dress pants? The crazy Deleno.
McCarthy? He was a puppy dog compared to Senate Democrats treatment of John Roberts.
McCarthy? He was a puppy dog compared to Senate Democrats treatment of John Roberts
Not to mention the MSMs treatment of Sarah Palin…
Rick,
Silly me, simply believing the word of a number of mere Danish, Dutch and German entrepreneurs and their tales of what a morass of epic suck their governments bring to their lives.
Swiftee-
The most revealing takeaway I got from Radical Son was that most of the Commies exposed by McCarthy hadn’t been active in the party since the late 30’s.
They didn’t mind the purges, show trials, forced famines, and the gulags. What made them drop out was the Hitler-Stalin pact. Mass-murder was fine with them, but an alliance with a non-commie made them doubt Stalin’s bona fides as a genuine revolutionary.
Terry, curious-
Which part gave you to conclude that?
Was it…
“My father knew very well that all eight of the suspended teachers [including himself] were Party members and it was their politics and not their Jewishness that had made them targets”
Or this?
“By this time, the Cold War was so close to being a hot one that it was as though we were behind enemy lines. The only time I felt politically safe was during the two weeks I spent at Wo-Chi-Ca, a summer camp for children of the Communist Party. The Indian sounding name was an acronym for “Workers Children’s Camp.”
“My buddies there were Billy Gerson and Freddy Jerome, whose fathers were “second string” leaders of the Party indicted under the Smith Act.”
Redicioulis!
“Remember when FDR sent a tailor in NJ to prison because the small businessman gave his neighbors a 10 cent discount on dry-cleaning of their dress pants? The crazy Deleno.”
See if you can find a reliable source for that, Upchuck. Yet another rightwing myth you kooks accept without evidence.
Swiftea said: “McCarthy was a hero.”
Swiftea’s Mount Rushmore would have Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Dick Nixon and George Lincoln Rockwell.
The tailor’s name was Jacob Maged.
I think he charged $0.35 rather than the FDR-mandated $0.40.
How is it possible to a babe in the woods and a clown at the same time?
A link, Terry. You need a link. I’m well aware of the right-wing urban legend.