Diabolical?

The alarm considering the diabolical nature of the Obama Administration is growing. People are now beginning to distrust Obama's motives. Does he want to take down the United States because he hates what is unique about the United States? It is, after all, the only country on the face of the earth founded on the fact that a human being is the source of value and is unique and individual. No one except the individual can seek to live his life and all human energy is individual human energy which is why the critical formulation in our Constitution is the protection of Individual Rights.

To socialize a nation is to disregard the nature of human being and attempt to annihilate him by recognizing him only as part of a group - racial, gender, sexuality, ethnic, or class. It is without doubt one of the most evil actions any man can advocate or take action to install. This idea is the root of failure of most modern governments and marks the downward direction of a society. Socialism ties up the energy of a person by requiring him to have permission to initiate any of his ideas. The parasites are the only ones who feel empowered. To install this idea over and at the expense of individuals is what I say Obama and his henchmen are up to.

This was apparent to anyone who bothered to investigate Obama during his campaign. I've yet to find a single Obama voter who cared enough about himself or his country to investigate him. Never has such lying and duplicity masqueraded in such an "attractive" form.

The question is increasingly going to become: What now? When?

This article is from Robert Tracinski's TIA Daily. SCB


A Principled Minority

Over the weekend, I got an e-mail from Jack Wakeland pointing out an error in the focus of my commentary on Judd Gregg's withdrawal as Obama's Secretary of Commerce. And it was not just that I incorrectly identified Gregg as a Senator from Connecticut (he's actually from New Hampshire). Here is Jack's comment:

"The story of Senator Judd Gregg is not a story about the incompetence of hot-house leftist Barack Obama.

"It is a story about Judd Gregg's integrity. Senator Gregg naively accepted a nomination to the cabinet by the president of the United States—uncritically accepting the idea that it would be a great honor to serve the top man in American government, because this is America. But after taking one good quick look at the shackles for our incremental enslavement being fashioned in the White House, he recoiled and said 'No!'

"No one quits a cabinet post one week after being nominated. No one quits after making a complex series of state and federal arrangements about who the Democratic governor of New Hampshire will appoint in his place (so as not to seal in more firmly the left's 60-vote steamroller-majority in the Senate). No one quits before hearings for his confirmation can even be scheduled. No one says no to a newly elected president so bluntly and unceremoniously—not without a substantial and very public provocation.

"Whatever faults he has (and I'm sure he has them), in quitting, Senator Judd deserves the best words of praise that can be penned.

"And one of the reasons why Senator Judd quit is the census. The census? That is one subject that should never be the object of partisan debate—not in a republic that has spent the past 80 years decaying towards democracy.

"The story of Rahm Emanuel's attempt—with the obvious approval of President Barack Obama—to take over of the census invites a retelling of the story of Joe Stalin's order that the head of his census bureau be shot for reporting that the population of the Soviet Union had decreased—thus giving evidence of the millions who were murdered in his purges and in his starvation of the Ukraine. It invites a reference to one of Stalin's best-known quotes: 'He who votes decides nothing. He who counts the votes decides everything.'

"The American people have handed the reins of our country over to a bunch of incompetent Chicago patronage hacks. They're deliberately planning to steer the whole nation into a ditch just to get the kickback for awarding the towing contract to their cousins. That is the whole dirty little extent of their idea for 'a change in direction.'"

A few weeks ago, I wrote that TIA Daily would respond to the bleak news of the Obama years by "looking for and highlighting the story of the people who are supporting and defending civilization. That is always more important than any other news, because in the long run, that is the story that actually explains the state of the world." That is why Jack is right that Senator Gregg's integrity is a more important story than the Obama administration's bumbling.

In fact, one of the bright spots of the current situation is the unaccustomed sight of Republican integrity on the issue of big government. A Washington Post analysis describes the battle over the "stimulus" that is just beginning: the battle over who gets the credit or the blame from its results. The most interesting fact from the article: "Rep. Eric Cantor, the House minority whip who led the fight to deny Obama every GOP vote for the plan, is studying Winston Churchill's role leading the Tories in the late 1930s, a principled minority that was eventually catapulted into power over the Labor Party." A "principled minority" that is rewarded by being "catapulted into power"? Sounds like a good plan to me.

I will resist the temptation to ask why the Republicans weren't more principled when they were in the majority, because we should still acknowledge that, even while Bush was still office, it was Republicans who offered the only glimmers of resistance to the bailout frenzy.

Jack points to another example of the new stiffening of the Republican opposition.

"Republican Congressman Tom Price (Chairman of the Republican Study Committee) was so furious with the non-objective vote on the 0.8-trillion-dollar Pelosi-Obey 'stimulus package,' that he couldn't wait for a news conference. So on Friday morning, while the vote was being rushed through, Rep. Price did a little one-minute video on the fact that no congressman or congressional staff member could possibly know what was in the 1073-page document that was to be voted on within 10 hours of its being marked up in the House-Senate Conference Committee. In the video, he shows two of the arbitrary and unaccountable scribbles in the margins of the thick document—one pencils out accountability for one of the thousands of appropriations in the bill and another pencils in the number $150 million in place of the number $100 million that had been typed in ink."

(In a similar vein, TIA Daily reader Ashley King asks a very good question: "I'd like to know when we will see a budget. We are going from one ad hoc monstrosity to the next. So I say again, where is the budget?")

The bracing effect of standing on principle is beginning to have more appeal to right-leaning intellectuals in the media, as well. The Wall Street Journal has just carried a second article by Judy Shelton advocating a return to the gold standard as the solution to the monetary central planning that helped cause the current financial crisis—and which now threatens to cause runaway inflation.

So all of that is good news. Unfortunately, it is happening in an evil context. Remember the Broken Culture Fallacy. The Republican Party trying to transform itself into a "principled minority" is a bit like the industrious glazier busy at work repairing a window broken by a vandal. It's good that he's repairing the damage—but everyone would have been better off if the vandal hadn't tried to smash everything to pieces in the first place.

Just to make sure that you are appropriately un-reassured, let's take a look at some of the things that were in the "stimulus bill," tucked away in those hundreds of pages that reporters and the public are just now getting around to reading.

We know that the bill authorized the federal government to spend hundreds of billions of dollars of money it doesn't have. But in addition, the Democrats in Congress couldn't resist exploiting the financial panic to add other statist elements. Thus, there is a cap on executive pay for companies that have taken bailout money under the TARP plan:

The pay restrictions resemble those that the Treasury Department announced this month, but are likely to ensnare more executives at many more companies and also to cut more deeply into the bonuses that often account for the bulk of annual pay.

Even the Obama administration thought that this provision "went too far and would cause a brain drain in the financial industry during an acute crisis."

One observer on Wall Street offers an ominous observation:

At some point, you begin to wonder: has the government given up on these companies anyway? Why would the government or White House want to go along with that unless they have come to the conclusion they will have to nationalize these firms anyway?

The flip side of punishing bank executives for the crime of being promoted to high-ranking jobs is to reward workers for losing their jobs. Thus, I have seen several reports indicating that the pseudo-stimulus undermines key provisions of the 1996 welfare reform that encouraged state-level "welfare to work" programs to move millions of people off of dependence on the government dole.

According to an overview in the London Times,

Robert Rector, a prominent welfare researcher who was one of the architects of Clinton's 1996 reform bill, warned last week that Obama's stimulus plan was a "welfare spendathon" that would amount to the largest one-year increase in government handouts in American history.

Douglas Besharov, author of a big study on welfare reform, said the stimulus bill passed by Congress and the Senate in separate votes on Friday would "unravel" most of the 1996 reforms that led to a 65% reduction in welfare caseloads.

Several TIA Daily readers sent me an excellent article detailing how the Democrats loaded into the "stimulus" various provisions for increased government control of medicine. The whole article is worth reading, but here is just one sample:

One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and "guide" your doctor's decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, "Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis." According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and "learn to operate less like solo practitioners."

The bill takes its cue from Daschle in more than one way.

Daschle supported the Clinton administration's health-care overhaul in 1994, and attributed its failure to debate and delay. A year ago, Daschle wrote that the next president should act quickly before critics mount an opposition. "If that means attaching a health-care plan to the federal budget, so be it," he said. "The issue is too important to be stalled by Senate protocol."

If a principled minority rises to oppose this unprincipled government takeover, they will be the heroes of the story of the next few years, because if anyone halts the renewed march toward socialism, it will be them. But let's not forget how grave the dangers are and how great the evil is that they will be struggling to save us from.—RWT