Dismantling America

Opinion Editorial by Thomas Sowell

Oct 27, 2009

As the American Constitution and free-market economy crumbles under the over-reach of the government, is there any way to put this country back together again upon the values it once stood for?

Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many "czars" appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent?

Did you think that another "czar" would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers — that is, to create a situation where some newspapers' survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?

Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called "experts" deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments?

Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life and death decisions about your loved ones?

Does any of this sound like America?

How about a federal agency giving school children material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough.

How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path? President Obama has already floated the idea of a national police force, something we have done without for more than two centuries.

We already have local police forces all across the country and military forces for national defense, as well as the FBI for federal crimes and the National Guard for local emergencies. What would be the role of a national police force created by Barack Obama, with all its leaders appointed by him? It would seem more like the brown shirts of dictators than like anything American.

How far the President will go depends of course on how much resistance he meets. But the direction in which he is trying to go tells us more than all his rhetoric or media spin.

Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to "change the United States of America," the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.

Jeremiah Wright said it with words: "God damn America!" Bill Ayers said it with bombs that he planted. Community activist goons have said it with their contempt for the rights of other people.

Among the people appointed as czars by President Obama have been people who have praised enemy dictators like Mao, who have seen the public schools as places to promote sexual practices contrary to the values of most Americans, to a captive audience of children.

Those who say that the Obama administration should have investigated those people more thoroughly before appointing them are missing the point completely. Why should we assume that Barack Obama didn't know what such people were like, when he has been associating with precisely these kinds of people for decades before he reached the White House?

Nothing is more consistent with his lifelong patterns than putting such people in government — people who reject American values, resent Americans in general and successful Americans in particular, as well as resenting America's influence in the world.

Any miscalculation on his part would be in not thinking that others would discover what these stealth appointees were like. Had it not been for the Fox News Channel, these stealth appointees might have remained unexposed for what they are. Fox News is now high on the administration's enemies list.

Nothing so epitomizes President Obama's own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year — each bill more than a thousand pages long — too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up.

Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question — and the biggest question for this generation.

Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. He has published dozens of books on economics, education, race, and other topics. His most recent book is The Housing Boom and Bust, from April 2009.

No Noes

This seen at www.lucianne.com.

The nation is starting to take on the project of having Barack grow up. Will he do it? Can he do it? Stay tuned.

The Insanity of Government Health Care

For all those that think that public health care, i.e., Government Health Care, is good, this man, Representative Rogers of Michigan, is very clear as to what the issues are and what’s more important, the insanity of the plan and the callous, arrogant, disgusting attitude of the government toward the people of the United States.

I suppose there are some sweet little old ladies out there advocating government health care who we think are soooo innocent that they would never be so evil and anti-human as to advocate a system of institutionalized evil - which is what government health care is. It’s time to call them, all of them, no matter what form they come in, to account. They are not your friend, not my friend, not humanity’s friend.

There should be no Government Health Care. None. Freedom which provides innovation in every aspect of that field is the answer if we want health care. The last anyone should want is the dead, corrupt, entangled, unaccountable, violently costly, political hand of government. I can't think of anything worse than that. No man should have to live with that institution directing his life. It is simply anti-human and sucks the life out of HIS life.

Apparently during this time in our history, a large number of people want the "mommy" state. Whatever that means, one thing is for sure. The state will not fulfill on that requirement. It has none of the characteristics of a mommy unless your view of a mommy is a "Mommy Dearest."

There is a place for government, but a proper government is nothing like the government we have today. For one thing - and for a teaser - it must not be able to arbitrarily levy taxes. There has to be another, voluntary way for the state to raise money. It must, as all of us must, be created to depend on enrollment and registration, not force of arms to obtain money from the people who it is designed to protect.

Great minds ought to be creating how, and the system required for a voluntary payment to government to work. Then it should be tried in small, and then increasingly larger, jurisdictions until it gets perfected as a working method for the government to raise money. We are never going to be politically free until we get rid of the arbitrary force of Caesar. I'm not persuaded by the Bible's command to "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's." I might be persuaded just to keep myself from having to go to prison, but I definitely am not persuaded as a design principle for a moral, principled and just government.

The Fear-based Government

Never have I seen such a fear-based Administration and government. The US Government has truly become public enemy #1. Give a man motivated by fear a gun and trouble is likely to ensue. The fact that the government is the final authority and possesses and uses guns as its ultimate and distinguishing characteristic, means that we are in big trouble.

Anyone who understands freedom and the abundance it provides for all those who participate must realize that we are on a path which is 180 degrees from that course. We have gotten a man and wife in the White House which have a score to settle. That score is based in hatred and hatred is based on fear. Instead of seeing an expansion of freedom such that we all can continue to learn what life requires and which nourishes us, we are seeing rules and regulations on everything. Instead of men welcoming disagreement in order to learn more about how life works and what is true, this Administration is refusing to talk to or about anyone who disagrees with them. This, I assert, implies massive fear.

It's funny to watch Obama pretend that Fox News, e.g., is not even a news organization. This guy is massively out of touch with reality. Further he is counting on the dumbbells of this country to give him the approval he needs. No one who is interested in life and living a good life can afford to live this way. Obama thinks he can. Hmmm. Is he that stupid? I don't think he is innately stupid. I do think, rather, that fear will make one stupid. Fear of people asking questions and perhaps doubting that he is really The One must be terrifying.

Clearly we are in a battle: Freedom vs. Tyranny. Barack Obama is the first snake oil salesman of the 21st century. He has the pleasant manner and the "sweet" family that keep a lot of people lulled into an "everything will be ok" state of mind.

Believe me, it is not OK and it will not turn out well. And at the rate that things are happening, it will not take long for the consequences of this horrendous, people-fearing, Democratically controlled government to become apparent.

The wealthy people may be able to get out of the country and not be controlled by this tyranny. But for the middle class and the underclass, this promises to be one huge concentration camp, border to border.

Sounds horrendous, doesn't it? If you show me one fact, one marker, that the direction of this government is any way other than toward tyranny, I would like to see it or hear it. I assert that the people who are still believing that this Administration is acting in their interests are asleep - deeply asleep. They are deeply invested in not rocking any boats. They hate conflict and argumentation, even disgruntlement. Their wallpaper patterns consist of babies, kittens and puppies. Or, as Rand once said, their lives "are about baby blankets and hams." They would rather ride blithely in a boat headed for the falls than jump overboard and, even though difficult, work to get to a solid bank.

The solid bank IS one's knowledge of how the world works. Not how one hopes it will work. Not how one prays it will turn out. I mean how the world works. It means being grounded in how human being operates, what political freedom is and why it is important that the political system be consistent with the possibility of human being, not the control of human being. (If you think that control of human being is the way of the future, you need to get your ass on a psychologist's couch to see if you can discover why you think that.) One must have, one way or the other, the philosophical/moral basis for the requirements for a society such that a man can freely live in it. And during these trying times, that knowledge cannot be implicit. It must be conscious and explicit. Otherwise, you don't really know and know that you. Without that, one is destined to drift, float and go over the falls. Without that there can be no access to the will to speak out, to resist and finally take the action which can, if successful, save yours and your loved ones' lives.

Do you think this is a dire message? Your god-damned right this is a dire message. Do you think I'm typing this up because I want to be ostracized as a pariah? No, I'm not. I am saying this because I'm a canary in the coal mine. I understand these things. The value of freedom and the morality that works for freedom has been something which was awakened by my father when I was a kid. I could see that he cared about such things and got disgusted when people didn't act according to the principles which honored people in their rights and as a person. He could get morally outraged at injustice. I liked that. I admired that. I became that.

I know what freedom is. I am very aware of it vs. when it is not present or being threatened to be taken away. I worked for 40 years to increase the distinctions I have around this topic. I am not one who is going to blithely slip into a life where those distinctions are missing. It's not me.

If you lived on a desert island, you would be free because there would be no one else on the island. A free country, a political system whose value and organization is for freedom, is living as free in society as one is free on a desert island. In a free society, people recognize and honor the right of every person to live his life. Nothing impinges upon him other than the principle by which he chooses to live which is, to honor the right of every man, woman and child which includes him, to be free of everyone else. He can do anything he wants except initiate force against another person or his property. A free man can interact with any other man so long as he can obtain the agreement of that person for such action. A lot of this is in the unsaid that governs society, but really it's quite simple.

But now, people are primarily scared. The big motivator is fear. The blacks have been buying the victim conversation for decades and that is a fear-based conversation. Many women and gays have been generating a fear-based conversation too. With all education controlled by the government, we are now realizing that our children have no knowledge of core values. Consequently anytime their actions are threatened or something isn't magically on the table before them, they have no interior to which to repair. All they have is fear - and then the sob stories.

So we have many millions of people who are hanging onto Obama as some kind of hope. Hope for what? Their good feeling won't be interrupted? Crumbs and chump change? What exactly? That their race will have some power and won't be a barrier for them? What is it? I don't see that hope.

We know that government health care will produce a poverty of health services and care. If that comes to pass, right now we are on the mountain top insofar as the kinds of health care that an average person can obtain. The wealth of health care that we now have will be going the way of the vinyl record. Fear shrinks life. Love expands it. Tyranny and fear go together. Freedom and love go together. Tyranny and poverty go together. Freedom and wealth go together.

American freedom and wealth is about to end. It has been easy for a middle class person to live well in the United States. Eighteen months ago, I was commenting on this very fact. That is ending and it is soon going to be hard. A year from now, that will be apparent to more people although I have to admit that I am experiencing it now.

Architecture, especially so for my small business, is one of the first things to be affected by the larger economic picture. I can tell you with certainty that nothing is happening. One thing that is happening is that people who have wanted to build are still wanting to build. As this drags out, they look for the slightest clue that it would be good to move forward. So if there is any easing, I expect it to be a boom, at least for a short period of time. It could be that in 2 to 3 months I may be working as much as I can physically work.

With the kinds of things going on with the government now, I will have to have everything be put in a form that can have some power in the dry period that will inevitably follow. Damn it, I wanted a flat screen TV. That, however, may not be the thing to be buying. I don't want to be one of those dunderheads that go with the flow and wake up one day shocked within an inch of my life. I know that experience. Not good. This clearly is going to take some thought.

We are in and heading for the eye of a fear-based hurricane. Do what you can to stop it. I think stopping the government from instituting government health care, a bureaucrat who is designated to sit between your mind and your body, would put an enormous crimp in the Democrats' push for total power. I think Government Health Care means that the government, not you, owns your life. It means that you do not possess the right to your life for the simple reason that you will be unable to act in your own interest when it comes to your body. You will get the chump change. The choices that would have been possible under freedom won't be. Simple as that. Only the government's interest will matter in that world.

The Cap and Trade bill definitely needs to be defeated. That will tax you unto death. Thousands of dollars in higher prices caused by the government's tax on energy will change your life. Man's role in the climate is not understood. Frankly, I don't think it amounts to much in the face of the enormous forces of a much larger system in which we and our planet lives. Read Heaven and Earth by Ian Plimer for a scenario that will place the earth in a much larger context than the global "warmist," "climate changers" have. I think Al Gore is an idiot. He's a person whose purpose is to accumulate wealth via political means.

The five primary arguments I have against the global "warmist" positions are these: 1) The science is not there. Al Gore and the desperate global warmists are not careful about the facts and they are only interested in pushing people to a conclusion that will get them the control they want. I saw An Inconvenient Truth and I was appalled at how disrespectful it was to a thinking person. It was really not about the earth at all. It was about getting the audience to like Al Gore. (Now isn't that an interesting motivation for a politician? Oh my, I should be surprised. Sounds like someone else I know.)

2) Environmentalists lie - boldly and outrageously. They lie about polar bears, for one thing. They also lie about a lot of other things. Many of these lies have been documented. They are not about the Environment. They are about religion. This is not the first time in history that the earth and nature has become the touchstone of a religion. People live on the earth and need the earth as a resource to maintain their lives. But, their lives are not to be sacrificed for the earth or nature. That would turn the whole way things work upside down. But this is the way an Environmentalist thinks. He would rather save a 2" fish than provide food for people. Something wrong here. When I see him be the first to lay down his life for a fish, he will have some credibility. Until then? No.

Another very interesting fact is that private property owners take care of the environment much better than government ever has or will. One of the reasons is that government, as it now operates, is set up on a double standard. Everything you cannot do, they can. I've read articles about tree farms and such and the private farms are far better than the government owned lands. People generally love their property and they do not go around with the intent to harm it. Also, property is an investment and it works to maintain its value. On the other hand, the government could care less. It is oriented toward power and political spoils, not real life and real property. (Of course if you organize a march on Washington with a million or more people, you might get their attention to do something. Not necessarily though.) The great devastation of land is in the public lands. Since no one owns it, the thing to do is get as much as one can while he has the access. Or to pass a law such that it cannot respond to the natural laws that govern it. There is no future that one is worried about. The future for someone with access to public lands is far more dependent on one's ass-kissing ability than one's nature-caring ability.

3) Resources never go out of existence. They are always in a process of transformation of their form. Today's trash is a potential resource tomorrow. (Actually it is a resource right now, but until we have worked out how to use it, it is in a latent form.) E = m times c squared. Energy and mass are intimately related. One transforms into the other. As we are better able to control this process, we will be able to make these transformations ourselves. There is no need to be "spiritually" worried that we are going to run out of resources. Not possible.

I think that eventually all the manufacturing may be located on other planets and asteroids. Earth, where we live, will be a country club.

4) Pollution is not something that is necessarily damaging. In a free society, pollution becomes a problem if it damages someone's property - their body or their farm, if you get my point. No one gets to dump their weekly trash on my side of the fence, the property line. If I think that factory X is polluting my property, all I have to do is show that to be true. I do that by discovering the facts that show that. Until one has discovered those facts, there is no evidence that Factory X is polluting my property. (In today's world, people try everything but the facts to get people to stop doing something. The tools are sob stories, social pressure and unearned guilt. That's the tools we now use. Nasty tools. They don't work and we don't learn anything about how things work except how to better use those tools which makes our social world an increasingly nasty place to live. Not good.)

5) The free market responds to change the fastest of any human invention ever. It is constantly changing and the entrepreneur is always on the lookout for how better to meet the needs and wants of potential consumers. If the climate changes, the last thing we need are rigid laws decided by a bunch of politicians sitting in Washington or State Capitols trying to figure out how to change the laws so they and their backers can make a buck. This is corrupt. The free market, if free, will handle the changes we are always dealing with and seeking to provide for and it will do it magnificently and quickly. That is inherent in its nature. Nothing to fear. It is imperative to separate economy and state.

There are many areas to fight the current government. The control of speech is one area. Net neutrality is an attempt to place the internet under government control rendering it unable to respond to what people want. Obama's czars have various plans for controlling talk radio, disagreeable cable channels, etc., etc. All of this is very bad for us because it makes it much harder for us to get information and adjust our view of the world as we need to do for our survival.

Do what you can to prepare. The very best thing you can do is school yourself as to why fear doesn't work and you should give it up. I'm 69 years old and I would give up Medicare in a nanosecond for a free market in health care. I guarantee you I would be far more likely to get the health care I need if the market is free. Government control of health care will, if it comes about, strangle health care. If government saw to it that freedom increased, there would be nurses in drug stores and grocery stores taking care of most of the basic questions we have about health care. Health care would be abundant. Instead, Obama, Pelosi, Reid and company trot out some sob story (what I call sore picking) which they think is sufficient reason to put the noose around the nation's neck. What a Carnival of Arrogant Asses we have in Washington.

Why I Don't Like Obama

He's a sore picker.

Both he and Michelle are sore pickers.

Sore pickers have a negative, nasty view of life and they advertise it in their way of being, the way they behave and the things they say. When you see them, unless you need their words as affirmation for your own worldview, you want to get away from them. From a robust standard of life, they are poison. Everything thing they touch gets diseased, withers and dies. When they arrive on the scene, they tell you the world stinks and then they proceed to make it stink more. That is the nature of a sore picker.

The primary orientation of a sore picker to life is that of a victim. Michelle illustrated this recently when she went to Copenhagen to hawk Chicago to host the Olympics. She told the world how big a sacrifice the whole affair was and well, the beneficiary of this huge sacrifice should be the children. She wore the finest clothing and took her own jet from Washington to Copenhagen. Never mind, life sucked.

The time I remember Obama's sore picking being so incongruous and inappropriate was during the campaign when he spoke at a fund-raiser in Hollywood. He was among some very wealthy people, people like, if not, Barbara Streisand, Michael Moore - those kind of people. Obama took the microphone and began talking about all the people who have no home, have no future. He talked about broken legs, sclerotic livers, broken families, hunger and such. He never talked about how well he and the guests had done to earn their money, the money he sought to transfer from their pocket to his. He never put them in touch with all the reasons they would feel generous and want to give. Instead, he brought out his bag of sores and showed them to everyone like they were the main attraction. He used guilt as a motivator not excellence. This is an essential distinction of the sore picker. Anyone in the room with a shred of self-esteem would have ordered a double shot, pure alcohol - no water, no ice.

With a sore picker at the helm of state, America is doomed. A sore picker cannot see a beautiful sunrise, a promising talent or a good idea. It's not their orientation. Further, objective success is not their goal. Their goal is to pick at a sore until it becomes inflamed and won't heal. It always has to be available to show the world as their reason for who they are and what they do.

Blaming others is a primary strategy for anything that needs to be a problem and catapulted to emergency status. Blame Bush, blame Limbaugh, blame Wall Street, blame Insurance Companies, blame Big Pharma, blame Banks, blame Fox, blame Beck, blame Rich People, blame Greed, blame Selfishness, blame Torture, blame anything that can be used to have us react from emotion. Point the finger at others and despicable behavior. Why? Because we must be victims at all costs. That finger can never, NEVER be pointed at oneself. What we are seeing is very juvenile, responsibility-shirking behavior sitting in the chair of the most powerful position on the planet.

When Obama goes out of the country he always takes the mic and apologizes for America. Translation: Get the sores out of the bag and parade them before the world. He doesn't put them in context, he doesn't do anything but leave the world and us with our sores on parade. Nice guy, Obama. (Can you imagine how much you would hate your dad or mom if every time they met a stranger they told them about all your faults? And then apologized to them when they didn't even owe them an apology? Jeez!)

I remember during the campaign when I was researching Barack Obama, coming across his success in getting a law passed in Illinois that prevented policemen from going into black neighborhoods and stopping kids to find out what was going on. It was an anti-profiling law. Apparently the police patrolling their neighborhood was a sore and some people wanted it stopped. So, they stopped it.

Guess what happened? Crime went up and the neighborhood ended up worse off. In fact a few weeks ago - right when Michelle, Barack and Oprah went to Copenhagen, we saw a video of thugs beating a recent high school graduate to death with a railroad tie. This happened in a neighborhood in Barack's former district where crime is on the rise. He applied his talents and got police stopped from doing their work.

For your information, police do not go into neighborhoods just to harass people. They go into neighborhoods where there is crime in order to make known their presence in order that the potential criminals see that it is not likely to go well if they do their crime. The fact that the neighborhood is black, latino, Asian or white is not the point. Only Barack Obama would focus on a non-essential and pick it into a sore. This is the kind of man he is.

When Rahm Emanuel says that a crisis cannot go to waste, what he is saying is "Hey, we got a sore here. Look, it's already inflamed. People are in pain. Let's use this sore to get the money, the control, the influence we want." Pick, pick, pick.

When Michelle told us how she didn't like America until her husband was running for office and extending his sore-picker vision for America, it seemed incongruous. Here was a woman who was reared in south Chicago, got into a top-flight university, Princeton, and was succeeding according to what we would normally call high standards. From college she went back to Chicago and worked for a well-known law firm. When Barrack started running for office, she got better jobs and higher salaries. Still, she was a victim. She still carries this same being and is now America's First Lady. "C'mon, Michelle, give it up." She is a walking contradiction and living proof that a sore picker is never happy, can never really win, can never really succeed and be satisfied. Sore pickers are only happy when they are ensconsed and comfortable in their misery and suffering. A sore picker's soul is nothing more than an inflamed sore with no prospect of ever being healed.

(I read the stories of White House galas - parties - which happen often. For a sore picker, what must these parties be like? They cannot be joyous. I guess they are momentary escapes - rather like the escapes that heroine users seek. A life built on pain and suffering can only have momentary escapes from pain and suffering.)

Examples of the mentality of this Administration are everywhere. They happen every day, practically every moment of every day. Barack, Michelle, Rahm, Gibbs, Axelrod, Jarrett, Dunn, the Czars,and even the non-White House Democrats such as Pelosi and Reid are all promulgating, propagating this world view. I want to throw up.

The apotheosis of a sore picker is Mother Teresa. I blogged about her yesterday. She worshiped poverty, sickness, disease and dying so much that she dedicated her life to living in the midst of such sores. Her monuments are her institutions for the dying destitute of Calcutta. She loved to not do anything to prevent suffering because she thought that suffering was what made heaven so delicious. Millions of dollars piled up in her coffers, but she didn't use them to provide air conditioning for some physical comfort for the uncomfortable or drugs to ease the pain of the terminally ill. She was a miserable failure of a human being who wrote and told her Vatican counselors that her 50 years of bereftness was hard to bear. Her prescription for herself and for all those to whom she ministered was not to find ways to cure the disease or ease the pain and make life better, but to forgive. Find someone - yourself, your parents, your boss, even God himself, someone - to forgive. That is the way to be at peace and heal the soul. She did that for a lifetime and died of soul pain - bereftness.

(I want to say that I think it is appropriate for people who see a need to care for the indigent and sick at the end of their lives and are called to minister at this often deeply intimate part of life to do so. But, the reason for it cannot be death, sickness and suffering as some kind of passage to the hereafter . Rather it is because it is part of life, the end of life. Life is better for the dying souls as well as the rest of us to know that it is possible to take care of the end of one's life in a way that is reverent of life. I think that all of this kind of thing should be done by private means and never by government force. I don't see much reverence for life if the government comes with a gun to take people's money to provide for the indigent and the dying or health care for the sick, for that matter.)

It is no mistake that Anita Dunn pointed out that her favorite philosophers are Mao Tse-Tung and Mother Teresa. Mao loved pain and death so much that he liked to watch people as he ordered them filleted before him.* Mother Teresa loved pain and death so much that she dedicated her life housing the permanently pained and dying, extolling their suffering as their access to the hereafter and her access to people's pocketbooks and proof that her life was worthwhile.

This orientation to life is sick - profoundly sick.

Life is a process of maintaining life - for as long as one is willing to do that. Sores are bumps in the road of living. They are not the focus for the living. Living and being able to continue living is the focus for the living. Yes, sores have to be dealt with, but if one gets oriented to them such that the sores themselves become one's reason for living and the way one gets attention in the world, that is evidence that one's orientation is off. For an American President and his First Lady to deck themselves out in sores is about as foul a display as could be had.

And that is what we have running our country. Anyone who has the victim mentality is not going to see another possibility and be transformed so long as Obama and company, the leader in this worldview, is of this mentality. A victim mentality always is at the effect of something or someone. It focuses on that and builds a life around it. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the black caucus, religious ministers of all races parade pain and suffering as an attraction. They live off this and propagate it. This is a big trap for anyone who has tendencies in this direction and for this nation.

This is not to say that Pollyanna positivism is the good. It isn't. It's just as inauthentic and ineffective as is the sore picker orientation. What is needed is an objective orientation to reality, a respect for facts and ideas which produce real results. The last thing we need is a war against reality which is what we now have going on.

Freedom provides abundance and peace. Government control provides scarcity and lots of fighting. We have a President and his administration that hate freedom and love government control. They want to nudge us, overthrow us, order us, rob us - you name it - all in service of their sores and any sores that they can get the public to pick up on.

Notice that they love collectivism. Collectivism is another escape. "The solution to your pain," they say, "is to see yourself as a piece of the group and forget your pitiful little self. Volunteer. Participate in something - anything. Serve, serve, serve. A life of service is the answer. Become selfless, just like Mother Teresa. Forget yourself, you selfish little ant of a man." That is the Obama and Michelle prescription.

For America to get itself on the right track, we have to give up sore picking, leave it behind. It's no orientation to life if you want to live, produce and seek happiness. It's now time for America to turn 180 degrees, face life and do what it takes to have a successful and happy future.

*Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.

Letter to Glenn Beck

In your stories on Anita Dunn and her citing Mao Tse-Tung and Mother Teresa as her favorite philosophers, you have said Chairman Mao is bad but not Mother Teresa. I agree that Mao, a mass murderer, is bad, but I would like to challenge your sheltering of Mother Teresa. She is the apotheosis of the selfless person, a person who toiled day in and day out to destroy the essence of life – valuing. If you notice, the entire socialist idea requires the selfless person – the person who has no worth as an individual and only as a cog in the wheel of the collective.

Yesterday (Monday, October 19) on the show, you mocked the idea of service – volunteerism – work without pay. But Mother Teresa was devoted to such service. She is exactly the kind of person that the Obamas want to populate this country.

If America is having trouble getting its feet on the ground, it is this moral idea, that we should be our brothers’ keeper and give what we earn to our neighbor, that is the source of the problem. This "Christian" tenet is providing the moral octane for Obama’s message. Until it is clarified that every individual has a right to his life and owns every second of it, and that it in no way, not an inch, not a minute, belongs to the government nor Barack nor Michelle nor anyone, this issue is not going to get settled. No one has the right to expect that anyone would want to, let alone ought to help his neighbor. It's true that most people are generous and do help their neighbors and those they value when they can. But that is their choice. One is not required to be selfless in the matter. Unless each of us is able to stand for our right to decided for ourselves about this matter, we are not going to be able to access the moral fire to fight this socialist juggernaut.


(By the way, read Christopher Hitchens' book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice to get a bead on Mother Teresa. She cashed in on the unearned guilt that the Catholic Church disseminated in its teachings. People gave her millions of dollars. But, she did not use it to ameliorate the suffering of the dying destitute, her ministry. When they were in pain near the end of their lives or were suffering from unbearable Bengali heat, she did nothing. No air conditioning. No pain relief. Why? "Suffering", she said, "is the access to everlasting life." All she would advocate is forgiveness. Forgiveness was her answer for everything. After her death it was learned that she sought psychological counseling within the Catholic Church for 50 years because all she could experience was a terrible bereftness. Her life is such an anathema of what a successful happy life is about that she should be given no consideration except as a phenomenon of irrationality carried to the extreme.)

For me, associating with other people in any way is my choice. To be forced, cajoled or driven by an unearned guilt (my fault if I accept the unearned guilt) to associate with someone abrogates the basis on which it could ever be declared a good thing. If one cannot choose a particular course, then it cannot be deemed good or bad. The moral assessment of good or bad applies only if one has a choice.

Rather than seeing the current Administration as concerned for the poor and those less fortunate, I see them as sore-pickers. Practically ever speech starts with warts, lost futures, broken legs and every form of human malady. (See the relationship to Mother Teresa yet?) These people thrive on sores and build their whole lives on supposedly helping the victims of such circumstances. The truth is they do little and whatever they do do is because of the strong. Individual freedom has done more to raise the standard of living for all the poor in the world than any other thing. And Obama is out to punish that. So which direction do you think the world is going?

People have not yet seen how evil the Obama Administration really is. Although cloaked in a largely unquestioned conventional goodness, I see it as everything but. Holding to the standard of political freedom and individual rights, it is not difficult to see how his every action augurs for the collectivization of society and the doing away with the concept of the individual and his life as an end in itself. To the extent his policies are carried out, we are all going to pay in terms of increasing hardship. A sore-picker sends up the red flag for me every time.