The Greatest Failure

“But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.”

“But what we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another. As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.”

-President Barack Hussein Obama, Tucson, Arizona, January 12, 2011

When much of the country is looking at the President with new eyes in light of the scandalpalooza that the Administration is mired in, in which deliberately discriminatory behavior against “those who think differently” than those in government and in the White House by several “independent” agencies, as well as lingering questions about Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the AP wiretaps, and the deliberate and intrusive surveillance on questionable grounds of James Rosen and other FOX reporters, and a weak defense that amounts to “We’re incompetent, not evil.”, it would be tempting to sort through the details of each to determine which is this Administration’s biggest failure.  If you were to pursue this inquiry, it wouldn’t be without good cause, but it would be missing the elephant in the room.

The Tucson speech, which I would grudgingly admit was one of the best and most appropriate of his Presidency should also be counted as the indicator of his greatest failure.  While he actually talked about the emotions America was feeling, and speaking honorably, and touchingly of the dead, he also managed to keep from making it about himself, and his wife (Contrast this with his memorial speech after the Boston Marathon bombing to see exactly what I mean.)  While his call for a return to civility in our discourse sounded hollow coming from someone with his record and campaign rhetoric, it turned out to be an opportunity wasted. 

If the President, or his advisors had even a shred of self-awareness,  they might have decided to treat it as an “Only Nixon could go to China.” moment, and deliberately choose to do something that he has never chosen to do his entire time in office:  Lead ALL the American people, rather than calling himself a great uniter when he is in fact a Great Divider. 

I could try to rationalize this by observing that old habits die hard, and being a graduate of the school of Chicago politics, it would require too much of any man.  But the fact is, that after observing his “leadership” for five years, I realize that he needs to be able to blame someone, anyone when nothing changes, when things don’t go as he planned, or when the situation requires leadership he is unable to provide.  Such a man isn’t capable of recognizing that this speech provided him and us with an opportunity for a lasting legacy that doesn’t require any government action at all.  This was a chance to do something that wouldn’t cost a thing, and would have gone a very long way toward ameliorating the “polarization” that he lamented.  But he didn’t, and instead his legacy will be one of encouraging the public revelations of ugliness and hypocrisy by his supporters, such as Lizz Winstead, who in their smugness reveal a lack of compassion and desire for the diversity they pretend to champion with statements like her deleted tweet about the Moore, OK tornado yesterday.

Thanks to his unwillingness to practice what he preached, the world is an uglier place today, and out of his legacy of failure, this may be the most enduring and damaging to the nation.

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On the Newfound Outrage and Disappointment of the Left and the Press

Screw Them.

No.  I mean that.  Seriously.

Screw Them.

They REFUSED to see this America-hating empty suit for what he has ALWAYS been.  He told us who he was in lectures, and interviews.  He told us who he is in presumptive and conceited “memoirs” and autobiographies that were in and of themselves, audacious in the belief that a life marked with so little accomplishment in such a short period was somehow worthy of not one, but two tomes dedicated to his self-important navel gazing and intellectual lily-gilding.

And now when he turns the apparatus of Fedzilla loose upon the very people who abdicated their duty to make sure that the electorate knew about the man asking to be made their leader, we’re supposed to share in their outrage?   They were simply late to a party they never thought they’d be invited to. 

I can be happy that they can finally bring themselves to point out their Emperor’s nakedness, but that doesn’t mean that I should or will forgive them for their complacency when it was *only* people like me being targeted by the apparatus of big government lead by a narcissistic popinjay with tyrannical tendencies… or for their refusal to see a pattern of selective enforcement and arbitrary and capricious application of coercion and intimidation.  Or for their ridiculous and insulting focus on people like me who understand the threat to basic Constitutional liberties posed by a government that makes a concerted effort to blame those who oppose overreach combined with a lack of accountability for its failure to completely fulfill its promises to give until it hurts to some from the earnings of others.  Or for their constant attempts to vilify those whose only “offense” was to oppose a government big enough to give them everything they want, because such a government would be big enough to take all we have.

No.  In the face of all the evidence they needed to see this President, and his agenda, and his administration for what it is, and has always been, they chose him anyway, happy to blame those like me for what ails the nation, because they never believed that they would be fed to the alligator.  Welcome to the country you chose.

*walks off whistling Elvis Costello’s ‘Welcome to the Working Week’*

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A “Private” Right To Murder…

…is not compatible with the American Mission Statement set forth in the Declaration of Independence.

The Gosnell trial was telling, not only because it revealed a physician running a charnel house that would have to sterilize with a squad of flamethrowers before it could pass inspection as meat-packing plant, but until Katie Pavelich shamed her colleagues into actually reporting on the story, the indifference to it in the legacy media was just as disgusting. While the verdict found the butcher guilty on three counts of murder in the case of babies delivered alive, then nearly beheaded when he “snipped” their spinal cords, even now the usual suspects have engaged in some serious creativity to avoid referring to these babies as babies, since doing so might spark some viewers/readers to consider the weighty question of why exactly a murder verdict is appropriate for children who were only seconds earlier still inside their mothers and fair game for the good doctor to dispatch with relish.

Gosnell’s clinic was by all accounts unsanitary and extremely filthy. This doesn’t just indicate a disregard for the babies he enjoyed dispatching, but a disregard for his “patients”, who were routinely infected with STDs as a result of unsterilized equipment. On its own, it is a stinging indictment of the laughable mantra “Safe, Rare, and Legal”, but coupled with such horrors as jars filled with babies feet, and baby corpses stuffed in a freezer, the evil on the inside becomes physically manifest.

And yet, much like the Bene Geserit Reverend Mother in Lynch’s DUNE whispering “The Spice Must Flow…”, Klanned Murderhood is out, unrepentantly claiming that Gosnell is the exception, making sure that the real questions never get asked because “The [Taxpayer] Money Must Flow.”

We can’t encourage murder for hire by pretending that it’s ok if we call it part of some greater right of “privacy” and then expect that the evil that it is won’t be manifested by the practitioners. It was easy to convict Gosnell because he used the scissors, but the fact is that we’re all guilty for perpetrating the fiction that the taking of the most innocent lives among us is a legitimate “women’s health” procedure. Two go in and one comes out (sometimes) is NOT a health procedure, no matter what the ghouls with the bloody upturned palms tell us.

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Another in the List of Thousands of Reasons Why the Only Response to Calls for more “Gun Control Laws” is “NO.”

Sometimes it’s easy to focus on the fact that government is prohibited from any infringement period (for any citizen who is not in the state’s custody), and forget the more obvious fact that government has already demonstrated that it does not approach the issue in good faith and already violates the law as it applies to its actions with regard to “gun control”.

This piece from Armed and Dangerous offers a refresher on this take…go now, and read it.

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At Play In The Mouth of Madness

When some people started pushing back against the Official Gun Control Narrative after Sandy Hook with the seemingly obvious retort that instead of more laws that would be ignored by those determined to do bad things, it might be time to revisit the issue of Crazy People Control instead, I was …unsettled with the idea… in part because I know the history of the Soviet Union, and I know that the political prisoners who weren’t shipped to the gulags were institutionalized in asylums after being diagnosed by the state-run medical system as “mentally ill”. With ObamaCare looming, along with its cadre of experts ready to guide diagnosis and treatment on political and financial considerations first, this should be enough to give anyone who is thinking two or three moves ahead some pause.

But for a while now, something else about the idea has been nagging at me, much like a yippy little dog tugging at my pant leg, and this week, an errant turn of phrase allowed me to see this concern for what it really is. 

As as society, we are no longer sane ourselves.

Sane people do not believe in the existence of a “private” right to murder, as long as it is exercised by a woman against her unborn child (with the assistance of a medical doctor).

Sane people do not ignore or attempt to cover up the astonishing story of one of these “doctors” snipping spines of children who survive abortion attempts, then keeping their feet in jars like trophies.

Sane governments do not foster the belief that such a “right” is for them to grant, and moreover subsidize, while at the same time indignantly defending the practice as a woman’s “right to choose”.

Sane people do not repeatedly elect government officials who spend more than the government takes in, and then spends a great deal of this borrowed money on offering services and benefits to people who have no lawful right to be in this country in the first place, or on foreigners, who make no secret of their contempt of us.

Sane governments do not invite foreigners inside their borders, make them citizens, and give them welfare without a care to the inclinations, intentions, or activities of these “guests”.

Sane governments do not conclude that the way to curtail crime in neighboring countries is to significantly curtail the freedoms of their own citizens, instead of acting to secure a border so porous that it is a threat to the national security of both countries, even when determining not to do so aids and abets an ongoing slow-motion invasion in exchange for the votes and political power the blind eye delivers, because it would be foolish to assume that the same government will benefit from the final result.

Sane people don’t mindlessly echo the mantra that “Something must be done about gun violence”, even “If it only saves one child”, and yet get whipped into an outrage because a private foundation choses to no longer spend money subsidizing the murder of unborn children.

Sane people do not accept the idea that their 15-year-old cannot take an aspirin to school, but can purchase a powerful and dangerous abortifacient over the counter, or be transported by school officials to obtain an abortion without the parents’ knowledge or consent.

Sane people do not chain themselves to trees to stop loggers, or ram whaling ships to prevent whales from being slaughtered, but turn a blind eye to the actions of Kermit Gosnell, and other abortion doctors operating human abbotoirs with little or no oversight by governments charged with licensing and monitoring of medical professionals for the public safety.

Sane people do not stand by quietly or meekly as governments dilute the nature and benefits of citizenship by encouraging or allowing illegal immigration, and then passing laws that allow these same people who do not respect our laws to vote and to serve on juries.

Sane people do not quietly accept the notion that passing bills that have not yet been fully written or that no one could have possibly read is in any way acceptable behavior for those who were elected to represent their interests.

Sane people do not subscribe to the notion that it is in any way, shape, or form, the purview of government to dictate to them what they may eat, portion size, or salt and trans fat content of what they chose to eat, and sane people know that if such intrusions are justified by government’s expanding role in delivering and overseeing their health care, then that is an excellent object lesson in why government has no business in our health care.

Sane people do not immerse themselves in a self-centered and single-minded devotion to the fulfillment of their own desires and self-gratification to the degree that they abandon the dignity inherent in the liberty of accorded by God to the individual, and sane governments would not foster such practices, because sooner or later, they will run out of the material possessions and bounty of others used by governments to create such terrifying and locust-like dependents.

I could go on, citing news story after news story, where the new normal is getting reality backwards, or indulging in a number of ridiculous fictions which we are being forced to go along with, and treated as if we’re the insane ones when we question their gaslighting of us on any number of topics, but the point is, I’m reluctant to rally for Crazy People Control, because I’m no longer certain that our society recognizes insanity any more.   But I am sure that the wrong people would be only too happy to politicize it, and that even if we could implement it correctly, the inmates would outnumber the orderlies…by perhaps as much as three-to-one.  It’s like C.M. Kornbluth’s ‘The Marching Morons’ on steroids, and it rapidly appears that we have two options: Embrace the Madness, or Resist Until We Are Overcome.

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A Time To Weep, And A Time To Mourn

So I just made the effort to watch the President’s speech at Boston Cathedral today.  I made it just shy of 13 minutes before disgust and impatience got the best of me and I switched to a transcript.

He spoke a lot of words, but I couldn’t find any emotion.  There was the pale assertion that we all claim Boston, the sadly predictable section about himself, Michelle, and himself, a litany of shout outs, the scripture mcnuggets, and glittering empty rhetoric about the spirit of Boston and America, with some brief mentions in the middle for each of the dead, and the collectively wounded, but there was no emotion.  If anything, his petulant rage he displayed yesterday would have been preferable, and given his “they picked the wrong city” talk, it at least wouldn’t have been as out-of-place as the mechanical delivery that he gave instead.

I think of one of the most notable speeches given in remembrance of the dead, The Gettysburg Address, and the brevity of it.  Or the powerful and brief letter penned by Lincoln to Mrs. Bixby. I searched and watched Reagan’s Challenger Speech, and Bush’s speech on the evening of 9-11.  Both a little over 4 minutes.  Neither one contained a shout out.  Neither one injected themselves.  Bush’s was a bit more defiant, but that can be understood under the circumstances.  But the most startling contrast, other than a measure of sympathy that Obama couldn’t imitate, was the fact that HE spoke in a church, when Reagan and Bush spoke from the Oval Office.  Why was this startling?  Because even Jesus could find real emotion, and the shortest verse in the Bible (Jesus wept.) when he came to the graveside of his friend, Lazarus.

Even when he came into God’s house, Obama couldn’t follow the example of his son.

Transcript here, for those who tire of a wooden delivery, and insufferable cadence.

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How Do You Top FAIL! Level: EPIC? If You’re Melissa Harris-Perry, You Double-Down.

“This isn’t about me wanting to take your kids, and this isn’t even about whether children are property,” she said. “This is about whether we as a society, expressing our collective will through our public institutions, including our government, have a right to impinge on individual freedoms in order to advance a common good. And that is exactly the fight that we have been having for a couple hundred years.”

A couple hundred years? I didn’t think that the Communist Manifesto was quite that old. Still it does have a great deal of staying power for a failed ideal that continues to fail every time it is tried. I think the real “fight we’ve been having” is between enlightened self-interest and the perpetual nature of humanity’s hubris in believing that “we are the ones we have waited for” to finally make an imposed mediocrity and equally miserable outcome create a successful and vibrant society, when no one else has managed to.

“We’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours, and your responsibility,” she says in the ad. “We haven’t had a very collective notion of ‘These are our children.’ So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that ‘kids belong to their parents’ or ‘kids belong to their families,’ and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

Given that these words tumbled from the same lips that supported abortion because of the “expense of having children”, I can only see it as more of the “What is mine is mine, and what is yours is also mine, because I want it” mindset that leftists cannot dispossess themselves of.

Let me make this starkly clear, “Professor”:

Your “collective rights” do not trump my RIGHTS. My RIGHTS are not government’s to grant, or withdraw. Government can only guarantee them, or jealously covet them.

As for my children belonging to your “community”?

Good luck with that.

We didn’t abort our children, and would have never considered that, even if we had known about the Asperger’s/Autism because we have always correctly regarded them as people and gifts from God. Your short-sightedness does not make my children a commodity to be shared “for the good of the tribe”.

Just because your precious collective cannot help themselves and continues to kill your own off at a genocidal pace does not give you the right to indoctrinate MY children with your anti-life agenda.

Enjoy extinction, you silly cow. You sowed it. Now reap it.

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Saturday Morning Shower Thoughts

Somewhere between the shampoo and the soap, I was pondering Sheriff Slow Joe Biden’s remarks about the Administration’s current gun control push and the President’s laughable remarks about “shaming” those who oppose further infringements on the right to bear arms by a government that was explicitly prohibited from engaging in the infringements which already exist.

Putting aside the issue of someone spending our money to have his children vacation at lavish resorts in the Bahamas and in Sun Valley when the economy is still in the tank and millions of American families can afford no vacation at all, let alone separate vacations for their children, I couldn’t help but consider that we have hundreds of “gun control” laws on the books now that simply aren’t being enforced.  I realize that our leftist betters who are always considering new ways of justifying the Federal government’s various attempts to circumvent the restrictions that the Constitution clearly places on it would justify these past ineffective measures as tacit decisions by “We the people” to allow the government the authority to infringe where no infringement was allowed.  I can even accept that there may be a measure of truth to this, as some people certainly would have been willing to surrender a measure of liberty for the illusion of security, much in the same way that the frog doesn’t really consider that the water he’s in just got a little hotter.  However, I’m not sure that we should accept the idea that liberty ensured by restrictions on Federal authority can be conceded by means of a “passive” waiver, that is to say, by not enforcing that restriction when a clearly prohibited authority is clearly usurped, when that act of usurpation in and of itself is not so onerous as to warrant an immediate, and vehement denial.  Such a belief cannot be logically defended, and if accepted, would fundamentally change the relationship between “We the people” and our government, and for the same reasons, the Federal government should be equally denied from arguing laches as a defense to any attempt to reassert the restrictions that have never been Constitutionally relaxed or rescinded.

Even the “Constitutional Scholar-In-Chief” understands that the Constitution ensures liberty by restricting what the Federal Government can and cannot do, even if he cannot help but to reveal his bias against that by referring to it by calling it a “charter of negative liberties” and lamenting that it prevents the Federal government from doing certain things for us.  (One of the inherent flaws in this viewpoint being revealed when you consider that when he is talking about “us” he only means some of “us”.)  If we were to accept that infringements that were enacted in another time were now acceptable, and allowed the Federal government the authority to enact even more infringements as long as it could justify them as “reasonable”, then all those who want an all-powerful state have to do is have a strategic long-term plan, and the will to carry it out in a creeping incrementalism over a period of decades in which emotionalism is used to justify the nibbles being taken from individual liberty, while at the same time, it can be asserted as the picture takes shape, that continuing infringements can be justified because it was allowed in the past…or because the Courts refused to uphold past challenges.  Essentially, such a philosophy fosters an adversarial relationship between the state and those who would be governed by it, because the state could, in time remove all restrictions lawfully imposed on it by the nation’s bylaws without ever calling for an upfront and open national referendum on the restriction itself.  As long as the state succeeds with its initial usurpation of that which was deliberately withheld from it, no further usurpation can ever be stopped; as long as they get away with it once, they would legally be allowed to get away with it again, while those who believe that they have been guaranteed such rights are slowly stripped of them, and rendered powerless to prevent it because their rights were not asserted from the start.  To allow this to either our representatives, or to nine (really less than nine) unelected men and women who are not in any way accountable for such extrajudicial activity is completely contrary to the idea of limited government on which this nation was founded, and encourages those who seek power, those of malicious intent, and those who are jealous of individual liberty, and the disparate impact that results from people being free to make their own choices about how they live, to subvert this founding principle at every opportunity.  Ultimately, it isn’t about safety, it is about control.

This is why despite having an entire Federal agency, with what would be an awesome name for a store, devoted to enforcing the infringements on the Second Amendment that previous generations mistakenly permitted, we still have crimes committed  with guns in this country.  It is why despite the fact that we have hundreds of laws criminalizing the ownership of certain firearms, and relating to the transfer, and use of firearms in crimes, crimes are still committed with guns in this country.  It is why, despite clear evidence of many of these crimes being broken in a manner that reveals itself to these Federal minders who are so empowered for our “safety” and “security” that the prosecution for these violations is shockingly, dare I say criminally low.  Against this stew of contradictions, and the constant drumbeat for more laws that the Federal government is still specifically prohibited from engaging in in the first place, one can only conclude that this drive is about control, and the ability to, through selective enforcement, prosecute certain people for engaging in activities that by the letter and the spirit of the organic law of this nation, remains, and always has been perfectly legal.

We need to say “NO!”  “HELL NO!”, and “ABSOLUTELY NOT!” until our self-appointed betters either come by the power they keep trying to assume for themselves honestly, by amending the bylaws, so that EVERYONE gets a say in the process, or until they get the message.

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Damn That Constitution!

Gun-fearing wussies and overbearing government control freaks continue to see an asterisk where none exists, in a determined effort to make the Constitution their own personal stumbling block like the living stone Peter wrote about in the second chapter of his first epistle.

First, we have New Jersey Police and CPS officials who executed a late-night, warrantless raid on the home of Shawn Moore, an NRA-Certified firearms instructor and range safety officer, who also teaches hunter education courses for the state of New Jersey this past Saturday night.   What could warrant such extraordinary action?  He posted a picture of his 11-year-old son, posing with a .22 caliber hunting rifle on Facebook.  His son has a New Jersey hunting license.  The authority’s excuse for trampling on Mr. Moore’s Fourth Amendment rights was an anonymous call to CPS as a result of the photo.  Apparently this was such a great indicator of child abuse that it caused the authorities to run out on a Saturday night to conduct this raid in such a hurry, that they forgot to get a warrant!  Thankfully, Mr. Moore’s attorney didn’t forget about the Fourth Amendment, and when the authorities demanded to get inside Mr. Moore’s gun safe “to see if all his weapons were properly registered” (registration isn’t required in New Jersey), Mr. Moore’s attorney reminded them that if they didn’t have a warrant, they could go pound sand.  The authorities were undeterred, attempting their typical “if you don’t cooperate with us, it looks suspicious” coercion, but Mr. Moore was having none of it.  It is reported that the Moores are considering suing the authorities.  I suggest a Section 1983 Civil Rights suit…the kind that carries personal liability for the offenders.  It’s well-past time to send a message to these people that they do not get to intimidate and harass law-abiding citizens who are simply exercising their rights.

Second is this “opinion” piece from the Los Angeles Times posted on Facebook by my friend and fellow patriot, Gary Graham.  It contains the same tired leftist lily-guilding casting people who believe that rights worth having are rights worth defending as “belligerently ignorant” and “filled with intractable hatred”, despite the fact that people who spout such nonsense in attempts to infringe or restrict the legitimate Constitutional rights of others are the ones most often proving themselves “belligerently ignorant” and so full of hate for others who engage in activity that they do not approve of…a trait so serendipitously displayed by this line from the story:

What can be done to reverse this tide of belligerent ignorance? Not much. The typical patriot acts within his free-speech and 2nd Amendment rights, and in fact most patriot activity consists of venting steam by meeting with like-minded Neanderthals and firing off blog posts threatening civil war. Yet such blather tends to get under the skin of the Timothy McVeighs of the world. These groups should be closely monitored, with resources adequate to the task, even if it means shifting some homeland security money from the hunt for foreign terrorists.

The contempt they have for the document drips off of the statement I bolded there.  And the bit about “getting under the skin of the Timothy McVeighs of the world” strikes me as a dangerous and determined flirtation with irony poisoning, considering that they are the local paper for an industry that makes its money from peddling all manner of violence, with firearms and without, and studiously deflecting any suggestion that its product might in some way contribute to the senseless violence that some claim is epidemic in our society.  But again, to the minds of these rocket surgeons, this is but another problem to be solved by an expansion of domestic government surveillance, because everyone knows that the way to save a free society is to curtail its freedoms whenever possible.

Some days, there is NEVER enough facepalm for the inconsistencies and illogical pontificating that pass for thinking.  Ambassador Soval would certainly raise an eyebrow.

 

 

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Appropos of Nothing…

Sometimes, I look at what posts are being read, and re-read them myself.

I did that today with this post, and came across this comment:

That is a serious question – would we as a nation, right now, recognize an honorable politician if we met one – a leader who might be accepted by all of the people as an honorable man or woman? Would it even be possible, in this age of attack advertising and hyperpartisanship, to see integrity when it is in front of us? It would be ironic, would it not, if Diogenes found the honest man but didn’t realize he had done so?

Sadly, Hippieprof passed away before the last election, but in reviewing his remarks, I’m not sure he would have truly understood that, much to all our detriment, his question was answered.

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