OBAMA IS A MARXIST IDEOLOGUE
Posted on 10/23/2009 9:45:09 AM PDT by markomalley
This past week showed us why modern liberalism poses such a grave threat to the United States of America as we know it.
It's not because liberals want a strong, secure social safety net for the poorer among us. The truth is, we should have a strong, secure social safety net for the poor, and we should end corporate welfare to help pay for it.
No, it's not that.
It's not because they want peace and love. Don't we all? So hail to Peter, Paul and Mary, I swear it's not too late.
No, it's not that.
It's not because they want to tax-and-spend us to death. They do, but the conservatives, at least those of the George W. Bush ilk, want to borrow-and-spend us to death, so we're screwed coming and going on that count.
It's not even because they like to eat lentils and tofu (which has been linked by Oxford University researchers to increased memory loss and Alzheimer's, by the way) in restaurants with hippie names like Beans & Barley and shop in grocery stores called Whole Foods.
No, it's not any of that.
Rather, liberals pose such a grave threat because not only do they want to live in their peculiar little sandal-laden worlds, they want the rest of us to live there, too.
It's not enough that they want to use politically correct language; we have to speak that way, too. It's not enough that they want to pervert their immune systems by over-vaccinating; they want us to shoot up, too. It's not enough that they quit smoking (or never started); they want to force us to quit, too, and they have pretty much succeeded.
For all the good things liberals have done - let's be honest now, in the old days, they did make solid contributions to this nation, including the building of a manufacturing-based middle class - their big character flaw, their hamartia, if you will, is the totalitarian tendencies that always seem to stew right beneath the surface of their thinking.
It might seem incongruous to utter 'liberal' and 'totalitarian' in the same sentence, but the terms are philosophically compatible only because modern liberals are, well, no longer liberals.
Classical liberalism was, of course, a product of the Age of Enlightenment and was associated with individual liberty. Those liberals, the real liberals, believed individual rights predated the state and government existed only as a mechanism to protect those rights, which included private property and individual autonomy.
Thomas Jefferson was a liberal. He challenged the proclaimed rights of royalty and the powerful chieftains of the established religions of his day. In foreign policy, he believed in noninterventionism. He believed all rights were inherent in the people.
But President Jefferson would not be called a liberal today. He believed strongly in the right of the people to bear arms ("Let your gun, therefore, be the constant companion of your walks"). He disliked big government ("Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread").
Today, Thomas Jefferson would be called a conservative, or, more likely, a libertarian. He wouldn't have much in common with President Barack Obama.
So where did today's modern liberals come from?
I have been told they were deposited in pods in Area 51 by aliens from a different galaxy, and now reproduce spontaneously. That seems to make sense, because when you meet them they do not seem to be from this planet and the species never seems to go away, no matter how unpopular they are.
But, no, upon further research, I believe the term truly began to morph in meaning during the early part of this century, accelerated in the 1930s, and became complete with the rise of the more affluent wine-and-cheese New Left crowd in the 1960s.
Liberals came to be identified with social welfare policies, the redistribution of wealth, and government regulation. In truth, the New Left liberals were more socialist in their thinking than previous generations.
That is to say, their philosophical underpinnings sprang more from the camp of social democracy than from classical liberalism - individuals don't uplift individuals, the entire collective of people, their will expressed through their government, uplifts individuals.
To modern liberals, then, individuals thrive not in a free marketplace of ideas, goods, and services but in a world where a collective enterprise takes care of them.
This requires sacrifices, of course, and so the totalitarian impulse emerges. To protect individuals, the government might have to take away individual rights. To make you safe, they might have to take away your guns. To protect 'tolerance,' the government might not tolerate some forms of speech.
And that's exactly where we are. This past week, President Obama's administration declared that we, as a nation, simply can no longer tolerate a certain form of speech: Fox News.
By now everyone must be aware of the administration's efforts to effectively shut down the opposition press. Mr. Obama is not only boycotting the network; his administration has not only launched a public relations propaganda campaign against it; but it has effectively tried to get the other major networks to boot Fox from the White House press pool.
In a truly free society, in a truly liberal society, this cannot and must not stand.
The administration is being hypocritical, of course. It proclaims Fox to be opinion journalism, but so what? What is wrong with healthy debate? Fox no more engages in opinion journalism than MSNBC, with Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann, and yet we hear not a peep of criticism of them from the Obama team.
For all of this, Mr. Obama has been compared to Richard Nixon and his famous Enemies List, which included not only individual journalists like Mary McGrory and Daniel Schorr, but the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Sound familiar? America, meet your president, the new Richard Nixon. He's come back from the dead.
That's unfortunately just the tip of the iceberg. I think veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas said it best when she said the behavior of this administration was actually worse than that of Nixon's.
She's right and not only because of the surface issue. Fox News will survive, thank you, and thrive to boot. Its ratings have already shot up about 20 percent since Mr. Obama was inaugurated, and now, thanks to the president, they are bound to soar.
The problem isn't so much this particular turf war as what the battle is reflective of - a deep disliking inside the White House of democratic principles and of a free press. The fight with Fox is nothing less than a symbolic declaration of war against the entire notion of free speech.
The administration has already launched a significant offensive against free speech. Among other things, Mr. Obama has backed away from supporting a federal shield law for reporters.
Worse still, he has installed in the White House a true opponent of free speech, Cass R. Sunstein, who has called for "reformulating" the First Amendment.
In an article, The Future of Free Speech, Mr. Sunstein made it clear he didn't like the idea of "individual" free speech very much and proposed a number of ways the government might regulate speech to make it "more deliberative."
Some positions, such as an Internet Fairness Doctrine, he has since reconsidered, but he has also proposed government subsidies for news, as dangerous an idea to a free, untethered press as you can get.
Most dangerously, and most pertinent to this discussion, Mr. Sunstein has openly questioned whether libel laws are tough enough, and he has advocated for a system that would make it easier for politicians to take commentators to court over "false rumors." His ideas would allow politicians to tie down journalists for months in court, effectively tying their hands.
It's a modern-day liberal's idea of free speech, and here's how Mr. Sunstein puts it in the aforementioned article:
"One question, which I mean to answer in the affirmative, is whether individual choices, perfectly reasonable in themselves, might produce a large set of social difficulties. ... I also mean to defend a conception of freedom, associated with the deliberative conception of democracy, and oppose it to a conception that sees consumption choices by individuals as the very embodiment of freedom."
Translated, that means Government-approved "deliberative" speech rather than individual speech.
Make no mistake about, President Obama is Mr. Sunstein's ally in this philosophy, and the behavior of this administration and his supporters in the presidential campaign was textbook Sunstein.
In September, 2008, for example, two Obama supporters - St. Louis County attorney Bob McCulloch and St. Louis City attorney Jennifer Joyce - went on the air to intimidate opposing campaigns by warning them, "we're here to respond to any character attacks, to set the record straight."
The implication was, they might might file ethics charges against anyone they decided was making false statements about Mr. Obama. The Obama campaign itself called for a criminal investigation of the American Issues Project when it ran ads highlighting Obama's ties to the 1960s radical William Ayers.
What's more, the Obama Administration has co-sponsored with Egypt an anti-free speech resolution at the United Nations, which urges nations to take action against "any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence" or "negative stereotyping of religions and racial groups."
But taking action against so-called hate speech in this country would require amending - reformulating, to use Mr. Sunstein's words - the constitution. Today, in this country, it is not against the law to negatively stereotype religions and racial groups, and it shouldn't be, for who is going to decide what speech is really hate speech deserving prosecution?
Today the enemy is Fox News. Who knows who it might be tomorrow. There is no longer any doubt: Barack Obama is a dangerous threat to free speech and thus to the constitutional underpinnings of the nation.
The ultimate problem with modern liberalism is that, in the end, there's nothing left of its original character. The totalitarian predisposition has become the disposition. Government no longer uplifts individuals; government is the individual, and wields its power for its own sake.
In a strange way, modern liberalism is even worse than European social democracy, for the latter is at least firmly grounded in democratic principle while the former is not. Modern liberalism is nothing less than a mutant gene of the democratic ideal.
With the advent of Barack Obama, the mutation is complete, and the message is clear: Put on your sandals, eat your tofu, take your vaccinations, don't talk hate about religions and races, and otherwise shut up, or we'll put you in jail.
Please Digg this piece
I Obama, Marxist
Mark for later reading.
I posted it on facebook as well.
WOW.
MFLR
Not saying anything new to most of us here, but saying it quite well. Thanks for posting - I hope it gets wide readership.
“Ending corporate welfare” is just a fuzzy-sounding code phrase for “raising corporate taxes.”
The truth is, you’ll need a strong, secure social safety net for all those people who lose their jobs at those very same corporations when you do that.
Just one more distraction from the dismantling of America by Barry Soetoro and Georgie Soros.
Right or wrong, I believe that in a free society discrimination is not a criminal action. I can't discriminate against pedophiles? How about racists? Can I discriminate against cannibals?
Come now, you are talking about people in the White House.
"It's not enough that they want to pervert their immune systems
by over-vaccinating; they want us to shoot up, too."
Vaccine May Be More Dangerous Than Swine Flu
Squalene: The Swine Flu Vaccine’s Dirty Little Secret Exposed
“Liberals” are much like the Muslims, in that their opponents, the infidels, are required to make the choice -
1) Convert and be/live like them
2) Live as their slaves
3) Die - they will use force to make us choose 1 or 2.
Only to anyone resolutely paying no attention at any point whatsoever during the past thirty, forty years or so.
Liberals can neither spell nor define totalitarianism.
Two words: lifestyle tyrants
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