>>America will be like any Eastern European bloc country of the 1960’s; dictatorship with no freedom. Christians and Jews will be screwed.
Posted on 05/15/2008 1:41:20 PM PDT by RWR8189
One of the wisest American former officials I know asked me a few nights ago: “Michael, put on your thinking cap, and tell me where the United States will be four years from now, if Barack Obama is president.”
I had been trying to avoid that question in my own mind. I have tried to tell myself the old proverb (told me by my father), “God takes care of children, drunks, and the United States of America.” I have tried to imagine that Obama will not be president.
But I should try to do the responsible thing: follow the trail from Obama’s announced principles and policies to their probable effects, based on how we have learned that the world actually works.
The number one issue, orders of magnitude greater than others, is what will happen in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other sources of worldwide terrorism — suicide bombers, haters of Israel, and would-be destroyers of the United States and her allies. What will happen in Iraq? What will happen in Iran? What will happen in Pakistan?
Our Democratic party ever since George McGovern’s candidacy in 1972 has wished and wished, like an undisciplined child, for a benevolent world of peace, in which we could “talk to” and “reason with” those leaders whom earlier administrations had learned they could neither trust nor deal with as rational, benevolent partners. Earlier administrations had also hoped that other leaders of nations respected us, and meant us well. Events like the bombing of the World Trade Center, the attack on the USS Cole, and September 11, 2001, plus the subsequent fury and irrational cruelty of jihadists around the world, disillusioned them. But not, apparently, Obama; nor many members of the left-wing generation he represents.
The partisans of the welfare state demand peace, in order to pay for its insatiable need to keep handing out more and more benefits. That is why left-wing statists take peace as their natural inheritance. They cannot go on without it. They do not intend to pay any price for it; there are no funds left for that.
Given the historical record of the last 200 years (and more), what can we expect from this nursery-room fantasy? An untypical, even unprecedented era of peace? Or, on the contrary, the salivating determination of enemies to celebrate our visible moral weakness, and to slay their hated enemy while we bow our heads, standing there as weak and frightened supplicants? When a head is lowered from weakness, they strike it off.
In my experience, unwillingness to fight earns one contempt, further furies of terror, and truly bitter war. But perhaps other observers trust human nature more than I.
If the United States shows signs of weakness, surrender, and a one-sided departure from Iraq, the rejoicing of those who predicted that they would in the end defeat us will profoundly strengthen their resolve for the next battle. Further, without an offensive thrust in Iraq, any military forts or airfields of ours would be sheltered in a defensive enclave — announcing to those who hate us that they should keep killing two or more Americans every day, drip, drip, drip, until the American people cannot stand it any more. Weakness once shown invites fiercer aggression.
Iran will thus have its nuclear weapon by 2012, secure in the knowledge that Americans have no heart to do battle to prevent it.
In Pakistan, forces of economic and political development will know that they can no longer count on the Americans as a last resort. They would soon — to save their families — begin to yield more and more space to jihadists, terrorists, and promoters of sharia law. Free nations by 2016 will be far weaker than now, with far less space in which to alter the direction of terrorism.
Domestic Policy
Meanwhile, if Obama keeps his pledge to raise taxes on the top 10 percent of income earners (or even on the top 2 percent), he will give them enormous incentives to alter their behavior, so as to show lower income. Since the top 1 percent of earners pay over 35 percent of all income taxes paid by all Americans, any decline in their income means a steep decline in tax revenues. Obama seems to have no comprehension that raising tax rates at the top dramatically lowers revenue coming in. He will learn the hard way.
His policies on quasi-universal health care will change all the incentives in our current health system — and for the worse. Studies show that a high proportion of demands for health care are the result of personal behaviors — eating or drinking too much, not exercising enough, leading a dissipated life, not taking advantage of preventive care, spending health dollars heedlessly (because they are paid by the State, not the responsible individual).
Many older doctors will leave medical practice rather than become employees of the State, constantly regulated, badgered, and demeaned. The idea of medicine as a proud, independent, inventive profession will be profoundly wounded. In hospitals, paying benefits for patients (even if they practice irresponsible behaviors) will demand ever more dollars, which must necessarily be pulled out of research and invention. Long bureaucratic lists of those needing particular operations will force even the neediest patients to wait long months before they can get care.
Neither Obama nor his party seems to understand how incentives motivate human behavior — not force, not coercion, not mockery, not nursery-school regulation, but real possibilities of good fruits up ahead for free and responsible actions. They do not understand the wellsprings of a virtuous, free, and prosperous society. They are still entangled in the fantasies of the European Left of 150 years ago.
Thus, Obama is now the creature and the prisoner of the American far Left, which has learned nothing from the failures of socialist and statist and anti-capitalist ideas during the past hundred years. Many leftists learn nothing, know nothing, and propel themselves not with practical wisdom, but with outrage and contempt and a desire to punish those who do not agree with them.
My friend himself thought, he finally revealed, that the West has come to an epochal axial point in history. From now on, economic and political progress would grow far less quickly than ever before, and a long-lasting, precipitous decline is about to begin. Overseas, and also at home.
Morally, too, virtue and character and responsibility for oneself would be mocked and discouraged. The State would take over more and more of life. Although licentiousness would be glorified on big screen and small screen (the Democrats favor the Hollywood view of the world, and vice versa), neither self-directed liberty nor self-mastery nor responsibility for the consequences of one’s own behavior would be encouraged. These would be treated as retrograde ideas. All virtue would be attributed to the motherly caring State — and to its political managers. Woe to the “right-wing” dissenters!
Well, maybe I am wrong. But that is how I see things, admittedly through a cloudy glass.
My only two suppositions are (1) that Obama will do exactly what he now says he will do; and (2) that we may dimly discern the consequences likely to flow from his words and actions, based upon what we have seen happen in other decades and other generations.
My most hopeful moments derive from imagining that Obama, as president, will be dissuaded from acting as he now says that he will. In that way, God will once again take care of those who are drunk on statist illusions, and He will once again take care of the United States, despite itself. It is when I take Obama at his word that pessimism floods over my heart.
— Michael Novak is the winner of the 1994 Templeton Prize for progress in religion and the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Novak's own website is www.michaelnovak.net.
America will be like any Eastern European bloc country of the 1960’s; dictatorship with no freedom. Christians and Jews will be screwed.
Mr. Obama your choices are dishonor or war. You chose dishonor. And you will have war...
I wish it was enough to merely make the easy case against Obama.
Remember, to vote for his opponent is to vote for a Kennedy-Republican. McCain’s record is largely liberal. I know about his 80% ACU rating, that’s not what I’m taking about (still, 80% is low), I’m talking about McCain’s entire political career being based on selling-out conservatives to the Left.
I have a long memory: Keating, gang of 14, McCain/Feingold, Amnesty...I want him to explain these failings.
Part of white written applies John McCain. The part about not fighting. McCain doesn’t want to fight with Democrats over policy.
Stalin’s definition of peace was when there is no resistance to Socialism, well McCain will give them what they want PEACE.
All three are a very bad choice for America.
BTTT!
In understand that you view 80% as to low using the ACU rating system, but where do you think Obama ranks on the ACU rating system. I would hypothesize he would rate about 0. While I think Ronald Reagan was the greatest embodiment of conservative principles, we don’t have a Reagan running. So for the the good of God and Country, I will vote for McCain and encourage other conservative minded folks (moderate/right of center, social conservatives, foreign policy conservatives, economic conservatives, movement conservatives, etc, etc,) to do the same.
Regards
IIRC Bambi's rating is 8 or 9. Definitely in the single digits and so is Hillary.
The lesser of two evils? Yes, McCain qualifies. Where does that put conservatives vis-a-vis the Republican party...I believe it gives us a second liberal party.
We went through this once before in 1964...Nelson Rockefeller was a liberal Democrat calling himself a Republican...Goldwater was...Goldwater.
Been there, done that.
That would make a great campaign ad.
You may be right about other things but that is really digging, in that McCain was included in Keating group because he was a republican. That's the way they did business when they were in charge.
This guy really scares me. So much rhetoric and not a shred of credible substance.
I’m not afraid to say - if this guy wasn’t black he would have been a bit part player in this election and everybody knows it.
Affirmative action is bad enough as it is, but for it to put a man into the position of the most powerful man in the world is ludicrous.
Vote for values and substance - something Obama is completely lacking in.
If he had been a man like MLK, who had achieved something and actually had a history of sorts, he’d avoid this criticism altogether.
For a sneak peek, rent this movie.
Eyeopening it is.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Obama is the black Jimmuh Carter, and if he wins, he’s going have a similar presidency: trying to get crazy liberal legislation across, bungling the heck out of the job so bad he can’t even keep his party behind him, and getting voted out in 2012.
People said the same thing after Carter’s election. And look what happened next — the Reagan Revolution.
America is a conservative nation at heart. It just has a habit of periodically falling for liberal claptrap, believing you can get something for nothing. It always goes back to its roots after experiencing what liberal rule leads to.
Well, lets be honest, I think Bush 2 is going to be the Republican’s “Jimmy Carter”. I voted for him twice (and would vote for him again vs. Gore and Kerry), as Bush was and is still the lesser of those two evils. But let’s be honest, Bush vs. Kerry in 2008, Bush does not win.
I don’t think McCain is a Rockefeller Repubilican. In fact, when you get down to it, Bush 1 and Bush 2 are more tied to that North East Corporate and Wall Street Republican Establishment or as Pat Buchanan describes as the “K-Street Fat Cats”.
McCain, for all his faults, is a Naval Academy grad, served in the Milatary, and thus on the issue of supporting and understanding the milatary (one of my personal core conservative principles), he past that tests. He has NARAL rating as one of the most anti-Abortion U.S. Senators, so on that test (and as a Pro-Life Catholic, this is one my personal conservative core issues), he past that test.
McCain has stated that he would appoint Supreme Court Justices in the Judicial Traditon of the late William Rehnquist, John Roberts, etc, which is also one of my core conservative principles (i.e. Originalist/Constructionist Judges).
Now, do I agree with everything McCain does? No, but I agree with nothing that Obama stands for.
Given the points I have cited above, I will gladly vote for McCain this fall as an Obama Presidency gives the George Soros Move on crowd the ability to influence the courts for the next four years.
Regards
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