Posted on 10/25/2008 8:49:23 AM PDT by Mr. Blonde
Across the electric wires, the hum is ceaseless: Give it up, loser. Don’t go down with the ship when it’s swept away by the Obama tsunami. According to newspaper reports, polls show that most people believe newspaper reports claiming that most people believe polls showing that most people have read newspaper reports agreeing that polls show he’s going to win.
In the words of Publishers’ Clearing House, he may already have won! The battleground states have all turned blue, the reddest of red states are rapidly purpling. Don’t you know, little fool? You never can win. Use your mentality, wake up to reality. Why be the last right-wing pundit to sign up with Small-Government Conservatives For The Liberal Supermajority? We still need pages for the coronation, and there’s a pair of velvet knickerbockers with your name on it.
Yes, technically, this is still a two-party state, but one of the parties is like Elton John’s post-Oscar bash and the other is a church social in Wasilla. As David Sedaris put it in The New Yorker:
“I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. ‘Can I interest you in the chicken?’ she asks. ‘Or would you prefer the platter of s—t with bits of broken glass in it?’
“To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.”
Well, to be honest, I’ve never much cared for chicken.
McCain vs Obama is not the choice many of us would have liked in an ideal world. But then it’s not an “ideal world”, and the belief that it can be made so is one of the things that separates those who think Obama will “heal the planet” and those of us who support McCain faute de mieux. I agree with Thomas Sowell that an Obama-Pelosi supermajority will mark what he calls “a point of no return”. It would not be, as some naysayers scoff, “Jimmy Carter’s second term”, but something far more transformative. The new president would front the fourth great wave of liberal annexation — the first being FDR’s New Deal, the second LBJ’s Great Society, and the third the incremental but remorseless cultural advance when Reagan conservatives began winning victories at the ballot box and liberals turned their attention to the other levers of the society, from grade school up. The terrorist educator William Ayers, Obama’s patron in Chicago, is an exemplar of the last model: forty years ago, he was in favor of blowing up public buildings; then he figured out it was easier to get inside and undermine them from within.
All three liberal waves have transformed American expectations of the state. The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it. Why can’t the government sort out my health care? Why can’t they pick up my mortgage?
In his first inaugural address, Calvin Coolidge said: “I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people.” That’s true in a more profound sense than he could have foreseen. In Europe, lavish social-democratic government has transformed citizens into eternal wards of the nanny state: the bureaucracy’s assumption of every adult responsibility has severed Continentals from the most basic survival impulse, to the point where unaffordable entitlements on shriveled birth rates have put a question mark over some of the oldest nation states on earth. A vote for an Obama-Pelosi-Barney Frank-ACORN supermajority is a vote for a Europeanized domestic policy that is, as the eco-types like to say, “unsustainable”.
More to the point, the only reason why Belgium has gotten away with being Belgium and Sweden Sweden and Germany Germany this long is because America’s America. The soft comfortable cocoon in which western Europe has dozed this last half-century is girded by cold hard American power. What happens when the last serious western nation votes for the same soothing beguiling siren song as its enervated allies?
“People of the world,” declared Senator Obama sonorously at his self-worship service in Germany, “look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”
No, sorry. History proved no such thing. In the Cold War, the world did not stand as one. One half of Europe was a prison, and in the other half far too many people — the Barack Obamas of the day — were happy to go along with that division in perpetuity. And the wall came down not because “the world stood as one” but because a few courageous people stood against the conventional wisdom of the day. Had Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan been like Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterand and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter, the Soviet empire (notwithstanding its own incompetence) would have survived and the wall would still be standing. Senator Obama’s feeble passivity will get you a big round of applause precisely because it’s the easy option: Do nothing but hold hands and sing the easy listening anthems of one-worldism, and the planet will heal.
To govern is to choose. And sometimes the choices are tough ones. When has Barack Obama chosen to take a stand? When he got along to get along with the Chicago machine? When he sat for 20 years in the pews of an ugly neo-segregationist race-baiting grievance-monger? When he voted to deny the surviving “fetuses” of botched abortions medical treatment? When in his short time in national politics he racked up the most liberal – ie, the most doctrinaire, the most orthodox, the most reflex — voting record in the Senate? Or when, on those many occasions the questions got complex and required a choice, he dodged it and voted merely “present”?
The world rarely stands as one. You can, as Reagan and Thatcher did, stand up. Or, like Obama voting “present”, you can stand down.
Nobody denies that, in promoting himself from “community organizer” to the world’s President-designate in nothing flat, he has shown an amazing and impressively ruthless single-mindedness. But the path of personal glory has been, in terms of policy and philosophy, the path of least resistance.
Peggy Noonan thinks a President Obama will be like the dog who chases the car and finally catches it: Now what? I think Obama will be content to be King Barack the Benign, Spreader of Wealth and Healer of Planets. His rise is, in many ways, testament to the persistence of the monarchical urge even in a two-century old republic. So the “Now what?” questions will be answered by others, beginning with the liberal supermajority in Congress. And as he has done all his life he will take the path of least resistance. An Obama Administration will pitch America toward EU domestic policy and UN foreign policy. Thomas Sowell is right: It would be a “point of no return”, the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America. For a vigilant republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens, it would be a Declaration of Dependence.
If a majority of Americans want that, we holdouts must respect their choice. But, if you don’t want it, vote accordingly.
I also wonder about his trademark” the “O” filled with the flag motif, which is on the floor, and the rising sun, which is the symbol of China.
Besides, what other candidates actually have a logo?
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
However, I'm not sure about this:
And the wall came down not because “the world stood as one” but because a few courageous people stood against the conventional wisdom of the day.
To God be the glory! or was it a curse? It seems like we are more like the Communist East now than they are like us.
We will be ripe for a radical islamic take-over. Steyn is one of my favorites ..perhaps he will follow up with the consequences of America’s surrender to global consensus.
I have a healthy man-crush on Steyn.
When we re-establish the Republic after the Obamatards and their RINO pets finally finish destroying it, I am nominating Steyn for Secretary of Logic and Persuasion.
For the first time ever, I disagree with Mark Steyn.
We holdouts may have to live with their choice; but I will never respect it.
bill ayres was on BOR last night wearing a t-shirt with a big red star also.
These guys are trying to dupe the American people...all in plain sight!!!!
I really wish he were US-born. Talk about someone who could win in a landslide. Being right and funny at the same time can be very hard to pull off. He does it with ease.
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Steyn is on target once again.
I tend to agree more with Dr. Sowell's assessment of a "point of no return".
America is currently on a path to destruction. With Obama and a RAT super-majority in the Congress, it will be full speed ahead.
Once they gain full control, they will pass laws to ensure they never lose power again. I'm not sure how they can be stopped once it reaches that point.
“If a majority of Americans want that, we holdouts must respect their choice.”
Not if, in the proccess of doing whatever it is they want to do, they toss the Constitution into the trash.
Perhaps a closer analogy would be the fiasco of the 2000 election. The news media were broadcasting that some polls were closed, that Gore had won, so why bother going? Personally, I think they should have been prosecuted. They were not reporting, they were attempting to fix an election.
“People of the world,” declared Senator Obama sonorously at his self-worship service in Germany, “look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”
I'll go with Reagan and Thatcher. There is a distinct difference between being a cheerleader or a real leader.
The end of the republic. America will no longer be the country founded by our forefathers, and will no longer lay claim to a constitutional government. Freedom will have been surrendered for security. The last vestige that will be ripped to shreds by an Obama led America will be to do away entirely with elections, and replace them with a sham exercise, like Cuba. This may already have been done.
And Obama's buddy Bill Ayers, a self-described "small-c communist," flaunts his red-star pin as a fashion accessory.
From a 12/9/2002 NYT story about his son (adopted with consent of his biological jailed domestic terrorist parents):
"A red-star revolutionary pin on his jacket, his Weatherman tattoo (and 17 others) hidden from sight, Mr. Ayers smiled as he watched his adopted son, fresh from his Rhodes interview, in the suit that Ms. Dohrn had helped pick."
And most recently he sports the red star pin on his shirt, in a video of this week's O'Reilly's talking points segment (in which a young Fox reporter does an excellent job of politely harassing a domestic terrorist who repeatedly bombed police stations, who now, in monumental irony, calls the police to protect from the dreaded Fox News boogeyman.)
Very true. A financially decimated USA is going to be an awfully inviting target to our enemies.
I have zero confidence that Obama would deal appropriately with the threat. My guess is he would surrender without a shot ever being fired.
Send out mass e-mail messages with this attached!!!!
ayres and obama are probably laughing at how easily they’re duping the American people!!!!
For a vigilant republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens, it [Obama's election] would be a Declaration of Dependence.
My only, teeny, issue is where he writes...I think Obama will be content to be King Barack the Benign, Spreader of Wealth and Healer of Planets.
I hope to heck I'm wrong, but I worry that Marxist Obama's handlers won't be content with anything less than King Obama the MALIGNANT, confiscator of property, wealth, and Constitutional rights.
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A fabulous piece by Mark Steyn, except for that last bit. If a majority of Americans want socialism, I may acknowledge their right to choose it. But I will never, not ever respect their choice.
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