Point of No Return (Mark Steyn)

NRO ^ | Oct. 25, 2008 | Mark Steyn

[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.

[Fishrrman]

“If a majority of Americans want that, we holdouts must respect their choice. But, if you don’t want it, vote accordingly.”

Perhaps the time has come to realize that perhaps the majority of Americans _do_ “want that”.

However, I will never respect them or their choice, and will “vote accordingly” so long as I still have the opportunity to do so.

One wonders how long before “the majority of Americans” surrender that, too.

- John

[Tench_Coxe]

"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. "

At the risk of some fool invoking Godwin's Law....when the Wehrmacht invaded Yugoslavia, the takeover was quick. Over the course of the next 3 years, more and more manpower and resources were required to protect the supply lines into Greece and the Eastern front (short article here: Yugoslavia During WWII )

Difference here is: when the power bases of the Democrats are isolated from 'flyover country', where are the supermarkets going to get their food from?

[livius]

I agree with Thomas Sowell that an Obama-Pelosi supermajority will mark what he calls “a point of no return”.

I disagree with Steyn, however, on Obama being a sort of benign dispenser of goodies. Obama is an evil and vicious person - as his unguarded photos and statements reveal - and will start making his enemies pay once he is in the White House.

That said, Obama is not the author of his own lunacy - unlike Hitler, who actually wrote all his crazy words himself - but is a willing pawn of people smarter than he is. These would include Bill Ayers, his wife Bernardine Dohrn, and a number of white left wingers who are manipulating him and using the black shock troops to carry out their will.

Barry is a sociopath, basically a shape-shifting personality, who is being used as the ultimate vehicle by 1960's radicals. They waited, they were forgiven by the US, and they used this forgiveness to regroup and redirect their efforts through the channels of foundations and identity politics. And they are now just on the edge of seizing what they have wanted for more than 40 years, control of the US.

I think Obama is a nasty, malicious person, and his wife is even worse. She'll be the Madame Dufarge in this purge. But her husband is weak and a sociopath, which means that he will do whatever he thinks is necessary to be accepted by a group and receive the benefits of this. He's not the mastermind, in other words. But it won't matter one way or the other once he and his cronies have control of the US government and the military.

[Americanexpat]

My country sent me half way across the world to fight and kill communists,now the sorry bastards want to put one in the white house.

[nathanbedford]

Marc Stein is a very gifted writer and a perceptive one as well so it is not to denigrate his effort to say that he has put a happy face on the potential Obama administration. He has left out a description of what the more sinister side of Obama might lead to.

Beyond our economic future, beyond the defense of the Republic, we might very well be confronted with the subversion of our precious constitutional liberties. We are all aware of the assault on free speech already committed by the Obama campaign including chilling announcements by prosecutors in Missouri, under orders from the Obama campaign, that they would prosecute anyone who falsified Obama's record. We know what Obamaniacs, only one step removed from the campaign itself, have done in trying to intimidate Chicago radio station. We know that the campaign has protested vehemently to a local television station in Florida because of a tough interview with Joe Biden. The Democrat party is already stated that it will attempt to reinstate the fairness doctrine which would take free speech off the airwaves, at the least free conservative speech -they will no doubt leave untouched the drip, drip of liberalism which we all are only too aware of on National Public Radio. The Democrats also intend to set up community "Soviets" Judge talk radio. The second amendment is also under threat despite Obama's protestations to the contrary. His record must make all who take the second amendment seriously very uneasy. There are intimations that the Obama administration will criminalize politics and undertake to prosecute members of the Bush administration for war crimes etc. This list is not meant to be exhaustive.

There is another sinister virus which might erupt from somewhere deep in the spinal cord of the Obama administration. Depending on how far left Obama really is, depending on how dedicated he is to the destruction of the United States as an effective nationstate and as a bulwark against pan nationalism represented by the United Nations, we might very well see the undermining of American sovereignty through a series of treaties which not only restrict domestic constitutional liberties but also severely curtail the sovereign independence of the nation. These will probably include treaties about global warming, international finance now that we are in the throes of an international financial crisis, arms control, and a world tax to fund the United Nations and to wage international wars on poverty. We might well see the explicit submission of American jurisprudence to international courts not limited to international crimes, human rights violations, but to all manner of justicible controversies. Again, this list is not meant to be exhaustive.

Finally, and perhaps most sinister of all, we may well be confronted with a cult of personality. We have already seen the first evidences of this with the singing children and the quasi military youngsters in the karate hall chanting for Obama. Obama has simply failed to repudiate any of this cult of personality. He has not been called the Messiah for nothing, such an appellation comes not from the man's modesty. Couple that with Obama's stated intention to have comprehensive national service and you have the levers with which a despot can begin to build a tyranny. Tell me again how Hugo Chavez got his start.

There is a hidden sinister face to the happy face of Barak Obama.

[yazoo]

He points out the biggest fear anyone should have. If Obama makes over half the voters dependent there will be no end to the take from the wealthy and give to everyone else. The poorer we get the more the unwashed will demand the government give them more. It ends with chaos.

[Islander7]

IGNORE THE POLLS!

Go VOTE!

Turn out is the key to victory!

Get off the couch, turn off the computer, take action!

Volunteer For Victory!

The Future of the Republic is at risk!

It is up to us, the people, to stop the leftist take over of America.

Are you willing to do your part?

[FlyVet]

I don't remember seeing that red star logo before, so I wonder if it is now unveiled because the Dems believe they've got this all wrapped up, and don't need to hide it any more. Obama ZEN?

If he wins, it's a sign this country doesn't want to live any more. I expect the attack on the 2nd Amendment will be one of the first things on the agenda.

[FlyVet]

I expect to see a huge increase in immigration from Islamic countries. In the spirit of unity (appeasement), of course.

It's working so well in Europe, why not here?

[Guenevere]

bttt

[jackv]

Check out his store. It is all in plain sight!!! Absolutely amazing!!!

http://www.democratnationalcommittee.com/candidates/barack_obama.htm?gclid=COTRgvrYwpYCFQykagodZj8FygtAmericans

[uncbob]

My country sent me half way across the world to fight and kill communists,now the sorry bastards want to put one in the white house.

And that is what is so damn infuriating

[brydic1]

The conservative has only to blame the GOP for what is coming. These pseudo conservatives have betrayed the cause of individualism, free enterprise, and limited government when they joined forces with the leftists in voting for countless new and expanded government programs costing trillions of dollars. Like democrats their only principles were preserving their power whatever the cost hoping that that they could postpone the inevitable until they would be dead or retired at taxpayer expense. I can not blame the politically unwashed who having seen the mess the GOP has made in governing of this country will surely be voting for any kind change. Hell, they would vote for Hitler or Stalin (the GOP president is less popular than the Unibomber) if that was the alternative to the republicans that have misgoverned this country in the past 8 years. Corruption, mismanagement, ineptness, and inarticulateness, thy name is the GOP.

While I will be voting for this incompetent GOP in November because I do not want to be a party to the destruction that is coming, millions of Americans simply see the financial destruction, the mismanaged war and total lack of leadership and will think no further than throw these bums out. I also would like to take this opportunity to chastise those GOP and Bush apologists that continued to support these witless people no matter their failures and ineptness. It is possible that had true conservatives rose up and truly censored those elected republicans in 2004 thru 2008, they could have succeeded bringing such pressure that they would have turned from the leftist socialist agenda.

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

Great piece by the always important-to-read Steyn, though I’d disagree with him in a few places. The first third is as spot-on as it’s possible to get.

I have complete confidence that an Obama presidency and a Dem supermajority in Congress would be the beginning of a radical, communistic and largely unstoppable shift in virtually all aspects of life in America. And I think we would far overshoot the status of “benign” socialistic states of Europe, thinking about Scandinavia/Belgium. No, we’d go much more towards the nightmare British model of endless suffocating regulation, overbearing bureaucracy, enforced in law by an activist judicial elite and in practice by shadowy administrations and bureaucracies without end. It would be themed as a hit-the-ground-running Dem revolt away from business and commerce and all the way into “people power” and cradle to grave socialism. It’s frankly completely nauseating to me.

But I have to say that the shredding of the Constitution and enlargement of government enacted by the Bush administration will be nothing if not the standard by which these s**theads measure their legislative performance going forward. I hope to God Americans wake up and think again about what they are about to inflict upon themselves if they vote these liars and scumbags into office.

[PowerPro]

Declaration of Dependence. How frighteningly appropriate.

[Cap Huff]

“Steyn is on target once again.”

Steyn also knows what it is like to be a target.

One hopes that he and others like him don’t have to go through that again in the future.

[denydenydeny]

His rise is, in many ways, testament to the persistence of the monarchical urge even in a two-century old republic.

If this only fit, I'd have a new tagline.

[A_perfect_lady]

Dayum! There are so many good quotes in this, I don't know where to start. I feel like the squirrel in Ice Age 2 when he goes to heaven and there are acorns all over the place.

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?

So good. "Declaration of Dependence." So true. I love this guy.

[Mr. Blonde]

Declaration of Dependence is one of the best ways to describe what an Obama presidency is. It amazes me that no one has said it before, but it is fitting that Steyn is the one who does say it.

[scory]

The question I have is this: If the worst case scenario or something very close to it comes about then what are we going to do about it? If the deck is stacked in such a way as to muzzle political opposition, rig the electoral process to ensure that the majority party cannot be defeated and the government has assumed effective control of finance, education and health care what options are left to try and put things right?

In my mind this is starting to become a real concern and not the stuff paranoid daydreams. And I hate that this is happening.