Posted on 04/06/2009 8:55:07 AM PDT by Borges
I have been watching an interesting phenomenon on the right, which is beginning to cause me concern. I am referring to the over-the-top hysteria in response to the first months in office of our new president, which distinctly reminds me of the "Bush is Hitler" crowd on the left.
Conservatives, please. Let's not duplicate the manias of the left as we figure out how to deal with President Obama. He is not exactly the antichrist, although a disturbing number of people on the right are convinced he is.
I have recently received commentaries that claim that "Obama's speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in American history" and "never has a politician in this land had such a quasi-religious impact on so many people" and "Obama is a narcissist," which leads the author to then compare Obama to David Koresh, Charles Manson, Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein. Excuse me while I blow my nose.
This fellow has failed to notice that all politicians are narcissists. So what? Political egos are one of the reasons the Founders put checks and balances on executive power. As for serial lying, is there a politician that cannot be accused of that? And once, a recent president set a pretty high bar in this category, and we survived it. As for Obama's speeches, they are hardly in the Huey Long, Louis Farrakhan, Fidel Castro vein. They are in fact eloquently and cleverly centrist and sober.
So what's the panic? It is true that Obama has shown surprising ineptitude in his first months in office, but he's not a zero with no accomplishments, as many conservatives seem to think -- unless you regard beating the Clinton machine and winning the presidency as nothing. But in doing this, you fall into the "Bush-is-an-idiot" bag of liberal miasmas.
It is also true Obama has ceded his domestic economic agenda to the House Democrats and spent a lot of money in the process. But what's the surprise in this? After all, George W. Bush and John McCain both proposed (and in Bush's case pushed through) massive government giveaways (which amount to government takeovers as well). This is bad, but it doesn't make Obama a closet Mussolini, however deplorable the conservatives among us may regard it. Moreover, he has run into political resistance even within his own party. Charlie Rangel has made it clear that the itemized deduction tax hike is not going through his committee -- and that should tell you the American system is still in place.
Even as astute a conservative thinker as Mark Steyn has been swept up in the tide that thinks Obama is a "transformative" radical. But look again at his approach to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both cases, he is carrying out the Bush policies -- the same that he once joined his fellow Democrats in condemning. And that should be reassuring to anyone concerned about where he is heading as commander in chief.
In other words, while it's reasonable to be unhappy with a Democratic administration and even concerned because the Democrats are now a socialist party in the European sense, we are not witnessing the coming of the antichrist. A good strategy for political conflicts is to understand your opponent first -- not to underestimate him, but not to overestimate him, either.
As we move forward, Obama faces increasingly tough choices in the wars against Islamic fascism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Gaza and Iran. Hopefully, he will make the right choices, and should he do so, conservatives will need to be there to support him. If he makes the wrong choices, conservatives will need to be there to oppose him. But neither our support nor our opposition should be based on hysterical responses to policies that we just don't like. Let's leave that kind of behavior to the liberals who invented it.
It is like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
There have been liberals swooning and fawning all over this guy like he was the new messiah. Talk about exaggeration and needing to calm down. They do.
That Berlin speech and the Greek Temple columns at the convention like he was from Mt. Olympus. You do have to go back to Leni Riefenstahl to find statist hysteria this silly. A lot of Americans don't want a globalist Emperor as their president.
Apparently not.
I am seriously disappointed in David Horowitz. Perhaps the fact that he was one of them, at one time, prevents him from feeling the shock at the loss of freedom that accompanies Obama’s fascist agenda.
Forget Afghanistan and the globaloney. A bankrupt America stuck in blame-America socialist policies will destabilize civilization.
THEN you bash the “Black Helicopter Crowd” that probably did NOT vote for McCain, in the primary?
Ok, whatever. I think you will always be hard to please.
You worry too much about associations with those you think are “crazy” -—
Again, let it go! The media will ALWAYS try to find the kookiest people, on the right, to interview. All you need to do is shrug and say “I disagree with so and so on that, but I am glad he supports us on -—— whatever”
The Dems did not care about Ayers, or Rev Wright, or any NUMBER of other associations.
We need to UNITE, and quit looking down our noses at those we think are kooky.
There are kooks on BOTH sides.
The KOOKS still write campaign checks, still put up yards signs, STILL VOTE!
Disagree all you want, with the fringe, but PUT THEM TO WORK!
I agree
Obama is now complaining about the $1.2T deficit he inherited (that's 500 + 700) and he blames it all on Bush and he seems to think that the solution is to triple the deficit.
The guy is a kook. His policies are not inadvisable -- they are ruinous.
Well, aren't you special!
O’Bama has one sure thing on his side....Americans can’t add. So, Hussein draws a pass.
I disagree with your comment about irreversible policies. (Please don’t take this as a personal attack on you, because I thought your response was a reasoned one, but I do disagree)
Anytime a government spends enough money to buy 400 Nimitz class aircraft carriers (or is it now 600 with the upcoming additional bailout money) and a huge amount of that money is going towards government oriented programs, we are in a dire condition.
Once beauracracies are created, they NEVER are dissolved, with a very few rare instances. NEVER. And these programs being instituted are overwhelmingly liberal in nature.
We could have said we eventually would be able to regain the ground lost to government beauracracy and spending when Roosevelt was constructing the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson was creating the Great Society and Nixon was creating the EPA.
Look where we are now. Someone once asked Patton why he disdained retreat and withdrawal in battle, and he said it was because he hated paying for the same ground twice.
I fear we will not be able to regain the ground lost in generations because we let them get away with spending this MASSIVE amount of money.
As Mark Levin states in his gut-wrenching, incisive book “Liberty and Tyranny” our government is spending more money in inflation adjusted dollars in this government expansion plan than the previous nine greatest expenditures in the history of our government ALL ADDED TOGETHER.
This includes WWI, the New Deal, WWII, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the NASA expenditures, and the Savings and Loan Bailout...ALL ADDED TOGETHER add up to a fraction of what is being spent by the government with money we don’t have.
The fact that the President is:
1.) A disciple of an astoundingly and incredibly amoral and immoral author like Saul Alinsky who dedicated the pinnacle of his life’s work (Rules for Radicals) to, amongst other thngs, Satan.
2.) A close personal friend with a Black Theologian racist “Reverend” Wright who thinks the white people in this country invented AIDS to kill black people, donated thousands of dollars to this man’s “church” as he sat in the pews nodding with agreement all those years before the light of the public shined for a fleeting instant on that rathole.
3.) A is a close associate of a terrorist like Bill Ayers and his like in the Weathermen who thought a reasonable price to pay would be to kill millions of Americans who wouldn’t buy into their radical plans once they took power, not to mention Bernadine Dohrn who thought the sticking of a fork by murderers into the slain body of a pregnant woman was a fabulous thing. Do any of YOU out there have friends like this? Do you even KNOW anyone like this? THESE people are close friends and associates of the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. Think about that for a minute.
4.) Has vowed on recorded film to gut our military
5.) Has bowed at the waist a la POW Jerimiah Denton to a Saudi King, something NEVER before done by a US President. As such, he has clearly telegraphed one of two things to the leaders and intelligence agencies both friend and foe: He is either incredibly stupid and naive, or he is deliberately sending a signal to those who are paying attention of his view of America’s new place in the world and his desire to set that place at the table for us.
And I could go on. Obama is not Hitler yet, because not enough time has passed. My tagline deals with “The Road to Serfdom”, and it is one of the most applicable treatments of where we are and where we are going, and it was written by a now deceased guy who published it in 1944 while the evils of socialism and where it invariably leads were fresh in the minds of all.
Socialism INVARIABLY leads to TYRANNY and DESPOTISM.
Invariably.
You always hear people say “Oh, we will do it RIGHT this time...you will see...we have the know-how, the technology and the brains to make it work this time...”
Liberals and Socialists never look at history. Never. Those of us who do are labeled as hysterics, Chicken Littles and Cassandras.
It is well to keep in mind how Churchill was viewed in England before he became Prime Minister. He took one look at Hitler, and he knew the measure of that tyrant.
He knew.
But he was ridiculed as a hysteric, tagged as Chicken Little, and referred to as an annoying Cassandra.
He was ridiculed, that is, until they needed someone who could lead them and stand up to someone like Hitler.
I have read much of David Horowitz’s work, and if anyone should understand the seamy underbelly of what it going on, it should be him. Instead, he castigates people who point out that this unknown person who cannot prove his citizenship has been elected to the most powerful office in the world, and now he tells us we are going overboard in our criticism and comparing many of us to the leftist lunatics who wanted Bush to be murdered because he didn’t hew to their ideology.
I am disappointed in Mr. Horowitz. He, of all people, should know better.
But now, when you listen to the voices in the 1930’s warning of a National Socialist Germany, or listen to the voices of people who predicted a bloodbath in Southeast Asia when we abandoned it to the Marxists in Cambodia and the Communists in Vietnam, they don’t sound so much like Cassandras as they do visionaries who were paying attention.
BBTTT.
I think Horowitz, in this article, soft pedaled the danger of what Obama has done so far. But calling him names (RINO, communist, etc) is stupid and ignorant.
And posts like yours that shows why conservatism is in such disaaray.
BTW: The Obama boot licking line forms to the left, so you better hurry and get your place secured.
>> However, what makes you think you can make pronouncements like this?
My faith in God and my country. We’ve survived far worse than this.
>> You undermine your own arguments by making absolute statements about things you cannot possibly know.
I will admit that I am not a fortune-teller — but I fail to see why my far-more-prudent predictions of a non-apocalypse should be tempered with “maybes” while others on this board predict fire-and-brimstone, the 2nd great depression, and vociferously advocate armed revolt with far more certaintly than I just displayed.
It is not difficult to surmise that the predictions that often emerge from this board are simply ridiculous. We have survived civil war, the actual great depression, world war, Soviet communism, Vietnam-era hippies and Obama’s liberal predecessors — and we will survive Obama.
SnakeDoc
You know, I was talking to an old Italian lady once, and I quoted that line and she said "You don't get it. Mussolini never made the trains run on time, you just weren't allowed to SAY that the trains didn't run on time."
And last time I checked National Security wasn't a discretionary item, at least not in a sane government.
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