Posted on 11/16/2012 6:15:00 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
In the last week, it is almost as if the entire American moral landscape has been turned upside down in eerie fashion — in matters that vastly transcend fornication and adultery. The Petraeus-gate matter is the stuff of tabloids now; but soon the real issues relating to when and what Eric Holder knew, and by extension the president, and how exactly Benghazi (the crime of indifference to the besieged, the cover-up of the truth, the actual mission of our consulate and annex) fits into this labyrinth of deceit, both petty and fundamental, may overshadow the present sensationalism.
Nothing seems real anymore, not pre-election federal data on jobs or food stamps or the release of such “facts”; not foreign-policy information like an Iranian attack on a drone; not the supposedly competent federal relief in response to Hurricane Sandy. Even Saddam Hussein’s plebiscites could not achieve margins like the 19,605 to 0 we saw in 59 Philadelphia precincts. Does anyone care?
Susan Rice, who flat out deceived five times in a single day on national TV, is supposedly seriously being considered as Secretary of State when Ms. Clinton leaves — the latter now plans to be “busy” when hearings on Libya resume. (If a John Bolton cannot be confirmed as a UN ambassador, how could Rice avoid a filibuster?) How can anyone now read Broadwell’s book and assume the research and analysis are disinterested?(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at victorhanson.com ...
Going onward, the occupation of the South by the North lasted over a century and produced not only widespread poverty in the entire Southern region, but also the hard-to-dislodge stereotypes about stupid rednecks, backwater knuckle-draggers, etc. that continue to this day.
Whatever political power that was allowed in the South by the North was the minority of people who were genuine race-haters propelled into office as Democrats to serve as moral whipping boys for the North, while the workaday people of the South, both whites and blacks, wrung their hands and buried their heads in fear -- unable to fight back again after having lost so much and so many in the last go-round.
The continual westward expansion allowed everyone to sweep the unremarked death of the Republic under the rug until 1959, when with the addition of Alaska and Hawaii, there was no longer any frontier to escape to. Now, with all need for escape from oppression turned inward, oppression is winning. Satan has captured the field.
Wow.
Every American should read this and realize it is true.
Nothing that comes out of DC or the state run media should be believed.
Americans just voted in -— or not -— the worst enemies we have had. We might as well have al Qaida at our helm. At least al Qaida are open about their intentions.
We are in a Civil War again; but it's one fought on subtle grounds that remain invisible to most people until the government does something to make them political victims. Now that this farcial "election" has concluded, this will happen to increasing numbers of people at an escalating pace. The question is where and when the final tipping point into undeniable overtness takes place, and whether, when it tips their way, our side will have the strength to shove it back. That's why they want to keep it secret as long as humanly possible, so they can keep simmering the frog until all their pre-emptive measures are in place.
Good job on that. Nice fit.
You fail to consider the economic realities of the South as it was then. A small number of people owned large plantations and slaves. A large number of white people lived rural agricultural lives as sharecroppers or small businesspersons. The minority plantation owners produced the commodities most under scrutiny by the North, since those commodities of cotton, tobacco, textile dyes and other agriproducts "fed" the North. I am not defending slavery as a moral system or an economic system. But I will compare today's average American wage-earner to the average non-slave-holding Southerner of the times. And I will compare today's corporate owners and shareholders to the South's plantation owners and textile exporters of the times.
Are you, if an average wage-earner, deserving of moral scorn because today's corporate classes favor importing illegal aliens as cheap labor? Are you responsible for the tiny handful, relative to our population, of Governors, Mayors, Senators and Congressmen who have made "sanctuaries" for illegal aliens so they may be economically exploited in today's economy? If you believe you are deserving of such scorn, should you be punished and painted with a broad brush of human rights violations for the next century and a half, relinquishing your state's rights or even your national rights so that Mexicans can rule this territory in retaliation for this crime against illegal hispanic immigrants who are actively being economically exploited by a small handful of today's "plantation owners"?
Change the vote back to only citizens who are property-owners.
One concerns the FBI agent who sent a shirtless photo. Apparently it was some sort of Internet joke photo that he sent out widely to his email list and it was sent from an account he shared with his wife; so its intention was not seduction at all. Making a federal case of it is a misdirection.
We haven't seen Caligula yet, but the dissevering of the office of the presidency from any real accountability to the grownups by Clinton and Obama, both of whom have beaten the opposition while boldly committing impeachable offenses, guarantees that our Caligula will appear shortly, and that bloodshed among the government-literate, the aforesaid "grownups", must necessarily accompany his untrammelling and manifestation.
What kept the government going was the civil service. Those lower paid guys who just went about their business keeping the empire going.
The civil service was created by Octavian Augustus out of the middle orders of Roman society, partly because he'd depleted the nobility by political mass-murder (Tiberius and Caligula killed more of them afterward, every time the government farted) and partly because Octavian wanted to ensure that what remained of them stayed on the sidelines of real government, and kept to their senatorial cattle-pen, from which he'd select a few fatted prize specimens every now and then to serve as a junior consular colleague or proconsul to the (by definition unimportant) senatorial provinces.
The real power centers -- pretorian prefect, prefect of Egypt (the grain supply), the fleet prefect (the grain supply, again), governors of key provinces -- Octavian filled with men of the equestrian class, his own political creatures, who were paid a stipend out of the imperial privy purse (Caesar's own pocket) and given narrow powers and privileges.
These prefects, procurators, and presidents (praeses was the most junior type of governor, and that was what Pontius Pilate was, as befitted a backward place like Judaea) became the civil service, salary-fed and tightly administered from the imperial palace, usually by slaves, interestingly, who became persons of huge prestige and power by the time of Claudius (AD 45).
This has been the idea behind the civil-service model ever since: political control, quality control, and consistent performance by publicly-compensated, socially-junior, subordinate men.
I agree; I had to go back to Wikipedia and refresh my knowledge of the tangled career of John Brown; but on balance, I see where your parallels to the media firestorms are relevant.
Tell your friend: towed away and insolently stolen.
Vox Alinsky vox Luciferi.
Dum veniat Sarah para bellum.
He got things about the FBI agent wrong (the man was not “sexting”) and about some of the relationships (which probably were not sexual at all). But that doesn’t invalidate his fundamental insight.
He got things about the FBI agent wrong (the man was not “sexting”) and about some of the relationships (which probably were not sexual at all). But that doesn’t invalidate his fundamental insight.
Lasted?? Past tense? Where'd you get that? It's over?
Don't think so -- as witness the joke at Judy Woodruff's Election Night table in 2008, about North Carolina and their "Dukes of Hazzard" voters, ha ha, who fortunately (halcyon days! tra-la and halloo!) are losing their state to snotty Up East parvenues who act like they now own the place and plan to drive the Tarheels back up into their hollows and mountain forests like they were Montagnards.
I like your version better.
By a totally amazing and no doubt unrelated coincidence (/sarc), our friend Ferfal describes on his blog (ferfal/blogspot) the mass-importation of descamisados from other countries by the Argentine Kirchner despotism (first Nestor, now Cristina Kirchner presiding) to push Argentines out of their jobs, displace good-wage jobs with minimum-wage bottom-feeders (mostly Bolivian Indians who can barely speak Spanish), and facilitate land expropriation by government-protected squatters, who are promptly given the franchise so they can outvote native Argentine conservatives and patriots.
Argentines who object to this process are promptly denounced as "racist" and face government retaliation.
Sound familiar?
That is very true, and if you have a system where "the people" get to pick the leadership, you can't play catch up after decades of ignorance and indoctrination and hope you can start about two months before the elections to convince them to vote intelligently.
The other problem is that they're too ignorant to know that they're actually doing what they're being told to do by their "betters" in the academic/talking heads class. These clueless, manipulated voters think they're being independent free spirits.
Since this is how the situation is, we need to do better on the media outreach. Seriously, we've got to start NOW to get people on our side and make it look like something attractive and cool to be with us.
Have some neat 2nd amendment ads, have the Church sponsor some great religious freedom or freedom of conscience ads and really go for it. And start now.
But our leaders are ashamed of the message and even if they wanted to popularize it, they don't know where to begin. They've completely forgotten the message of Ronald Reagan, the "Great Communicator."
Cheap labor? Latin American laborers are exactly like all piecework people in the South. They earn based on what they do (picking pine straw, harvesting crops, tending our fern nurseries, etc.), but Latin Americans do it faster and better than the locals, because they don’t show up stoned, don’t consider the work beneath them, don’t expect the boss to pick them up and drive them to work, and don’t try to rob the boss on the way out.
It was the unions that killed the bracero program under LBJ, a big union sympathizer, because these people were not here long enough to join the union and the unions were busy promoting the type of work rules that led to mechanization. This can be a good thing in the long run, but it’s sure not going to lead to employment of American born unionistas either.
Braceros needed better protection because they were often housed in places where the owner of the farm wouldn’t let them leave the farm, so they had to shop at the company store. By the time they went back to their countries, they could end up owing practically their entire salary. This was an evil thing and should have been and sometimes was stopped by law.
Employment practice control shifted to the states, with better or worse results. Here in Florida now, the farms bring the migrant workers in a bus to Walmart once or twice a week, the workers pay normal prices, they go back to their compounds (which certainly aren’t very nice, but are liveable) and then they send some money back home and save the rest of it. I don’t think this is a bad thing.
But the whole point of destroying the labor program nationally was to protect the unions, not American workers.
We need a good immigration program that gets us good permanent residents (*hint: not Muslims or from Muslim countries) and good temporary residents who come here to make money and then go back home and buy a patch of land or open a store. Most Latin Americans don’t like living in the US, which they perceive as cold and hostile, and would like to be able to come and go to their countries as needed. And for those who have been here for a long time and love our country, why shouldn’t they get a way to stay?
They’d be a heck of a lot better than our nasty, dog-in-the-manger former involuntary servitude group that has never accepted responsibility and freedom.
The world (including the ancient and modern worlds) have had these kinds of episodes where mass craziness prevails.
This too will pass.
What will not pass is that we have as a nation been through and through interlarded with atheists, communists and useful idiots, starting about 100 years ago.
We have strayed from God and the Constitution, and virtually every government entity we deal with should by rights NOT EXIST according to the Constitution.
Washington foresaw us deviating from the Constitution in his farewell address.
The abandoning God he had not imagined.
But read the Old Testament and you see mankind doing this again and again.
We are nothing special.
THE UPSIDE of all this is that there have been reform movements in the world and in the United States, and many of them have been phenomenally successful, and THERE WILL BE ONE AGAIN.
We are due for a large reform movement, and FReepers and Tea Party members are going to be leading the way.
The question is, what sort of chastisement will come (war, famine, hyperinflation, plague, etc.,) to awaken the revival?
Hate to see FReepers being defeatist and nihilistic about Obama's reelection.
It was due to Affirmative Action again, plus some massive vote fraud on the part of the Rats.
Let's all stop crying, let's clean up the voting process, let's go back to Church and the Bible, and let's have a little FAITH and use our backbones again.
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