Posted on 01/04/2014 8:44:09 AM PST by grimalkin
One of the most disturbing things about Barack Obama's reign of lawless executive power is that it has people fantasizing about outright totalitarian dictatorship, and not in a faculty-lounge-B.S. kind of way. We've always had to put up with the likes of Thomas Friedman at the New York Times rhapsodizing about the joys of Chinese authoritarianism - provided a duly accredited Democrat gets to be America's temporary dictator, of course - but now we've got Jesse Myerson at Rolling Stone daydreaming about hard-core communism as the solution to America's ills.
He's not fooling around, either. He wants the government to guarantee a job and income for every single person, and seize all private property to overthrow capitalism, although he would generously allow the Glorious Peoples' Republic of America to rent the land back to private individuals... as long as everyone is clear that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the ultimate landlord:
Ever noticed how much landlords blow? They don't really do anything to earn their money. They just claim ownership of buildings and charge people who actually work for a living the majority of our incomes for the privilege of staying in boxes that these owners often didn't build and rarely if ever improve. In a few years, my landlord will probably sell my building to another landlord and make off with the appreciated value of the land s/he also claims to own – which won't even get taxed, as long as s/he ploughs it right back into more real estate.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
To boot, you can get sued any time.
My parents were served 20 years after they gave up by a little brat who was a baby then, hoping to get them on lead paint. Jerk had the nerve to claim he must’ve gotten poisoned there and “couldn’t work”. Fool put all his info on Facebook where he claimed to be manager of a Meineke shop. Couldn’t work, huh?
Don’t you know by now they all just didn’t do it right?
A dictator could give you that and then step aside just like Washington did.
No one said the dictatorship had to last forever, just long enough to rid us of the communist scum and re-establish a free Republic again.
We already have examples of the government-controlled housing that the author pines for. They are called housing projects, and they are typically run-down, dirty, and crime-infested. Yeah, let’s just extend that model to everybody and make it mandatory.
Bump
It SHOULD mean that landlords -- when putting out a candle or cooling a spoonful of soup -- purse their lips and gently exhale.
I suspect that's not what the 'writer' is attempting to communicate.
Feed ‘em to the dogs.
Time for this gubamint to go on Uncle NorK’s diet.
I’d love to sell him one of my buildings so he can experience first hand the joys of fixing toilets, leaky roofs, holes in the wall, drug traffic, tenants skipping out on the rent or worse not paying and staying put while they work the system and last but not least paying the mortgage.
The problem is Democracy just doesn’t work, never has, never will. As soon as the ignorant masses learn that they can effectively vote themselves the treasury (but electing only those who promises them the most stuff) it collapses.
Only a revolution can fix such a situation, and my definition a revolution has a leader, which in the strictest sense is a dictator. Until such time as a Republican form of government can be re-established restricting voting to only those that have proven responsible enough to be entrusted with the task.
Barack Obama, and the totalitarian temptation
Sol W. Sanders
Tuesday, March 5th, 2013 | Posted by WorldTribune.com
http://www.worldtribune.com/2013/03/05/barack-obama-huey-long-and-the-totalitarian-temptation/
“ In a new class of ill-educated but highly mobile elitists who know what is best for the rest of us, there is a growing tendency toward authoritarian rule.”
We live in dangerous times.
Not so much that the world economy threatens to crash, that our carefully nuanced political system in the U.S. is momentarily checkmated, or even that while the U.S. is running the highest unemployment rates in recent memory the European Community has not resolved its disintegrating common currency.
No, those are indeed serious concerns. Hopefully they are temporary. It is so easy to forget how serious such occurrences have been in the past and how basic American beliefs and initiatives have rescued us from the plight time and time again. Those widely repeated clichés about the first time, the largest ever, the worst in history, etc. are often as foolish as much else that appears in our increasingly illiterate media by journalists who have forgotten that their métier was supposed to be history.
What is much more threatening is that once again, as has happened in our history but rarely at the federal level, we are threatened by demagoguery masquerading as populist reformism.
Those who would want “to transform” the American Republic are, alas! often those whose abysmal ignorance of our history and our institutions is apparent. But their appeal for facile [often termed “comprehensive”] solutions to complex problems that require repeated and detailed analyses and incremental remedial rather than revolutionary solutions is stronger than ever.
In a new class of ill-educated but highly mobile elitists who know what is best for the rest of us, there is a growing tendency toward authoritarian rule.
What they neglect most of all is that 250 years of American governance has built established patterns of behavior as well as a rule of law which one tampers with at the risk of destroying the edifice. Our society is built and ruled on a structure unique to the political world in which it was created in the late 18th and early 19th century and remains much to this day very special and like none other.
Cynics may scoff at “American exceptionalism” but everyone from serious political scientists to the Comintern has learned it is a truism; America is different. Only someone who does not know and appreciate American history, its trials and tribulations as well as its triumphs, could make a statement that U.S. uniqueness is simply another of the reflections of nation states in Europe.
The main reason is that the American Founders were an unusual collection of unusually well read and educated men for their time who although many held sinecures were revolutionaries in regard to their attitudes toward government.
Whether slaveholders in Virginia or hardscrabble farmers in Massachusetts, they had the benefit of a European political tradition and most of all a British inheritance of individual freedom passed down as it had been secured under often bitter and dangerous circumstances class by class for generations.
But most of all they had an intuitive knowledge of human imperfection; they knew that no institutions could survive without being carefully crafted to avoid the domination of one man or one group of men or even one portion of the governing process. It was for that reason that the genius of the American constitution was separation of powers – which even Britain had not achieved and the failure of which in no small part helped bring on the American Revolution, a revolt initially for Englishman’s rights in the new colonies in North America, but eventually for redress before an overweening executive acting through parliamentary dictatorship.
Dividing the roles of government into legislative, executive and judicial was at the heart of the new American Republic which Benjamin Franklin said the Constitutional Convention had bequeathed Americans “if they could keep it”. Never has it been more threatened as it is today by an extremely popular president who has the temerity to publicly espouse a course of action where he will use the vast power of his office to achieve what he considers a worthy end when the tangled but necessary Congressional procedure does not produce.
History isn’t taught any more in our schools. And our media, captivated by every superficiality whether from Hollywood or their own creation, is largely ignorant of it.
This veteran journalists shudders at a sycophantic, giggling reporter making googoo eyes and saccharine suggestions through pseudo-questions at what was once a forum for ideas in the White House press conference.
Unfortunately, there is a decided ring to the noises coming out of Washington now, and they resemble nothing so much as the attempt by Huey Long of Louisiana in the early 1930s to capture the popular imagination for a near-dictatorship in his own state and with a threat to carry it on to a national level with the help of a rogue priest, Father Charles Couglin of Michigan. Had he not been cut down by an assassin’s bullet, he might well have imitated the roles of the European dictators who took over in the 1930s and led the world into the bloody World War II.
Long, too, made attacks on “the rich”, exalted giveaway social programs, and initiated grandiose proposals for infrastructure as his bait for the unsuspecting voter, caught up in the toils of The Great Depression. Long before Hitler’s Josef Goebbels pointed out the significance of The Big Lie – out and out prevarication of the truth with no limits as more successful than eating around the edges of truth as more effective – Long spun them.
The president in a rare moment of self-abnegation said recently in a public forum that he was not a dictator. We shall hold him to that admission.
While we must be on the alert for the kinds of usurpation of public trust and power that have characterized so many other countries in the last century, this writer is optimistic that it cannot happen here. If for no other reason, while Mussolini made the trains run on time, as they said, and Hitler built the autobahns, and Stalin modernized the Russian army, this gang of Kartzenjammer kids seems incapable of doing much of anything right except pandering to their benighted constituencies.
Whether it is their incredibly ideological warped energy strategy blown clear apart by the shale gas revolution they had nothing to do with [what a joke that the new nominee for energy secretary glows in the light of the vast new gas reserves!] or their bumbling foreign policy which waffles into insignificance, these are the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. And we will survive them as we have other travesties in our history.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is a contributing editor for WorldTribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com and blogs at yeoldecrabb.wordpress.com
What is to be done?
Peace! Land! Bread!
The impulse is there, but on FR it is usually preceded with the words "We should..." rather than "The government should..." "We", of course, means the government in some form or another, it's just distasteful for conservatives to admit that to themselves.
Think of it as the equivalent of "suck".
Landlords blow? What is this idiot talking about?
My wife and were owner/landlords for three separate houses for almost ten years. We did all of the management and maintenance ourselves while holding down full-time jobs. On occasion it was like having three full-time jobs. Tenants would give notice or be slow paying the rent or not pay at all and we had to look for new renters. Plumbing would back up, roofs would leak, appliances went on the blink, landscaping needed attending to, carpets replaced, inside and outside needed painting, refrigeration/furnace units wouldn’t work right, and in one house, the swimming pool needed cleaning and cared for every weekend. And, of course, the mortgage needed to be paid no matter what, and taxes paid to the county because the property was not owner-occupied. It is a lot of hard, tedious work to be a landlord and take care of your asset.
So, for this wannabe communist to say that landlords don’t do anything for their money, he can go F**K himself where the sun don’t shine. He obviously knows not of what he speaks.
Fish from the right side of the boat, for the left side is barren.
A wise man's heart is at his right hand; but a fool's heart at his left.
OK, thanks. I was a little worried about that word...
The US is not a democracy, it is a representative republic.
The problem is that our representatives are more interested in what affects them personally and ignore the people for whom they work (i.e., us).
Bttt for later
What these misguided common liberals don't understand is there's VERY FEW slots at the top for tyrants and they'll be the folks 'paying for Obamacare' or in this case filling up concentration camps to satisfy quotas.
By definition, a dictator is against conservatism. Everyone needs the freedom to pursue their own self-interest. For self-interest for everyone is the optimum for society as a whole. Any dictatorship subtracts that self-interest from some subset and thus eventually for all.
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As I read the comments in this thread my mind is transported to Egypt and I try to fit the ongoing military ‘dictatorship’ into this discussion. I believe the only way you can break a hell bent totalitarian regime is with the military, as is now taking place in Egypt. If a dictator is bent on maintaining perpetual totalitarian rule and he retains the confidence of country's military, the people are screwed. Where we now go as a country rests in the hands of our military.
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