What’s New Today
Story #1 relates
as to why the Democrats are starting to panic.
#2 shows the cracks in the Democratic coalition. #3 asks if liberals will destroy the
West. #4 talks about liberal philosophy collapsing
on itself. #5 tells about the Netroots
convention. Things were not light and
happy there. #6 talks about the new
eugenics vs the early Twentieth Century Movement.
Today’s
Thoughts
“The
lesson the unions should take away
is that just as there is power in numbers, there
is also hubris -- enough to make for an irreparable fall from grace in the eyes
of both voters and workers.” Esther
Cepeda
“The U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops has called for the period from June 21, when the Church commemorates Catholic martyrs
to political persecution, through
Independence Day, to be dedicated to "this 'Fortnight for Freedom.’”
Ann Althouse has an interesting blog asking what happened to the reported robocalls that told people in Wisconsin
if they had signed the petition they didn’t need to vote? They
seem to have disappeared.
1. Reading
the Tea Leaves
These people, starting with Bill Clinton, the master Democratic politician of our era, can read the tea leaves, and the following factors alarm them:
1. Obama has energized his opposition. Despite throwing everything they could into the game, the turnout effort in Wisconsin was handily beaten by those Tea Party nobodies and an RNC head who is actually up to the job.
2. Obama has alienated hugely important constituencies. Labor unions, utterly essentially to the ground game in November, feel betrayed, and are starting to focus more on their own survival than the success of the Obama re-election campaign. The antiwar left feels betrayed over Gitmo, drones, rendition, domestic surveillance, and a host of other issues. They turned out in San Francisco picketing his fundraisers, and spoke of not voting. His Bain Capital attacks are verging into a repudiation of capitalism, so Wall Street and the finance sector are getting alarmed, and the essential flow of political contributions to Democrats from them is drying up.
3. The economy is a disaster, and Obama is doing all the wrong things. The administration is reduced to making implausible claims of spending moderation based on an internet post. The public is fed up with Obama's performance, and his personal popularity is declining and will tank further as he goes increasingly negative on Romney. Swing voters are almost as negative about Obama as are Romney voters.
4. Obama is out for himself, and himself only. He has even thrown national security under the bus, allowing the leaking of critical information to the press about intelligence operations and cyber-warfare, and feigning outrage in Friday's presser over the idea that he would do such a thing. Never mind what they say publicly; the insiders know that we are at cyber-war with Iran and China, among others, right now. Following the prosecutorial lynching of Scooter Libby, it is politically impossible to sweep this leak, which actually is causing our allies to shun information-sharing with us, under the rug. Unlike the Valerie Plame case, people have died, and intelligence operations have been seriously harmed.
5. A wave election is shaping up. Democrats could be swept out of office in Congress, and on down to statehouses, city halls, and dog pounds. With the left flank threatening to stay home, union funds and enthusiasm depleted, and Obama offering nothing but negativity, while Tea Partiers mobilize nationally as never before seen on the GOP side, the electorate will skew so far right that the GOP could end up as dominant in 2013 as the Democrats were in 2009.
It's already leaking into the smarter corners of the media world: Obama is killing the Democratic Party…
The
last point is very significant. A wave
election would sweep the Democrats out of power in Washington and probably a
number of state capitals. It will by
1932 again, but in the opposite political direction with the Republican being
swept into power across the country.
2. Cracks in the Democratic Coalition
Divisions in the Democratic
coalition have burst into view, endangering both President Obama and his party
colleagues in Congress as November’s election nears.
Fissures have opened over everything from tax policy and
former President Bill Clinton’s off-message comments to recriminations
following the party’s fiasco in the Wisconsin recall, which some say
should have been avoided.
Democrats
disagree over the wisdom of Obama’s attacks
on Republican Mitt Romney’s private equity background at Bain Capital and are split
over the proposed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s vast
oil sands.
The divides are opening just as
Republicans appear more unified, which underlines the danger for Democrats and
highlights an abrupt reversal in the two major parties’ fortunes…
Obama has compared himself to FDR,
JFK, and even Ronald Reagan. Perhaps it
is more accurate to compare him to Jimmy Carter, Herbert Hoover and even
Richard Nixon.
…And yet, today's Western media have never stopped working to destroy the very societies they claim to serve. We have the most pathogenic media in history -- they create social divisions, ethnic hostilities, massive deliberate misunderstandings of the real causes of economic despair, and political "solutions" from the very people who created those problems in the first place. Our media are the worst plague virus in history because they spread falsehoods and block the truth. No society can solve problems if the media lie as a daily habit. Perverse and dysfunctional media can destroy working societies -- Joseph Goebbels' handiwork being a prime example.
Today's euro crisis in Greece and the other dysfunctional Eurocolonies is a direct and predictable result of what Tony Blair called "Third Way Socialism" -- which turns out to be crony capitalism wearing a Groucho mustache. Tony Blair himself is now one of the chief Cronies. Blairite Socialism rejected Soviet Marxism and American capitalism equally; but capitalism is productive and Soviet socialism never was, so Third Way Socialism turns out to be parasitical on free market inventiveness and hard work. When all is said and done, Blairism becomes a kind of Brezhnev style of a corrupt, unaccountable ruling class. That's why George Soros and his ilk love crony capitalism; it puts them in the driver's seat.
Eurosocialism today copies Barney Frank's compulsory sale of empty mortgages to American banks, under threat of direct action by ACORN and other gangsters, backed by media blackmail and an endless supply of inflated money from the Fed. Empty mortgages are toxic because they are lies, and everybody knows it. They are monopoly money, and there will always be a reckoning. So the banks that are forced to buy them put them in gaudy Xmas wrapping, and everybody passes that hot potato to the next sucker, hoping that they won't be the last one holding it when the bubble finally pops….
… I don't
know how and when the liberal media will collapse, though the drooping balance
sheets of TIME, Newsweek, and the New York Times
suggest that the end is near. Power classes take a lot of time to
die, even after they become public jokes. The talking heads of today's
pop culture lost any rationale for existing a long time ago. They are now
repackaging their empty souls, and tossing that smoking potato from CNN to CNBC
to Facebook and Twitter. They have been tried and found wanting, and the handwriting is on the wall…
This is an interesting article.
It moves around quite a bit in its basic focus, but most of what it says
is true and frightening.
4. The Left’s Super nova Collapse
Two parties, left and right, are
central to good consensual government — one the perennial check on the other,
both within the general boundaries of constitutional free-market capitalism.
Yet the hard-Left takeover of the Democratic Party has meant that there is
no longer a credible balance in our system, as almost all the tenets of contemporary left-wing ideology are blowing
up, imploding super nova style — unsustainable ideas that are contrary to
human nature and demand coercion for their implementation, given that they are
increasingly anti-democratic and have to be implemented from high by an elite
technocracy whether in Brussels, Sacramento, or Washington.
Far too much is always seen as not
enough: Greeks are angry that there was
too much “austerity” and not enough of the old borrow and spend; Obama is
blamed for only borrowing $5 trillion for too “little” stimulus; Democrats
threaten to withhold from the community-organizer Obama because he was not hard
enough on “fat cats” and the capitalist state; in California, a 10.3% income
tax is too low, not too high. When the remedy is seen worse than the
disease, then the patient is indeed terminal….
All the old shiny chrome is rusted and crumpled: Harvard? Knee-deep in the Elizabeth Warren scam. The Noble Peace prize? Neither Al Gore nor Barack Obama had a record of bringing peace to anyone. The postmodern EU and its vaunted euro? The mystery is how even technocrats could design such a suicidal currency. The paper of record? The New York Times has become a sort of shopper’s insert, its op-eds and news accounts synopses of yuppie and baby-boomer angst.
Like a super nova, contemporary liberalism is imploding through its own irreconcilable forces.
I highly recommend you click the link and the read the
entire thing. VDH nails the left with
plenty of specifics.
5. Netroots: The absence of Hope
…Van Jones — the former Obama
administration “green jobs” czar who was forced to resign from the White House
after his radical past was exposed — did his best to follow the Obama video
with some fiery rhetoric. “We do not
have the right to sit here and feel sorry for ourselves and let these people
destroy our country,” he yelled.
But after another burst of
obligatory fear mongering about the Tea Party— “When they get power, they use
it to decimate us!” — even he calmed
down and acknowledged that these were tough times for the Left. He claimed the union recall in Wisconsin had
been a “potential national breakthrough” but admitted it had fallen short. The local forces “fought alone,” he said.
“Let’s be honest now. We’re all friends here.” At that point, someone in
the audience shouted out, “Where was Obama?”
“Where were the national Democrats?”
Jones replied. “And where were a lot of us?” The questions lingered in the
room, and no one addressed them further.
What participants did address —
frequently — was their dissatisfaction
with the fact that elected Democrats have failed to deliver on the progressive
agenda. During a panel discussion on Latino issues, Gaby Pacheco weighed
in. A liberal crusader working to pass the DREAM Act (which would allow the
children of illegal aliens to pay in-state tuition at U.S. colleges and also
give them a path to citizenship), Pacheco
was openly disdainful of the Obama White House. She pointed out that more
people (some 400,000 last year) have been deported in the Obama years than at
any other time in U.S. history. She compared minority groups to people trapped
in abusive relationships they refuse to leave, no matter how bad things get —
and in her analogy, the abusive partner was Obama. “That, I feel, is the
situation that we’re in,” she told the crowd. “And it’s very hard for a lot of people to stand up to their abusers
and say, enough, no more.”
Another panel featured four local liberal
activists discussing the problems of the host state for Netroots Nation: “When Democrats Aren’t Democrats: The Story
of Rhode Island.” Kate Brown, the executive director of the liberal group
Ocean State Action, warned that progressives are in a minority on “a lot of
issues” they care about, including gay marriage, expanding abortion rights,
raising tax rates, and even implementing Obamacare. “We cut tax rates for the
wealthy,” she asserted. “So when they tell us there’s no money [for programs],
they are lying! There’s lots of money.”
Her grievances took no account of the fact that Republicans
are a minority in the Rhode Island legislature and hold no statewide elected
offices. Rhode Island sends only Democrats to Congress. Steven Brown, the executive director of the state’s ACLU,
pointed out that Rhode Island passed into law a tough voter-ID bill last year;
he noted that the bill’s chief sponsors were Rhode Island’s only
African-American state senator and the leader of the Latino caucus in the state
house.
Of course, it wasn’t all doom and
gloom at Netroots Nation. There was no
shortage of bravado and chest-thumping among liberals who are convinced they are
the wave of the future. But having attended most of the Netroots Nation
gatherings, I observed many fewer
victory jigs than in previous years…
This is bad times for the left. The ignorant don’t realize it yet. They are like the Germans who in 1944 and
1945 thought Hitler’s super weapons would save them. But it is dawning on a lot more Democrats
that the end is near.
6.
Eugenics Past and Future
THE current issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine
includes a portrait of Irving Fisher, a Yale economics professor in the 1920s
and ’30s and a giant of his field. The author, Richard Conniff, takes note of
Fisher’s prodigious professional accomplishments and his private decency in
order to foreground the real subject of his article: the economist’s role as one of his era’s highest-wattage proponents of
eugenics.
But these same
eugenicists were often political and social liberals — advocates of social
reform, partisans of science, critics of stasis and reaction. “They weren’t sinister characters out of
some darkly lighted noir film about Nazi sympathizers,” Conniff writes of
Fisher and his peers, “but
environmentalists, peace activists, fitness buffs, healthy-living enthusiasts,
inventors and family men.” From Teddy Roosevelt to the Planned Parenthood
founder Margaret Sanger, fears about
“race suicide” and “human weeds” were common among self-conscious progressives,
who saw the quest for a better gene pool as of a piece with their broader
dream of human advancement.
This progressive fascination with eugenics largely
ended with World War II and the horrors wrought by National Socialism. But
while the West has discarded the theory of the eugenics era, the practice urged by Fisher and others —
the elimination or pre-emption, through careful reproductive planning, of the
weaker members of the human species — has become a more realistic possibility
than it ever was in the 1920s and ’30s.
The eugenicists had very general ideas about genetics
and heredity, very crude ideas about intelligence, and deeply poisonous ideas
about racial hierarchies. They did not
have, as we do, access to the genetic blueprints of individuals — including,
most important, human beings still developing in utero, whose development can
be legally interrupted by the intervention of an abortionist.
That access, until recently, has required invasive
procedures like amniocentesis. But last week brought a remarkable breakthrough: a team of scientists mapped nearly an
entire fetal genome using blood from the mother and saliva from the father….
The
Germans consider Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and Homosexuals “untermench” and
eventually set up camps to kill them. It
appears we already have the camps and have now found a way to pick out the
victims. The one paragraph that got to me was when author separated the
academics from the sinister people who implemented their theories. I guess he had to because they were
progressives just like he is.
