http://www.liveleak.com/browse?q=nixon Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:39:59 -0400 Liveleak http://edge.liveleak.com/80281E/u/u/ll2/logo.gif http://www.liveleak.com/browse?q=nixon Sun, 16 Jun 2013 23:19:13 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=786_1371439019 USMC_SRT Dear Mr. Security Agent, Federal, state, or local. You, the man or woman with the badge, the sworn LEO or FLEA and those who inhabit the many law enforcement niches in between and on all sides. This essay is directed to you, because in the end, how this turmoil about gun control turns out will depend largely upon your decisions and actions over the coming months and years. I sincerely wish that members of Congress-who may soon be voting on new gun control measures-would read this essay, but I realize that's a pipe dream, considering the impenetrable bubbles around those exalted entities. So I'll settle for you, Mr. (or Ms.) Security Agent, since you already gobble up everything on the internet, and I don't have to seek you out. A decade ago I wrote the novel Enemies Foreign and Domestic, a tale about how tragic events involving the misuse of firearms can be used by an evil administration to misinform and mold public opinion to support its malign anti-freedom policies. No, my novel was not predicting "Operation Fast and Furious" a decade before that covert policy of "pursuing gun control under the radar," (which was President Obama's explanation to Sarah Brady for his lack of overt political action). That inter-agency gun-walking policy, remember, resulted in the deaths of over four hundred Mexicans and two U.S. federal agents, murdered in an effort to discredit the Second Amendment and lead to more restrictive gun control laws in America. (If Nixon-or any Republican, for that matter-were in office, the intentional bloodbath would be called Murdergate, but today's collaborating Woodwards and Bernsteins are in on the cover-up.) Instead of gun-walking thousands of AK-47s to Mexican drug cartel assassins (who would believe that?), Enemies Foreign and Domestic begins with a sniper opening fire on a packed football stadium. A thousand innocent fans die, some from the ninety bullets fired but most in the ensuing panic stampede. In a traumatized America, the fictional stadium massacre results in the banning of all semi-automatic rifles, with no buyback, no grandfathering of weapons already owned, and no sunset clause. Citizens had to turn them in for destruction or face years in federal prison. The page-one stadium massacre was simply a plot device chosen to launch the story in high gear and set the stage to immediately and fully explore the main theme of the novel: the calculated transformation of our Constitutional republic into a socialist police state. Since I prefer to write tightly wound fiction transpiring at a rapid pace in a compressed time period, I examined the imposition of totalitarian controls over the course of just a few weeks, not years or decades. 1. The TSA: On the road to the American police state Consider: The TSA was born in the panicked backwash of 9/11, which is understandable given the events of that day, when Muslim maniacs screaming allahu akbar murdered 3,000 Americans and others in the name of Islamic global jihad. But a decade after 9/11, due entirely to political correctness, it's completely out of the question to profile Mohammed at the airport yet absolutely necessary for that bloated agency to "randomly" select your pre-teen or teenage daughter for a body search performed by a government matron in a TSA uniform. This frequently under-the-clothes and against-the-skin complete body search may done in full public view, or in a hidden back room, solely at the discretion of the TSA agents involved. Meanwhile, Mom and Dad stand off to the side where they have been directed to wait, saying nothing, scarcely moving, avoiding random eye contact lest a TSA security agent catch a wayward smirk or utterance of protest. To pull out a cell phone camera at this time would surely invite arrest. To walk over and grab the matron by the arm is out of the question. Defending your child from the indignity would lead only to your being Tasered and handcuffed on the cold airport floor. After that, your entire family may wind up in some TSA airport detention cells, conveniently located right on your concourse and unknown to you until then. Better to stew in silence, let the incident pass, and try to forget it. So in the year 2013, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we stand with our eyes averted, burning with humiliation, while our spouses or children are groped above and below the waist by blue-gloved government prison guards-only we are in an airport in a free country, and not in a prison! Or are we? A virtual open-air prison, where government security agents can pat down ordinary citizens at will is the accepted "new normal." Did that happen often in East Germany, I wonder? In the Soviet Union? Does it happen today in Cuba? Officially sanctioned crotch groping in the name of "security?" (Why, again, was it that the TSA was created? Oh yes, Islamic jihad terrorists destroyed some big buildings and killed thousands of people in New York City on September 11 way back in the year 2001. It was because of that very bad day in lower Manhattan and many other acts of bloody Muslim terrorism around the world going on for decades, especially hijacking and blowing up lots of airliners full of people. It's so easy to forget why exactly it is that we need to become a police state for our own safety.) And now we read that the TSA is yet again expanding and branching out, like an octopus on steroids. This suddenly gargantuan federal agency is not only running routine checkpoints and stop-and-frisk operations in airports, but at bus and train stations also. Eight thousand times in 2010, if you can believe the government's own accounting figures. Your papers, please! These checkpoints and mobile searching stations are called VIPR Teams, a telling acronym for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response Teams. Folks, you cannot make this stuff up. Well, actually, you can. Way back in 2002 in Enemies Foreign and Domestic I invented FIST checkpoints, for Firearms Inspections Stop Terrorism. I leave it to you as to which sounds more coolly ominous and plausible in fact and in fiction-VIPRs or FISTs. The advance word is that at the next stop on this express lane to tyranny, we will be seeing the TSA on our highways, setting up roaming vehicle checkpoints. For our "public safety," of course. Watch the recent YouTube video of the Texas state trooper digitally raping a mother and daughter by the side of a Texas highway to see law enforcement checkpoint authority run amok, and wonder at the future of our nation and our hard-won legacy of individual freedom. If you can stomach to watch it. Welcome to the USSA, comrades! How in the world did this happen? When did we wake up to find our freedom stolen in the night-and all in name of "homeland security" and "public safety"? 2. Nobody needs an assault weapon! And now in the wake of yet another disgusting example of the worst human depravity, this time in an elementary school in New England, we are told by the government that some firearms are simply too dangerous for citizens to possess. We are told that limiting or removing these firearms from private hands will increase the general public safety. We are told that it is a small thing to give up semi-automatic rifles, which the political and cooperating media elites will dutifully call "assault weapons," even though nobody can quite define the term. In any case, we are told, nobody needs an "assault weapon" with a thirty-round magazine. Well, actually, almost nobody needs them. Apparently, Mr. Security Agent and his comrades need them, lots of them. Tens of thousands of new "assault weapons," enough to shoot all of the billions (with a "b") of .223 and .40 caliber hollow-point bullets recently purchased by our federal law enforcement agencies in unprecedented new acquisitions. Are we suddenly expecting a foreign invasion I missed reading about? Wouldn't that be the job of the military? Why do our federal law enforcement agencies suddenly need tens of thousands of "assault weapons" and billions of new hollow-point (not training) bullets, many times more than in previous years? Evidently, it's very dangerous on the Homeland Security front, and Mr. Security Agent needs a lot of firepower to be able to put down all of the assorted troublemakers and problem children out in the "uncontrolled spaces" of America. You can't have too much firepower if you work for our government law enforcement agencies! But in the name of public safety the government is going to whittle your allowable firearms down step by step, first eliminating semi-automatic rifles, then pistols, and eventually on down to the last bolt-action hunting rifles and shotguns, which may be kept at a government armory, and signed out for an approved day of hunting with a few shells. (Make sure to retrieve your empty brass for the counting.) So, step by step, the government is going to take away any ability the average citizen might have to resist a rampaging mob or roving gangs of bandits during a breakdown in law and order, or any demands at all made by a tyrannical government sometime in the murky future. 3. Trust us, we're from the government. So at the historical moment that our nation is turning into a police state, with no expectation of privacy, even of our private parts in public airports or on public highways, we are commanded to grant even greater trust in our government's perpetual future benevolence, to have blind faith that at no point in the future will our government turn tyrannical. But in the year 2013, has the government already earned our trust, or our disgust, with its current abuses of its police powers? In this environment of steadily creeping tyranny, should we comply with government demands for our increasing disarmament? I wrote Enemies Foreign and Domestic a decade ago with the hope that eventually anti-gun liberals would discover it and it would provide them with a virtual road map to understanding conservative thinking about firearms and their place in society. Additionally, I wrote the novel hoping that if it were successful, it might provide me a platform and a microphone to discuss these issues at some dangerous time in the future. That time is now. Well-meaning, gun-loathing liberals need to understand that they are blindly tossing matches into a dynamite factory with their threats to severely limit and restrict the Second Amendment. They must understand the other point of view in order not to send America careening into a deadly minefield, the existence of which they are, evidently, blissfully unaware. 4. The gun nuts To many liberals, the popular American hobby of collecting and shooting guns is a bizarre and shameful vice. Three or four pistols and long guns and a few hundred rounds of ammunition are routinely described in the popular media as an "arsenal." Perhaps in a Manhattan walk-up studio apartment, where that handful of guns had to be smuggled in and hidden, it would be considered an "arsenal." But out past the urban beltway, out in Red State America, that is what many folks I know keep in their car or truck for roadside emergencies, or impromptu plinking, or varmint-hunting opportunities. And hell, isn't that why we have guns out in Red State America? Damn sure is. Among other reasons. Millions of firearms aficionados in their later years have purchased a rifle, pistol or shotgun every year or two for decades. In millions of cases, these add up to dozens of firearms per household. A round dozen firearms of all types might be a good average. Some are hunting arms, some are military antiques, and increasingly, many are defensive pistols and modern sporting rifles, and yes, both are semi-automatic. For example, millions of AR-15 rifles have been purchased in just the last few years. Note that I did not say modern hunting rifles. That is a separate category, but the important thing to understand is that the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting, and anybody who says it does is telling a lie. Those of us who enjoy firearms feel it deeply when some lunatic misuses one to slaughter innocents. Shooting ranges are virtually churches of gun safety, with safety rules posted everywhere, taught to one and all, and enforced strictly. Passing down our tradition of safe and responsible gun ownership from generation to generation is considered a sacred trust. When a firearm is misused by a criminal, our greatest wish is always that we had been present with our legally concealed pistols to stop the slaughter of unarmed, defenseless innocents. And more frequently than you might imagine, this actually happens. Consider this: the average number of victims per incident when the shooter is stopped by an armed civilian: three. The average number of victims when the shooter is stopped by a policeman: fourteen. Why? Because when every second is a matter of life and death, the police are still minutes away. Think about those numbers. Eleven people die needlessly if the shooting takes place in a "victim disarmament zone," where legal firearms are prohibited. This is why deranged shooters head for schools, malls, and theaters, where signs forthrightly proclaim that guns are forbidden. A "no firearms" sign draws such a person the way that a starving wolf is attracted to a pen full of helpless lambs. But when the killer is stopped by an armed civilian, the mainstream media rarely or never mention that fact, because it goes against their propaganda template: the inherent evil of guns in civilian hands. So those stories are spiked and the typical American never hears of them. Did you know that shortly before the tragedy in Connecticut, an armed civilian stopped a maniac in a packed shopping mall after he had killed only two victims, instead of twenty-seven? 5. If it bleeds, it leads: The media love maniacs. The same media that pointedly ignore frequent life-saving defensive uses of firearms consistently pours hours and days and weeks of attention upon the latest maniac who chooses a firearm as his tool of mass murder, so that the next potential insane villain cannot fail to notice the easy path to fame and immortality that the misuse of a gun can bring. But the greatest fame will only attach if they can beat the previous body-count record, a number constantly and loudly broadcast, so that no one can fail to hear it. The message to the unstable is clear: Come on, you crazy guys, can't you at least murder your way to thirty? The Virginia Polytechnic Institute madman is still leading the lone-wolf pack, but college students might resist, so maybe find an easier target to rack up higher numbers. Find a killing zone with younger and more helpless victims. The media's lesson was clear, and it was well learned by Adam Lanza when he set out to slaughter helpless little lambs instead of bigger and tougher sheep. The mainstream media pour a Niagara of crocodile tears over the most recent child victims, after doing everything for the killer but sign his name to their pre-written script. With such fanfare, is it any wonder that there is no lack of new monsters playing "beat the kill record" on a regular basis? It's almost become a recurring television reality show. Meanwhile, liberal politicians scheme about how to leverage the latest human tragedy into new gun control laws, laws that by definition will be obeyed only by the law-abiding, not by criminals. "Never let a good crisis go to waste," to paraphrase Obama confidant Rahm Emmanuel. And no better opportunity to trim the Second Amendment fangs and claws of their ideological enemies than in the immediate aftermath of another massacre wrought by a madman with a gun. But conservatives have also considered this phenomenon of grief exploitation for political ends, although from a very different ideological perspective. We look back a century and even longer, and see other nations and peoples that were also on the march forward toward "social progress" when the need for mandatory gun registration suddenly became an urgent national priority. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=786_1371439019 USMC_SRT Dear Government NWO, Government, Guns, Weapons Sun, 16 Jun 2013 20:36:58 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=fa3_1371429284 SAPD_HRT Dear Mr. Security Agent, Federal, state, or local. You, the man or woman with the badge, the sworn LEO or FLEA and those who inhabit the many law enforcement niches in between and on all sides. This essay is directed to you, because in the end, how this turmoil about gun control turns out will depend largely upon your decisions and actions over the coming months and years. I sincerely wish that members of Congress-who may soon be voting on new gun control measures-would read this essay, but I realize that's a pipe dream, considering the impenetrable bubbles around those exalted entities. So I'll settle for you, Mr. (or Ms.) Security Agent, since you already gobble up everything on the internet, and I don't have to seek you out. A decade ago I wrote the novel Enemies Foreign and Domestic, a tale about how tragic events involving the misuse of firearms can be used by an evil administration to misinform and mold public opinion to support its malign anti-freedom policies. No, my novel was not predicting "Operation Fast and Furious" a decade before that covert policy of "pursuing gun control under the radar," (which was President Obama's explanation to Sarah Brady for his lack of overt political action). That inter-agency gun-walking policy, remember, resulted in the deaths of over four hundred Mexicans and two U.S. federal agents, murdered in an effort to discredit the Second Amendment and lead to more restrictive gun control laws in America. (If Nixon-or any Republican, for that matter-were in office, the intentional bloodbath would be called Murdergate, but today's collaborating Woodwards and Bernsteins are in on the cover-up.) Instead of gun-walking thousands of AK-47s to Mexican drug cartel assassins (who would believe that?), Enemies Foreign and Domestic begins with a sniper opening fire on a packed football stadium. A thousand innocent fans die, some from the ninety bullets fired but most in the ensuing panic stampede. In a traumatized America, the fictional stadium massacre results in the banning of all semi-automatic rifles, with no buyback, no grandfathering of weapons already owned, and no sunset clause. Citizens had to turn them in for destruction or face years in federal prison. The page-one stadium massacre was simply a plot device chosen to launch the story in high gear and set the stage to immediately and fully explore the main theme of the novel: the calculated transformation of our Constitutional republic into a socialist police state. Since I prefer to write tightly wound fiction transpiring at a rapid pace in a compressed time period, I examined the imposition of totalitarian controls over the course of just a few weeks, not years or decades. 1. The TSA: On the road to the American police state Consider: The TSA was born in the panicked backwash of 9/11, which is understandable given the events of that day, when Muslim maniacs screaming allahu akbar murdered 3,000 Americans and others in the name of Islamic global jihad. But a decade after 9/11, due entirely to political correctness, it's completely out of the question to profile Mohammed at the airport yet absolutely necessary for that bloated agency to "randomly" select your pre-teen or teenage daughter for a body search performed by a government matron in a TSA uniform. This frequently under-the-clothes and against-the-skin complete body search may done in full public view, or in a hidden back room, solely at the discretion of the TSA agents involved. Meanwhile, Mom and Dad stand off to the side where they have been directed to wait, saying nothing, scarcely moving, avoiding random eye contact lest a TSA security agent catch a wayward smirk or utterance of protest. To pull out a cell phone camera at this time would surely invite arrest. To walk over and grab the matron by the arm is out of the question. Defending your child from the indignity would lead only to your being Tasered and handcuffed on the cold airport floor. After that, your entire family may wind up in some TSA airport detention cells, conveniently located right on your concourse and unknown to you until then. Better to stew in silence, let the incident pass, and try to forget it. So in the year 2013, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we stand with our eyes averted, burning with humiliation, while our spouses or children are groped above and below the waist by blue-gloved government prison guards-only we are in an airport in a free country, and not in a prison! Or are we? A virtual open-air prison, where government security agents can pat down ordinary citizens at will is the accepted "new normal." Did that happen often in East Germany, I wonder? In the Soviet Union? Does it happen today in Cuba? Officially sanctioned crotch groping in the name of "security?" (Why, again, was it that the TSA was created? Oh yes, Islamic jihad terrorists destroyed some big buildings and killed thousands of people in New York City on September 11 way back in the year 2001. It was because of that very bad day in lower Manhattan and many other acts of bloody Muslim terrorism around the world going on for decades, especially hijacking and blowing up lots of airliners full of people. It's so easy to forget why exactly it is that we need to become a police state for our own safety.) And now we read that the TSA is yet again expanding and branching out, like an octopus on steroids. This suddenly gargantuan federal agency is not only running routine checkpoints and stop-and-frisk operations in airports, but at bus and train stations also. Eight thousand times in 2010, if you can believe the government's own accounting figures. Your papers, please! These checkpoints and mobile searching stations are called VIPR Teams, a telling acronym for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response Teams. Folks, you cannot make this stuff up. Well, actually, you can. Way back in 2002 in Enemies Foreign and Domestic I invented FIST checkpoints, for Firearms Inspections Stop Terrorism. I leave it to you as to which sounds more coolly ominous and plausible in fact and in fiction-VIPRs or FISTs. The advance word is that at the next stop on this express lane to tyranny, we will be seeing the TSA on our highways, setting up roaming vehicle checkpoints. For our "public safety," of course. Watch the recent YouTube video of the Texas state trooper digitally raping a mother and daughter by the side of a Texas highway to see law enforcement checkpoint authority run amok, and wonder at the future of our nation and our hard-won legacy of individual freedom. If you can stomach to watch it. Welcome to the USSA, comrades! How in the world did this happen? When did we wake up to find our freedom stolen in the night-and all in name of "homeland security" and "public safety"? 2. Nobody needs an assault weapon! And now in the wake of yet another disgusting example of the worst human depravity, this time in an elementary school in New England, we are told by the government that some firearms are simply too dangerous for citizens to possess. We are told that limiting or removing these firearms from private hands will increase the general public safety. We are told that it is a small thing to give up semi-automatic rifles, which the political and cooperating media elites will dutifully call "assault weapons," even though nobody can quite define the term. In any case, we are told, nobody needs an "assault weapon" with a thirty-round magazine. Well, actually, almost nobody needs them. Apparently, Mr. Security Agent and his comrades need them, lots of them. Tens of thousands of new "assault weapons," enough to shoot all of the billions (with a "b") of .223 and .40 caliber hollow-point bullets recently purchased by our federal law enforcement agencies in unprecedented new acquisitions. Are we suddenly expecting a foreign invasion I missed reading about? Wouldn't that be the job of the military? Why do our federal law enforcement agencies suddenly need tens of thousands of "assault weapons" and billions of new hollow-point (not training) bullets, many times more than in previous years? Evidently, it's very dangerous on the Homeland Security front, and Mr. Security Agent needs a lot of firepower to be able to put down all of the assorted troublemakers and problem children out in the "uncontrolled spaces" of America. You can't have too much firepower if you work for our government law enforcement agencies! But in the name of public safety the government is going to whittle your allowable firearms down step by step, first eliminating semi-automatic rifles, then pistols, and eventually on down to the last bolt-action hunting rifles and shotguns, which may be kept at a government armory, and signed out for an approved day of hunting with a few shells. (Make sure to retrieve your empty brass for the counting.) So, step by step, the government is going to take away any ability the average citizen might have to resist a rampaging mob or roving gangs of bandits during a breakdown in law and order, or any demands at all made by a tyrannical government sometime in the murky future. 3. Trust us, we're from the government. So at the historical moment that our nation is turning into a police state, with no expectation of privacy, even of our private parts in public airports or on public highways, we are commanded to grant even greater trust in our government's perpetual future benevolence, to have blind faith that at no point in the future will our government turn tyrannical. But in the year 2013, has the government already earned our trust, or our disgust, with its current abuses of its police powers? In this environment of steadily creeping tyranny, should we comply with government demands for our increasing disarmament? I wrote Enemies Foreign and Domestic a decade ago with the hope that eventually anti-gun liberals would discover it and it would provide them with a virtual road map to understanding conservative thinking about firearms and their place in society. Additionally, I wrote the novel hoping that if it were successful, it might provide me a platform and a microphone to discuss these issues at some dangerous time in the future. That time is now. Well-meaning, gun-loathing liberals need to understand that they are blindly tossing matches into a dynamite factory with their threats to severely limit and restrict the Second Amendment. They must understand the other point of view in order not to send America careening into a deadly minefield, the existence of which they are, evidently, blissfully unaware. 4. The gun nuts To many liberals, the popular American hobby of collecting and shooting guns is a bizarre and shameful vice. Three or four pistols and long guns and a few hundred rounds of ammunition are routinely described in the popular media as an "arsenal." Perhaps in a Manhattan walk-up studio apartment, where that handful of guns had to be smuggled in and hidden, it would be considered an "arsenal." But out past the urban beltway, out in Red State America, that is what many folks I know keep in their car or truck for roadside emergencies, or impromptu plinking, or varmint-hunting opportunities. And hell, isn't that why we have guns out in Red State America? Damn sure is. Among other reasons. Millions of firearms aficionados in their later years have purchased a rifle, pistol or shotgun every year or two for decades. In millions of cases, these add up to dozens of firearms per household. A round dozen firearms of all types might be a good average. Some are hunting arms, some are military antiques, and increasingly, many are defensive pistols and modern sporting rifles, and yes, both are semi-automatic. For example, millions of AR-15 rifles have been purchased in just the last few years. Note that I did not say modern hunting rifles. That is a separate category, but the important thing to understand is that the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting, and anybody who says it does is telling a lie. Those of us who enjoy firearms feel it deeply when some lunatic misuses one to slaughter innocents. Shooting ranges are virtually churches of gun safety, with safety rules posted everywhere, taught to one and all, and enforced strictly. Passing down our tradition of safe and responsible gun ownership from generation to generation is considered a sacred trust. When a firearm is misused by a criminal, our greatest wish is always that we had been present with our legally concealed pistols to stop the slaughter of unarmed, defenseless innocents. And more frequently than you might imagine, this actually happens. Consider this: the average number of victims per incident when the shooter is stopped by an armed civilian: three. The average number of victims when the shooter is stopped by a policeman: fourteen. Why? Because when every second is a matter of life and death, the police are still minutes away. Think about those numbers. Eleven people die needlessly if the shooting takes place in a "victim disarmament zone," where legal firearms are prohibited. This is why deranged shooters head for schools, malls, and theaters, where signs forthrightly proclaim that guns are forbidden. A "no firearms" sign draws such a person the way that a starving wolf is attracted to a pen full of helpless lambs. But when the killer is stopped by an armed civilian, the mainstream media rarely or never mention that fact, because it goes against their propaganda template: the inherent evil of guns in civilian hands. So those stories are spiked and the typical American never hears of them. Did you know that shortly before the tragedy in Connecticut, an armed civilian stopped a maniac in a packed shopping mall after he had killed only two victims, instead of twenty-seven? 5. If it bleeds, it leads: The media love maniacs. The same media that pointedly ignore frequent life-saving defensive uses of firearms consistently pours hours and days and weeks of attention upon the latest maniac who chooses a firearm as his tool of mass murder, so that the next potential insane villain cannot fail to notice the easy path to fame and immortality that the misuse of a gun can bring. But the greatest fame will only attach if they can beat the previous body-count record, a number constantly and loudly broadcast, so that no one can fail to hear it. The message to the unstable is clear: Come on, you crazy guys, can't you at least murder your way to thirty? The Virginia Polytechnic Institute madman is still leading the lone-wolf pack, but college students might resist, so maybe find an easier target to rack up higher numbers. Find a killing zone with younger and more helpless victims. The media's lesson was clear, and it was well learned by Adam Lanza when he set out to slaughter helpless little lambs instead of bigger and tougher sheep. The mainstream media pour a Niagara of crocodile tears over the most recent child victims, after doing everything for the killer but sign his name to their pre-written script. With such fanfare, is it any wonder that there is no lack of new monsters playing "beat the kill record" on a regular basis? It's almost become a recurring television reality show. Meanwhile, liberal politicians scheme about how to leverage the latest human tragedy into new gun control laws, laws that by definition will be obeyed only by the law-abiding, not by criminals. "Never let a good crisis go to waste," to paraphrase Obama confidant Rahm Emmanuel. And no better opportunity to trim the Second Amendment fangs and claws of their ideological enemies than in the immediate aftermath of another massacre wrought by a madman with a gun. But conservatives have also considered this phenomenon of grief exploitation for political ends, although from a very different ideological perspective. We look back a century and even longer, and see other nations and peoples that were also on the march forward toward "social progress" when the need for mandatory gun registration suddenly became an urgent national priority. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=fa3_1371429284 SAPD_HRT Dear Mr. Government NWO, Government, Weapon, Gun, Control Sat, 15 Jun 2013 17:06:30 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=81f_1371330063 Detroit Iron Posted by Edward Cline at 8:22 PM Review: American Betrayal : The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character , by Diana West Where to begin? In American Betrayal *, Diana West begins in 1933. In the name of establishing historical causo-connections, I would have begun in 1781, when Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason , a brain-cracking treatise which relied on reality to prove that reality was unknowable. That is, by reading his book, a real thing in your real hands, you were expected to agree with Kant that real things were only rough reflections of things whose "essences" existed beyond the evidence of our benighted, warping senses, in some other realm. Kant counted on everyone not noticing the contradiction and not seeing the ease with which his elaborately constructed mare's nest could be exploded. No contemporary, I gather, ever confronted Kant and said, "Herr Professor! If what you say is true, then this book is just a shadow, and the print in it, and all your words, too! What could they mean? How could they be true? Are your words noumena , or mere phenomena ?" But no one ever did confront Kant with his contradictions, fallacies, and cerebral legerdemain, except some Hegelian hair-splitters, and the Western world has been the worse for it. 1781 . Just as the American Revolution, a product of the Enlightenment, was winding to a close with the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, with reality-loyal Americans winning their freedom from the British monarchy, Kant published his Critique , whose ideas, if not opposed and refuted, were guaranteed to destroy the freedom of their heirs. The Founders, as they later debated in Philadelphia the means and ends of a true republican government that would guarantee men's freedom from each other, were not aware of the incubus that was birthing across the Atlantic and which would eventually infect American political philosophy with the syphilis of collectivism, moral relativism, and statism in the 19thcentury. Kant was an enemy of the Enlightenment. Diana West, among her other arguments, contends that the political and intellectual leaders of the West by 1933 had abandoned reason and all Enlightenment ideas. Nay, with very few exceptions, they became as hostile to them as Kant ever was. West begins in 1933. Of what significance is that year? Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and Reichsstatthalter of Prussia on January 30th, 1933. From August 1934, he would be F"uhrer of Germany until his suicide in April 1945. Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt became the 32nd president of the United States on March 4th, 1933. He would remain in that office until his death in April 1945. On November 20, 1933, at Roosevelt's urging, the U.S. recognized the Soviet Union. West writes: The West's decision to recognize the USSR - and its determination to keep recognizing it, no matter how much lying and acquiescence to betrayal that entailed - did more to transform us than any single act before or since. The profound diplomatic shift - part Faustian bargain, part moral lobotomy - didn't just invite the Soviet Union into the community of nations. To make room for the monster-r'egime, the United States had to surrender the terra firma of objective morality and reality-based judgment. No wonder, then, that tens of thousands of Dreyfus cases in Russia meant nothing to the "conscience of the civilized world.... Because the Communist r'egime was so openly and ideologically dedicated to our destruction, the act of recognition defied reason and the demands of self-preservation. Recognition and all that came with it, including alliance, would soon become the enemy of reason and self-preservation.... ...It was here that we abandoned the lodestars of good and evil, the clarity of black and white. Closing our eyes, we dove head first into a weltering morass of exquisitely enervating and agonizing grays. (pp. 195-196) In short, the U.S. government had by 1933 lost the capacity for making moral judgments. It cringed like a coward when asked to make one, and hissed and spat like a rabid animal at the mere suggestion of it. It still does when the subject of Islam comes up. Recognition of the Soviet Union not only granted the murderous Communist dictatorship a moral sanction, it also opened the gates to the wholesale Soviet infiltration and subversive activities of its agents, American sympathizers or "fellow travelers," and members of the Communist Party USA. The Soviets never honored any of the terms of that recognition. The precedent had been set. We can see the insidious parallels today in our government's refusal to withdraw moral sanctions from Islamic r'egimes and its tolerance of terrorist-founded and terrorist state-funded organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) within our own borders. In March 1933, Harry Hopkins, a veteran of former New York Governor Roosevelt's welfare programs, on Roosevelt's invitation joins the new administration, at first running the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In this pre-war period he also established the National Youth Administration (NYA) and the Federal One Programs for artists and writers. In May 1940, Roosevelt makes Hopkins his first counsel in all matters pertaining to Europe and the new war. Hopkins moves into the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House, his office and residence for the next three and a half years. Hopkins not only advises Roosevelt on foreign policy and war issues, but directs Lend-Lease, a program conceived by Armand Hammer, a notorious Sovietaphile, ostensibly created to aid the British in their fight against the Nazis, but actually intended to aid Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union. Between 1932 and 1933, millions of Russians starved to death as Stalin's government confiscated harvests in the brutal forced collectivization of Russian agriculture. Millions more would perish over the decade from starvation, from being sent as slaves in the Gulag, in mass executions, and in political purges. But 1933, writes West, was a crucial year in American history. In reprising the statements of historians and commentators about the wrongness of recognizing the Soviet r'egime as a legitimate government, given the known horrific consequences of forced collectivization, she states: Dennis J. Dunn agrees with historian David Mayers, who has argued that the failure of the U.S. government under Roosevelt to reckon with the profound crime of the Terror Famine in negotiations over recognition made it - us - "a passive accomplice to Stalin in the Ukraine." I agree. Which makes 1933 the year of America's Fall (p. 243) Diana West steps up to lectern and confronts Professor Kant with some very incisive and inconvenient questions of her own. Who really won World War II? Was it really America's "Good War"? Did the "greatest generation" fight to rid the world of one toxic dictatorship only to enable another to take its place? How is it that the only beneficiary of that war was the Soviet Union, which acquired an Eastern European empire? Were Americans conned, scammed, and robbed throughout the government-perpetuated Depression and then during the war? Who was really establishing American foreign policy in the 1930's and 1940's: Roosevelt, or Stalin through Harry Hopkins, who had Roosevelt's ear 24/7, and countless Soviet agents and traitors embedded in our government dedicated to selling secrets, altruism, self-sacrifice and welfare statism? Hopkins, West suggests, was the Soviets' most important agent in the U.S. government. Whether or not he was "recruited" or "co-opted" by the Soviets, or was a volunteer agent, West was not able to determine with certainty. He is referred to in Soviet cables as "Agent 19." The KGB boasted that he was the Soviet Union's "most important agent." West performs a yeoman's task and gets to the "essence" of that whole sorry and tragic period, proving in her narrative that the reality of our relationship with the Soviets is knowable, and moreover, that its "essence" was ugly, scary, and shameful. I would add, pertaining to all the actors in that period responsible for what West calls the "Big Lie," criminal and treasonous. What precedes and follows West's statement is not for the weak of stomach or faint of heart. With a meticulous and excruciating fealty to the truth, and after exhaustive and often frustrating research (because many documents that once existed and that were evidence of the government's complicity were destroyed or had simply vanished from government archives), West paints a picture of not only FDR's complacency towards Soviet totalitarianism, but Harry Hopkins's contribution to the fall, as well, in addition to that of a legion of liars, fabricators, Communist moles, agents, and spies who populated government positions. If you think the Benghazi cover-up is a classic case of desperate political back-pedaling, official lies and semi-lies, face-saving, and walking away from reality, that episode is merely a miniature of the colossal con pulled on the whole country by Roosevelt and his minions from 1933 onward. West covers several main subjects, among them the extent of Soviet espionage against the U.S. and the extent of Soviet infiltration in our government, an infiltration so common and ubiquitous in numerous Depression Era and wartime agencies that the government was literally top-heavy enough to cause the ship-of-state to list ever Leftward. The government was so saturated with lefties and Communists that they became the de facto architects of domestic and foreign policies. West dates the beginning of the end of a fairly solid and reclaimable constitutional republic - reclaimable from Wilson's Progressive precedents of a central bank, the income tax, and becoming the world's moral policeman, moves which put the country on the road to incremental serfdom - from 1933, when the U.S. recognized the U.S.S.R. as "just another system of government," not much different from our own. Roosevelt, West explains, believed in the "convergence" of our system of government and that of the Soviets. Aside from buttressing his collectivist programs of the New Deal welfare state, the "convergence theory" enabled Roosevelt to be essentially an apolitical pragmatist . There was...one point of ideology that Roosevelt does seem to have fervently embraced, which historian Dennis J. Dunn believes made him an ideologue after all. FDR, Dunn writes, seized on the theory of "convergence" as it applied to the United States and the USSR, the idea being that capitalism and Communism would take on enough characteristics of the other to "converge." ...As Dunn explains it, the convergence theory "held that Soviet Russia and the United States were on convergent paths, where the United States was moving from laissez-faire capitalism to welfare state socialism and the Soviet Union was evolving from totalitarianism to social democracy." (p. 192) There's that Hegelian/Marxist "dialectical" evolutionary force that was somehow ineluctably moving both sides toward "convergence" so that, to the casual observer, when the melding occurred, there wouldn't be a dime's or kopek's worth of difference between the two countries. Human volition and action would have nothing to do with it, neither in acts of Congress nor in executive branch decrees nor in Supreme Court decisions. "Convergence theory" assumed the cognitive powers of a somnambulist. It would "just happen." Don't blame us, counter the advocates of that theory and others. We have nothing to do with it. It's just "history." It would be unfair to both West and her book to attempt anything here other than highlighting some of the revelations she discusses at length throughout American Betrayal . Here are some of them: Lend-Lease Much of West's story focuses on the organized massive theft and redirection of American war productivity to the Soviets that occurred under Lend-Lease. But how did it really begin? As noted above, it was the idea of politically ambidextrous businessman Armand Hammer whose financial and commercial relationship with the Soviets dated back to 1921. (His father, Dr. Julius Hammer, a socialist and later a Communist, named him after the Socialist Labor Party of America's symbol of an arm and hammer.) Worried that a Nazi attack on the Soviet Union would jeopardize his interests in the Soviet Union (and no one in Washington believed the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, signed on August 23rd, 1939, would last), he met with Roosevelt in the White House on November 28th, 1940 and sold the president and Hopkins on the idea of establishing a government entity that would be responsible for aiding the British in their war with Germany (Hopkins later claimed the idea came to him out of the blue), but would actually help Stalin prepare for the expected abrogation of the "non-aggression" pact and enable him to withstand the invasion with American help. It should be noted that this "pact" prepared the way for the co-invasion of Poland by both the Nazis and the Soviets on September 1st, 1939, the spark that began World War II. Both regarded the pact as a temporary truce (in Islam, a hudna contrived to buy time); Stalin wanted to eventually conquer Europe; the Nazis drooled over the oil fields of Baku and the prospect of endless lebensraum . Armand Hammer, who died in 1989, was a walking exemplar of the political "convergence" subscribed to by Roosevelt, a Republican who contributed to Richard Nixon's 1972 presidential campaign, and was a frequent visitor to the White Houses of Presidents Reagan, Carter, and George H.W. Bush. He had met and was on friendly terms with every Soviet dictator but Stalin. Hitler signed the first operational directive to invade the Soviet Union on December 18th, 1940. On March 11, 1941, Congress passed the Lend-Lease bill, and on June 22nd, Hitler invaded Russia. Roosevelt appointed Hopkins as head of Lend-Lease. West details just how much Lend-Lease aided the Soviets. When the U.S. finally entered the war on December 7th, 1941, Hopkins and Lend-Lease gave aiding the Soviets the first priority in planes, tanks, small arms, munitions, Liberty ships, military machine parts, and other materiel, including food, clothing, medical supplies, etc. - over the U.S.'s own warfighting needs . While Americans had to make do with rationed sugar, butter, meat, tires and gasoline, the Soviet government received these things free, without condition, and without interest (on a "loan" which was not expected to ever be paid back by the Soviets, and never was). The Navy and Army had to wait until Soviet quotas were filled before being able to take delivery on their own weaponry and supplies. Harry Hopkins said so, and Roosevelt agreed. West also investigates the likelihood that Hopkins aided the Soviets in acquiring not only information regarding the Manhattan Project to produce the first atomic bomb, but facilitated, through Lend-Lease, the Soviets receiving the actual physical components, such as cadmium rods and uranium, allowing Soviet scientists to fashion their own bomb, first tested in 1949. (pp. 122-123) West writes about the political power Lend-Lease gave Roosevelt and his "co-president," Hopkins. Lend-Lease was ...sold to the American public as a means to keep the United States out of war in Europe - as a substitute for U.S. military involvement, not a means by which to enter the war...The legislation endowed the president with unprecedented powers to bypass the Senate and other checks and balances. For example, Lend-Lease allowed FDR to set the terms of the most massive U.S. expenditures in foreign aid history and their repayment, or nonrepayment. Who, then, needed a Senate to advise and consent on related treaties? The State Department, too, took on attributes of a governmental fifth wheel as Hopkins helmed Lend-Lease and U.S. foreign policy from the White House. (p. 134) Among other things, Singapore, the Philippines and Corregidor fell to the Japanese because all the war materiel that could've saved Americans and the British was instead sent to Russia under Lend-Lease, and FDR and his advisers knew it. Douglas MacArthur had to beg Washington for planes and naval support and relief, but the Soviets came first. Roosevelt said, "I would rather lose New Zealand, Australia or anything else rather than have the Russian front collapse." (pp. 46-47) The Office of War Information (OWI) West devotes many pages to how the Office of War Information, staffed and controlled largely by Communist Party members, contributed to the white-washing of Soviet Russia, to make "Papa Joe" Stalin and his dictatorship palatable to the American public. Aiding them in this propaganda and agitprop were the press and broadcast luminaries. The overall mantra was: Stalin and Russia were the "good guys," put upon by the "bad guys," the Nazis. Stalin and his r'egime never did a bad thing, they just had a "different" political system, which shouldn't be judged because of the millions it wiped out of existence (those millions never mentioned). This effort ranged from standard pep-talky government propaganda to wartime newsreels to Hollywood movies. The standing orders from the OWI especially were that in no instance was the totalitarian nature of Soviet Russia ever to be revealed, discussed, or even insinuated. A book about novelist Ayn Rand's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 concerning the propaganda film Song of Russia (1944) is revealing in and of itself. Rand's testimony was solicited because she had escaped Soviet Russia in 1926 and had first-hand knowledge of conditions there. Concerning the lies propagated by the government, one committee member asked her why she objected to the U.S. allying itself with the Soviets to defeat Hitler. Rand answered: That is not what I said. I was not in a position to make that decision. If I were, I would tell you what I would do. That is not what we are discussing. We are discussing the fact that our country was an ally of Russia, and the question is: what should we tell the American people about it - the truth or a lie? If we had good reason, if that is what you believe, all right, then why not tell the truth? Say it is a dictatorship, but we want to be associated with it. Say it is worthwhile being associated with the devil, as Churchill said, in order to defeat another evil which is Hitler. There might be some good argument made for that. But why pretend that Russia was not what it was?** Why pretend, indeed? Because the government didn't want to risk alienating Americans from the war effort. It wouldn't be good for "morale." They might stop buying War Bonds, and demand an end to rationing. They might object to being in league with a devil that wanted to collectivize them, too. Katyn Forest Massacre After Hitler and Stalin had devoured Poland in 1939, both went about "cleansing" Poland of its government and military elements, with the Nazis targeting Polish Jews. We are accustomed to watching videos of the Polish cavalry facing German tanks, but we are rarely informed that in the spring of 1940 the Soviets murdered between 15,000 and 22,000 Polish officers and policemen in Katyn Forest to remove any chance of the Poles resisting the Soviet occupation. Initial blame was put on the equally blood-thirsty Nazis, but it was the Nazis who discovered the mass graves after capturing that region from the Soviets, and who brought in several American and British POWs to see for themselves (hoping to put a chink in the American-Soviet alliance), among them Americans Capt. Donald B. Stewart and Lt. Col. John H. Van Vliet Jr. Stewart later testified before a Congressional committee about what he saw, and Van Vliet wrote two memos, one of which was put into an Orwellian memory hole - by Alger Hiss in the State Department. This information was relayed to Roosevelt, so he and Hopkins knew about the massacre. They suppressed the information. The country would not learn about it until 1950, when Stewart delivered his testimony. Russia would not confess to the massacre until 1990. Diana West discusses this whole shameful episode in her ground-breaking book. (pp. 202-218) The Nuremberg Trials Another issue that sent Diana West off on a wholly justified tear was the hypocrisy of the Nuremberg Trials , two sets of them between November 1945 and October 1946, with the U.S. conducting separate trials in its occupied zone in Germany. Two Soviet judges sat in judgment of their fellow killers, the Germans, alongside their American, British and French colleagues, and one Soviet chief prosecutor argued that justice be meted out to the Germans in the dock. The presiding Soviet judge, Major General Iona Nikitchenko, had previously presided over some of the notorious show trials in the1930's during the Great Purge. But all the judges at Nuremberg took part in a conspiracy of silence about the enormity of guilt shared by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the way of massacres, purges, beginning WWII by invading Poland with Germany, and policies of extermination. West noted: The fact is, not a jot about the Soviet criminal case came to judgment at Nuremberg - not the NKVD massacre of some twenty thousand Polish officers known as the Katyn Forest Massacre (charged to the Germans), not the forced "repatriation" of some two million Soviet-claimed refugees, which occurred thanks to essential assistance from British and U.S. troops - our very own war crime - which was still underway in Germany and elsewhere even as Nuremberg unfolded. (p. 55) No one was supposed to raise so much as an eyebrow, if the ghastly details of Nazi depredations described during the trials seemed to resemble the ghastly details of Soviet depredations. The Soviets commit such crimes? Perish the thought. And thought did indeed perish. Stalin's insistence on a "second front" The conduct of the war was more or less dictated by Stalin and adapted as necessary by Roosevelt and his Hopkins-picked general military staff, which included Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and George C. Marshall. Stalin's idea was, first, to prolong the war as long as necessary, in order for the Soviets to better defend itself against the Nazis; and second, that the British and Americans should open up a "second front" by invading France. Winston Churchill, increasingly the odd-man-out in the triumvirate, argued fruitlessly to open up the new front by invading through the Balkans or through Italy, the better to cut off Soviet advances into central Europe. Unlike Roosevelt, he had no illusions about Stalin's master plan and motives. Both Roosevelt and Stalin knew alsowhat Churchill was certain would happen if the Soviet armies were able to overrun Eastern Europe and also Germany: those countries would remain under Soviet rule. Roosevelt, the "great liberator," was comfortable with the idea. West writes, quoting Francis Cardinal Spellman's recollections from his September 3rd, 1943 meeting with Roosevelt: "The European people will simply have to endure the Russian domination in the hope that in ten or twenty years they will be able to live well with the Russians," Spellman recounted FDR saying at this pre-Tehran, pre-Yalta moment. Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bessarabia, the eastern half of Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Germany - FDR conceded all to Communist r'egimes or Soviet protection! What is most weird and most disturbing about Roosevelt's obdurate fatalism is that the entire Red Army at this time was still inside the USSR . (p. 266) Of course Roosevelt's "fatalism" saved him the necessity of making a moral judgment. That was moral relativism at work, his "convergence" kicking in to relieve him of all responsibility for the certain misery and deaths that were sure to follow a Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. Don't bother me, don't bother me. I don't want to know. And so Eisenhower became Supreme Allied Commander and began planning D-Day. German overtures to end war in 1943 rejected Integral to understanding why Stalin wanted his "second front" is West's revelations that not only was there an extensive German underground dedicated to ridding the country of Hitler and ending the war - an underground the U.S. refused to assist or aid in any way - but that Roosevelt, beholden to Stalin, rejected several overtures from high-ranking German officers to kill or incarcerate Hitler, establish a provisional, non-Nazi government, and sue for peace - but on the condition that German forces released from fighting the British and Americans be free to repel the Red Army from Germany and other regions then held by the Nazis. The war could have ended in 1943, long before the costly D-Day invasion through France in June 1944. Had that surrender happened, D-Day would never have taken place. It wouldn't have been necessary. Churchill, sympathetic to the idea, was helpless. Stalin wanted Germany reduced to rubble. A German surrender in 1943 would have been premature for Stalin and spoiled his plans to conquer as much of Europe as possible without bumping into Anglo-American forces coming from the west. He insisted on a "second front" and Roosevelt obliged him, with Churchill's strategic advice shunted to the side as irrelevant. All the men in the conspiracy to stage a coup d''etat against Hitler were subsequently executed by Hitler's henchmen, including Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of German military intelligence, who had been aiding British intelligence, and who was baffled by Roosevelt's resistance. (pp. 282-286, pp. 308-309) The repatriation of Russians and Europeans to the Soviets by British and American forces, on order from Washington, was another shameful episode discussed by West, one not known to very many Americans. Ordering General Patton to stop his pell-mell drive so that the Red Army could take Berlin is a bit of history that hasn't been covered up. There is the issue of tens of thousands of American and British POWs in German camps being "liberated" by the Red Army and subsequently incarcerated in Soviet labor camps. There is one pre-war episode not mentioned by West but which has always stuck in my mind, one I read about long ago as a teen and which inaugurated my suspicions that WWII was not entirely conducted as I'd read in history books. This was story about the S.S. St. Louis , which left Hamburg, Germany in May 1939 with 900 Jewish refugees escaping Nazi persecution. After being turned away by Cuba, the ship called on Miami, Florida. No one was allowed to enter the country because of an annual quota on immigrants. After being rebuffed by the Canadians, as well, the ship sailed to Antwerp, where many of the passengers were taken in by Britain, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. When the Nazis invaded the Continental countries, there was no escape for the remaining 620 passengers taken in by those countries. It is estimated that 254 of them died from one Nazi reason or another. My point here is that the U.S.'s ersatz immigrant quota system denied all those passengers a chance to survive and live. Today, we allow the virtually unlimited immigration of Muslims, and are contemplating allowing millions of illegal Mexican aliens, under the rubric of "amnesty," to remain here to better ensure a Democratic victory in 2016. This is a form of "convergence" not even Roosevelt could have contemplated or imagined. He opened the gates to one form of enemy; Obama and his minions continue to open them to another. Diana West has done this country a favor by putting between two covers the record of a long, disgraceful period in American history. She will not receive very many thanks or compliments for having done so. She is likely to be reviled and smeared, when it is Franklin D. Roosevelt's person and record that should be reviled, together with the Soviets' top agent, Harry Hopkins. Moral and political relativism, she demonstrated, allowed the U.S. to tolerate the Soviets and their murderous totalitarian r'egime in the Red Decade, and then become an "ally" with it to crush a rival totalitarian r'egime, that of the Nazis. It inoculated Roosevelt, a political pragmatist with strong left-wing premises, against knowledge of the terrible and freedom-destroying nature of Communism, while, au contraire , at the same time allowed him and his agents to decry the terrible and freedom-destroying nature of Nazism. West's book initially began as an enquiry into why 9/11 was met with the government's ambivalence and delusions about the nature of Islam. Observing the inroads Islam and Sharia law were making in the U.S., she was certain that Islam was not so much a primitive religion as an all-encompassing totalitarian ideology, one as committed to conquest and slavery as had been Nazism, Communism, and Shintoism. If the government had raised the hue and cry about the evils of Nazism, why not about the evils of Islam? Because Roosevelt, Hopkins, and their allies in the State Department and other government entities practiced their own brand of uncritical "outreach" to Communism and the Soviet Union. Her search for an answer led her to discover and uncover, as far as the surviving records permitted her, all the lies and truths about Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, Stalin, Communism, and the real reasons why the U.S. was drawn into a war whose only real victor was the Soviet Union. No hue and cry was ever raised by anyone in power about the evils of Communism, she discovered. Why not? And those few who did raise the hue and cry were mocked, smeared, marginalized, discredited, ignored, and banished from serious discussion. Why? What would permit our government, the leader of the "free world," to participate in and perpetuate the suppression of the truth about Communism and the Soviet Union, and to enlarge the area of the unfree world with an insouciant cry of C'est la vie ? What would motivate it to con Americans year after year and throughout a devastating war? If our national character is defined as one of incorrigible individualism and freedom from fiat or arbitrary coercion, what had happened to it? These were the questions she sought answers to. One answer she learned was that by 1933, our government had indeed reached another kind of "convergence," one in which truth and liberty met power-lust at a vector point and were demolished by a craving for power over men as a means of having power over reality, and that such power-lust would readily discard all principles and all commitment to upholding not just the Constitution, but the value of freedom. West does not go into the history of that growing power, which can be traced back to certain ideas and actions taken by men in government in the 19th and early 20th centuries to implement those ideas, and advocated by numerous groups, the most prominent of which were the Progressives. On one hand, the culprits did not value the truth. On the other, they feared its power and went to extraordinary lengths to suppress it, erected ideological barricades to block it from public knowledge, and punished those who spoke the truth or threatened to tell the truth. It's all here in American Betrayal . Read it at your own risk. West's lesson to Americans: Reality can't be redacted, buried, fabricated, falsified, or omitted. Her book is eloquent proof of it. * American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character, by Diana West. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2013. http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2013/06/our-enemy-inside-gates.html http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=81f_1371330063 Detroit Iron Our Enemy Inside the Gates Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin Thu, 13 Jun 2013 13:07:01 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=80f_1371142331 cajunmojo In his latest attempt to emasculate the Constitution, President Obama made the unprecedented move last week of nominating three reliable, Washington-centric liberals to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, commonly known as the D.C. Circuit. Obama defied Republicans to block the nominations. "This is not about principled opposition," said Obama. "This is about political obstruction. I recognize that neither party has a perfect track record here. Democrats weren't completely blameless when I was in the Senate." "But what's happening now is unprecedented," Obama complained. "For the good of the American people, it has to stop." Obama's henchmen let it be known that if Republicans try to block confirmation, the reliable Harry Reid would moved forward with the so-called Nuclear Option, blow up any resemblance of bi-partisanship, and confirm the three nominees with 51 Democrat votes. Sources inside the Senate Judiciary Committee tell me that Obama's defiant words will likely result in the defeat of his three nominees. Republican Senators, I am told, will not confirm any more judges to the D.C. Circuit unless a sitting judge takes senior status, retires, or dies. Otherwise, Republicans are nearly unanimous in their conviction to stop these nominees, and will likely be successful. Why is Obama so adamant about confirming his picks for the D.C. Circuit, and why are Republicans so adamant about stopping them? The D.C. Circuit is the linchpin in the advance of the Administrative State; it is the court where Obama's end-runs around Congress and constitutional government will either be upheld or sent to the trash pile. Obama, not having a rubber-stamp Congress, is busy expanding federal power by regulations issued by independent agencies, cabinet departments, and executive orders. Challenges to such actions usually go directly to the D.C. Circuit, making a left-wing majority on that court a necessity if Obama hopes to make his leftward lurch survive. According to one Republican Senator on the Judiciary Committee with whom I spoke, the die for opposing Obama's nominees was cast during the Bush Administration when nominees Peter Keisler and Miguel Estrada were stopped by Democrats because the workload, they contended, did not warrant any more judges. The workload today is lower than it was then; besides, one new Obama judge for the court was unanimously confirmed several months ago. The D.C. Circuit now has eight full-time judges, evenly split between liberals and conservatives, and six senior judges, five of whom are Republican appointees. Their skepticism of Obama's attitudes about the Constitution was demonstrated in several major cases in recent months that have blocked his the expansionist agenda, including: disallowing what the court found to be an unconstitutional attempt to circumvent the Senate with recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board; throwing out the EPA's unlawful Clean Air Act regulations that would have virtually shut down the coal industry; and requiring that the Securities and Exchange Commission consider cost benefit analyses in their rulings. There is a long list of Obama regulations which will find their way into the federal court system over the next several years, and it is these three appointees, if they are confirmed by the Senate, who will help determine whether Constitutional brakes are applied or not. Included in the long list are: Obamacare regulations, control of the banking and financial industries by Dodd Frank, more EPA regulations, highway safety and emissions standards, campaign finance regulations, national security issues, and a host of others. In a word, much of the success or failure of the Obama agenda hinges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Liberals are deservedly concerned. New York Senator Chuck Schumer recently announced that if Republicans attempt to stop Obama's picks for the court, "it will give those of us that want to change the rules and not allow 60 votes to dominate the Senate but require a talking-filibuster to prevail. We will fill up the D.C. circuit one way or another." The Senate won't touch the nominations until it has completed work on the immigration reform bill now being considered. Then, if Harry Reid decides to go nuclear, all bets will be off for anything getting through the Senate until after the 2014 election. As was stated recently in The Atlantic, the nuclear option "would inevitably provoke a strong and sustained response from the minority, using the many tools available to them in the Senate to bollix up the works and bring the place to a halt." What Obama is up to is nothing short of court-packing - an argument he himself made, as a Senator, against the George W. Bush nominees. "It's hard to imagine the rationale for nominating three judges at once for this court given the many vacant emergency seats across the country, unless your goal is to pack the court to advance a certain policy agenda," said Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, the senior GOP member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Historically, the D.C. Circuit almost single-handedly legitimized and helped expand the administrative state. During the Kennedy, LBJ, and Nixon-Ford Administrations, when the alphabet-soup agencies were formed or expanded, regulation after regulation and executive order after executive order were scrutinized and given the go-ahead by liberal, Washington-centric judges appointed to do just that. As Congress increasingly delegated its constitutional authority to unaccountable independent agencies, giving them broad powers to regulate the economy, the environment, energy, traffic, or a thousand other things, the D.C. Circuit regularly added its stamp of approval. As only a small number of cases are reviewed by the Supreme Court, the D.C. Circuit often has the final say in such matters, with the result that it is probably accurately described as the second most important court in the country. "These are no slouches," Obama declared when he announced his nominations. "These are no hacks. These are incredibly accomplished lawyers." He's correct. They are all able, accomplished, and experienced lawyers, but what Obama did not say is that they are Washington-centric, Harvard educated, big-government liberals who will be reliable votes for the Administration. The Obama agenda is at stake, and Democrats know it. Stopping the Obama court-packing plan, if successful, may be one of the GOP's proudest moments. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=80f_1371142331 cajunmojo OBAMA'S COURT PACKING PLAN obama, court packing, liberal agenda Sun, 26 May 2013 13:32:35 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=aa2_1369589487 Detroit Iron By Victor Davis Hanson May 20, 2013 12:12 PM There have been lots of comparisons, most hotly dismissed by the president's defenders, between Nixon and Obama, but in some ways the latest scandals have the potential to match or even trump those of 1973-4. Nixon's sins were primarily domestic; no one died. Benghazi goes to the heart of U.S. foreign policy, when an administration knowingly misled the United States, and stuck to a preelection campaign narrative that ensured a facility was endangered, help was not sent, Americans died, and a petty crook would be jailed to take the rap - while officials for weeks peddled an untruth. Unlike "Bush lied, thousands died," the CIA did not give the president "slam dunk" information, supported by most agencies abroad and both Houses of Congress, but rather had its initial analyses massaged by the White House for overtly campaign purposes. Much of the hatred toward Nixon emanates from the tapes that reveal the private man to be a paranoid and often deceitful character. But while Nixon stormed on about the IRS, and dispatched the odious John Dean to find a way to use tax returns against his enemies, at least after Donald Alexander took over, the agency pushed back, and often in heroic fashion thwarted the destruction of the once independent bureau. So far, in 2013, the IRS seems to have been compliant, almost an extension of Obama-Biden 2012. Will a memo surface of just a single Alexander-like hero who said, "No, the IRS does not determine its tax policies on the basis of politics"? I hope so, but think not. And while Nixon certainly went after the press and ordered phone monitoring of supposed leakers, Obama more often selectively has gone after the press, in a fashion in some sense even more chilling, using the mainstream media to peddle administration tropes, while demonizing dissenters like Fox News (and monitoring a Fox reporter) and talk radio. The Justice Department's beef with the AP was not just leaks - after all, the Obama administration itself leaked all sorts of classified information that it felt was useful to the reelection effort, from the details of the Stuxnet virus to the drone targeting details, to channeling information to favorite New York Times and Washington Post reporters, who were even given exclusive access to troves of the bin Laden documents. The AP's problem was that it thought it had been given the unofficial green light to release information that the Obama administration on second thought wanted to release first, and so was considered a sort of "how dare you" double-crosser by the administration. On this incestuous relationship with the media and the corruption in selectively releasing classified information for particular political purposes, I wrote back in May 2012, in the Corner the following about the Washington Post 's analyses (branded with "EXCLUSIVE") of the recovered bin Laden documents: While the analyses may well be insightful and balanced, no one can know that, given that Ignatius is apparently working alone ("exclusively") with formerly classified documents under conditions that are not transparent and without a published narrative of how he obtained them and/or any detailed information about the nature of the raw data he has acquired. . . . The trove found in bin Laden's compound either belongs to the security agency or Defense Department bureau that classified it, or the documents that were given to Ignatius belong in the public domain - otherwise, fairly or not, the impression given is that we are a sort of garrison state that choses authorized state megaphones to analyze what have become court documents. And when administration officials praise Ignatius's sobriety and that sanction is echoed by peers in New York and Washington, then one only gets the impression that something is terribly wrong in this insular DC-NY corridor, where no one any longer seems aware of simple ethics and propriety. I think when one adds up Benghazi, the AP mess, the IRS scandal, the politically correct laxity about domestic terrorism and radical Islam, the deliberate leaking of classified documents to preapproved in-house reporters, and what Kathleen Sebelius is trying to do, the impression given is Nixonian to the core: scores of "blindly" ambitious underlings, competing with each other to outdo the next, in order to gain attention or brownie points from the man at the top, who lets it trickle back down that he is in a virtual push-back war with certain Americans (e.g., the Tea Party, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the NRA, the post-2010 Republican House, and assorted conservative groups). In 1973, the press was almost uniformly adversarial; today it has shamefully functioned from 2009 onwards as a Ministry of Truth, a sort of force multiplier of the West Wing. Everything Nixon did was suspect, often with good cause, and seen through the prism of his excesses; in the case of Obama, from Fast and Furious to Solyndra to the EPA and NLRB freelancing to the selective enforcement of the law, the press has more often been an enabler, working to explain why a scandal or an excess is really some sort of right-wing obsession, emanating from suspect or even racist motives. Something very scary started in 2009-10 - and that this new way of doing business was supposedly done for the proverbial "people" to ensure "fairness" has made it even more insidious and far more difficult to come to terms with. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/348810/nixon-fair-comparison-victor-davis-hanson http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=aa2_1369589487 Detroit Iron <span class="highlight">Nixon</span> Is a Fair Comparison Nixon, obama Wed, 29 May 2013 14:02:46 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=4b2_1369850198 joe prole Here's an eerie comparison of Nixon's statements to Obama's, regarding scandals and targeted investigations of supposed national security leaks inside their respective administrations. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=4b2_1369850198 joe prole Obama Following <span class="highlight">Nixon</span>'s Script Presidential lies, Government coverups Sun, 26 May 2013 12:55:31 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=1ee_1369587225 cathy winslow President Barack Obama is the biggest threat to press freedom, one of the hallmarks of a true democracy, the United States has seen since former President Nixon, according to attorney James Goodale, widely seen as "the father of reporters' privileges." Goodale is best known for using the First Amendment of the US Constitution to successfully defend the New York Times after the paper published the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The documents, leaked by Defense Department employee Daniel Ellsberg, revealed that four presidents had deliberately misled US citizens regarding the countries' intentions in Vietnam. The Nixon administration sought to block the publication of the documents, citing national security and the Espionage Act. The case is especially relevant today as the Obama administration seeks to punish WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing diplomatic cables leaked by US Army soldier Bradley Manning. The New York Times, the Guardian, and other outlets would also go on to publish the same information revealed by Manning but have not been targeted for punishment by the government prosecutors. Speaking with RT, Goodale also gave his opinion on the recent scandals that saw the US Department of Justice tap phones used by reporters, at least once going as far as to issue a search warrant for a Fox News correspondents' email account. All, presumably, as part of an attempt to intimidate potential leakers and media personnel into remaining silent on issues that plague the nation. Goodale's book, "Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles," is available now. http://on.rt.com/6g1e3r http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=1ee_1369587225 cathy winslow Obama 'worse than <span class="highlight">Nixon</span>' in regard of press freedoms Obama,Press,Freedom,Lies,Wikileaks Mon, 20 May 2013 09:59:48 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=27f_1369058276 ConspiracyTardLL James Goodale, who represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, tells Reuters Global Editor-at-Large Sir Harold Evans that President Obama is fast becoming the worst president ever when it comes to defending freedom of the press. Goodale is the author of "Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles." SOURCE: http://www.thebrennerbrief.com/2013/05/20/video-fmr-nyt-representative-in-pentagon-papers-obama-for-worse-than-nixon/ http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=27f_1369058276 ConspiracyTardLL Obama worse for press freedom than <span class="highlight">Nixon</span> Obama, Press, media Mon, 10 Jun 2013 12:41:22 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=633_1370881909 Razor Wolf "We Demand President Obama Resign President Richard Nixon resigned after wiretapping a handful of journalists, sparing the nation the ordeal of impeachment. We call on Obama to do the same. His administration vetted the NSA's surveillance of millions of Americans and seriously violated the Fourth Amendment. He confiscated the personal records of reporters, thus violating the First Amendment, and the IRS under his watch harassed political organizations opposed to his policies. Moreover, his administration has lied under oath to Congress. In addition to violating Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution by invading Libya, his administration engaged in torture and conducted a covert drone war. Due to the severity of these crimes, we call for the immediate resignation of Barack Obama." Sign the petition here: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/we-demand-president-obama-resign/sTtJndXm The IRS scandal, the NSA scandal, Benghazi Gate, running guns to Mexican drug cartels, and a whole host of other criminal actions, should give the American public enough evidence to impeach or demand the resignation of this illegitimate, bastard child president. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=633_1370881909 Razor Wolf American Public Demanding The Immediate Resignation of Obama sign petition, obama, resignation, impeach, criminal Sun, 09 Jun 2013 12:28:18 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=527_1370794988 juba776 There is no surprise that Russia has delivered S-300 air defense systems to Syria. The US has been screaming for Assad to go for a long time and Russia has a naval base in Tartus. Guess what? Russia is not moving. There is finger pointing between the West and Russia but the political rhetoric is ignored by President Vladimir Putin as he calmly directs stability in the Middle East. His talent as a Judo expert became useful as he told Netanyahu, "We need to talk". Russia was not happy when Israel fired into Damascus early May. The Israeli Prime Minister hastened to Russia last May 14 and did as he was told. He listened and understood that indeed there is a new Sheriff in town in the Middle East . President Putin said, "My colleague and I agree that continuing the armed conflict in the country is fraught with disastrous consequences for both Syria and the region. Only by quickly ending the armed struggle and arriving at a political settlement can we prevent a very negative outcome. In this crucial period it is especially important to avoid actions that could destabilize the situation. The Prime Minister and I agreed to stay in contact: both in personal contact and via our organizations and special services." Bibi reminded the world, "the great role the Russian people played in stopping Nazi Germany and facilitating victory over it is our shared history. A great many Jews fought in the Red Army. So when you celebrate Victory Day here on May 9, in our country, in another part of the world, we also celebrate that day and salute your contribution to the victory over Nazi Germany." President Putin does his best to secure stability in the world with economic success while the Communists in America create wars and discord like pyromaniacs. Obama smiles and laughs to his worshippers while elusively avoiding any blame. After all, he's trying his best. His best to oust Assad and fulfill his masters plan of conquest in the Middle East. "Assad must go!" and "What difference does it make!, Clinton shouted. Pure madness displayed for all to see. This from the woman who was trying to get rid of Nixon but was later removed for lying. Nixon was threatened with impeachment for wiretapping and the Watergate break in. What a terrible thing wiretapping is in life . Especially when compared to the Bengazi fiasco; government funded abortions; trillions in debt; giving weapons to drug dealers along the Mexican border that killed thousands; failure to act quickly in the Gulf oil spill; the Solyndra scandal. The list continues to grow. Amerikan Demonocracy threatening the world. Thank God for Vladimir Putin who defends Russia and pushes back those who threaten Christianity. Little is mentioned of Christians or priests murdered in Syria by the western media. The Christian Bishops that were kidnapped and are now being held hostage are also conveniently ignored. Again the western cry is here reiterated, "What difference does it make! Assad must go!" Amerikan Demonocracy foaming at the mouth rabid with hate and with selfish reasons. There is another reason Putin will not let the Middle East be torn apart by the US. Last Monday, May 27th, in Sochi, President Vladimir Putin met with Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia and Patriarch Theophilos III of Jerusalem and All Palestine. Patriarch Kirill thanked the president for making the meeting possible. Putin said to Patriarch Theophilos, "Your Holiness, let me thank you once more for supporting our initiative to build a pilgrims' house in Jordan, by the River Jordan. We have very good relations with Jerusalem. Many Russian pilgrims visit the Holy Land. Our Russian Orthodox Church and the Moscow Patriarchate have a longstanding presence there too. I am very pleased to see that the two sister churches have developed such good relations. Your Holiness, we are always happy to see you. I hope to see you again when we celebrate the 1025th anniversary of the baptism of Russia. I wish you an interesting and productive time here on Russian soil." Patriarch Theophilos III replied, "You know what huge significance the radiant city of Jerusalem has for the Russian Orthodox Church , for the Russian people , and for us too. Mr. President, on behalf of all Orthodox Christians in Jordan and Palestine, and on behalf of the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulcher , I want to thank you for the active interest you show towards the Holy Land and the holy sites there. I especially thank you for your contribution to working for peace in the Middle East and promoting the cause of peace throughout our region. Your recent visit to Israel , Palestine and Jordan had great historical significance not just in political terms but also from the religious point of view. I want you to know that we always pray for you because we recognize your role as the great Russian people's leader, and a leader who defends universal human and Orthodox values. Thank you very much for this." If Putin succeeds in bringing peace to the Middle East by standing up to US aggression he will be the hero of the world. A hero unrecognized and anathema to America and the West. They will never really know about him or appreciate his efforts. Their media keeps yelling, "Putin KGB! Putin Communist!", as though he is as bad as Obama and his real Communist cronies who continually destroy the world http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=527_1370794988 juba776 Putin defies US aggression russia,ww3,USA,syria,s-300 Sat, 08 Jun 2013 10:21:59 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d57_1370700809 Detroit Iron JUNE 7, 2013 6:00 PM The inevitable corruption of the permanent bureaucracy By Mark Steyn A few years ago, after one corruption scandal too many, the then Liberal government in Canada announced that, to prevent further outbreaks of malfeasance, it would be hiring 300 new federal auditors plus a bunch of ethics czars, and mandating "integrity provisions" in government contracts, including "prohibitions against paying, offering, demanding or accepting bribes." There were already plenty of laws against bribery, but one small additional sign on the desk should do the trick: "Please do not attempt to bribe the Minister of the Crown as a refusal may offend. Also: He's not allowed to bribe you, whatever he says." A government that requires "integrity provisions" is by definition past the stage where they will do any good. I thought of those Canadian Liberal "integrity provisions" passing a TV screen the other day and catching hack bureaucrats from the IRS Small Business/Self-Employed Division reassuring Congress that systems had now been put in place to prevent them succumbing to the urge to put on Spock ears and moob-hugging blue polyester for the purposes of starring in a Star Trek government training video. The Small Business/Self-Employed Division had boldly gone where no IRS man had gone before - to a conference in Anaheim, where they were put up in $3,500-a-night hotel rooms and entertained by a man who was paid $27,500 to fly in and paint on stage a portrait of Bono. Bono is the veteran Irish rocker knighted by the Queen for his tireless campaign on behalf of debt forgiveness, which doesn't sound the IRS's bag at all. But don't worry, debt forgiveness-wise Bono has Africa in mind, not New Jersey. And, as Matthew Cowart tweeted me the other day, he did have a big hit with "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," which I believe is now the official anthem of the IRS Cincinnati office. It took Congressman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina to get to the heart of the matter: "With all due respect, this is not a training issue," he said. "This cannot be solved with another webinar. . . . We can adopt all the recommendations you can possibly conceive of. I just say it strikes me - and maybe it's just me - but it strikes me as a cultural, systemic, character, moral issue." He's right. If you don't instinctively know it's wrong to stay in $3,500-a-night hotel rooms at public expense, a revised conference-accommodations-guidelines manual isn't going to fix the real problem. So we know the IRS is corrupt. What happens then when an ambitious government understands it can yoke that corruption to its political needs? What's striking as the revelations multiply and metastasize is that at no point does any IRS official appear to have raised objections. If any of them understood that what they were doing was wrong, they kept it to themselves. When Nixon tried to sic the IRS on a few powerful political enemies, the IRS told him to take a hike. When Obama's courtiers tried to sic the IRS on thousands of ordinary American citizens, the agency went along, and very enthusiastically. This is a scale of depravity hitherto unknown to the tax authorities of the United States, and for that reason alone they should be disarmed and disbanded - and rebuilt from scratch with far more circumscribed powers. Here's another congressional-subcommittee transcript highlight of the week. Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois asks the attorney general if he's spying on members of Congress and thereby giving the executive branch leverage over the legislative branch. Eric Holder answers: "With all due respect, senator, I don't think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss that issue." Senator Kirk responded that "the correct answer would be, 'No, we stayed within our lane and I'm assuring you we did not spy on members of Congress.'" For some reason, the attorney general felt unable to say that. So I think we all know what the answer to the original question really is. Holder had another great contribution to the epitaph of the Republic this week. He went on TV to explain that he didn't really regard Fox News's James Rosen as a "co-conspirator" but had to pretend he did to the judge in order to get the judge to cough up the warrant. So rest easy, America! Your chief law officer was telling the truth when he said he hadn't lied to Congress because in fact he'd been lying when he said he told the truth to the judge. If you lie to one of Holder's minions, you go to jail: They tossed Martha Stewart in the slammer for being insufficiently truthful to a low-level employee of the attorney general's. But the attorney general can apparently lie willy-nilly to judges and/or Congress. This, incidentally, is at the heart of the revelation (in a non-U.S. newspaper, naturally) that hundreds of millions of Americans' phone records have been subpoenaed by the United States government. In 2011, Eric Holder's assistant attorney general Todd Hinen testified to the House Judiciary Committee that "on average, we seek and obtain Section 215 orders less than 40 times per year." Forty times per year doesn't sound very high, does it? What is that - the cell phones of a few Massachusetts Chechens and some Yemeni pen-pals? No. The Verizon order will eventually be included as just another individual Section 215 order, even though it covers over a hundred million Americans. Ongoing universal monitoring of mass populations is being passed off to Congress and the public as a few dozen narrowly targeted surveillance operations. Mr. Hinen chose his words more carefully than his boss, but both men are in the business of deceiving the citizenry, their elected representatives, and maybe the judges, too. Perhaps this is just the way it is in the panopticon state. Tocqueville foresaw this, as he did most things. Although absolute monarchy "clothed kings with a power almost without limits" in practice "the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control." What would happen, Tocqueville wondered, if administrative capability were to evolve to bring "the details of social life and of individual existence" within the King's oversight? Eric Holder and Lois Lerner now have that power. My comrade John Podhoretz, doughty warrior of the New York Post , says relax, there's nothing to worry about. But how do I know he's not just saying that because Eric Holder's monitoring his OnStar account and knows that when he lost his car keys last Tuesday he was in the parking lot of Madam Whiplash's Bondage Dungeon? When the state has the power to know everything about everyone, the integrity of the civil service is the only bulwark against men like Holder. Instead, the ruling party and the non-partisan bureaucracy seem to be converging. In August 2010, President Obama began railing publicly against "groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity" (August 9th, a speech in Texas) and "shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names" (August 21st, radio address). And whaddayaknow, that self-same month the IRS obligingly issued its first BOLO (Be On the Look-Out) for groups with harmless-sounding names, like "tea party," "patriot," and "constitution." It may be that the strange synchronicity between the president and the permanent bureaucracy is mere happenstance and not, as it might sound to the casual ear, the sinister merging of party and state. Either way, they need to be pried apart. When the state has the capability to know everything except the difference between right and wrong, it won't end well. - Mark Steyn , a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon . (c) 2013 Mark Steyn http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350537/all-seeing-state-mark-steyn http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d57_1370700809 Detroit Iron The All-Seeing State IRS, Congressman Trey Gowdy, Obama, Eric Holder Fri, 07 Jun 2013 06:27:47 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=7cb_1370600469 Detroit Iron JUNE 7, 2013 3:00 AM His morality is to be judged by his professed aims, not his means of achieving them. By Victor Davis Hanson Presidential ethics are now situational. Obama is calling for a shield law to protect reporters from the sort of harassment that his attorney general, Eric Holder, and the FBI practiced against Fox News and the Associated Press. Through such rhetoric, he remains a staunch champion of the First Amendment - even though he now has the ability to peek into the private phone records of millions of Americans. The president is outraged that the IRS went after those deemed politically suspicious. So he sacked the acting head of the IRS, Steven Miller, who was scheduled to step down soon anyway. The administration remains opposed to any partisanship of the sort that might deny tax-exempt status to the Barack H. Obama Foundation, founded by the president's half-brother Malik, but would indefinitely delay almost all the applications from those suspected of tea-party sympathies. Consequently, Lois Lerner granted the former's request in 30 days, but took the Fifth Amendment when asked the reasons for obstructing the applications of the latter. These ethical gymnastics were not entirely unforeseeable. Obama ran as a reform candidate for the Senate in 2004, while his campaign was most likely involved in the leaking of the sealed divorce records of both his primary- and general-election opponents. As a senator, he characterized recess appointments as tainted, only as president to make just such appointments - some of which later were declared unconstitutional in a unanimous decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Senator Obama employed filibusters to block judicial appointments; President Obama now condemns as bad-faith partisans any who might follow his own former custom. He championed public campaign financing before he became the first general-election presidential candidate since the program was enacted to opt out of it. President Obama has railed against any who would vote against raising the debt ceiling as putting partisanship ahead of the national interest - which, as senator, he himself had done. He ran in 2008 on the excesses of the Bush administration's War on Terror, and then as president embraced or even expanded almost all of the very programs he had so adroitly demagogued in his campaign. One of the legacies of the Obama administration is presidential ethics as an entirely relative, abstract concept. Obama's morality is to be judged by his professed aims, not his actual means of achieving them, thereby turning classical Aristotelian ethics on its head: Dreaming of doing the right thing becomes more important than actually doing it while awake. Apparently reporters who had their phones monitored are to be impressed that Obama is advocating a shield law to protect them from any future president not so ethical as Obama. The problem, however, is not just that Obama's declarations of moral intent are deemed more important than his concrete behavior, but also that his moral pieties serve as a psychological mechanism that offers exemption for his unethical conduct. Obama repeatedly declared that citing the bin Laden raid for partisan purposes would be "spiking the ball" of the worst sort - and thereby was freed to do just that without any guilt over his own hypocrisy, much less a worry that there was something untoward in using a national-security operation for campaign advantage. The president deplores leaks as injurious to national security. Indeed, Attorney General Holder declares that the AP reporters endangered national security to a degree without precedent in modern memory. However, they did not do so as flagrantly as the administration itself, which leaked selected documents of the bin Laden trove to pet reporters, leaked the details of the Stuxnet cyber war against Iran, leaked information surrounding the drone targeting, and leaked details about the Yemeni double agent. The common theme was that such unlawful disclosures would let the voters know that their commander-in-chief was far more effective than they otherwise might have thought. In contrast, the sin of the AP reporters was not leaking per se, but in some cases their freelancing attempts to beat the administration's preplanned timing of its own leaks, and in others leaking things that the administration did not find particularly helpful to its reelection efforts. But again, Obama bought exemption for his own leaks by first citing the dangers that the AP leaks posed. Only by berating Wall Street "fat cats" and "corporate-jet owners" can one justify being the largest recipient of Goldman Sachs campaign cash in history. If you talk of kicking BP's "ass," then having taken more of its money than any other candidate becomes palatable. Under situational ethics, the new transparency means that Obama can square the circle of promoting Susan Rice by doing so to a position that does not require Senate confirmation. Will Samantha Power, Obama's nominee as ambassador to the U.N., receive the sort of congressional reception that once awaited John Bolton? Cf. Senator Obama on that recess appointment: "To some degree, he's damaged goods. Not in the history of United Nations representatives have we ever had a recess appointment, somebody who couldn't get through a nomination in the Senate. And I think that that means that we will have less credibility and ironically be less equipped to reform the United Nations in the way that it needs to be reformed." Obama once noted that John Bolton had "a lot of ideological baggage," presumably in a way that Samantha Power does not. Power once wrote of the Bush administration that "We need a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, or permitted by the United States. This would entail restoring FOIA to its pre-Bush stature, opening the files, and acknowledging the force of a mantra we have spent the last decade promoting in Guatemala, South Africa, and Yugoslavia: A country has to look back before it can move forward. Instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors." If such absolute standards of transparency and public apologies for untruth applied across the board, only the "doctrine of the mea culpa" would put to rest doubts over whether partisan concerns governed the fates of those trapped in Benghazi and the postmortem accounts of their tragic ends. The new ethical transparency means that there is no conflict of interest when Susan Rice appears on ABC news programs that her husband once produced. Nor should anyone worry that the brother of one of the president's closest advisers heads CBS News, or that the president of ABC News has a sister in a high position in the Obama administration, or that the wife of press secretary Jay Carney is the national correspondent of ABC's Good Morning America . Under the new ethics, to point out any such connection is at best illiberal, and perhaps motivated by darker impulses; but to discuss with your spouse or sibling how you will cover his or her televised performance is a necessary means to an exalted ethical end. What is the short-term effect of such postmodern ethical behavior? Not much. The media will determine publicly that the Benghazi, IRS, AP, and Fox scandals, to the extent that they remain in the public view much longer as scandals, were the products of overzealous subordinates, while privately concluding that too much public attention to them might aid the illiberal agenda of conservative Republicans. Thus the better - indeed, the more moral - course is to let the scandals go the way of Fast and Furious and Solyndra. I think their reasoning, to the degree it is ever consciously examined, goes something like the following: Is pursuing a rogue IRS or a John Mitchell-like attorney general really worth wounding the second term of a reelected liberal president? Do we really need another Watergate or Iran-Contra, when the possible outcome this time around is not stopping the regressive efforts of a Richard Nixon or a Ronald Reagan, but rather endangering the political survival of the first black president, and the first northern liberal to be elected president since John Kennedy a half-century earlier - and, with him, a long-overdue progressive agenda that so far has given us needed higher taxes, socialized medicine, more entitlements, and liberal social initiatives? What about the long-term consequences? To paraphrase Thucydides on the stasis at Corcyra, as a practical matter, it is always unwise when in power to destroy the ethical safety net that you may need when you are out of power. But here too Obama is not worried. He assumes that if Congress and the White House return to Republican control, the media will revert to their traditional watchdog role, resuscitated and on the scent once more of a lack of transparency, the revolving door, efforts to stifle the press, Guantanamo and drones, lobbyists in government, and the politicization of the federal government. Some day soon perhaps, once-bad filibusters and recess appointments will again turn bad. Lying attorney generals will again earn special prosecutors. Tapped reporters will again become courageous, not careerist opportunists. Whistleblowers will once more be lauded for speaking truth to power rather than be derided as reactionary snitches. The lesson is not necessarily that Republicans are inherently more ethical than Democrats - although their aims are not so utopian - and thus more likely to adhere to a fixed notion of morality that transcends situational ethics. Rather, in the present climate, conservative politicians find it more difficult to get away with hypocrisies and opportunistic ethics, given their traditional adversarial relationship with the mainstream media. Obama is not inherently more amoral than his predecessors, only more exempt from charges of amorality. He appreciates that this latitude has never been extended to any other president in modern memory. The result is that there is no longer such a thing as presidential ethics. - NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His The Savior Generals is just out from Bloomsbury Books. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350388/obamas-ethical-gymnastics-victor-davis-hanson/page/0/1 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=7cb_1370600469 Detroit Iron Obama's Ethical Gymnastics Eric Holder, the FBI, obama