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The revolution wasn't. When Scott Brown, the new senator from Massachusetts, says the election is over, what he means is this: "All you Tea Partyers can go back to your sheeple pens now, while I get down to the serious business of cutting a deal with Obama to expand government's control over health care by 89 percent instead of the 100 percent favored by my predecessor." [Richard Wilkins]  (January 2010)

Building socialism. I guess this shows that I've been around the block a few times, even if that block is situated in fly-over soybean country, six hundred miles from the Imperial City.

An idea for a parable occurred to me the other day, having to do with the progress of the socialist health bill. Let us imagine that a grizzled VP for Construction at a department-store chain is touring a new store at its grand opening, accompanied by an eager and sharp-eyed young management trainee. And the youngster is troubled: "Uh, sir, the plumbing seems insufficient."

VP: "The budget didn't allow for more. But the pipe-ducts are in place. We'll upgrade the plumbing next year."

Trainee: "I see. But, look — that corridor leads nowhere!"

VP: "Relax, my boy. It will when we build the new wing."

Trainee: "Sir, some of these elevator shafts don't have any cars or cables!"

VP: "Next year ... next year."

And so on. The analogy breaks down, of course, because a private company in a competitive marketplace wouldn't open a half-finished store. But Congress passes half-baked legislation all the time. Often that just reflects idiocy, but sometimes it illustrates a very different trait: the cunning of the true political wolf.

Before starting to write my parable, I retrieved a Politico.com update promoting one of their stories with this teaser: "Dems are already hinting at future changes to health care, hoping to calm revolt on the left." This is the story: "Public option tensions linger," by Carrie Budoff Brown and Patrick O'Connor.

And in it I read:

Just hours after a critical Monday morning vote in the Senate, Democrats were already talking about future changes to the health reform effort in hopes of calming a revolt among liberal activists.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, predicted the government health insurance option long favored by liberals would be part of that second look.

"It will be revisited," Harkin said. "This is just the beginning.... What we're building is a starter home, not a mansion. And guess what? We have room for expansions and additions later on."

Senior editor Ronn Neff, for his part, points out that we see here why the leaders are willing to make whatever compromises they have to, in order to get the bill passed.

The political gravity of our time moves us relentlessly toward ever more statism. I am left asking: Over the next few years, how many Republicans will quietly help the Democrats finish building their expanded mansion of socialism? [Nicholas Strakon]

Historical perspective. In her great book Dependent on D.C., Charlotte Twight observes that important and evil parts of HillaryCare were enacted a few years after the package as a whole went down to defeat in Congress. See especially pp. 213-214.

(December 2009)

Yet another futile observation by Strakon. The only reason I'm going to specifically beat up on Democratic Party Flack Donna Brazile here, among the thousands of other polfolk who must have said the same thing, is that I heard her say it, straight out, on George Stephanopoulos's "This Week" panel this past Sunday.

Among the "abuses" she said congressional Democrats are determined to correct, Miss Brazile listed the health-insurance companies' "discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions."

In American Newspeak, you understand, discrimination is always doubleplusungood.

Now it seems to me that anyone operating a live brain, hearing what Miss Brazile said, would have to ask: Is this woman too stupid and ignorant to understand what insurance is? Or is she an evil trickster seeking to manipulate the stupid and ignorant among her listeners?

But if the latter, when did things get so easy for the forked of tongue? Even the stupid and ignorant have auto-insurance policies, have they not? Don't they understand that someone with a history of motor-vehicle disasters is going to be paying higher premiums? And, you know, mutatis mutandis ...? Ah, never mind. I don't know why I bother. [Nicholas Strakon]  (December 2009)

Mr. Thompson rampant. Let me get this straight. In the same period that the regime has rewarded dinosaurian, politically mired, fascist-poisoned financiers and auto manufacturers for their failure, it has hosted a massive antitrust suit against Intel brought by one of that company's less successful competitors. And now, only a few weeks after the settlement of that $1.2 billion mugging, the FTC itself has brought suit, accusing the chipmaker of "trying to snuff out competition in its sector" (CBC News). The European central regime has also been persecuting Intel, seeking to rob it of $1.45 billion, and the Robber General of New York, Andrew Cuomo, is seeking plunder for his predatory gang, too.

Now, I don't mean to idealize Intel — it does some business with leviathan — but let's keep a sense of proportion and try to see things in context. If Intel did actually engage in any "snuffing out" or "conspiring" or "bribing" (of customers), its persecutors stipulate that it did so using only peaceful, voluntary means — whereas they themselves, brandishing their guns and shackles, depend absolutely on coercive, tyrannical means to get their way.

One of the charges being laid by the parasites and looters is that Intel has stifled innovation — in an era when chip-driven electronics is one of the few major industries not crushingly dominated and distorted by government intervention, and thus is one of the few still able to produce both stunning innovation and ever-more-competitive prices.

To the distress and surprise of the System's intelligentsia, sales of Ayn Rand's books have surged this year. But I'm not surprised, and I won't be surprised if, this Christmas, an increased number of people find nestling under the tree — among all those nifty, cheap new electronics — a crisp new copy of Atlas Shrugged. [Nicholas Strakon]  (December 2009)

Have you reread Atlas Shrugged  yet this decade?

We hold this duncery to be self-evident. On November 5, addressing the crowd of anti-PelosiCare protesters, John Boehner, Republican minority leader in the House, whipped out an object he said was his copy of the Constitution. He began bloviating that he stood with the Founders, who wrote in the Preamble of the Constitution, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

We can't attribute this gaffe to a mere misspeaking on his part. After all, he held up a physical object. Did he not know what he was holding? And he explicitly referred to a "preamble."

So I say, Really? Can we really not expect of elected officials, who take an oath to protect the Constitution — an oath Boehner has had to take at least five times — to know the difference between it and the Declaration of Independence? Is it really too much to expect a crowd who say they love the Constitution not to laugh this constitutional illiterate to scorn and run him off the stage?

I have a booklet that contains both the Constitution and the Declaration. Can it be that John Boehner has such a booklet and is unaware that there are two different documents in it? Can it be that he does not know they are not the same document?

Further: Because of his position, this guy probably has the largest staff in the Republican caucus. Does he have no one on his staff — not even one functioning mind — who works on his speeches who is capable of recognizing one of these documents from the other? Just how many historically illiterate people helped prepare his comments?

Worse: How many people listening to him didn't even notice? How many actually know the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and are able to distinguish one text from the other?

If I thought that the Constitution was a good thing, I would cease to despair of the loss of constitutional government in this country: some people just can't keep nice things.

I have sometimes wondered what good a Constitution is if it can be ignored at will. Now I have to wonder what good a Constitution can possibly be — what good reasonable, unasleep people can expect it to be — when neither those elected nor those who vote for them know what is in the miserable thing. [Ronn Neff]  (November 2009)

The ghost of Walter Karp. Appearing on the George Stephanopoulos panel ("This Week," ABC-TV) on November 1, former Clintonista operative Dee Dee Myers said something remarkable — not so much in its actual content as in the fact that she said it at all in such a public forum. Dede Scozzafava, the Republican candidate for the special election in New York's 23rd congressional district, had just dropped out of the race. George Will pointed out that Scozzafava was indistinguishable from a left-wing Democrat, and another panel member noted that the left-wing Website Daily Kos had actually endorsed Scozzafava over the Democrat candidate. (Scozzafava urged her supporters to vote for Democrat Bill Owens, and in Tuesday's election, Owens defeated Conservative Doug Hoffman.)

What Myers said was this: "It was interesting that she was chosen by the county party chairs. Eleven people got in a back room and chose her for some reasons that may have to do with state party politics and not to do with winning."

Now, Stephanopoulos's audience are political junkies and surely more sophisticated than run-of-the-mill viewers of "Two and a Half Men." But such unvarnished, matter-of-fact Karpian analysis had to have shocked and mystified some significant portion of them: "But — but — what can parties and campaigns possibly be about if not trying to win elections?!"

The late Walter Karp remains the most obscure of the great American political analysts (except, perhaps, for some of the greats who were explicit libertarians). Hardly anyone ever cites him, and even most anti-System radicals seem completely unaware that he ever existed. But veteran political operatives such as Myers are intimately familiar with his insights, from their own personal experience. Those insights are supposed to remain terra incognita, however, for the untold millions of foot-shooting voters and System simps. Dee Dee had better watch her mouth. [Nicholas Strakon]  (November 2009)

The "individual mandate" strikes me as the single most invasive and outrageous part of the proposed government health takeover. That's probably because there's no other provision of the proposed fakelaw that would injure me more directly and unmistakably: thanks to the fascism and socialism our rulers have already imposed in the health and insurance industries, over many decades, I cannot begin to afford any health-insurance policy offered by what passes as a private company. Recently I heard on the telescreen that if the mandate does become fakelaw, "congressional conservatives" plan to sue in the Central Government courts, attempting to persuade the government employees on the bench to declare it unconstitutional. But few other people seem to be upset about it at all.

Apologists for the Permanent Regime, for their part, have come up with the ingenious and inventive question, "We require drivers to have insurance, don't we?" I kid, of course — about the ingenuity and inventiveness. It's really just another version of, "We license drivers, don't we?" (Somehow, that's always reminded me of the desperate observation, "They shoot horses, don't they?") Fans of leviathan have long used "obviously necessary" driver-licensing to justify any and all of government's licensing requirements, as well as proposals to extend licensing over hitherto unlicensed areas of endeavor. (As an inconvenient historical aside, I point out that at one time in this country, people weren't required to have a license to drive on the government roads. Several of my older relatives have told me that such was the case here in Indiana as late as the 1930s.)

Both rhetorical questions — the original one involving licensing and the revised one involving insurance — are wonderful demonstrations of how smooth, wide, and open the road to serfdom becomes as soon as you surrender the principle of freedom. Give them an inch, and our adversaries will take you five hundred miles down that road.

But our old anti-statist analysis does not exhaust the outrageousness of requiring people, under penalty of a special tax, to buy health insurance. Almost everyone, even including some fairly hard free-marketeers, concedes the notion that the government owns the roads it purports to own. And after all, the landlord makes the rules, right? (If only that applied to actual property owners!)

To extrapolate from mandating auto insurance for drivers on the government roads to mandating health insurance for people merely living in the country is a revealing leap, even within the prevailing statism. The people who make that leap are asserting that the government owns not just the roads but the whole country; maybe they're even asserting that the government owns our lives.

Of course, accepting taxes as just and moral is the same thing, the same concession. Taxes are the rent we pay for living on our masters' land. But in the case of taxes, familiarity seems to have bred a lack of contempt.

Poking around at the Sobran's site, I rediscovered this writing of Joe Sobran's: "'It's no use telling our rulers to mind their own business,' C.S. Lewis observed. 'Our whole lives are their business.' You can run afoul of the law nowadays by standing still. Doing nothing is illegal." And that's where we're at. [Nicholas Strakon]  (November 2009)

The "pay czar" has decreed that the salaries of certain auto and banking executives will be limited. The chairman of the Federal Reserve is "taking a look" at the pay of other bank employees.

Back in the 1960s, free-market conservatives and libertarians were warning you: with state money comes state control.

We were scoffed at. The state had no intention of controlling aspects of daily life just because it supplied funds by way of assistance. We were paranoid. We were conspiracy nuts.

We were right. [Ronn Neff]
 

Any number of people who one would expect would be outraged at the tyrannical declaration of the intention to control executive pay are instead saying, in effect, "Good." And they are saying that, because those executives (or at least their companies) received bailout money. If they are going to take the taxpayers' money, it is said, then the taxpayers have the right to limit their pay.

In the first place, it should be noted that the taxpayers are doing no such thing. Unelected czars (just what every free society needs!) are doing it — men who cannot even pretend, in virtue of some election, that they speak or act for "the people."

But more important, let us remember that before the bailouts, before the economic meltdown, we knew that the more power the state exercises, the worse it is for us. The more power the state exercises, the less freedom there is. So what has changed? The state now presumes to exercise more power, and there is less freedom.

No additional exercise of state power is good or just. Think in principles. The state cannot — by extending its reach by handing out money — make its further reach just or fair. Rather, each act enlarges its tyranny. When you say of the new targets of tyranny, "Good! They are getting what they deserve," notice that part of what you have just said is that the newly expanded tyranny is good. [RNN]
 

Just a matter of time ...

Minimum-wage laws.

Peacetime wage and price controls.

Pay caps, i.e., maximum-wage laws.

As long as one was accepted, it was really just a matter of time before the others were attempted. [RNN]  (October 2009)

The imaginary Reich. Back on September 26, 2007, ex-Minister of Labor Robert Reich gave a speech at Berkeley that's lately garnered a lot of attention on talk radio. I haven't been able to find a transcript, but I have transcribed the version on YouTube. The ellipses indicate breaks in the grammar.

I wish I could hear more of it, because Reich is obviously planning to make something of the imaginary speech. But the fact is, he says that this is what an honest politician would say, which means he must believe that it is, at root, an accurate statement of what government-supplied health care, as imagined by a leftist, would be like:

I will actually give you a speech made up entirely almost on the spur of the moment of what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president. In other words, this is what the truth is and the candidate will never say, but what candidates should say if we were in a kind of democracy where citizens were honored in terms of their practice of citizenship and they were educated in terms of what the issues were and they could separate myth from reality uh, from ... in terms of what candidates would tell them.

"Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I'm so glad to see you and, uh, I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Uh, look, we are ... we have the only health-care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. And that's true, and what I'm going to do is I am going to try to reorganize it to be, uh, more amenable to treating sick people, but that means you ... particularly you young people ... uh, particularly you young healthy people ... you're going to have to pay more. [Audience laughter and applause.] Thank you.

"Uh, and by the way, uh, we're going to have to — if you're very old — we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive. So we're going to let you die. [More laughter and applause.]

"Uh, also, uh, I'm going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government, uh, in terms of Medicare, Medicaid ... we already have a lot of bar ... bargaining leverage ... uh, to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs, but that means less innovation and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market. Which means you are probably not going to live that much longer than your parents. [More laughter and applause.]"

[Ronn Neff]

When the laughing stops. I would say that I'm waiting with great anticipation for the time when the idiotic "laughter and applause" stop, but for the fact that we'll all be in the same bad fix as the idiots.

And no matter how newly crushing and newly disastrous the new foray into socialism is, Reich and his useful idiots are sure to blame greedy dog-eat-dog laissez-faire free-market capitalism. [Nicholas Strakon]  (October 2009)

Remember, fire is burny-burny hot! As you may have heard, at the end of September the Central Government's Transportation Ministry threw a "summit" on the new national crisis of "distracted driving," focusing on the dangers of texting while driving. And in early October, the Prophet Obama (Praise Be unto Him), "wanting to set an example for the country," issued an executive order forbidding federal employees from texting while driving government vehicles. That's according to an October 15 report by Denise Pellow at Examiner.com.

Pellow writes, "U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood believes police enforcement is not enough. 'You can't legislate behavior,' was his comment at the Distracted Driving Summit." Well, if they can't legislate behavior, then it's off-kilter to say that police enforcement is not enough. Instead, police enforcement is fruitless if not counter-productive.

Actually, they can legislate behavior — otherwise we'd be living in a free society, with no manufactured fake law — but they can't always enforce their busy little edicts. Thank God.

Other regime operators aren't bothering to paste scrambled libertarian-ish slogans over their proposals. Pellow reports that someone has proposed legislation to withhold Central Government highway money "from states that neglect to impose a 'texting and driving ban.'" (That someone turns out to be Chuck Schumer, according to CNN.) Confusingly enough, however, Pellow goes on to write that "18 states have complied to date." Complied with proposed legislation? Constitutionalists who still hold out hope for federalism and its scattered "laboratories of freedom" should note that the states — make that provinces — are now so cowed by Central authority and dependent on Central bribery that they're actually anticipating their master's commands. High-strung dogs sometimes do that.
 

Speaking of dependence  brings me to my main point. As an anti-statist, I draw the sharpest possible distinction between society and its enemy, the state. I'm on firm ground, there, morally and praxeologically (that is, in terms of the study of human action). But as the state continues remorselessly to extend its power and reach, the distinction starts to blur — out on the ground, so to speak. That's because there is ever less of genuine society and ever more of the state, as it replaces human society in the same way a runaway cancer remorselessly replaces healthy tissue in an organism.

Since society is made up of people, one necessary aspect of that process is the progressive mental disablement and infantilizing of the ruled population. In the book of his that I've been praising lately — Democracy: The God That Failed — Hans-Hermann Hoppe provides an extensive and riveting analysis of the process, which he places in the wider context of decivilization. Hoppe's explanations aside, I'd have to say that anyone who hasn't noticed the accelerating infantilization of American adults and the collapse of American civilization just hasn't been paying attention to what is in front of his nose.

The distracted-driving "summit" is an example in microcosm, carried to the transparodistic extreme. The focus of the confab, texting-while-driving, is such reckless, heedless, imbecilic, even suicidal behavior that, pessimistic as I am, I have difficulty believing anyone really does it who is allowed to leave the house by himself. But I have heard adult (albeit telescreen) journalists admit to doing it. I have to grant that many other people do it, too.

The transparodism doesn't stop there. If a large number of people can no longer grasp this particular aspect of self-preservation, and if they display such contempt for the life and well-being of others, then the Central Government "has to" step in and relieve them, or pretend to relieve them, of the responsibility of teaching and learning that it's crazy to play with hand-held devices while trying to pilot a car. What's next? In a few years, will people be depending on the government to warn them against touching the burny-burny stove? To remind them to breathe?

It may seem as though two dismal but separate trends just happen to be converging, namely, a metastasizing leviathan and a population mutating into clowns, fools, and infants in adult bodies. But it's not an accidental convergence.

It's one big malignancy. [Nicholas Strakon]  (October 2009)

P.C. from hell? An evangelical friend of mine has speculated that Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ.

I hope she is wrong. I have thought of the Anti-Christ as more dynamic — a man of dazzling achievements and suave speech to mislead the world.

I have never imagined him as an affirmative-action hire. [Ronn Neff]

Be grateful for small favors.  At least they didn't give him the Nobel Prize in Economics. [Modine Herbey]

You mustn't miss  Steve Sailer's reimagining of the Emperor's remarks upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Sailer does something similar here to what I did when I twisted the Emperor's school speech into an address by Mr. Bartolomeo Obamio, president of Amerigo Vending and Industrial Laundry, Inc. I suppose strange minds think alike.

Obama's Acceptance Speech (posted at Sailer's blog)

[Nicholas Strakon]  (October 2009)

The MOCK in Duh-MOCK-risy. It's always Election Year somewhere in America, so crummy sociopaths in various states are scrabbling frantically through the final month of their struggle to seize or retain power. Moreover — and it just about makes me retch to think of it — the 2010 campaigns are well under way. Therefore I declare it timely to pass along this sharp-cut gem I found in a footnote of Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Democracy: The God That Failed :

Today, a person is deemed to be politically "represented" no matter what, i.e., regardless of his own will and actions or [those] of his representative. A person is considered represented if he votes, but also if he does not vote. He is considered represented if the candidate he has voted for is elected, but also if another candidate is elected. He is represented, whether or not the candidate he voted or did not vote for does or does not do what he wished him to do. And he is considered politically represented, whether "his" representative will find majority support among all elected representatives or not. (Transaction paperback edition, 2007, pp. 283-4, note 24)

I'm an anarchist. How come I  have to point this out? I am reminded more and more often that I'm just an old guy now. The latest reminder came when I heard about the anger and outrage that exploded after the "National Republican Congressional Committee [urged] Gen. Stanley McChrystal to put House Speaker Nancy Pelosi 'in her place' for weighing in on Afghanistan." ("NRCC hits Pelosi for Afghan remarks," by Glenn Thrush, Politico.com, October 7, 2009)

Although I've been an anarchist since 1969, I started my political peregrination on the Right, as a republican constitutionalist. And from my adolescence on throughout my entire adult life, I've heard over and over about how all normal Americans — right, left, and center — revere the Constitution. I know they don't, really, and that they just make up Constitutions as they go along, to suit their purposes, but it's hard to extinguish one's intellectual kneejerk responses.

Before I heard the details, my kneejerk response was to assume that what was angering and outraging the Republicans' critics was the idea that any military officer could rightfully put a civilian constitutional officer in his place. For those who try to take the Constitution seriously, it is an outrageous notion. I doubted that the Democrats were really angered and outraged, and assumed they were just attacking the Republicans in bad faith — but surely they were draping themselves, however ill-fittingly, in constitutional garb, yes?

No. Old-time constitutional assumptions play no part in the flap. Such assumptions aren't really alive in most people's minds any longer, not even for purposes of masquerade. It's not Pelosi's status as a high constitutional officer, per se, that the Democrats are adducing, but her status as a woman who has Made It as a powerful statesgoddess. The Republicans have ignored the mandatory protocols of the modern female-supremacist lingo: that's their deadly crime.

Meanwhile, the militaristic Republicans' open contempt for the old Constitution seems to be going unremarked — except, of course, in this anarchist forum. It all makes my head swim. [Nicholas Strakon]  (October 2009)

Pittsburgh. Once again, anti-capitalists held a big meeting — and, once again, other anti-capitalists showed up to protest it! Strange days ... strange days, indeed. [Nicholas Strakon]  (September 2009)

The charmless and offensive. Driving to work yesterday morning I heard on NRR (National Roosevelt Radio) that the Vice Emperor, Mr. Biden, has been unleashed on a "charm offensive" (I kid you not) to help sell the "health care" initiative. The news reader said that Biden is a "dangerous weapon," no doubt for his habit of making a pluperfect ass of himself.

What struck me is how frustrating it must be for the Mahogany Savior (peace be upon him) to have to depend on such people as Biden. He and Hillary Clinton have been buzzing around stabbing Obama in the back and embarrassing him through their incompetence. Obama had to jettison Green Czar Van Jones when the Limbaugh types publicized what a weirdo he was. His man in Afghanistan, General McChrystal, is a genuine nutball who boasts that he eats one meal a day and sleeps only four hours, and who is busy sabotaging the Emperor's attempts to convince the sheeple he's got everything there under control. And then there's Nancy Pelosi. I mean, what a bunch of gargoyles.

It reminds me of the movie "Bedazzled" — the original version — in which the Devil finds it so difficult to get anything done, because all he has to help him are the embodiments of the various sins: Lust (played by Raquel Welch), Gluttony, Anger, Vanity, etc., all of whom, by their very natures, are incapable of accomplishing anything. I think Biden would make a very good Vanity. Clinton would do well for Avarice. Ted Kennedy would, no doubt, have embraced the role of Gluttony.

It almost makes me feel sorry for Obama. But I don't. [David T. Wright]  (September 2009)

In praise of Larry O'Donnell. This goes back a ways — to May 15, in fact — and I should have written about it at the time, but it's still pertinent, and in fact it's too good to simply toss into File 13. On the morning in question my sometimes-embarrassing addiction to MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program paid rich rewards.

The eponymous host of the show is Republican ex-Congressman Joe Scarborough, a wisecracking, chaotic-minded bully who describes himself, somewhat confusingly, as both a Burkean conservative and a libertarian conservative. I have to say one good thing about him: he lets people appear on the program who disagree with him, and disagree in a variety of directions. As a result, "Morning Joe" is part of the small fraction of MSNBC's news and commentary programming that's not necessarily leftist all the time. Pat Buchanan frequently sits in as a member of the panel, and minarchists such as Tucker Carlson, Peter Schiff, and Dr. Ron Paul occasionally appear as guests. The usual totalitarians and corruptionists of leviathan are interviewed, of course, as well as outright left-wing ideologues; but illuminating sparks fly often enough to keep me interested.

So it was on May 15, when left-wing operative Lawrence O'Donnell, an in-studio guest, failed to play the fancy games of evasion that Reds usually play and bullied Scarborough back. Their stinging exchange came fifteen or twenty minutes after a remote interview of Dr. Paul.

O'Donnell to Scarborough: "All you conservatives are, are more-moderate socialists. Not one of you, not one Republican has ever introduced a bill to repeal Medicare, to repeal Social Security, or to abolish the Department of Education. None of you mean it. All you want to do is tinker with the socialism the way the Democrats do. You just want to spend a little less on it."

O'Donnell was wrong on the facts here, allowing Scarborough to protest that in 1995 he introduced a bill to "get rid of the federal education bureaucracy" that attracted 175 co-sponsors and made its way into the budget resolution.

Now, lacking an item veto, President Clinton of course vetoed the budget when it hit his desk, leading to one of those government "shutdowns" that used to occur every whip-stitch in those days ... Oh. Don't remember that particular one? Of course it didn't happen. What did happen, according to the New York Times, was that Scarborough's bill failed even to make it out of the House, which at the time was controlled by Republicans: "The House majority leader, Dick Armey of Texas, who scorns the department as an example of 'trickle-down incompetence,' acknowledged last week that he could not muster the votes this session to pass either of two bills to abolish the department."

By the way, Scarborough's bill would have preserved and transferred to another ministry one of the worst statist enormities ever invented, one that has lured a large proportion of young Americans into further dependence on leviathan and the System at large: the government student-loan program.
 

Scarborough's memory may be a little foggy, but I'm easy. I'll award him half a point on Fed Ed. With respect to Social Security and Medicare, though, Scarborough could only tell O'Donnell, "That's part of the social contract at this point."

O'Donnell: "Oh, social contract. Socialism contract. You guys like socialism as much as the Democrats. C'mon!"

That set Scarborough all a-burble about Edmund Burke and the need to preserve "the social order."

O'Donnell was relentless: "When socialism wins, you surrender. Like when socialism wins in the '30s and in the '60s, you surrender and never try to dismantle it."

Scarborough replied that getting rid of Social Security and Medicare would cause "social unrest."

O'Donnell observed that Ron Paul would get rid of them.

Scarborough replied, "He's not a Burkean conservative."

I doubt I've ever seen the bankruptcy of conservatism so vividly and definitively exposed on mainstream TV — even by a libertarian, let alone a leftist!

Remarkably, O'Donnell — whom Scarborough often "genially" zings as "Crazy Larry" — reappeared on the program a few weeks later to make the same extremely non-crazy points about conservatives.
 

We don't have to insist that Edmund Burke was sincere in his early anarchist work Vindication of Natural Society (1756) to wonder whether he could possibly have favored — at any point in his career — the kind of "social order" that the American leviathan has given us.

Leviathan, as I and many other writers have pointed out, creates not social order or social peace but social disorder and social war. Every time it thrusts its bloody pincers into another area of social life, it heightens social conflict. It is with respect to "public" libraries, including "public" school libraries, that we see ferocious political struggles over what books should be included. It is with respect to "public" schools that we see ferocious political struggles over curricula, student dress, busing, and the medicalization of misbehavior. It is with respect to "public" parks and the "public" square that we see ferocious political struggles over what symbols are to be displayed and what demonstrations of popular discontent are to be allowed. It is with respect to "public" roads that we see ferocious political struggles over helmet-wearing, child-safety cocoons, speed limits, and all the rest. If such matters were left to free society, whose material expression is the free market, such conflicts could never arise. People would be left — what's that's obscure formulation? Oh yes: Free to choose.

Leviathan sets people at each other's throat, inducing them to abandon peaceful coexistence in society and instead struggle to capture the violence of the state to work their will or at least defend themselves, desperately, against the enforced will of others. Leviathan's statization of health care and old-age pensions — the issues at hand here — has set the generations against each other, igniting inter-generational resentment, fear, and conflict. As it worsens, and the white demographic collapse continues, that conflict will come to include a major racial component as well; but we cannot expect Scarborough to recognize that, either, since he believes "we" (i.e., whites) are moving toward a "color-blind" society.

As for Scarborough's notional "social contract," I protest that no one ever asked me to sign such a contract; and I wager the same goes for you. Moreover, I point out that the state does not draw and propose social contracts, or any valid contracts for that matter; the state can only issue statish edicts and intimidations. It is accurate to consider the state a social institution only insofar as it is accurate to consider cancer a bodily tissue.

Lawrence O'Donnell is no partisan of freedom, and in most respects we may fairly regard him as our enemy; but he is a spark-striker, especially in contrast to soggy Big Government conservatives such as Scarborough. O'Donnell inhabits that unusual and narrow category of left-wingers who are worth listening to. [Nicholas Strakon]  (September 2009)

"You lie!" I keep reading that Joe Wilson's calling out, "You lie!" to the president during his address to a joint session of Congress was unprecedented, that it was the first time a president had ever been called a liar in the House of Representatives.

Others have noted that "Pete" Stark had called George W. Bush a liar, but I'm not interested in that sort of reply. What I marvel at is that people do not remember (or are pretending not to remember) that more than 50 percent of the House of Representatives called Bill Clinton a liar when they impeached him for committing perjury in a civil-rights case.

And it has been said that the reason Richard Nixon resigned is that he knew that when the articles of impeachment against him were put to a vote, they would be approved. And those articles of impeachment called him a liar.

Maybe Joe Wilson was just a little ahead of his time. [Ronn Neff]  (September 2009)

Let's not miss the forest for the ACORN. So this is what it takes to tear a screamingly left-wing, anti-white activist group away from the Central Government teat? To put a stop to its fifteen years of sucking up millions of dollars from tax victims? That's assuming ACORN really does end up defunded: as of this writing, Comrade Pelosi's House has yet to act, and of course we don't know what the left-corruptionists will sneak into one of their 1,000-page bills a few months from now, once people are distracted by some other governmental enormity.

I'm afraid I can produce only two cheers. According to the usual estimate, the Central Government has extorted and passed along $53 million in loot for ACORN since 1994. Reflect on that date. Didn't the right-populist "Republican Revolution" come to glory on Election Day 1994? Sending a feisty new cohort of heroic right-populist Republicans to take over Congress in January 1995? And didn't Republicans maintain majorities in both houses (apart from a minor blip in the Senate) for the next 12 years?

Good job with ACORN, there, Republicans.

The other thing keeping my huzzahs relatively muted is the fact that a fortune in money extorted from tax-victims is still flowing to left-wing groups (from state and local governments, too, by the way). Anyone heard of La Raza? How about the National Council of Senior Citizens? Catholic Charities? The Natural Resources Defense Council? Planned Parenthood, for heaven's sake? I could go on.

In fact, I will go on, since I don't wish to limit this to freedom's enemies on the Left. Other giant-government groups and individuals stand urgently in need of defunding, too. So I award a full three cheers to the title of a 2005 article by Cato's John Samples: "Defund Everyone"! [Nicholas Strakon]
 

Update. On September 17, the House voted to cut off all tax-victim subsidies to ACORN. (Sources: MSNBC and Politico.com) However, it turns out that the Senate cut off only one kind of subsidy, not all. A reconciliation procedure will therefore be necessary.
 

So why was it a bad idea to let one's children sit there and lap up Obama's school speech? According to the established media, including System mouthpieces such as MSNBC's "libertarian" and "Burkean" Joe Scarborough, only hysterical Birthers and other fever-swampers could possibly object to such a heart-warming, character-building public event. Indeed, what could possibly be wrong with having the Man Who Was Democratically Elected to Run Our Lives speak to schoolchildren on a nationwide hookup? Especially if he restricted himself to goody-goody pabulum and wore a good-role-model mask to conceal his shrieking Bolshevism?

All right, that last bit is fairly tendentious, but it gets to my point. I wish more of our countrymen could hear Obama and the rest of the statesgods as we anti-statists hear them. What follows is one possible way of hearing. In it, I depart a little from pure goody-goodyness, partly for comic effect, but you've got to read between the lines when it comes to statesgod utterances, and really I'm just filling in some of that interlineal material. (The transcript of the real speech can be found at www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=news-000003197719.)
 

VENUE: Antonio Meucci Technical High School, Rubblefield, N.J.

SPEAKERS:

MR. BARTOLOMEO OBAMIO, president of Amerigo Vending and Industrial Laundry, Inc.
MR. ARNIE D'UNCANA, president of the school board
 

OBAMIO: How youse doon? So dis is da first day a high school?

STUDENTS: Yo.

OBAMIO: Hey. I'm tryin' to remember back to my first day a high school. I can't remember dat far back. Lotta water under da bridge since den. An' a lotta other t'ings. But it is great to see all a youse here. I'm really proud a my friend Arnie D'Uncana, who's doon a great job tryin'a create, whatcha call it, a envirament where all a youse can learn what's what. And I know it's a little intimidatin' wit' all my crew an' associates an' what not aroun', and all dis ...

D'UNCANA: Don' pay no attention to dem guys. Dey're all friends a ours.

OBAMIO: ... so just pretend dat dey're not dere.

Here's the main reason I wanted to come by. As Arnie pointed out, when I was growin' up, my faddah wasn't in the house. He was in anuddah house, ya know what I mean? We weren't poor, we weren't rich, hey. My muddah — Madonn', dat woman was a saint! — had to work real hard, so sometimes my grandparents had to fill in. And my wife, Michela, who all a youse have seen — the Bawse Lady, hey — her dad worked in a — as a ... well, I ain't gonna exactly say, but basically in a blue-collar job, kind of a contrac' worker, ya know? But not a big earner. Hey, whacha gonna do? Her mamma worked as a secatary, keepin' track a some money dat came an' went. What we call da vig. And dey lived in a tiny — dey din't even live in a house, dey lived upstairs above her aunt's house. And so neither of us really hadda whole lot when we were comin' up, but the one t'ing dat we had was parents who insisted on gettin' a good education, so we don' grow up to be like some moolie onna corner.

And I want youse all to know dat despite the good home trainin' I was gettin', dat when I was in nint' and tent' grade, I was still kind of a mamaluke, and I din't study as hard as I coulda. I was a lot more concerned about bocce bawll and runnin' my own little borgata. I made some mistakes when I was in high school, wasn't as focused as I shoulda been. But the fack dat my parents — not my faddah so much, but my muddah and my grandparents — had emphasized education allowed me to make up for some a dem mistakes, get probation, and still get into a good collitch. And when I got to collitch, I was able to really bear down and focus on education and learnin' how to calcalate da vig, an' all about the laws and the pezzonovanti in politics, and what not.

Michela, she was a good student the whole time. She was sort of a, what we call a "citizen," capisce?

(LAUGHTER)

And she just did good in high school, and then she went to collitch and then she went to da law school, and she just was always really organized and together. Guys like me, we like t'ings organized, hey! Listen, a good fella name a Hagen — not an Italian, OK, but he explained what one lawyer wit' a briefcase could do dat a hunnert men wit' guns couldn't. Dat's one a da main t'ings youse should learn in school.

But the point is, is dat both of us were able to succeed not because of who our parents were, not because we came from the ricci or because we had a lotta connections — yeah, we had some friends, but don' believe everyt'ing ya hear — but it was mainly just because we ended up gettin' into good schools and we worked hard and we did good. And I did some good work when I got out, too, so I got made early, but dis ain't da place for me to get inta all dat.

All a youse are in dat same position. And as I look out at dis class, I say to myself, youse guys remind me of me and Michela. And you're in the same position dat we were. We were no different, even if we did have some special friends. Youse got the same opportunities dat we had. The key is for youse to seize dem opportunities.

And the reason I wanted to come by to talk to students — and then we're goin' to talk to students all across the city — Arnie is workin' really hard wit' some businessmen we know to make sure dat yer schools are well equipped. We're tryin' to get more money in the budget for t'ings like computers. Dem computers make it a lot easier to keep track a da money comin' and goin', and find people who got lost — unnerstand? — and do the complicated beezineess, like wit' da Russians and everyt'ing dey're into. And we wanna make sure dat we're gettin' the very best teachers and dat dey're gettin' all the right kinda trainin', and have the right ideas about some t'ings we're innerested in.

We're doon everyt'ing we can as adults to give youse a good learning situation. But ultimately we can't force youse to learn. Far as force goes — sure, some guy can whack anuddah guy, but ... Hey. I'm just kiddin' here. Not even yer parents can force youse to learn. Fuhgeddaboudit. Ultimately youse gotta want to learn. Youse got to realize dat education is yer ticket into earnin' big so youse don't got to be some babbo runnin' street scams for forty years, and dat education's not gonna happen just because ya show up, although showin' up helps, 'specially when yer skipper says youse gotta come in for a sit-down. So I wanna make sure everybody ...

(LAUGHTER)

(UNKNOWN): We're glad you're here.

OBAMIO: We're glad youse are here.

Youse gotta be hungry to want to learn more, whether — whatever the subject is. Learnin' the odds, tools a the trade, what kinda guy youse can count on in a deal, an' even, what's the word, topography? Like which construction sites are good if youse have to find a place for some snitch who's gotta go ... I'm just kiddin'. Hey. And if youse got dat hunger and dat drive and dat passion, yer gonna do good. And if youse don't, y'know, you're just gonna do mezzo mezz', you'll be mediocre, and you'll never be a man a respect, and I don't t'ink dat's what any of youse want for yer lives.

So dat's the main message dat I want to send, is take advantage of the opportunity. If youse are hungry for learning, youse will find teachers dat want to help ya, youse will — y'know, yer parents will be dere for ya, the men a respect in the neighborhood will be dere, you'll be able to finance yer way outta juvie and inta collitch, you'll be able to move up in yer crew, you'll be able to earn good. But youse got to want it. And youse got to get right on certain ideas about what's what, too. And dat's the main message dat we want to send.

So, wit' dat, we got about twenny minutes just to go back and fort'. And I know, like I said, youse might have a little agita wit' all dese guys aroun'. But it's not every day dat youse get a chance to talk to a businessman like me. But, listen, certain subjecks, youse want answers, we gonna have to do a walk-and-talk.

(LAUGHTER)

They're all in it together. As I write, the praise party roars on. It erupted the moment Ted Kennedy died, and it ripples and roils right across the political mainstream, among officeholders, appointees, and commentators Democrat, Republican, and in between. It teaches us something important, and the general commotion hammers home our lesson harder than particular cases of Kennedy-truckling, in the past, by Republican swine such as Orrin Hatch, John McCain, and Bob Dole.

If one is a partisan of liberty and justice, and believes that a famous man was, throughout his public career, a malevolent and destructive force in terms of liberty and justice, just what does one say upon that man's death? Now, when it comes to the blessed expiring of public villains I don't adhere to the old "nil nisi bonum" rule; but if one does adhere to it, the most he can do is grit his teeth and extend quiet condolences to the man's family if he happens to be personally acquainted with them. Otherwise, he maintains a dignified silence.

He does not expatiate on how genial or humorous or personally generous the man was. What would be the point of that? No doubt many organized-crime figures have been genial or humorous or personally generous. Some of them, I suppose, have been generous with money stolen from other people, as Kennedy was.

One would more gracefully confine oneself to praising the geniality, humor, and generosity of honest people who refrained from robbing and tyrannizing over their fellow countrymen.

But the System's praise-partyers, many of them, go far beyond merely praising Kennedy's purported personal qualities (including the virtues of sobriety and sexual continence that, we are told, he adopted as an old man). No, the partyers are actually celebrating how marvelously effective Kennedy was in perpetrating his crimes! — even if, in the past, they claimed to oppose some of those crimes. Now we see how serious those "opponents" were in their opposition.

It's as if a fellow claimed to hate crime, while at the same time celebrating how marvelously effective Albert Anastasia was in running the New York docks for La Cosa Nostra. Or celebrating how marvelously effective Luciano and Lansky were in establishing the Commission.

But why should the praise-partyers not work themselves into a frenzy of admiration? They are not partisans of liberty and justice. They are themselves organized-crime figures, or its servants, shills, and dupes. The hard but invaluable lesson for us is that these people are all in it together. Against us. [Nicholas Strakon]

The nightmare will never die. Democrats immediately started using Ted Kennedy's death as a tool in their drive to pass Obamacare — meaning that, like Jason, Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and a hundred other slashers from bad horror films, Kennedy will reach out from the grave to terrorize us one more time. [Richard Wilkins]

Douglas Olson's pre-obituary of Kennedy,
"The man who murdered America," October 2008.
 
(August 2009)

All too human. Earlier this month we heard that the Central Government is concerned about all the war veterans who are coming home with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I myself think it is a good thing that so many are afflicted. And have bad dreams. And thoughts of suicide. It shows that they are still human — well, at least partly. Men who do what they have done, seen what they have seen should be disturbed by it.

But the government wants to make sure that future soldiers get more training that will help them endure the horrors of war. And this was put out as cheery good news. The state will be taking care of them.

What we were actually being told was that the state is going to make a greater effort to robotize the men and women it sends into battle. Yes, let's make them all less human.

Especially the women.

Apparently the state's concern about its military personnel echoes a Nietzsche title: Human, All Too Human. [Ronn Neff]  (August 2009)

Now that I think of it ...

What is the "carbon footprint" of the Af-Pak war?

Of the war on drugs?

Of the IRS? [Ronn Neff]  (June 2009)

The State will breathe for you, Comrade! As the forces of leviathan plot To Serve Man even more relentlessly on the health-care front by forcing an even stiffer dose of statism down our throat, we thought we'd comment on one triumph of theirs, in the struggle to ensure wellness for the oppressed workers and peasants, that you may not have heard about.

A friend of ours is a longtime sufferer from asthma, and she's had some serious episodes. Inhalers for asthmatics must contain a propellant, but the EPA recently decreed the formerly used propellant to be an Enemy of the Ozone or something, and convicted it of aiding and abetting Global Warming. Therefore, inhalers now feature an environmentally friendly propellant. But our friend finds that it is too weak to quite get the medicine as far into the lungs as it needs to go. She has been visiting various Websites and bulletin boards, and reading the complaints of other asthmatics whose experience matches hers. Some of the writers have arrived at a pretty chilling conclusion, expressed starkly by one: "I guess the next time I have a serious attack will be my last."

Of course, the official (FDA, EPA) line is that this is all nonsense. The new propellant is fully as effective as the old one. We are not to believe our own experience of not being able to breathe, but only the reassuring grandfatherly faces of the FDA — as though even they, with their "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic," were free to say otherwise.

Our friend has been driven to look for inhalers with the older propellant for sale in Mexico and India. The ones she ordered from India arrived recently — containing, sure enough, the people's glooorious democratic fraternal peaceloving new propellant. She may try Myanmar next.

In monitoring government's poisonous impact on our health, let us not fall victim to tunnel vision, examining only policies and programs explicitly devoted to health-care socialism and fascism. We need to beware other kinds of sickening government intervention, too. [Ronn Neff and Nicholas Strakon]
 

The DEA's attack on pain relief is one of them. [Modine Herbey]  (June 2009)

Our new god is cruel but quick. You may have seen the tape of Emperor Barack swatting a bothersome fly during an interview with CNBC's John Harwood. In response, PETA's president, Ingrid Newkirk, sighed with disappointment and reminded us that "he isn't the Buddha."

Over the past few days I've been contending with a bothersome fly myself, here at TLD Galactic Headquarters. But every time I try to dispatch the loathsome pest my nervous system can barely get my hand moving before my target teleports itself twenty feet away. The Emperor had no such problem. He peered at the fly for a second, struck with superhuman speed and accuracy, and BAM! — the wee monster was no more. It was a remarkable feat, performed in the glare of TV's bright lights, and I actually found it somewhat scary.

Not the Buddha? No, Barack certainly isn't the Buddha. He's the Antichrist, and Lord of the Flies.

I'm kidding. More or less.

I suppose I ought to squeeze one serious point out of this comedy, so here it is. The PETAphiles' disenchantment with Super Fly illustrates one thing of some significance, namely, the gap between the transparodistic frontier of Red Guard goofery and Barack's pragmatic Bolshevism. In the eyes of the unwary, that gap keeps the Obamunists looking reasonable and credible. [Nicholas Strakon]  (June 2009)

What's good for the gander ... The Emperor's candidate to join the Supreme Legislature, Señora Sotomayor, turns out to have been a member of an all-female club. For purposes of political self-defense she has now resigned from the "Belizean Grove," which was modeled on the old ruling-class outfit, the Bohemian Club.

The female-only aspect of this is the only part that interests the established media even slightly, but the ruling-class aspect is more worthy of investigation. I must say, the mention of the Bohemian Club on the Belizeans' Website tickled my antennae. I recommend to your attention G. William Domhoff's Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness, the 1975 edition of which is still available from Amazon. Naturally, with the passage of time it has become an historical rather than a contemporary analysis, and especially in view of other changes in the ruling class I don't know how big the Bohemians are nowadays.

I don't know, either, how successful the Belizean Club has been in imitating its male predecessor, but according to its Website it has certainly been trying:

Having observed the power of the Bohemian Grove, a 130-year-old, elite old boys' network of former Presidents, businessmen, military, musicians, academics, and non-profit leaders, and realizing that women didn't have a similar organization, Susan Stautberg and 26 other founding members created the Belizean Grove, a constellation of influential women who are key decision makers in the profit, non-profit and social sectors; who build long term mutually beneficial relationships in order to both take charge of their own destinies and help others to do the same.

It's fun to point out the hypocrisy (or outright deceit) of purported egalitarians on the Left who join exclusive-identity organizations while attacking others' freedom of association. It's even more fun pointing it out when those leftists are colored women who beat up on white men. But let's keep our eye on the ruling-class ball, here, and focus on the use of the P-word: "Having observed the power of the Bohemian Grove...." Be they goose or gander, the name of the game for these birds is Power. [Nicholas Strakon]  (June 2009)

Ugliness pageant. Carrie Prejean, the beauty queen who got in trouble with the homosexualists when one of them interviewed her at the Miss USA Pageant in April, has now been fired as Miss California USA by the pageant's owner — and the man who earlier had defended her during a risqué-photo crisis — Donald Trump.

Before now, I've been reluctant to write about the affair, for reasons that ought to be apparent. Culturally orthodox Westerners don't want to see women on these shores wandering about in black chador and veil, but on the other hand, it's a mite risky for us to honor, as a paladinette of the West, a girl who strips down on national TV.

Miss Prejean, though, certainly seems to have the right enemies. Evoking extra sympathy from me is the fact that she wasn't trying to make any enemies when she gave the pageant's homosexualist judge the "wrong" answer about so-called gay marriage. She told Mr. "Perez Hilton" (Mario Lavandeira) that she and her family believed not in "gay marriage" but instead in real marriage — which she described, awkwardly, as "opposite" marriage. In return for that honest expression of her personal beliefs, Mr. "Hilton" voted against her in the pageant, which some believe doomed her chances; and within hours he was calling her a "dumb bitch" on his blog.

Well, there's one homosexualist who will never be accused of being a feminist! All joking aside, the silence from the P.C. police upon this unleashing of the "B word" has rivaled that of the tomb, proving again that, for our supervisors, the important thing isn't what is said but who says it.

Of course, many normal people suspect — reasonably enough — that male homosexuals, whether activists for homosexualism or not, often harbor a hatred and revulsion for normal women. Nevertheless, it seems to have become routine for heterosexual beauty pageants to appoint male homosexuals either as judges or as commentators. I assume that has something to do with the high-fashion segment of the pageants, which must be included to attract some dollop of female viewers; but it's still a massively jarring and discordant development.

In response to Mr. "Hilton's" slurful spite and intolerance, the late-night comedians immediately began ridiculing — Miss Prejean! The worst offender to my knowledge is ABC's Jimmy Kimmel, who has derided Miss Prejean several times during his opening monologue. A gifted satirist, Mr. Kimmel is often gleefully disrespectful of the privileged minorities, but he marched right up and toed the System's line in this case, even making fun of Miss Prejean's grandmother, who, believe it or not, had never heard of "Perez Hilton" and assumed he was Hispanic. (Actually, if the Wiki article for "Hilton" is to be trusted, he is Cuban-American, of "Galician" ancestry. Kimmel's writers and researchers must have missed that.)

Now Miss Prejean has been dethroned as Miss California USA, ostensibly for failing to live up to her contractual obligations involving public appearances and what not. She and her spokespeople deny the charges, and she insists she lost her crown because she crossed the homosexualists. CNN's story of June 10 on Miss Prejean's sacking contains an inconvenient revelation that I didn't expect to see from a left-wing anticultural news organization, namely, that some of the "Miss California USA officials [are] outspoken advocates of same-sex marriage."

According to CNN, Mr. "Hilton" cheered Miss Prejean's dismissal: "Better late than never."

I'm not going to sink into the swamp of charges and countercharges involving Miss Prejean's contractual performance. Instead I'm simply going to ask:

Will this "Perez Hilton" man ever be invited to be a judge or commentator by another televised beauty pageant? In terms of income, public exposure, or reputation, will he pay any price for what he did? Time will tell, and it will also tell us how far gone we really are. [Nicholas Strakon]  (June 2009)

What does Barack Obama want? Now that General Motors has become Government Motors (and UAW Motors), socialists have confected another distracting dodge to keep non-socialists from worrying about socialism. It's a variation on the old "emergency" dodge, used by fans of American government since Lincoln's time (actually, since Washington's) to justify more Power and less Liberty.

The socialists — whose love "dare not speak its name" — are exclaiming, "Socialism! That's ridiculous! This is an emergency! You don't really believe President Obama wants to run GM, do you?" And their interlocutors are supposed to blink and blush and say, "Oh, well, of course not. Forget I said anything."

Of course not, indeed. B.H. Obama is no more eager to run GM in 2009 than J.V. Stalin was to run Glorious People's Automobile Factory No. 1 in 1935. Stalin turned over such picayune tasks to the Minister for Heavy Industry and his minions. The Great Teacher set his sights far higher.

And so does our own Great Teacher. Anyone who has attended to the declarations of the mainstream media over the past 20 years — long before anyone ever heard of Barack Obama — knows that the president doesn't focus narrowly on running a single company.

No, no, no. The very idea! What does the modern American president do? Why, he "runs the country." [Nicholas Strakon]  (June 2009)

Extraordinary government, 1. Robert Reich, secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, was on today's broadcast of NPR's Diane Rehm Show. He was asked whether the government takeovers of various businesses represented a move toward socialism, and instead of saying yes or no, he replied that these are extraordinary times, and government must step in to take extraordinary measures.

Apparently Mr. Reich believes that liberty is a luxury that people can afford only in prosperous times, but when there's trouble on the horizon, we have to turn to government management. If so, I would be inclined to agree with him that "we" cannot afford liberty — if only he would tell us who the "we" is. [Ronn Neff]
 

Extraordinary government, 2. Mr. Reich also assured listeners that he certainly hopes that the extraordinary measures being taken are temporary. But why should they be? If the free market and liberty are so ruinous that they caused The Mess We Are In (as Diane Rehm herself said on another occasion), why would anyone want to return to them? Why would anyone want to undo the measures we are told are protecting us from the ravages of the free market? [RNN]  (May 2009)

Maybe she's a strict destructionist. On the telescreen, the lavishly funded Left is already running campaign spots pushing Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation as a member of the Supreme Legislature. The sponsoring organization? Why, none other than the Coalition for Constitutional Values, at www.constitutionalvalues.org/.

The Left is just shameless, isn't it? But why shouldn't it be? It can get away with almost anything, here in America the Ovine. [Nicholas Strakon]

P.S. Oh! — I almost forgot to ask: Have you reread 1984  yet this year?

(May 2009)

We the Renting. On the 16th, Michelle Obama gave a commencement address at the University of California-Merced, and in it she alleged: "Service is the rent we pay for living.... It is the true measure, the only measure, of our success." She was quoting "advocate and activist" Marian Wright Edelman, a Negro child-welfarist and a left-wing critic of Bill Clinton's welfare "reform."

I had thought that taxes were the rent we pay for living, but it appears that once again, in the age of Obama, I was thinking too small.

True, calls for "service" are pretty much conventional in commencement speeches, and La Obama seemed to be speaking in a context of voluntarism. But of course the Obamites are not to be trusted in this.

Take, for example, the "national service" law that the Obamites and their congressional operatives imposed in April. If you can ignore the $5.7 billion in money robbed from taxpayers that will go to fund the program, and if you can ignore the larger fact that the Central Government — that least-voluntaristic of entities — has no imaginable business involving itself in such matters, it looks pretty voluntaristic. No one (it appears) will be forced at gunpoint to dress up in the costume of the Young Pioneers and march out, smiling grimly, to propagandize the Poor, the Sick, the Needy, and other especially downtrodden elements of the Gloooorious Workers and Peasants.

But look a little more closely, and you'll start to suspect that a hidden form of totalitarianism is at work — that is, Polite Totalitarianism as Ronn Neff has defined it.
 

I decided to spend a little time with Google, looking into this "service" business as it affects young folk. It turns out that, since 1997, Maryland has required what the educrats call "service-learning" of all students who wish to graduate from its government high schools. Yes, it is what you think it is, though I didn't find any actual mention of bedpan-emptying. A minute's further Googling revealed that "service-learning" is also required for graduation from the Chicago government schools and from the government schools in Broward County, Fla. (A Web page on "service-learning" posted by the Chicago Public Schools uses an epigraph from Cesar Chavez that would broil the cockles of any Randian's heart: "Surely the end of all education is service to others.")

Then I hit the site operated by the gracefully named Learn and Serve America's National Service-Learning Clearinghouse, which reports that in 2001 Maryland was still the only mandatory-volunteer state but that "six states (ID, MI, MN, NJ, NM, VT) include service-learning in the state's education standards," whatever that may mean — but it doesn't sound good. (For the benefit of those who prefer standard English, those damnable postal codes translate as Idaho, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Vermont.) Furthermore, "In Iowa, as of April 2003, local school boards may require service-learning units for a service-learning endorsement on a high school diploma or as a condition for graduation according to legislation passed by the Iowa General Assembly."

There, brothers and sisters, I suspended my research — but at this point let's note that an extensive and ongoing research project would indeed be necessary to sort out and keep track of what the states' school authorities and local school boards are getting up to, with this "service-learning" business, from year to year or even from month to month. Part of our project would involve figuring out to what extent the Obama national-service law will influence and encourage such local programs.
 

I'm sure it will, but how exactly? That's the Polite Totalitarian achievement right there: rendering the overall dimensions of the phenomenon relatively invisible to most people. The Obamites will be able to burble on about the "volunteerism" of "service" as they understand it, as the actual implementation dissolves among an archipelago of local authorities who will make it mandatory. For their part, the local authorities will prate about the "voluntary" nature of their coercion, since, after all, parents can always choose to send their children to private or parochial schools, or home-school them — though of course those lucky parents will have to pay to educate someone else's children in the state schools.

And the pincers of leviathan will have thrust out to envelop, and damage, even more of the American tradition of true charity and true voluntarism, which has already been partly enveloped and badly damaged by the Central Government's financing (and direction) of major "private" charities. Meanwhile, even without donning a Young Pioneer costume, young Americans will be even more limited to understanding "service" as the state defines it, and even less able to distinguish between their country and the state that rules it. Service — to the state — will indeed be the rent we pay for living. [Nicholas Strakon]

Ronn Neff comments on the oration:

Big talk from a woman who lives in a mansion and

– doesn't have to worry about her children's safety
– doesn't have to worry about her or her children's health or medical care
– doesn't have to worry about getting fired or laid off
– doesn't have to worry about her husband's getting fired or laid off
– doesn't have to worry about her or her husband's retirement
– doesn't have to worry about her own future if her husband suddenly dies
– doesn't have to worry about the price of groceries
– doesn't have to worry about the price of gasoline and
– doesn't even have to worry about veterinary bills.

Need I go on? As Joe Sobran has said, when these people talk of their own service, they mean something that pays pretty well. For the rest of us, it means something else entirely.

Of course, when Michelle Obama talks of "service," she is talking about making sacrifices, and as Ayn Rand said, whenever you hear someone talking about making sacrifices, you can be sure there will be someone collecting them.

"Sacrifice" probably has a nice, soothing sound to most Christians because they don't know that the only proper recipient of sacrifice is the deity; and they have forgotten that "to sacrifice" is "to make holy." Like most people, they think that sacrifice is something a devoted mother does for her children. Or that a good chess player does with his pawns. (May 2009)

As an old ink-stained wretch who still occasionally growls about how much better things were "back in the Days of Hot Type," I'm sad to see daily newspapers going, going, gone. The Respectable and Concerned actually ask a good question when they demand to know how distant bloggers on the Web are ever going to keep the zoning board, the city council, and the (government) school board honest in Fort Wayne, Fresno, Wilkes-Barre, and a thousand other home towns once the local presses stop rolling.

The papers cover other kinds of local news, of course — sports, traffic accidents, the Annual Purple Martin Festival, nonpolitical crime — and we'll miss all that; but there is something we can do to prevent corruptionists running amok once the Daily Bugle folds. Cue Frank Chodorov yet again. It was Chodorov, you'll recall, who gave the classic libertarian response when asked, during the '50s Red Scare, what he'd do about the dreadful danger of Commies in government jobs: "Abolish the jobs!" Hint, hint. [Nicholas Strakon] (May 2009)

Another brain-dead mantra. As I've pointed out, the Obamites are using the Green frenzy as one of the chief devices for muscling up their big Red state. Accordingly, mouthpieces for the regime, both official and unofficial, are giving forth with a certain utterance more and more often: America has only 4 percent of the world's population but consumes 25 percent of "the world's energy."

I question whether the expression "the world's energy" is validly formulated — just whose energy is it, again? — but what I really want to ask here is:

So what?

Well, the Red Greens believe, or pretend to believe, that the state of affairs they report is self-evidently bad. And urgently in need of Change.

More than anything, it's the self-evident part that really gets my goat, and the fact that our supervisors can successfully sell it as self-evident. Once again, a screamingly obvious question languishes unasked, namely, how does America's energy consumption stack up against its production of wealth, vis-à-vis the rest of the world? Zimbabwe no doubt has a much smaller "carbon footprint" than America, but before choosing the Zimbabwean Way (with all its virtues) over the American Way (with all its vices), anyone still operating a live brain would want to know how Zimbabwe scored on the wealth-production front.

One might also want to know whether Zimbabweans have benefited at all, over the years, from American advances in medicine, manufacturing, transportation, communication, and energy production. And if they have not been permitted to benefit, whether that has been mostly the fault of productive Americans or mostly the fault of wealth-destroyers such as Mugabe.

Leftists seem to think that Americans spend all their time consuming and not producing; or, rather, that the only thing we produce is toxic waste. Well, that makes sense. Leftists have never been too swift when it comes to understanding the production of wealth. Wealth destruction, though: they've always been on top of that. [Nicholas Strakon] (May 2009)

"Standing up for the little guy." Notre Dame University's invitation to President Obama to speak at Commencement has sparked a fiery dispute on and off campus because of Obama's stand on abortion; the Rt. Rev. John D'Arcy, bishop of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, will be conspicuous in his absence from the ceremony.

Speaking today with MSNBC left-wing operative Andrea Mitchell, Kevin Tibbles, an NBC News reporter in Chicago, reported on what he considered the remarkable decline of Notre Dame since its radical-chic days when it was led by the "progressive" Father Theodore Hesburgh, cuddled up with Martin L. King and other "progressive" figures, and backed "progressive" causes. Straight-faced, Tibbles said that "the school has a history of human rights, of standing up for the little guy." As opposed to the regressive atmosphere now, you see.

"Little guy."  Wherever you stand on abortion rights, you've got to admit that that's funny — albeit dark, like so much of the Irony-Deaf Left's unintentional humor. [Nicholas Strakon]

P.S. We ought to remember that Notre Dame hasn't yet revoked its invitation. Moreover, I saw one news account indicating that a majority of students and professors are in favor of the Obama visit. What disturbs the leftist media, it seems, is that there's any controversy at all. (April 2009)

Try thinking outside the matchbox, guys. Walter Isaacson, head of the establishmentarian-reformist Aspen Institute, is proposing uniform nationwide standards for state-school performance. That amounts to a call for extending the nationalization and centralization of America's primary and secondary schools (and, by the way, the nationalization and centralization of thought), whether or not the Central Government would have to directly impose such standards.

Sad to say, Isaacson may win the support of some unwary non-leftists because he stipulates that simply pouring more taxpayer money into the state schools won't work, and also because his plan, if perfectly implemented, would break the stranglehold of the left-wing teachers unions where it now exists.

Isaacson wants to see more "innovative charter schools," charter schools being a corner of their tiny intellectual matchbox that reformists began to explore twenty years ago, with what amounted to dizzy excitement for such dozy mildcats. But charter schools are still state schools, even though some of them are managed by politically favored "private" contractors.

You've got to hand it to these establishmentarians, who are an inexhaustible fount of ideas that manage to be both mind-numbingly boring and screamingly utopian. Interviewed on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program on April 13, Isaacson uttered not one word about really private, non-state education. Not even to criticize it!

Neither did anyone else.

I propose a thought experiment. Imagine that — owing to whatever historical contingency you like — the various levels of American government had never come to control most of the education industry, or, indeed, any part of it whatsoever. Would American children, on the whole, be more or less skilled at reading? More or less familiar with scientific and mathematical concepts?

Would they be more or less oriented in terms of time and space? — that is, more or less knowledgeable about history and geography?

Would they be more or less skilled at thinking? And would they be more or less attached to liberty and justice than they are now?

It's like asking whether the Russians and the Ukrainians and the other peoples under the rule of Moscow would have been able to feed themselves better or worse, ceteris paribus, had the Bolsheviks kept their bloody mitts off agriculture. I understand that counterfactuals can be tricky, but, come on, which way would you bet?

There's one good thing we can say about leviathan when it forces vital functions of society deeper and ever deeper into the black abyss. It makes such questions ever easier to answer.[Nicholas Strakon]

P.S. — The matchbox shrinks. Interviewed on the same episode of "Morning Joe," D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty opined that allowing state-school principals to hire and fire at will would amount to a form of "privatization." Another bold and revolutionary thinker heard from! (April 2009)

The AIG bonuses. The American people — having swallowed the camel of the stimulus bill and massive spending, sending billions to liberal projects and their executives — now strain at the gnat. [Ronn Neff]
 

That famously efficient socialism. On MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program for March 25, "fiscally conservative" socialist Howard Dean told viewers, "Medicare is much more efficient than the private sector is in health care. [Medicare's] administrative costs are about a third of what they are in the private sector."

Dr. Dean's assertion went unchallenged. He was not asked to cite his sources. No one remarked how counterintuitive his claim was, on the scale of, "Venus is three times as habitable for humans as Earth." No one asked him to define "costs," or wondered aloud whether he had manufactured some narrow, deceitful context within which his statement could be considered at least technically true. No one wondered, either, how it was that medical socialism came to be so much more efficient than "private" medicine, when in all other areas of endeavor socialist bureaucracy is notorious for driving up costs. No one asked him what he meant by "the private sector," more than forty years into a socialist pandemic that has crippled, stunted, and deformed the health-care industry.

No one even just screamed, "What?!"

It is breathtaking what left-wingers can get away with.

Contrast the meek acceptance of Dr. Dean's pronouncement with what you'd expect to hear if a partisan of freedom, on some mainstream show, should advance an equally succinct claim that Franklin Roosevelt's policies didn't end but instead worsened and extended the Great Depression.

I'd like to ask Dr. Dean what entity it was, enforcing what programs, that rendered the "private" sector so oddly inefficient.

But look on the bright side. It's comforting to learn that Medicare has successfully offloaded so many of its internal costs onto the "private" sector. Efficient, indeed! No doubt the KGB was pretty cost-efficient, too, in house; sad to say, though, it was awfully costly for Soviet society at large. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2009)

Even a blind pig ... On February 25 the AP reported that Barack Obama had told various pols: "The choice we face is not between an oppressive government-run economy and a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism."

For sure, that's not our choice, since "capitalism," if by that we mean the free market, is not chaotic and unforgiving. It's spontaneously ordered and humane, especially when compared with statism and the blood-painted state.

It's breathtaking to see the charlatan-in-chief say something that's literally true, even if he's too dim or deceitful to use words properly. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2009)

Here's an entry for those who monitor the System's manipulation of our public language. I have reason to believe that those in charge of language and everything else are dropping the old phrase global warming in favor of the less-specific alternative, climate change. It seems that too many ordinary people have been making too many rude jokes during too many hard winters about global warming, and it's starting to get under the skin of the Totaligoreians.

I think I'll continue to say global warming. After all, I still say coed, Third World, Oriental, retarded, and Negro. While I'm on the subject, did you know that the System has even come up with new names for autism and multiple-personality disorder? Anything to keep us off balance. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2009)

Lincoln again. On March 10, Maximum Leader Obama once again edged into what he believes is the glorious aura of Abraham Lincoln, in the course of "refus[ing] to temper his ambitious reform drive," as the Associated Press tendentiously put it. In other words, he's refusing to concentrate on the banking crisis — today's equivalent of Lincoln's War — and is trying to impose other kinds of "Chaaaange" while he has the chance. Obama explained that "Lincoln helped lay down the transcontinental railroad, passed the Homestead Act, and created the National Academy of Sciences in the midst of civil war."

Students of political history will indeed see a striking parallel here between Lincoln and the current president. It's no surprise that Lincoln did his best to ram through the entire Hamiltonian-Whig-Republican program during that sweet time for government consolidationists when Southern Democrats were out of Congress. As opponents of leviathan, today's Republicans come off as mountebanks or paralytics compared with 19th-century Democrats, but, still, if the GOP had remained strong in Congress it's reasonable to think that certain distinctively Obamite proposals would be encountering a colder reception.

The proto-fascist transcontinental-railroad project that Obama cited shows what can be done when your opposition is especially weak and demoralized. The route chosen by the Lincolnians ran through northern states and territories; in the years before secession, not-so-laissez-faire Southerners such as Jefferson Davis had promoted a southern route. And more important, Lincoln's congressional ally Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania ironmonger, inserted into the railroad bill a provision that only U.S.-produced iron could be used in construction of the road. Protection and subsidy of Northern manufacturers were basically what Whiggery and the new Republicanism were all about; and Southern Democrats had done their best to fight those ideologies when they were still in Congress.

Lincoln made the most of other opportunities that were created by the absence of an effective congressional opposition, ramming through two National Bank Acts and the introduction of "greenbacks," a national paper currency. All were represented, at least in part, as measures to finance Lincoln's war of aggression against the southern part of the country. That was convenient, and may put us in mind of the Obamites' insistence that their dirigiste Green-technology fascism is an important part of their war against Economic Badness, despite the fact that, until recently, most people had supposed that the Green madness would worsen general economic distress. (Perhaps Obama should not be as shy as he appears in his March 10 utterance and should claim that all his "reform" proposals will help restore prosperity, or at least a 14,000 Dow.)

Following on President Buchanan's Morrill Tariff of 1861, which helped precipitate Southern secession, Lincoln successfully pressed twice for even higher tariffs — again under the rubric of "war measures." It was just a coincidence that high tariffs were the traditional centerpiece of Whiggery and the bête noire of Southerners; or perhaps I had better say that it was no coincidence that a state-building, high-taxing leader such as Lincoln also turned out to be a war leader. Thomas Paine wrote more boldly about the tendencies of a previous government over America, the one run out of London: "A bystander, not blinded by prejudice nor warped by interest, would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes."

Even the Homestead Act, beloved of some conservatives, reflected Lincoln's consolidationism and proto-fascism. (Ex-Confederates were barred from participating, by the way.) It reinforced the bizarre and disastrous notion that the state apparatus in Washington somehow owned and could rightfully dispose of unsettled land (and other natural resources) in the West; and it would furnish the railroads with customers they otherwise would not have had, as if it were not enough that those companies already wallowed in government land grants. The Act distorted the natural pattern of land ownership that would have arisen under true homesteading, tempting many naive pioneers into setting up stakes on land that was too arid for successful, long-term agriculture. (The railroads actually ran ads and distributed booklets in Europe to lure emigrants to the supposed Eden of the Great American Desert.) That, in turn, set the stage for pharaonic government water programs and other agricultural subsidies that have further empowered the Central Government while continuing to distort patterns of settlement in our country.

Obama is right to compare himself to Lincoln. Thaddeus Stevens wasn't as frank as Rahm Emanuel, or he might have been the first to publicly trumpet the great strategy of leviathan: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2009)

"Do you hope Obama will fail?" Rush Limbaugh has ignited a peculiar little controversy by expressing the hope that Obama will "fail." It's my understanding that Limbaugh has actually voiced two different hopes. I've heard him voice one of them on TV: that Obama and the other Democrats will fail to impose all of their declared policies on our hapless country. The second version, which for our purposes I'm assuming he also really voiced, is the hope that if the Obamites do succeed in imposing their policies, the policies will fail to produce economic recovery. It's that version that has been seized upon by the Obamites and the mainstream media (if we may distinguish those two groups from each other). And it's the more interesting of the two.

However we classify Limbaugh (and I am not a fan), partisans of freedom and justice naturally hope that the Obamites will fail to impose their fascist and socialist policies. We even hope that the fascist and socialist policies previously imposed will be lifted, although we haven't been holding our breath all our lives waiting for that to happen. But do we hope that fascism and socialism will fail, as already imposed and if imposed more fully?

It's a trick question. If we answer yes, our adversaries will accuse us of irrational pride and "narrow partisanship": the success of our adversary's program would mean that our entire philosophy was wrong. And we are too small, too close-minded to contemplate that. But if we answer no, we undermine ourselves also by implying that we think fascism and socialism have a chance of succeeding in bringing us good things.

The proper answer is, instead, that we know fascism and socialism will fail, in terms of freedom and justice, just as the murder, rape, robbery, and arson carried out by unofficial criminals fail categorically in terms of morality. Our study and contemplation of economy, history, society, logic, morality, and the nature of man have convinced us that fascism and socialism must fail, leaving peaceful, non-parasitic people less free, as well as materially poorer. Being asked whether we hope fascism and socialism will fail is rather like asking us whether we hope that some gangster's attempt to add two and two, and come up with five, will fail. Looked at that way, a trick question collapses into one that is merely silly and stupid.
 

Undaunted, and somewhat inattentive, our interlocutor may say that freedom and justice are both fine things, on those rare occasions when we can afford such fripperies, but what if Obamism produces "economic recovery"?

We must ask what "recovery" could possibly mean, in Obamite terms. Success in preserving the politically driven malinvestments that have not yet been liquidated? Success in rescuing ruling-class criminals by further robbing American taxpayers? Success in suppressing true economic interest rates through the political means? And encouraging worse malinvestments in other ways, too? Success in "putting people to work" — at uneconomic, politically created jobs?

Success, that is, in stopping the junky's withdrawal and putting him back on heroin, or introducing him to methadone?

Or would Obama's fascist and socialist policies remove the obstacles now interfering with the market's stupendously splendid cybernetic mechanism, allow people to trade in honest money, leave property in the hands of those who have earned it, strip away all politically awarded privilege, permit "capitalist acts among consenting adults," and — generally — get the state the hell out of our way? By definition: No. If the American economy ever accomplishes a genuine recovery, one that does not increase the political crime rate, it will occur despite the criminal efforts of Obama, Pelosi, and their masters.

Forgive me if, as an old Randian, I observe that it's just impractical to separate the moral and the practical. Crime can "succeed," but only for the criminal, not the victim. We can't define crime without understanding equal liberty and rightful conduct, nor can we define the opposite of crime — economic behavior. A free people spontaneously cooperating in an environment of justly held property, honest money, and an unfettered price system is the economy. Anything short of that is less than an economy, and more of a crime. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2009)

May I freshen your paradigm? After the most recent revelations of regulatory dub-flubbing — by the FDA and Bernie Madoff's cronies at the SEC — we're hearing the standard cries for more and better regulation. I even heard some poor chap on the telescreen calling for better regulation of the regulators!

The FDA's predecessor agency won its first regulatory authority in 1906, and the FDA gelled into its modern form in 1927. The SEC was founded in 1934. And lo, these many years later, both outfits are still notorious for intractable fumblitis, shading into actual corruption in the case of the SEC. Now fans of regulation want to reward the agencies with even more power to do harm. That's utopianism verging on head-banging autism, and I doubt I've ever seen folks who stood in more urgent need of a paradigm shift. But it won't happen no matter how bad things get, as long as the established intelligentsia manages to represent fascism as laissez-faire, and confines true free-market thinking to an intellectual ghetto. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2009)

Ronn Neff observes: Appearing on C-SPAN on January 29, Ron Paul said a lot of incisive things about the bailout, the free market, and government spending. But he also said this:

The role of government ought to be to provide a sound currency, to provide freedom in the marketplace, to make sure people follow through on their contracts, nobody can commit fraud, and nobody can commit violence.

Nicholas Strakon observes: Paul appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program on January 27, and in that forum, too, he said many incisive things about the bailout, the market, and spending. I particularly liked his reference to the costs of the U.S. Empire in connection with the economic collapse. Or, rather, I liked the first part of it. Right after mentioning the absurdity of American tax-victims' paying to build bridges in Iraq, Paul proposed more Central Government spending on the state "infrastructure" here at home. Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower (Barney Frank, too), meet your new friend Ron Paul.

And what did that concession buy him? Well, it didn't help him at all in the eyes of two panel members, Dylan Ratigan the Wall Street semi-fascist and Mike Barnicle the FDR fascist/socialist, who derided Paul as, essentially, an idiot who wants to "do nothing and let 'em starve."

It was a nice demonstration of what a man earns when he departs from principle in the presence of his enemies. (February 2009)

More bad faith from the Left. A whole raft of statist PSAs are airing on the telescreen at the moment — actually, they'll probably be airing from now on, here in the USSA. Most of them push Green totalitarianism, but the one that irritates me the most — because it's so profoundly dishonest — promotes the Employee Free Choice Act, notorious among pro-market people as "card check."

The spot comes to us courtesy of the American Rights at Work Education Fund, with a Website at www.freechoiceact.org. ("Rights at Work," instead of the old conservative shibboleth "Right to Work," get it?)

The PSA's narrator says: "We voted on Election Day for hope and change. Now it's time for action. The Employee Free Choice Act lets workers choose to join a union to earn better pay, health benefits, and job security." (Emphasis spoken in original.)

Imagine that! American workers actually being allowed to decide whether or not to join a union!

It's as if the Wagner Act (1935) had never been passed, or any of the other Roosevelt labor laws. Haven't all the state schools, state-licensed media, and union shills told Americans for decades that the Roosevelt laws, and the later amendments and reinforcements thereof, were a smashing victory for the oppressed worker and his freedom to organize? But now union leftists themselves are willing to ignore and insult their former demigod Roosevelt in order to extend his program, namely, extinguishing employees' (and of course employers') freedom of association by propping up Big Labor's officially privileged position as a junior partner in the socialist/fascist System.

The point of the "card check" bill is to minimize the number of unionizing elections conducted by secret ballot; the government-dependent unions hope that more employees would approve unionization if they had to declare themselves publicly by either checking a card or declining to check it, in the presence of glowering union thugs. Now, personally, I'd like to see the secret ballot dropped, at least in government elections — it worsens the irresponsibility inherent in mass voting — but I'm focusing here on this latest breathtaking distortion produced by the Left. The Left's reality-filter makes a funhouse mirror look like the Hubble space telescope.

But the more ignorant the sheeple become, the more the Big Liars can get away with. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2009)

Innumeracy in power. In his inauguration speech, Obama said, "Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath."

Is it really too much to ask that a president or his speechwriters be able to read a list of names in an almanac?

It may be that it is proper to refer to Grover Cleveland both as the 22nd and as the 24th president. He may be two different presidents, but he is not two different men. He is not two different Americans.

Only 43 Americans have taken the presidential oath. [Ronn Neff]
 

Modine Herbey comments: Under the Obama Numbering System, 45 Americans have now taken the oath. After all, Obama himself took it twice. (February 2009)

"Divisive." Since Barack Obama's victory in November, the established media have been assuring us that the Culture War is over. In fact much blood-letting remains to be accomplished before our dread adversaries manage to extinguish all the bitter-end resistance in all the "last ditches," but in a strategic sense, Minitrue is correct: it is over. (And it was over long before Obama's election.)

However, I still find myself shaking my head in amazement as I watch Minitrue pursuing and extending its party line with the assurance, serenity, and matter-of-factness of the Soviet media propagating the Stalinist world-view in 1938. On January 19 one of MSNBC's left-wing operatives, Andrea Mitchell, interviewed "openly gay" Episcopal bishop V. Gene Robinson about the Inaugural festivities and the prospects of the Obama regime, and she led off by asking the Right Reverend what he thought of Obama's choice of Pop Preacher Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the Inauguration. Warren, though hardly a threat to the System, has not yet fully endorsed its homosexualist program, and in her opening question Miss Mitchell described him as a "divisive" figure.

"Divisive"? Ignorant viewers were afforded no background on the civil war in the Episcopal Church or the damage that that ancient institution has suffered, actually leading to schism, thanks to homosexualists such as Robinson. No: it's normal people who are "divisive" now, in the eyes of our masters and their mouthpieces.

Answering Miss Mitchell's question, Robinson said he was "very disappointed" that Warren would be appearing. Now, Robinson himself gave the invocation at one of the Inaugural Obama-Worship Services, the "We Are One" concert on the Mall, held January 18. But by official definition, no divisiveness can attach to Robinson's appearance or, more generally, to an event proclaiming that "We Are One." If We Are One, then of course We can have Only One Opinion about important matters such as homosexualism and its political promotion. Accordingly, Miss Mitchell interviewed no one who considers Robinson a "divisive" figure. (By the way, this sort of psywar is what our adversaries are referring to when they warble about promoting "diversity.")

However disappointed Robinson may be by the choice of Warren, he expressed confidence that Obama would succeed in advancing homosexualism. As the kids say: Well, duh! [Nicholas Strakon] (January 2009)

"They kept us safe." As the Bush regime finally slinks to its end, that claim seems to be what the remnant of Bush/Cheney/neocon fans are hanging their ragged hats on.

We know that the Bushites failed to keep our liberty and property safe from the grasping mitts of the banditti outside the Executive Branch — i.e., Republocrat socialists and fascists, and the criminal masterminds (or masterdoofuses) of the ruling class. Worse, our liberty and property were hardly safe from the grasping mitts of the Bushites themselves. Please excuse the understatement.

But let's limit ourselves to the Bushites' own definition of safety. As Bush himself indicated in his farewell speech, what the Bushites mean by safety is safety from foreign terrorism, especially Islamic terrorism. Well, it smells like bull ... derdash to me. As I've written before, I doubt that the best way to keep from being stung is to detour far out of one's way to poke a stick into a hornets' nest; but I'll be merciful and refrain from droning on about the United State's 60 years of nest-poking in the Middle East. Instead, this is my question for today: Are we really expected to believe that a regime that was stupendously incompetent even within the overall historical context of government incompetence somehow succeeded in being super-competent with respect to domestic security?

I do try to nurture my inner child, but even if I eventually come to believe in unicorns, leprechauns, and the saintliness of Barack Obama, I don't think I have it in me to believe that.

The Bushites adduce a long list of specific terrorist conspiracies that they claim to have foiled, including many conspiracies that we seem never to have heard of before. And they refer to other conspiracies that they can't describe, because of, you know, National Security. A comrade of mine asks a question simple but profound: Why should we believe any of it? Why should we trust them, of all people? If the Bushites were notorious — even within the established government context — for making off with our liberty and property, they were equally notorious for gang-raping the truth. [Nicholas Strakon]

A different assessment. It occurs to me that the policies of George Bush and the promised policies of Barack Obama are going quite a long way to protect us from terrorist attacks, and that we at The Ditch have been insufficiently grateful to them and for them.

Consider: We have been repeatedly told that the reason the terrorists were targeting the United State was that they hate us for our freedom and our prosperity.

Bush has certainly done quite a lot to diminish both, and Obama promises to continue to diminish them.

It won't be long before the terrorists won't have any reason whatever to hate us. [Ronn Neff] (January 2009)

Pilots. Three cheers for US Airways's hero pilot, Chesley B. Sullenberger III. Although other acts of heroism — and industry and inventiveness — still often occur in our country, the filter of the established media rarely allows us to learn of them. Instead, in covering News of the Homeland, the media focus on the acts of fools or knaves: that is, of politicians, bureaucrats, war criminals, police thugs, gutter-licking celebrities, and, of course, private-sector felons (whom they consider less praiseworthy). The closest we come to hearing about actual heroes, and usually it's not very close, is when we're fed change-of-pace "human interest" stories sticky with sentimentalistic and welfarist pabulum.

For quite a few years now I've been wondering what the country will be like when the Sullenberger types finally disappear — those white men with the "pilot personality" who are irreplaceable in many vocations beyond aviation: scientific and technological research, engineering, sanitation, construction, railroading, power generation, medicine, and so on. Even in some occupations dominated by government, the "pilot" types render the haplessness of bureaucracy less grievous than it otherwise would be: I think immediately of NTSB accident investigators, air-traffic controllers, and firemen and other rescue experts. Not all are chronologically old, to be sure; but the types I'm referring to are all of the old school.

As the nonwhite demographic revolution and the white cultural collapse speed up, the "pilot" population is not sustaining itself at a socially survivable rate. That does not trouble Zeitgeist fans and System defenders in the slightest, as they believe, or claim to believe, that all people are interchangeable and that no cultural-sexual-racial group is irreplaceable or even particularly important. (My own straining hope is that Asian males can pick up some of the slack — they do keep some of their own native societies up and running — but I recognize that they're just not the same.)

Apart from the times when some instructive event, such as the successful ditching of US Airways flight 1549, smacks them on the forehead, many Americans see the "pilot" only as the butt of jokes and target of satire. You've seen him a million times in the movies and on "Saturday Night Live." He's the humorless white guy wearing the short-sleeve white shirt, narrow black tie, pocket protector, and Brylcreemed crewcut. In the '60s, when his longhair contemporaries were raising hell, he was walking across the M.I.T. campus enveloped in a cloud of cigarette smoke and swinging a slide rule from his belt. He's authoritarian, sexually repressed, workaholic, blindly linear, patriarchal, racist, homophobic, gun-obsessed, carnivorous — and, worst of all, just too, too white. He's both fool and knave, really. Down with him! ... except for when — oops! — we suddenly need him to save our bacon.

Now it's true that the "pilot" typically cultivates some attachments that we partisans of freedom deplore and regret — perhaps most notably, to national-statism, imperialism, and militarism. Sullenberger himself is an Air Force veteran, like many commercial airline pilots, and many such men naturally labor under a history of war crimes. But I'm trying to focus here on their socially productive and virtuous contributions; and it's easy to predict that as the "pilot type" vanishes, accidents and interruptions of service will increase, maintenance will deteriorate, and innovation and efficiency will decline. I should say: Will continue to increase, deteriorate, and decline.

And the sheeple will start to suffer many more forehead-smacks of the negative kind: electrical blackouts, hospital disasters, food adulterations, derailments, airplane catastrophes, uncontrollable fires, toxic spillages, water- and sewer-line failures, and on and on. It will be interesting to see whether those smacks are any more educational than the inspiring kind exemplified by Sullenberger's heroism; I expect not. Fellow passengers, brace for impact. [Nicholas Strakon] (January 2009)

Rod's revenge. I know I've said some hard things about Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich — while suggesting that he's nothing more than a medium-size lump on the broad continuum of all pols — but unexpectedly I'm starting to be a fan of the man. I always enjoy seeing self-righteous Red Guards hoist sky high on any of their numerous petards, and now old Blago has blowed 'em up real good. The comrade commissars in control of the Senate have been harrumphing about how they'd refuse to seat anyone whom Blago appointed to fill the Obama vacancy — whereupon he up and named an old Negro hack named Burris. If the comrade commissars reject Burris, there will be no Negroes in the Senate.

Will the Guards really dare to reject him, offending The African American Communi-TEE and hordes of racially soggy whites? I'm laying in some popcorn and Junior Mints. Should be a fun show. [Nicholas Strakon]

Modine Herbey comments: The Guards are a clever bunch of lads and lassies. Depending on what happens to Blago in the near term, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw Comrade Senators cobble together some kind of Negro Replacement Strategy, allowing them to seat a Person of (the Correct) Color who doesn't carry the Blago stink. (December 2008)

Survival of the slickest. How about that Blagojevich fella? His problem, of course, is that he has no sense of subtlety. Selling a Senate appointment is just business as usual, but you don't go around bragging about it, you stupid oaf! You use code words.

You say stuff such as: "Of course, we'll have to take a lot of things into consideration, and I'm not ruling out appointing myself to the position." Or: "I want to make sure that the interests of the people of Illinois are best served by this appointment." Or: "We need to have a senator who can work together with the governor to advance the interests of the people of Illinois."

To give people an idea of what you want, you find excuses to talk about what you want to do after you leave office: "It's a little early to think about such things, of course, but I'm hoping I could use my skills to help a non-profit such as (blank)." And so on. Let them figure it out.

But Blagojevich couldn't resist imitating Tony Soprano, and in doing so showed that he really doesn't know how to play the game — all the more so because he knew that the Authorities were already interested in him owing to the fact that his father-in-law, a Chicago ward-heeler, had already accused him of similar shenanigans. That put him squarely in the sights when it came time to thin the herd. [David T. Wright] (December 2008)

Copernicus and the bailouts. Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) is best known for providing the first scientifically based theory of the heliocentric structure of the solar system. But he was a true polymath, with interests that went far beyond astronomy, and significant accomplishments in mathematics, medicine, canon law, and economics.

The debasement of coins was a major problem in Copernicus's day. Government authorities debased their coinage — not even kings could get away with fiat paper money in the 16th century — in the belief that it would increase their wealth. Copernicus recognized the problems that this approach was causing. He advised both the Prussian Diet and the Polish king to maintain sound money, and at the behest of the latter wrote a tract on the subject. His key assertion was: "Money loses its value when it becomes too abundant." In short, Copernicus understood the cause and perils of inflation. He saw the debasement of coinage as one of the four disasters that could befall a country, the other three being discord, high mortality, and poor harvests.

While Copernicus was able to bring about a revolution in thinking about the cosmos, a comparable Copernican revolution in economics has yet to be achieved. The current trillion-dollar bailouts show that the old "geocentric" theory still prevails among Establishment economists. [Stephen J. Sniegoski] (December 2008)

Happy days are here again! "This is a sad day for government," U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald declared on December 9 in his news conference after the arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Yes, indeed, and that made it a happy day for us. Whenever some cesspol goes down and it makes big headlines, we anti-statists have a fine teaching opportunity.

Assuming that the National Secret Police really have the goods on him (always a good question), Blagojevich has managed to outdo most of his fellow sewer rats — Illinois sewer rats, which makes this an unusually pungent chunk of cheese. (His predecessor is still in prison.) It was smelly enough when he threatened to block a state subsidy for the financially sick Tribune Company until it fired some Trib writers who were critical of Blago; and denying approval for a children's-hospital expansion unless the hospital paid him off really pumped up the reek; but the FBI says that the man actually was aiming to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama. Any time now, the League of Women Voters goody-two-shoes goofs are sure to start handing out their ancient prescription: We need to start electing good people! And ... and ... pass more anti-corruption laws!

Through how many elections, and how many scandals, in Illinois and elsewhere, have well-meaning naïfs been saying that?

As I've suggested, lank-locks Blago is a champ of corruption. He makes his next-door colleague, Hoosierdom's Mitch Daniels the Technocrat, look like Cato the Elder. But, you know, I'll bet that even old Cato knew his way around bagmen and bribes and back-alley threats, because Roman politics and the Roman state were inherently corrupt. All politics and all states tend toward corruption, in the Actonian sense. And why does power corrupt? By definition, states depend on the initiation of force; and initiating force is a crime.

Along the way here, meditate a bit on the Trib scandal: the Tribune Company was willing to whine for loot robbed from taxpayers, and Blago's state government had the power to do that robbing and hand out that loot to favored clients. That's an inherently corrupt and criminal state of affairs, and it is so regardless of Blago's participation. Forget Blago: it's officially legal!

While we're talking inherent corruption and criminality, you might want to meditate, too, on the much vaster loot-distribution that has occurred and continues to occur in Washington. That, too, is all legal. After all, governments define for themselves what is legal. (That's more apparent nowadays because, unlike the government of the Old Republic, the modern Imperial Government doesn't bother hiding its criminality behind all of that outdated mystical claptrap about the Constitution.)

An inherently criminal and corrupt entity is naturally going to attract criminals and would-be criminals to operate it. Now I see two characteristic types of politicriminals. One is the Blago type, interested in grabbing all the loot he can. The other is the Robespierre type, interested in forcing what Thomas Sowell calls the "Vision of the Anointed" on the hapless people he rules. In terms of murderous psychopathology, the first resembles the Mob hitman, merely looking for a good payday, while the second resembles the serial killer, uninterested in money and looking for, shall we say, more-intrinsic psychic rewards.

From time to time you'll find a pol who manages to inhabit both categories: Hillary Clinton is a good example. Throughout her public life she's always been a genuine Red totalitarian — but allied with Hot Springs Bill she also proved herself a pretty avid boodle-girl. Most of the successful Negro politicians, too, combine socialism (insofar as it seems to favor their race) with corruption as traditionally defined. Charlie Rangel is merely the latest example.

I admit that most pols come off as "moderates" in their criminality compared with Blago, the Clintons, and Rangel. In some cases, that's only because their own scandalous illegality hasn't yet become public. But in all cases, even "honest" pols are hip deep in a legal criminal conspiracy against the people, and all the elections until the end of time can't change that. [Nicholas Strakon]

P.S. Let's hope that some of the Blago stink attaches itself unwashably to the Commissar of Cool himself, who emerged from the same political sewer as the man he helped become governor.

A "betrayal" of the "innocent" voter? Anarchists debate whether voting is inherently a criminal act, but I think we'd all agree that a criminal mentality is revealed any time a voter casts a ballot in order to share some boodle stolen from a peaceful neighbor or in order to see some Vision of the Anointed imposed on that peaceful neighbor. I leave it to the reader to estimate how many of the votes cast in November fall into those categories. [Modine Herbey]  (October 2008)

"Joe the Plumber." You know what I think of the candidate who first met "Joe the Plumber" and what I think of the candidate who then lionized him, but my view of Ohioan S. Joseph Wurzelbacher himself is much more benign. That's especially so since the Red Guards of the Glorious People's News Collective started knocking over desks, chairs, and seven different kinds of recycling bins in their rabid rush to destroy him.

Various technical nigglings about Joe's economic prospects and projected tax rate feature in the media coverage, but a CBS story's headline conveys what the newsies are really focusing on: "Joe The Plumber: Unlicensed, Owes Back Taxes."

CBS puts it this way in its October 17 dispatch: "Joe the Plumber's story sprang a few leaks." One of them is supposed to be the fact that Wurzelbacher "isn't really a licensed plumber." The form of that attack tells us much about a modern American derangement. CBS is clearly implying that since Wurzelbacher isn't licensed, he isn't actually a plumber. The man does plumbing; he works as a plumber; he plumbs, for heaven's sake — but that's irrelevant in light of the fact that some government entity hasn't waved a magic credential and chanted some bureaucratic litany over him. Governmental rituals and paperwork take precedence over the facts of reality.

If you think about it, that nicely parallels government's idea that the fiat currency it conjures out of nothing is real money, whereas gold isn't money at all.

The CBS dispatch deepens the nastiness in characterizing as another "leak" in the "story" the fact that Wurzelbacher "owes nearly $1,200 in back taxes." In other words, some other government entity wants to rob Wurzelbacher of more money than it has already managed to steal from him. The robber barons of Ohio have slapped a lien on him until he ponies up all the loot they want.

In the view of the Red Guard media, that's supposed to make us think less of this hard-pressed but hopeful craftsman. No doubt all fraternal workers and peasants will erupt in spontaneous demonstrations throughout Oceania and denounce the class-traitor Wurzelbacher.

In the meantime, don't forget that it's we partisans of freedom who are the running dogs of greed and elitism, and the enemy of ordinary people. [Nicholas Strakon, unlicensed writer]

Ronn Neff would like to know: What on Earth does any of that unlicensed or back-taxes business have to do with what Joe Wurzelbacher asked or the answer that was given to him? Why is any of it relevant and what is it relevant to?

It shows that the left-wing media — let's change that — it shows that the extremist left-wing media in this country will destroy anyone in order to secure a win for their boy.

Evil or just illiterate? I find myself asking that question all the time these days. And I asked it again on October 20 when a newsreader for the Fort Wayne CBS affiliate, WANE-TV, referred to "the now-infamous Joe the Plumber."

"Infamous"! [Modine Herbey] (October 2008)

Truth and untruth in dirty hands. Fans of the National Forensic League and the House of Commons lament the lack of classic debating between our candidates for emperor, but they may as well save their breath. That kind of debating is the last thing the pols' handlers and spinners want. Our pols don't debate so much as collide on the issues. (Once in office, of course, they often change a vowel and collude.)

Sometimes a little bit of truth or probable truth leaks out from those collisions. I often say that we can believe a politician only when he's smearing his opponent, and I'm not just joking. But, still, on the level of actual ideas there's a frustrating quality to most of the pol-collisions we see.

One reason is that pols usually propose action on the basis of their Polite Totalitarian premises: We'll pass a law! Expand government power! Intervene in that country! No, intervene in that other country! Tax! Subsidize! Prevent! Require! Imprison! Since totalitarianism is the enemy of logic, morality, economy, society, and all else that is true and good, it's easy for the pol's opponent — if he or his handlers enjoy a three-digit IQ — to predict unjust or otherwise negative effects from this or that tax, this or that "program," this or that foreign intervention.

But there's a second, more interesting reason that pol-collisions tend to be unproductive, and it moves in the opposite direction, making for a sort of pincer operation. Pols still sometimes interrupt their outright socialist or fascist preaching to praise freedom, property, "fiscal responsibility," and restraint abroad, ladling out some reassuring libertarian-ish pabulum to voters who remember, however dimly, that at one time those things were supposed to be a part of the Glorious American Story. (The replacement American population will not demand or even understand that kind of stroking, but we're not quite there yet.) The trouble with the libertarian-pabulum approach is that a pol's opponent can immediately show how it contradicts "fairness," "equality," "progress," "our security," the need to "protect the disadvantaged," and so on. It threatens "education," "health care," "the environment," "economic stability," "energy," "jobs," and all those other general categories that are nowadays understood in purely totalitarian terms. (Such an attack, of course, must be preceded by the disclaimer that "of course everyone believes in freedom and all that stuff, but ...")

Moreover, an opponent usually has no trouble in casting doubt on the candidate's good faith, since virtually no one is sincere in praising freedom, property, and so forth. That very thing happened to John McCain when he characterized as socialist his opponent's plan to "redistribute" wealth (i.e., steal even more from taxpayers and pass out a portion of the loot to the politically favored). Well, it certainly is socialist. Obama is a socialist, wearing a tissue-thin messiah mask. But McCain's opponents immediately asked the old fellow a couple of difficult questions. Aren't his proposals for building infrastructure with taxpayer money also "redistributive"? Doesn't that make them socialist, too? How about the Wall Street Bailout? If we're socialists, well, you're a socialist, too! McCain's intellectual integrity and consistency were immediately undermined, at least in the eyes of anyone who still cared about the principle of contradiction.

It comes down to this. Whenever a pol proposes some totalitarian program, consisting as always of unfathomable technicalities, illogicalities, and imponderables, it's easy for his opponent to show its true defects — while going on to claim that his totalitarian program will work better. But whenever a pol pretends to be in favor of true freedom and justice, it's equally easy for his opponent to explode in a demagogic frenzy and show how his foe has departed from the tyrannical proposals and institutions that people really cherish.

Trying to derive enlightenment from pol-collisions is worse than a waste of time. Try too hard, and you may poison your mind. [Nicholas Strakon]

Note. I place those irritating quote marks around "redistribute" because the very idea of redistributing wealth itself harbors a socialist premise. In a free society wealth is not originally "distributed" by some authority. It is created and earned and freely exchanged.

It is only when we understand how profoundly our very language and thought have been shaped by statism that we are able to become realistic about the prospects for liberty. (October 2008)

Bulletin from the Malabar Front! Coalition forces have killed al Qaeda's number two man in Iraq, according to news reports today. That may be worth reporting, but it's not worth crowing about. How many times in the past five years, I wonder, have coalition forces killed al Qaeda's number two man in Iraq? According to CBS News, the latest number two man became number two only in June 2007.

Going back a few years before 2007, I can remember when we were told that coalition forces had destroyed the Taliban.

This isn't World War II, when it would have been genuinely big news if the Allies had succeeded in killing the Wehrmacht's number two man in the West — Erwin Rommel — a week before D-Day. What it is like (as other commentators have observed) is an interminable game of Whack-a-Mole. Just a reminder.

While we're in a reminiscing mood, it's probably a good idea to remember also that it's thanks to Bush and his neocons that al Qaeda is in Iraq. [Henry Gallagher Fields] (October 2008)

"We're all socialists now, comrade," reads the headline on an (anti-socialist) opinion piece by Simon Heffer in The Telegraph, written after the British government decided to re-capitalize major banks. Actually, of course, most people in the West have been socialists for a long time now. Or fascists and fascist dupes, with fascism understood as socialism for the rich and well-connected.

No one with half a brain took Sociopathic Bill seriously when he said that "the era of big government is over," but many had been less cautious, and more credulous, a few years before when Sovietism disintegrated. Even the chatterers of the established media started to sound less pink. They admitted, grudgingly or otherwise, the failure of impoverished slave-holes such as North Korea, Cuba, and Zimbabwe, and suddenly announced that "markets" were the way to go after all. (Those with an ear for language noticed that they never actually talked in terms of "the free market," as real free-marketeers do. Neocons, by the way, prefer the label "democratic capitalism" for their own ideal of welfarist fascism.) Liberal commentators praised Red China's movement from straight socialism to a more fascist system. And mass-media consumers began hearing the name "Hayek" three or four times a year, instead of once every couple of years; and the name "Mises" once every couple of years, instead of never.

As it turned out, none of that represented a real change of mind. It was just a necessary mental dance. Now the three-minute waltz has ended and the System's intelligentsia are back to boogying all night long, down at the People's Glorious and Fraternal House of Progressive Recreation.

Even our pinko eggheads had to stipulate that socialism dominated the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but no such recognition is necessary when the System's socialists and fascists set off a new business crisis on these shores. Until recently System courtiers liked to advertise the American Way as a "mixed" economy that somehow was always in urgent need of more socialist ingredients in the "mix," but now they've gone from bad to worse, actually characterizing the political-economy they're responsible for as "laissez faire."

Their recurring diagnosis is more than a hundred years old, if you go back to the original "progressive" anti-trust era: Every time their own policies produce a cluster-fumble that can't be covered up, why, "the free market has failed." And the remedy is: their policies, times two. Or three. Or ten. Over the past several decades we've labored under a socialism-fascism that has become ever more concentrated, ever more intrusive, ever more distortive, and ever more deadening; but that matters not. For statism cannot fail in principle. Only freedom can fail in principle. The only thing that "democratic" socialism ever needs is some occasional tinkering.

The useful thing about a pronouncement that "we're all socialists now" (even if it's meant ironically) is that it takes us right down to premises. The intelligentsia are prisoners of their bad premises; and, more important, we are prisoners of their bad premises. Even if voting were moral and instrumental, it couldn't get the statists and their statism off our back. One thing Ayn Rand was right about (and she was right about quite a few) was that we need a full-scale intellectual revolution, all the way down to the level of premises, before we have a hope of firing up the necessary revolution in politics and economics. In fact, if an intellectual revolution succeeded, we wouldn't have to do any more firing up.

Now, as we have pointed out before in The Last Ditch, our civilization has reached the stage where such a revolution is no longer in the cards. But whether it's the least we can do or the most we can do, we have to try to reach the reachable, teach the teachable, and keep it from ever becoming literally true that "we're all socialists now." [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2008)

Arch-neocon William Kristol and Patrick Buchanan, hammer of neocons, turn out to have a hero in common — one who may surprise those who believe that Buchanan is a paladin of freedom and think that his support for protectionism is a fluke.

Kristol on "Fox News Sunday," October 12, 2008: "Alexander Hamilton is the founder of democratic capitalism in America."

Buchanan on "Morning Joe," MSNBC, October 6, 2008: Alexander Hamilton was the "architect of the American economy," and "Hamilton's my hero."

In contradistinction, libertarians have always considered Hamilton — in the words of Roy Childs — "the Stalin of the American Revolution." And that's so even if one believes it is obscene to imply, even within the analogy, that Washington or Jefferson was our Lenin.

On the important matter of Hamiltonianism and the foundation of American fascism, Kristol and Buchanan are virtual comrades in arms.

Buchanan uttered his praise of Hamilton in the context of a panel interview with Tom DiLorenzo, the libertarian economic historian whose latest book, Hamilton's Curse, is nearing publication. Buchanan fiercely attacked DiLorenzo's negative view of Hamilton, while saying that he liked one of DiLorenzo's books on Lincoln. He didn't specify which one, but they all attack Lincoln, and here's the interesting thing. Hamilton's High Federalism led to American Whiggery, and Whiggery led to Lincoln Republicanism. They are all the same ideology, at its various stages of evolution through history, and that ideology has achieved its full flowering as the current American imperial-fascism.

Pat Buchanan, the brave historical revisionist and noninterventionist, really doesn't understand that? Paleos of the Buchananite stripe are never going to be friends worth having until they cure at least this one big blind spot. [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2008)

You and me both, Citizen Neff. I mentioned to Ronn Neff the other day that I'd seen some coverage of an anti-Columbus Day movement at Brown University, and I told him I was surprised that such a reactionary, racist, genocidal observance as Columbus Day still had a place on the calendar of any Ivy League school.

Neff replied: "Strakon, I'm surprised to wake up each day and discover we still don't have a base-10 system of months and weeks. ('Is it Thermidor yet?')" [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2008)

Remember, you're supposed to call it a "rescue," not a "bailout." After all, who could oppose a "rescue"?

It's not a "bailout," anyway, because the government stands to profit from it in the end!

If that is so, I say let's go to complete, undiluted socialism in all areas. Totally abolish all markets. Wouldn't that be the way to really pile up those "profits"? (For the government, that is. Not for us, of course.)

I'm no economist, but if I had one on hand, I'd ask him whether Bastiat's "Broken Window" insights might somehow be relevant here, along with Mises's argument that economic calculation is impossible under socialism — i.e., in the context of forced exchanges, using stolen money, that never would have occurred in a true market. [Modine Herbey]

Black magic, scary mojo. I too feel the urge to ask an economist some questions. In particular I'd like to ask a free-market economist about the "mark-to-market" accounting rule that the SEC imposed on financial institutions in January, which had the effect of shredding much of the dicey paper they were holding. Foes of "mark-to-market" blame it for killing Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, among other things. Here's a brief account of "mark-to-market" by "BoomerJeff," writing at LibertyWorks: "Bailout Update: SEC Changes Mark-to-Market Rule."

According to "BoomerJeff," the SEC has now ditched or at least softened "mark-to-market." That being so, am I wrong in assuming that some of those mortgage-backed assets will, in fact, start looking pretty good — just in time for them to land in the government's grubby paws? If that's so, then the government may actually be able to claim a profit — thanks to a series of machinations that will make the incantations and rituals of a voodoo priest look as simple as an EXIT sign.

What a scam! How could Strakon's Dark Suits have let this be done to them? [Henry Gallagher Fields]

Editor's note.  "BoomerJeff" was wrong about the repeal of "mark-to-market," according to financial news reports and commentary. The rule was still in place, and still much lamented, as of early February 2009.

It all depends, Hank, on whether those valuations rise before or after that grubby-paw-landing occurs. Note that the relief from "mark-to-market" was announced before the actual Bailout took place (assuming it is going to take place). The Dark Suits may yet make out. They usually do. (I realize that this does not address the fatalities that have already occurred among my gentlemen of somber garb.) [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2008)

Bad weather and steep roads. One of my co-conspirators here at TLD recently took a road trip to the mountains of North Carolina, and he got caught up in the gasoline shortage that, week after week, continues to afflict parts of the American South. He's back home now, with an amusing explanation for the shortage that he picked up while in Asheville.

For their part, the established media have been blaming hurricanes, refinery bottlenecks, and the like; but they haven't been amusing me as much as driving me crazy. Such factors might explain why the price of gasoline in affected areas would rise, in a free market; that is, they might explain changes in relative scarcity. But they could not explain an actual shortage. They could not explain why the market failed to retain equilibrium between supply and demand, at whatever price was necessary to clear the market.

A sharp rise in that price, by the way, would be the best way to ensure that gasoline suppliers exerted all efforts to frantically shove increased supplies into the affected area — eventually allowing the market to clear at a lower price. It would be the best way because it is the market way — the social way — freedom's way.

My vacationing friend heard the usual chatter about bad weather, but here's the funny bit. Word on the street in Asheville, it seems, is that gasoline trucks are having difficulty making it up the region's mountain roads. Apparently the roads have suddenly gotten steeper, just as "greed" suddenly worsened on Wall Street some time ago, as financiers abruptly switched from their traditionally altruistic personae, quite lacking in the acquisitive impulse.

Well, that's the state of economics education in this country, for which we can thank the schools and the mainstream media, among other culprits.

At lunch on Sunday, I asked my economics-professor sister whether she didn't think that the gas shortage in the South had resulted largely from state-level anti-gouging laws and regulations. She thought it was a dead cert. But I shouldn't have had to ask a professor. Anyone with a little understanding of economics should have been able to tell me that when we see not just a change in relative scarcity but an actual shortage, government has once again rushed in to help us with our problems.

You won't hear that from the MSM, but it took me only a minute's Googling to find an intelligent article, at JohnLocke.org, that lo and behold deals specifically with the Tarheel state: "N.C. price-gouging law promotes gas lines, shortages / Government interference hurts state's consumers." What do you want to bet that similar interference — sorry, helping — has caused the shortages in Tennessee, Georgia, and the other affected states? [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2008)

A little street theater. I am compelled to share some comedy recently recounted to me by a longtime racialist friend. He was walking down the street in a liberal white neighborhood when he encountered a group of older white women wearing Obama T-shirts and fluttering around a card table festooned with Obama posters that they had set up on the sidewalk.

As he approached, he broke into a broad smile. "I'm so glad that Obama is running," he gushed. "I'm so glad that an African American is finally going to be our president!"

The biddies beamed at him and offered applications to register to vote.

"I'm already registered," he assured them, "and I can't wait to vote for Barack Obama. I've been waiting for this all my life. This has been my dream."

As their expressions approached ecstasy, he moved in for the kill:

"I know you all remember back when we finally got rid of that awful Ian Smith and put the white people in Rhodesia in their place, and made Robert Mugabe president of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has made so much progress under Mugabe! I do so hope that Barack Obama turns out to be America's Robert Mugabe!"

Their smiles disappeared instantly, to be replaced with expressions of utter hatred — not, of course, directed toward Mugabe.

My friend smiled broadly at them all and then walked away. I am so jealous! I wish I had thought of this myself! [Douglas Olson] (October 1, 2008)

I'm running out of popcorn! Yesterday I almost posted some comment on the failure of the bailout bill, but it got out of control and I didn't finish it. I'm glad.

I figured that whatever I wrote stood an excellent chance of being overtaken by events within a few days, but it took only two days for what happened in the House on Monday to be revealed as little more than theater.

1) Speaker Pelosi brought a big important measure to the floor "without knowing" whether she had the votes to pass it. "Foolish incompetence!" cried the established-media commentators. "Try to imagine Sam Rayburn doing such a thing! Or Tip O'Neill!"

2) Before the vote, Pelosi and Rep. Barney Frank (chairman of the Finance Committee) made partisan, anti-Republican speeches on the floor. Why, that wasn't the way to Bring Us Together! "Foolish incompetence and uncontrollable Red Guardism!" cried I myself, rashly, in e-mail messages to some co-conspirators.

3) Pelosi stayed out of the chair after the clock expired — ostensibly working the floor to get a few members to change their vote — and a few minutes later Frank demanded, "Regular order!," which prompted the chairwoman to smack the final gavel on the bill, certifying its defeat. It was nice for Pelosi — nicely convenient — that she didn't have to do that smacking herself. And all the cognoscenti cried out that Frank had made a freshman parliamentary mistake: "What was he thinking?"

4) On Tuesday, the Republican hard men protested that what Pelosi and Frank said had had no effect on their voting. They voted on principle! And media commentators — turning on a dime — pooh-poohed the effect of the speeches, too: All the refuseniks knew how they were going to vote long before Comrades P. and F. opened their traps.

5) After the vote, despite the Grave National Emergency, the House stuck with its plan to adjourn for the Jewish holidays. That puzzled Joe Scarborough, the Republican ex-congressman who hosts MSNBC's "Morning Joe." He pointed out that while he was in the House, "we worked through Good Friday" when urgent and important business was pending. Well, I'm not too sure whether any Christian holy day holds a candle to Rosh Hashanah in the eyes of the System, but it was peculiar to see congressional Jews close down the House and — so it seemed — leave in the lurch all those Jewish financiers up in New York. Even Comedy Central's Jon Stewart — himself a Jew — thought it was weird, pointing out that there are many more Jews on Wall Street, proportionately, than in Congress.

Though I fell, momentarily, for some of the other playacting, I smelled something false in this one. It seemed to contradict so much of what Kevin MacDonald has written.

6) We hear now that when the House comes back into session, it's going to pass a bill reinforced with "sweeteners." The Senate is expected to pass a "sweetened" version this very evening (Wednesday, October 1).

We are witnessing real tension in the ruling class and in the political class that has been designed to serve it, but it's not the sort of rivalrous tension that we saw in the Yankee and Cowboy War forty years ago or that we currently see between the "moderate" Dark Suits and the Bush Likudniks. Rather it is the tension of alarm and danger.

In pursuing their own specialized financial interests within the nightmare web of regulations, distortions, and privileges they themselves are ultimately responsible for — given their dominant influence over general policy formation — the Dark Suits have in effect blinded and crippled themselves in the process of blinding and crippling the rest of the country. I keep saying that the Suits just haven't been the same since 9/11. George W. Bonzo has made me miss good old Bill Clinton, and now I miss the good old Suits, too. You never know what you've got 'til it's gone.

Well, I go too far. But, really, the ruling class has so badly fumbled and bumbled its own special business that it is very difficult, now, for its hirelings in Washington to save it from itself while at the same time retaining their own offices. Hollowed-out though it may be, and always inherently fraudulent, Duh-MOCK-risy still formally exists in the United State. It's not too important for the Dark Suits if pols are turned out of office, though a mass kill would involve considerable training costs for the replacements. But keeping their current job is very important for the pols themselves, and they're dancing and prancing across hot coals right now in a frantic effort to make it through November 4.

Excuse me: I'm heading to the lobby for another tub. With extra butter. [Nicholas Strakon]

P.S. He and I might disagree on various plot points, but one man I'd really like to be watching this movie with is Walter Karp.

The established-media commentators I heard on the telescreen Monday, including the financial commentators, were all aghast at the initial failure of the bailout. One thing in particular they all agreed on was that the last thing we wanted to see was any standing on principle by House members who oppose socialism. (For purposes of argument only, I'm stipulating that some other members do join Dr. Ron Paul in opposing socialism on principle.) In other words, principles and political philosophy are diverting topics to chat about while we sip scotch in the evenings, but it's senseless to pay attention to such fripperies during a Grave National Emergency.

It reminded me of leviathan's standard line about how we mustn't pay any attention to civil liberties during the Emergencies leviathan reliably creates. (Abraham Lincoln, Our Greatest Tribune of Freedom, seems to have pioneered that dodge.) In fact, adherence to civil liberties and libertarian principle in general are never more important than during leviathan's serial Emergencies. Our ambitious rulers know that all too well, but their bodyguard of liars work overtime to keep it secret from the sheeple. [NS] (October 1, 2008)

Once again, it's all the fault of "laissez faire"!

• Obama "senior advisor" Stephanie Otter, on "Morning Joe," MSNBC, September 15: "If there's anybody to blame for [the Wall Street cluster of error], it's the laissez-faire economics of the last eight years."

• John McCain on "Morning Joe," September 16: Wall Street has "broken the social contract between capitalism and the average citizen and the worker." If the reference to a "social contract" isn't smelly enough, another thing to wrinkle your nose at, here, is McCain's belief that ordinary people do not themselves participate in "capitalism," i.e., the market. In fact, even in our totalitarian time, when it comes to keeping body and soul together the overwhelming majority of Americans spend 90 percent of their time participating in the market. (I believe Sheldon Richman once made that point to good effect.) McCain went on to propose more and better regulation.

• Mitt Romney on "Morning Joe," September 17: "No one believes in no regulation" of Wall Street. Well, except for those evil laissez-fairists who were in charge until the last week or so! Romney, of course, is the "business expert" among the Republicans. What I take from what he said is that we, and the folks at Mises and Future of Freedom and FEE, and Robert Higgs, and all the other free-market people are — "no one." From the standpoint of the System, I guess that's about right. [Nicholas Strakon]

Dark Suits ripped. It's a commonplace, at least hereabouts, that the more the Central Government fails, the more powerful it gets. On the basis of recent events, we can confidently extend that rule to cover the ruling class standing outside the official regime. The more the Dark Suits fail at their own specialized financial business, the more powerful they become.

To be sure, as specialized entities operating in the market, they have suffered damage, and their weaknesses have been revealed anew. But entities that are weak with respect to the entire political-economic System are not able to induce the Central Government to commit ever greater, ever worse crimes on their behalf. The particular men who are the Dark Suits may be clowns or madmen — they may have hoist themselves on a petard they had ignited to destroy others — but the Dark Suits as a class, as a force, are indeed "too big to fail." And their employees in Washington will not permit them to fail.

I need to write about these matters at greater length, once things gel a bit. [NS]

At least since the adoption of the Constitution, America has always had a ruling class standing outside the regime, or at least straddling the divide between officialdom and formally private entities. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries it based itself on government land grants. Those remained important for a time, especially with respect to the railroads as they developed, but protective tariffs and other interventions soon established additional bases for extra-regime rulers; and it became somewhat unusual for actual officials of the regime also to be senior members of the ruling class.

Now it is possible to propose that the American system — at the highest levels of finance — is taking giant steps from its traditional fascism toward straight socialism. It will be interesting to see how long the true ruling class can remain even formally separable from the official regime. The structure may be changing at a level more fundamental than Strakon has deemed possible. At least it's a possibility worth entertaining. [Henry Gallagher Fields]

Irony, typically delicious. Whatever is happening, it's big and bad. How wonderful that it's happening during the presidency of a Republican who at one time was touted as a conservative! [Modine Herbey] (September 22, 2008)

"Lipstick on a pig," indeed! I find that to be a dazzlingly apposite way to describe the moronic fraud of American electoral politics. (I think the Sage of Baltimore wrote a little on this subject.)

For benefit of readers bold and vigilant enough to avoid all news coverage, I must report that on September 8, Barack Obama used the phrase "you can put lipstick on a pig" in the course of criticizing John McCain's positions, and the McCain campaign responded by claiming that Obama was denigrating McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, as somehow porcine. Palin, you see, had identified herself as a lipstick-wearer in her acceptance speech at the convention.

Palin's speech occurred recently enough that it did not fall under McCain's interdict on discussing "history," for which he has explicitly expressed contempt. McCain himself used the phrase "lipstick on a pig" last October in slamming Hillary Clinton's proposals, but that, of course, does qualify as "history," so it is irrelevant according to the McCain philosophy.

Now, I've been known to grumble about my beloved fellow Americans' devolving into "sheeple" who just beg to be gulled by the worst sociopaths in the country, and honestly I am afraid that we are heading toward an age of idiotocracy when we'll either have to accept some major Asian intervention to swab out our collective throat or risk drowning in our own spit. You can't destroy a country's culture, including its family culture, and its educational industry without putting a major dent in people's ability to think and to run their own private lives. And you can't erect a leviathan both vast and microscopically intrusive without rendering a people heedless, unable to plan, and present-bound. Infantile, in short.

But a radical divide still exists between the habits of mind that people exercise when they walk into the voting booth and those that they exercise when they walk onto a used-car lot. The media are properly pointing out the transparent untruth of the McCain attack, but they take it for granted that some voters will swallow it. I take it for granted that they're right.

If most voters brought at least average intelligence and average self-respect to bear on campaigns and elections, the "pig" lie alone would destroy McCain. The Republicans have exhibited a contempt for ordinary Americans that has managed, at least temporarily, to exceed that of the Democrats when they disseminate their goofy socialist propaganda denying the laws of justice, cause and effect, and simple arithmetic.

But voters do not employ normal cognition when meditating and acting on electoral politics. They have no incentive to do so, and really they can't do so, since voting is silly, incoherent, and inutile. (It's also immoral for a free man, but that's a subject for another day.) A "responsible" voter has to try figuring out 1) whether a pol is telling the truth about his intentions and 2) whether the pol will be able to do what he promises if (mirabile dictu) he is truthful. And all in a context where one is more likely to influence the weather by dancing nude in his front yard than he is to influence an election by voting.

Attaching oneself to the cause of some pol — who, let's face it, is just a character on TV for 99 percent of voters — is a species of what I like to call "statish thinking." Try using a similar kind of cognition when doing business at Friendly Sam's Pre-owned Auto Paradise. You'll wind up helping Friendly Sam — with $10,000 of your money straining his pocket — push your newly purchased junker off the lot. [Nicholas Strakon]

Speaking of what should destroy a candidate, anywhere but here in Bizarro World, a couple of Sarah Palin's statements certainly fit the bill, as uttered during her September 11 interview with ABC's Charles Gibson.

A partisan of NATO expansion — one of the nuttiest, riskiest, and most counterintuitive ideas our rulers have dreamed up since the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. — Palin admitted with little apparent reluctance that if (Caucasian) Georgia were a member of NATO and were attacked by Russia, America "perhaps" would have to go to war with Russia. And she said that "we [sic] are friends of Israel, and I don't think that we should second-guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves, and for their security." That had to do with the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. Well, no responsible, patriotic American would want to second-guess any such attack — yes? — despite its nightmarish implications for the U.S. Empire's current adventure in Mesopotamia. (Transcript.)

So now we know, and what a relief! If McCain and Palin are elected, we'll have yet another team of objective, impartial, honest brokers in place to sort out quarrels in the Muslim world and in Russia's "near abroad," all in the genuine interests of the American people.

Seriously, the thing is this. Unlike the "pig" lie, which is a little bold even for American campaigns, Palin's support for crazed foreign adventurism puts her right smack in the American political mainstream. Support for such outlandish policies won't destroy her or any other candidate licensed by the System, even though the policies themselves may wind up destroying us.

You know you're living in Bizarro World when mainstreamers are the extremists, and extremists are the ones urging caution, restraint, and ordinary good sense. [Henry Gallagher Fields]

You want sexism? I'll give you sexism. Veep candidate Sarah Palin should drop off the ticket, resign her job as governor of Alaska, return to her troubled family, and focus on her most important work — being the mother of her children.

I include among her family troubles the deployment of her son "Track," an Army PFC, to Body-Bag Land. Astonishingly — and disgustingly — Palin seems happy and proud to see him go.

Let's see. If he gets himself KIA before Election Day, will that help or hinder Palin's chances of becoming vice president? No doubt that talking-point has been staffed, just in case, and the handlers have been incentivized to effort for a favorablizing spin in the target demographics.

More noteworthy than Palin's defaulting on her responsibilities as a mother is conservatives' resorting to the "sexism" charge in response to Democrat criticism of Palin. Young Christians make a similar spectacle of themselves when they have themselves tattooed with portraits of Jesus and listen to "Christian" heavy metal. The medium is the message. People have lost all sense of proper idiom, and, along the way, all sense of how degraded they've become.

It's disconcerting enough to hear modern conservatives add Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy to their list of political heroes (alongside Ape Lincoln), but over the past two or three decades conservatives have actually started stealing the lingo of the Red Guards. In the present campaign they're using it gleefully as they angle for political advantage. And many, I'm sure, are sincere as well as gleeful as they level the dread charge of "sexism": that is, they have absorbed the Red Guards' lesson that there are no inherent differences between men and women — except, of course, that women are superior in all respects to men.

For the hundredth time, I invite those who consider themselves to be part of the Right to meditate on exactly what it is that conservatives are seeking to conserve. [NS] (September 2008)

It's serious business, but you've still got to laugh. According to the September issue of American Renaissance, the special tendency of black and brown folks to commit crimes extends even to ... wait for it ... "hate crimes"! At least that's the case in Los Angeles County.

Citing a report by the L.A. County Human Relations Commission covering 2007, AR reveals that "on a per capita basis, Hispanics were about 20 percent more likely to commit a racial hate crime than whites, and blacks were more than twice as likely." AR notes that "Hispanic-on-black was the largest 'hate' category, followed by black-on-Hispanic."

That's not all. Two separate anti-white activists in California (both Jews, it seems) blame the colored "hate crimes" at least partly on ... wait for it ... racist whites! However risible that is, for some reason I don't feel like laughing any longer. ("Still Blaming Whitey," p. 16) [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2008)

The politics of ADD. As soon as Obama picked Joe Biden as his running mate, the McCain campaign started running an ad that quoted Biden saying negative things about Obama, back when Biden was a presidential hopeful.

And that's great. Biden's job, now, is to depict Obama as the greatest statesgod to come down the pike since, I don't know, Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Satan or some similar goblin; and the McCain ad helps illuminate the systematic deceit, if not sociopathy, that is inherent in politics. If we were supposed to believe what Biden said about Obama then, why should we believe what he will be saying now? And vice versa.

But less than 24 hours after the first ad appeared, the McCain campaign started running another ad that quoted Hillary Clinton saying negative things about Obama, back when Mrs. Clinton was a presidential hopeful. And that, according to the ad, is why Obama didn't pick her as his running mate.

Maybe so, but then what about Biden?

Such open, vaunting contempt for simple logic should render any serious man — any man still operating a live brain — ashamed at having anything to do with these pols and their giant, unending, unholy criminal enterprise. They don't just enslave and ruin us. They insult our intelligence while doing so. [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2008)

Luckier than they knew. The lonely partisans of freedom in 1945 had a hard enough time staving off apoplexy as it was, but just think what they'd have had to put up with from the Left and the New York media if Joe Stalin had been diagnosed with brain cancer. [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2008)

The "surge" at Belleau Wood. The War Party, with Bombs Away McCain in the forefront, has been trying to embarrass the anti-war movement by claiming that the Bush regime's "surge" of a modest number of reinforcements into Iraq has been a brilliant success in their terms. Obama and the Obamites — who are not anti-imperialists but sometimes try to play them on TV — respond with wonk talk about the "Sunni awakening" and other alternate explanations for the current Happy Days in Mesopotamia. Whatever the truth of that technical back-and-forth may be, I find all of it to be both misleading and irrelevant. Genuine enemies of imperialism and imperialist war need to keep their eye on the ball.

In June 1918, the U.S. Marines led the Wilson regime's "surge" into ground combat on the Western Front by launching the battles of Chateau Thierry and Belleau Wood. The whole grim and protracted struggle found a prominent place in the Marine mythos, and the institutional memory of the U.S. military in general, as an epic of courage, loyalty, and heroism rivaling even that of Bombs Away when he got himself apprehended and imprisoned for the war crimes he committed in Vietnam.

Officialdom and the veterans' lobby may have exaggerated the importance of the Marines' eventual success, but it does seem to have spoiled the last major offensive that the Germans would be able to mount in France. Now, if the brave Marines' victory played a significant part in the Allies' eventual strategic victory, what did that victory lead to?

Well, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, to name three. And just maybe the Great Depression, too, though other factors were certainly important there.

The United State's very entry into the war was a tremendous crime, and Americans were the first to suffer its depredations. Those who need to be refreshed on the Wilsonian domestic tyranny must consult Thomas Fleming's gripping tale of true-life horror, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I. On any list of the worst presidents to whom the evil dullard George W. Bush may be compared, ranking near the top must be the evil pedant Woodrow Wilson.

I throw out those observations just to suggest that, in discussing tactical or strategic successes, we ought not lose sight of the nature of our rulers' wars. We must understand what success means for those fighting a criminal, aggressive war: it means success in committing crime, and, if history teaches us anything, in clearing the ground for future crime. No amount of ingenious generalship and derring-do on the part of Our Boys (and Wymyn) can change that. [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2008)

Obama abroad. Like Strakon, I'm still rooting halfheartedly — quarter-heartedly — for Race Commissar Obama over Field Marshal McCain, but I hope that the Young Imam's traveling thousands of miles to deliver his treacly sermons to foreigners just destroys him so far as self-respecting Red Staters are concerned. Much as I hate to say anything favorable about Bombs Away, I thought it was a nice touch for McCain to appear at a German restaurant in Ohio at the same time Obama appeared in Berlin. And more than that: it was a hundred times more of an American thing to do than what Obama did. But as Strakon has pointed out, Obama is a virtual foreigner.

Sad to say, that foreignness is probably appropriate given the office he's seeking, namely, that of Emperor of the World Except for Russia, China, and a Few Other Unenlightened Places. It's bad enough — and badly significant — to see incumbent U.S. presidents giving speeches abroad, but to see a presidential candidate doing it just nails down the fact that the United State is an empire. Not that any further proof is needed; for at least sixty years now it's been pretty easy to figure out. I would say a hundred and forty years, but I don't want to come off as some kind of radical.

It's still a bit odd: the preaching to foreigners who can't vote for Obama. Legally, it is still the case that actual U.S. citizens must elect a president, even if creative authorities in some localities stretch that rule. Apparently Obama and his gang are hoping that the foreign glory won by their hero will reflect back to his benefit at home, impressing United Statians who are capable of being impressed by that sort of thing. As I suggest above, I'm hoping they've miscalculated badly with respect to Middle Americans. But Middle Americans continue to disappoint on many fronts — as they send their sons and their daughters to fight in Bush's War — and I'm afraid that many six-packers in non-Commie flyover territory will now conclude that Obama would be an emperor strong and wise: just what's needed to Keep Us Safe and Defend Our Freedom in Strange Places.

Alternatively, if the Obamites have miscalculated, then the ruling class will just have to accelerate its forty-year campaign to — as Bertolt Brecht put it in a parallel context — dissolve the old people and elect a new one. [Henry Gallagher Fields]

Comment. I think Mr. Fields is on to something when he writes of Obama's overseas appearances reflecting back on his political fortunes at home. Whether or not those appearances directly impress American voters, they satisfy the transnational ruling class, which owns and operates the apparatus for impressing, manipulating, deceiving, and otherwise motivating the voters. Obama's jumping through hoops in foreign countries helps make him Palace-worthy in the eyes of his, and our, true masters. Naturally he would not have achieved his status as nominee-designate had they not already recognized that he was malleable — but he must still perform his public obeisance. A capo who has faithfully served the Godfather for decades must still be seen to bow and kiss his hand.

In minimizing the importance of the voters as independent actors, I'm thinking of what James Burnham wrote in one of the formulations of his that I love to quote: "The existence in [democratic] society of the suffrage machinery naturally tends to favor those individuals who are adept at using the machinery; just as, in a society where rule is founded directly on force, the ablest fighting men are favored against the rest." (The Machiavellians, 1943)

The title character in the movie "Charlie Wilson's War," played by Tom Hanks, puts it less formally when he tells a friend that "I'm not elected by voters; I'm elected by contributors." In a lapse into realism (if not crimethink) that is astonishing for Hollywood, the Wilson character goes on to make it clear that his biggest contributors are Jews, even though almost no Jews live in his district. He explains: "I'm one of Israel's men on the Hill."

In terms of that specific context, Obama's appearance before AIPAC and his visit to Israel were surely more important, for purposes of bowing and hand-kissing, than any of his visits to European countries. [Nicholas Strakon] (July 2008)

Distracting Mr. Wright. Here in Trantor driving to work is often an ordeal of traffic jams, long stoplights, and other hazards such as gigantic SUVs piloted by morons simultaneously reading e-mails on their Blackberries — all of it made worse by the restrictions forced on us by the traffic-control Ms. Grundys. Then, once you make it to work, there's the problem of finding and paying for a place to park.

However, for some people, there's an alternative. We have a number of paved bicycle trails, most of them on U.S. Park Service land. I sometimes ride on them to work. Most have little yellow dashed lines in the middle, just like a real road, even though the trails are only about 5 feet wide. They also, and I am not making this up, have "STOP" and "YIELD" signs at intersections with other trails, making them resemble the little roads in Legoland, or somewhere.

At intersections with roads, the trails feature not only stop signs but also notices ordering the cyclist to "Dismount and Walk Bike." That makes a lot of sense, because it's much easier to get out of the way of speeding cars if you're hobbling across an intersection on your bike cleats.

Of course, the bicyclists contemptuously ignore those ridiculous intrusions and do what they think best. That's despite the fact that a large proportion of them are insufferably "Green," believe they're saving the planet by biking to work, and support all kinds of state intrusion for the good of all.

But now even this partial refuge from the traffic prudes is under attack: on one of the trails, the Authorities are installing speed-limit signs. For bicycles! From now on bikers on the Capital Crescent trail are restricted to 15 miles per hour, which isn't much more than my 80-year-old mother can grind out on her three-wheeler. And they're enforcing the limit with radar and $50 fines. I really am not making this up.

The next step? How about speed limits on sidewalks? Stop signs in the corridors of buildings? And perhaps they should fine the owners of Frisbee-playing dogs that run too fast in public parks. The possibilities for creative do-goodism are endless! [David T. Wright] (July 2008)

"Be glad  'bout the jihad!" A lot of people are doing it — including ultra-respectable, racially terrified whites in the MSM. On July 18 it was Dan Rather's turn, during a guest appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show. Commenting on the Reverend Doctor Doggerel's latest case of foot-in-mouth disease, Rather sent his own oxford wingtip mouthward by stipulating that "Jesse Jackson was an important figure in paving the way for an Osama bin Laden to appear."

However mortified, the panel members let the remark pass without correction — namely, Zbig's daughter Mika, columnist Mike Barnicle, and the Negro "Tiki" Barber, who apparently is some sort of retired sports figure.

Barack Obama may actually win in November, but, still, this is just the sort of thing the Democrats should have expected when they chose a virtual foreigner as their candidate. [Nicholas Strakon]

During the same installment of "Morning Joe," Mr. Barber supported the position of Miss "Whoopi" "Goldberg" — as delineated on the televised hen-party "The View" — that while it is a dreadful thing for most whites to use the word nigger, it is a fine thing for Negroes to use it. Showing remarkable liberality, Mr. Barber allowed that some white athletes, insofar as they are on terms of locker-room familiarity with their Negro brethren, may properly use the word in certain contexts.

It is useful for us whites to receive such instruction, from time to time, on Negro policy, but I should have been even more grateful had Mr. Barber gone on to explain when, if ever, it is appropriate for Orientals or Hispanics to employ the traditional language. One suspects that the question is especially pressing with respect to our friends from south of the border. [NS] (July 2008)

The road to fairdom. One of the media's feminist operatives recently asked old Bombs Away whether he thought it was "fair" that health-insurance companies paid for Viagra but not for birth-control drugs. Having no analytical ability or attachment to principle, McCain could only try spinning a non-answer answer that would do the least damage to his campaign for emperor, and he failed. The MSM did their best to raise the resulting wave of embarrassment to tsunami levels.

For benefit of those emerging from time capsules, I explain that the feminists, and cultural Bolsheviks generally, consider pregnancy to be a disease — among white women, at least.

Now, from a purely analytical standpoint it is hard to explain why insurance companies do what they do, given the prevailing health-care fascism. But given a free market, if some malcontent asked a principled free-marketeer the "fairness" question the latter might well answer:

That is an incoherent question, unless by "fairness" you mean "a result that I, personally, happen to like." Is it "fair" that a certain road owner rents space along his right-of-way for giant billboards? Is it "fair" that McBurger doesn't limit its menu to broccoli and oat bran? Is it "fair" that recording labels sell more popular music than unpopular music?

You are free to tell the untold millions of people acting on their ever-changing personal preferences in society that you find the result of their decisions to be "unfair" or otherwise unpleasant. You are free to try to persuade them to your way of thinking. But perhaps I should remind you: You are not free to forcibly replace their preferences with your own.

Apparently, demand in the competitive marketplace has induced the health-insurance companies to cover erectile dysfunction as a disease and has discouraged them from covering pregnancy as a disease. "Fairness," as a general and fatally foggy principle, doesn't come into it.

Why they're winning and we're losing. The Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League (SMYAL) is a nonprofit organization that serves "gay" youth in the Washington, D.C., area by reinforcing their feelings of homosexuality, promoting their alienation from normal society, and encouraging them to participate in "safe" sex.

In recent months, according to an article in the homosexualist Washington Blade, the group has lost five of its top officials, either through resignation or dismissal. SMYAL also lost about $70,000 in grant funds from the State of Maryland AIDS Administration, money that was supposed to be used for HIV-prevention services in the state's public schools — because the work was not being done. Other lost funding includes a $25,000 grant from the D.C. Children's and Youth Investment Trust Corp., $20,000 from Sasha Bruce Youthwork, and $15,000 from something called "Break the Cycle."

A significant setback for the homosexualist forces? Well, stop and think about the larger context. In all, SMYAL has been operating its propaganda and support services on about $1 million a year, and the reductions represent a loss of only 13 percent of its total budget.

One metro area. One organization promoting homosexuality. One million dollars a year.

Wouldn't it be awfully nice to know that somewhere in the world — or everywhere in the world combined — dedicated people had resources of $1 million a year to champion the cause of white rights and the very survival of the white race? [Douglas Olson] (July 2008)

One side only, as usual. Over the past few days MSNBC has reported that Iran's missiles can reach Israel, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Arabian Peninsula. Naturally the missiles can hit targets next door in Iraq as well, including the tempting bull's-eyes that the U.S. Empire has thoughtfully pasted onto the map of that satrapy in the form of big bases.

In the coverage I've seen, the threat to Israel has garnered the most attention.

Given Iran's recent test-launches, I understand why their weapons are the focus of the current missile stories; but I'd expect a free, independent, unterrified news medium to include some background information on what countries Israel can hit with its missiles.

Since free, independent, unterrified news media are thin on the ground here in the Utopia of Democracy, I offer these links, at the risk of promoting crimethink:

"Israel's Nuclear Missile Threat against Iran," by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya at Global Research

"Israel: How Far Can Its Missiles Fly?," The Risk Report, Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, June 1995

[Nicholas Strakon] (July 2008)

Succinct wisdom about "white privilege." In the Fall 2007 issue of The Occidental Quarterly, reviewer David Wilson carries out an appropriately concise demolition of Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege by Robert Jensen, an anti-white white. Addressing "that weakest item in the anti-white left's concept bin, 'white privilege' or 'institutionalized racism,'" Wilson writes:

That a white person might receive better reception in a predominantly white society is as natural a proposition as to say that a penguin will thrive in icy waters or a palm tree in a tropical climate. To accept it as morally deficient requires a belief that the group existence of whites itself is morally deficient or in need of obliteration. (p. 124)

The truth at last. President-for-Life Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has acknowledged that he will not respect the result of the June 27 run-off presidential election if he loses. "We fought for this country, and a lot of blood was shed," Mugabe declared recently in a state-controlled newspaper. "We are not going to give up our country because of a mere X. How can a ballpoint [pen] fight with a gun?"

Many of us knew thirty years ago that Mugabe was fighting not for "freedom" but for personal power and plunder. This latest news will be totally ignored by those who called us "haters" for perceiving the truth while they were willfully deceiving themselves. [Douglas Olson] (June 2008)

Don't you wish we had an energy policy? As the fuel crisis deepens, many commentators — typically but not exclusively left-wing — have started crying for the Central Government to adopt and impose an "energy policy." They maintain that "we" have not had an "energy policy" for many years.

I am reminded of the Left's repeated insistence that the current system of crushing, totalitarian socialism/fascism amounts to "laissez-faire capitalism."

No energy policy, eh? The long-running ban on offshore drilling doesn't qualify as such a policy, it appears. Nor do the thousand other interventions by Red Guards — tolerated by anti-competitive Dark Suits — that have sabotaged petroleum exploration, extraction, and refining. Also not qualifying are the Guards' suppressing the nuclear-power industry and the fascists' distorting that same industry through regulation, monopoly privilege, and risk-subsidy.

Likewise, the existence of a Strategic Petroleum Reserve doesn't qualify, or oil leases on land the government purports to own, or the inequitable awarding of special tax privileges to Big Oil, or the entire combustible mixture of regulation and subsidy extended to the industry decade after decade. (I am all in favor of tax exemptions, but they do amount to special privilege when they are restricted to certain sectors and not offered to all tax-victims.) The catastrophic subsidizing of ethanol doesn't seem to qualify as an energy policy, either. I could go on, but I will relent.

What true, sincere leftists mean by an "energy policy" is a gleaming, triple-riveted, unitary, utterly totalitarian system designed and run by them. The existing plethora of state interventions — chaotic, corrupt, and contradictory — has been produced bit by bit by pols thinking only of the next election, bureaucrats building their own empires, militarists seeking secure fuel supplies, and corporate fascists bidding for privilege. And it drives our coercive utopians crazy.

What I mean by an "energy policy" is no policy. Or, rather, no state policy, a state of affairs that would allow each of us to have our own policy with respect to peacefully creating, selling, buying, and using energy. In other words — and they're words that you've seen before in these pages — Smash the state. The only utopian thing about that is that we can't seem to get there from here. [Nicholas Strakon]

A related column by Strakon: "Global warming: What if the Left is right?" (October 27, 2007).

(June 2008)

Professor McCain and the Hoosier schoolmistress. John McCain is now offering to school his young competitor, Barack Obama, during a joint trip to Mesopotamia that Bombs Away is proposing. Let's take McCain at his word for a moment, even though the idea is just a political ploy in bad faith.

Wasn't it McCain who, in Baghdad a year ago, toured what he termed a "safe neighborhood" in Baghdad while wearing body armor and being escorted by heavily armed U.S. troops and helo gunships?

Wasn't it McCain who, shortly after returning to the United State, sang the version of "Barbara Ann" in which he threatened the Iranian people with bombing, thereby earning his indelible nickname?

Wasn't it McCain who, touring Iraq this year with his minder Joe Lieberman, repeatedly revealed his confusion about the various groups resisting the Empire in that country?

And was it not McCain who, when Obama declared that Bush's War opened up Iraq to al Qaeda, replied, "That's history — that's the past — that's talking about what happened before." Apparently, if McCain does have some teaching ability, it does not apply to the teaching of history.

One is permitted to wonder just how much McCain has learned during his little forays of globe-trotting and, therefore, just how much he would be able to teach the Young Imam.

I don't think such plastic-bubble globe-trotting has much educational value in any case. In 1985 I spent a couple weeks in Europe, including several days in Switzerland. Owing to a bizarre upgrade in our accommodations, my group of weefolk wound up staying at the Hotel Intercontinental in Lausanne, overlooking the lake and sharing the public areas of the hotel with oil sheikhs and their mistresses. That was another kind of plastic-bubble tourism, and upon returning to these shores I resisted the temptation to represent myself as an authority on all things Swiss, though I did lecture everyone within earshot about how the Swiss knew how to cook a steak and the French didn't. But maybe I'd have been bolder if I'd had a Lieberman with me, or some political generals.

On our bus, by the way, was an Indiana schoolmistress who, in retrospect, reminds me a little of old Bombs Away in terms of her perspective and openness toward learning. I must emphasize that, in what follows, she was not trying to be a comedian. When we disembarked on the outskirts of a preserved Mediaeval village that straggled up an incline, the lady opined, "They ought to knock down some of those buildings so the bus could go up the hill." And as we were wending our way along mountain roads, coming into Switzerland, with the Alps shouting their magnificence all around us, she commented, "Far as I'm concerned, they can give this country back to the Indi'ns."

Maybe McCain should seek out that lady and make her his running mate. Who knows: she might advise him to give Iraq back to the Iraqis. [Nicholas Strakon] (May 2008)

TLD Golden Oldie. In observance of War Celebration Weekend 2008, I invite readers to refresh themselves with this piece by senior editor Ronn Neff from 1999: "What was the 'greatest generation'?" (May 2008)

Perpetual war for perpetual jobs. I recently watched the movie "American Gangster," starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, and one line of the script has stuck with me. Washington plays a major Harlem drug gangster, and Crowe plays the head of a special narcotics unit across the river in Jersey. The story is set in the late '60s through the mid '70s.

Crowe's character is a "good cop," along the lines of Serpico, and he enjoys a notoriety paralleling Serpico's among his corrupt or indolent colleagues. At one point, grousing to his boss about his unit's failure to extract cooperation from other agencies, including the feds, he comments:

"You know, I don't think they want this [the illegal-drug industry] to stop. I think it employs too many people. Judges, lawyers, cops, politicians, prison guards, probation officers ... They stop bringing dope into the country, about 100,000 people are going to be out of a job."

I wonder what that job-loss figure would be now, thirty-some years later, if our rulers abandoned their Drug War? Very much greater, I'm sure.

One might hope that the loss of state power would be very much greater, too — but it is likely that much of the damage the war has already inflicted on our liberties is permanent. [Nicholas Strakon] (May 2008)

Sorry, Holy Pair, you can't have it both ways. For normal Americans — however few they may be — the Democrats' cage-match for the Emperor nomination has been full of entertainment on the P.C. front, as we've heard Hillary partisans repeatedly shriek, You can't say that about her! She's a womunnnn! and Obama partisans repeatedly wail, You can't say that about him! He's half-Africannnn!

It's been fun, but now, as I expected, the Obama forces are starting to lay down the special rules and restrictions that they want to enforce against Bombs Away McCain and his supporters in the fall campaign.

As you know, in one of her campaign appearances Michelle Obama confessed a lack of pride in her country during the dark time before her spouse started his ministry for its redemption. GOP forces in Tennessee duly posted a mildly critical Internet spot juxtaposing La Obama's lack of pride with the stout national pride of good ol' boys in the Volunteer State — whereupon the Rev. Dr. Obama responded by telling Republicans: "Lay off my wife." (ABC News, May 19, 2008) He added, "When you start attacking family members, there's a lack of decency there." And he characterized the attack, mild and indirect though it was, as "detestable."

In truth I'm not quite sure whether that qualifies as P.C. or not. Actually it comes off as rather patriarchal, but then the whole feminist "I Am Woman — Hear Me Whine for Special Protection!" thing is shot through with contradiction. In any event, this absurdity I do not find so entertaining.

If Michelle Obama or Chelsea Clinton or — for that matter — Bill Clinton doesn't want to come under attack from political rivals, that family member should, er, not make political speeches. Could anything be plainer? I am amazed that anyone, even in the degraded mainstream media, took the Young Imam's complaint seriously.

That's especially so in light of the fact that the ABC story blandly goes on to report: "Michelle Obama denied reports that she had personally ruled out considering Clinton as Obama's vice presidential running mate." The Obamas rose to no dudgeon, high or low, at the suggestion that little nonpolitical Michelle, so frail and so meek, might be in a position to decisively influence her husband's political machinations. Instead, La Obama praised Hillary, declaring that "there is no way that I would say absolutely no to one of the most successful and powerful and groundbreaking women on this planet." From that, we are entitled to conclude that Michelle could say no if she wanted to.

We'll have to wait and see whether the Obama forces observe the rule they've laid down for Bombs Away when it comes to the possibility of their attacking Mrs. Bombs Away, multimillionaire replacement wife and ex-babe Cindy McCain. I'm sure she knows of some closets where certain skeletons are hanging, even if she didn't help hang 'em there. [Nicholas Strakon] (May 2008)

Who runs America? Following the death of Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) in February, Howard Berman (D-Calif.) succeeded him as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Lantos, a Hungarian-born Jew, was famed as the "only Holocaust survivor in Congress," even though there were no "death camps" in Hungary. He was actually a petty, cowardly bully who routinely abused witnesses at hearings, once going so far as to compare a witness to a Nazi, and then using his power as chairman to forbid the man from speaking a word in his own defense. A few years ago Lantos ran his automobile over the foot of a child in a Capitol parking area and fled the scene rather than stop and own up to his misdeed.

He was, of course, lionized as "brave" and as a "humanitarian" when he finally ceased polluting the planet with his presence. Berman, like Lantos, is Jewish. He is followed in seniority on the committee by Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), also a Jew. Then come Eni Faleomavaega, the non-white, non-voting delegate from American Samoa, and Donald Payne (D-N.J.), a Negro.

Next in the pecking order is Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), a Jew, followed by Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), another Jew, and Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), yet another Jew.

One has to go down nine places in the original majority membership list to find the first white Western man — Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.), who is closely followed by Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), a Negro, and Diane Watson (D-Calif.), a Negress.

I don't think much else needs to be said. The cold, hard facts speak for themselves. [Douglas Olson] (May 2008)

Yankee president, stay home. Don't fall out of your chair, now, but I have to agree with the Squirrel-Monkey-in-Chief on something. If elected, Barack Obama should not go abroad to talk with adversaries of the Empire. I have to agree also with partisans of Tibet: George Bush himself should not attend the Summer Olympics — but not just because the Games are in Beijing. Moreover, Americans should not have tolerated Bush's traveling to Israel or to any other foreign country.

If I were still a constitutionalist republican, I'd favor a constitutional amendment prohibiting a president from leaving the national territory of the United State while in office. Woodrow Wilson was the first to do so, if you don't count Abraham Lincoln's visit to Richmond, Virginia, in April 1865. Franklin Roosevelt started the real globe-trotting, during World War II. He even went all the way to Tehran and Yalta to conspire with his beloved comrade, Uncle Joe.

Please note that I have just named the three men whom I consider to have been the worst American presidents. All of them were major founders of the U.S. Empire — in Lincoln's case, the unitary continental empire.

Such an amendment would not have prevented the rise of the Empire — as an anarchist, I maintain that pretty pieces of paper, or even parchment, ultimately cannot prevent anything — but it might have erected a few inconvenient hurdles for the empire-builders in the Presidential Palace. And it would be a very good thing, even in our desperate state during this darkling time, if the emperor were somehow restrained from leaving the country.

Ideally, of course, we wouldn't have an emperor in the country, either. By the way, there is plenty in the Constitution that would have prevented that — if constitutions really worked to restrain the power-hungry ladies and gentlemen responsible for enforcing them. [Nicholas Strakon] (May 2008)

She's melllltingggg! Nicholas Munchkin of TLDville hopes it's not premature to make a joyful noise:

Ding Dong! The Witch is dead. Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch!
Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.
Wake up, you sleepy head.
Rub your eyes, get out of bed.
Wake up, the Wicked Witch is dead.
She's gone where the goblins go,
Below – below – below.
Yo-ho, let's open up and sing and ring the bells out.
Ding Dong, the merry-oh, sing it high, sing it low.
Let them know the Wicked Witch is dead!

(May 2008)

There's obscene, and then there's obscene. The New York Times recently unleashed its propagandists to bemoan a sharp increase in the use of Food Stamps — one of the most openly obscene welfare programs because it was designed not to feed the hungry but to keep American farmers prosperous by increasing the purchase of food. Stop and think: Why else would it have been created by two farm-state legislators — Bob Dole (R-Kans.) and George McGovern (D-S.D.) — instead of by inner-city (code word for black) pols?

"Driven by a painful mix of layoffs and rising food and fuel prices," writes Erik Eckholm of the New York Times, "the number of Americans receiving food stamps is projected to reach 28 million in the coming year, the highest level since the aid program began in the 1960s." ("As Jobs Vanish and Prices Rise, Food Stamp Use Nears Record," March 31, 2008.)

That is a deliberate distortion. About 10 percent of the population was using Food Stamps during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the projection cited by Eckholm does not approach that level, although the total monetary outlay is, of course, higher.

But stop and think again: The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program (another telling indication that it is actually a farm program and not a hunger program) has been pressing for decades to increase the volume of its giveaways.

A February 14, 2008, press release from that department boasts:

Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer today announced that USDA will offer $5 million in grants to improve participation in food stamps for those who are eligible but for a variety of reasons do not receive the help intended for them.

"Nationally, about 65 percent of all those who are eligible for good stamp benefits are currently participating in the program," said Schafer. "Yet fewer than 31 percent of the elderly and 50 percent of Hispanic families who are eligible for food stamps are actually participating."

The Times and the actual state of the economy notwithstanding, couldn't those machinations have something to do with the increase...? [Douglas Olson] (May 2008)

Government's crystal ball cracks again. Preparing for the current campaign for emperor, states competed more fiercely than ever before to one-up each other and schedule early primaries. In so doing they sought to give their voters (or local political apparat) a better chance to influence the nominations. On the Republican side, the competition may have been worthwhile for certain states. But on the Democrat side, it certainly wasn't. Appearing in my home state earlier this month, Barack Obama noted that, in the super-late May 6 primary, Indiana Democrats may actually help decide something for the first time since 1968.

State legislatures' scramble to schedule ever-earlier primaries now looks like another good example of bollixed-up government "planning," doesn't it? — at least on the Democrat side. Seems appropriate. Though both ruling parties are thoroughly totalitarian, it's the Democrats who jabber the most about "planning" our society and economy. [Henry Gallagher Fields] (April 2008)

Clintons still pimping out daughter. After using their political muscle to end, at least temporarily, the career of MSNBC commentator David Shuster for observing that Chelsea Clinton was being "pimped out" by Hillary's campaign, her parents continue to shamelessly pimp out their only daughter to promote her mother's pitiful delusions of grandeur. (Don't even think about demanding an apology or a suspension from The Last Ditch, Hillary! Unlike those wimps at MSNBC, we never back away from the truth.) With growing desperation to win the Pennsylvania primary in the face of shrinking poll numbers, Hillary's campaign scheduled surrogate Chelsea for an appearance at Woody's, a notorious "gay" bar in Philadelphia. To counter that sacrificial lamb, lesbian singer Melissa Etheridge pimped herself for Barack Obama by telephone at the event, which was sponsored by the homosexual National Stonewall Democrats group.

Hillary won the backing of the Liberty City Democratic Club, Philly's largest queer political organization. "We are proud to endorse Senator Hillary Clinton in this important primary cycle," declared spokesman Matthew Woodcock. (Sic: I'm not making this up!) "Her record of accomplishments is proof positive that she'll be a fighter for the LGBT [lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender] community in the White House, and that's what we need." [Douglas Olson] (April 2008)

Br'er Jeremiah and Br'er Barack. I hope this doesn't strike you as too conspiratorialist, but I have to wonder whether Minister Jeremiah Wright, in his interview with Bill Moyers and in his remarks at the National Press Club and the NAACP, was deliberately falling on his sword while appearing to nick Barack Obama with it. Minister Wright "dissed" Obama — if I may employ the popular ghettospeak — and thus handed the senator a perfect opportunity to definitively sever his ties with the radical Afro-cleric. Obama lost no time doing so, and now — he and his campaign hope — he can "move on."

It may not work; the telescreen talkers are still chattering about Obama's judgment and timing in handling the Wright crisis before now. But all that aside, if it were a stratagem, it would be interesting to know whether Obama or his handlers were in on it, or whether it was a brainstorm that Minister Wright came up with on his own in an attempt to help the candidate.

I never tire of quoting Ronn Neff in "Cognitive vanity": "Deceit is the basis of all politics." We are talking here, after all, about bigtime imperial politics — and Obama is one of the biggest charlatans to come down the political pike since Bill Clinton himself. [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2008)

The "elitist" evasion. Obama flacks always come out with some version of the same thing whenever a telescreen talker asks whether the Imam is an "elitist." The version I've heard most recently is that Obama was "born so far on the wrong side of the tracks that he couldn't even hear the trains."

In itself that's balderdash, of course. But my response to the overall claim is, No, no, no, no, no. No one is claiming that Obama is a woodpile scion of the Rockefellers or Vanderbilts, or that he grew up playing polo. Of the preening left-wing "bourgeois Bohemians" whom David Brooks surveyed in Bobos in Paradise, compulsively shopping for $400 designer hammers and hitherto-unheard-of kinds of cheese, I'm pretty sure a good proportion are sons and daughters of grade-school teachers and insurance agents. In this country those who issue from petit-bourgeois or even factory-class origins, graduate from one of the Bolshevik universities, and make their way into the corporate – media – law – administrative – political nomenklatura wind up as the shrillest, most obnoxious, most compulsive elitists you can ever hope to avoid. This isn't 17th-century France with aristos of ancient houses inspecting each other's coat of arms; it's 21st-century America with female lawyers of obscure origins sniffing over each other's diplomas and Hermès accessories.

Barack Obama is a graduate of Columbia and Harvard, isn't he? Or did I get that wrong? Seems I even heard that his father was a Harvard man, too. That's worth remembering even if Obama père sold collision coverage from State Farm on the side. [Nicholas Strakon]
 

P.S. Surveying the site, I find I have neglected to mention that I'm actually rooting for the Young Imam in the current contest for emperor, in my half-hearted way. That ought to give you an idea of what I think of the other candidates and, indeed, of this entire carnival of sociopathy. My hypothesis is that Obama has the better chance of keeping Field Marshal Bombs Away out of the imperial palace. I may be wrong about that, of course. For that matter I may be wrong in rooting for Obama: I rooted, half-heartedly, for George W. Bush in 2000, and just look what happened. Could the Horror of Gorror have been worse?

When we predict what some pol will do once in office, our only hope for avoiding Neff's "cognitive vanity" is to predict that he'll do something terrible. (April 2008)

Doesn't it take a cornfield? Hillary has been campaigning in the Hoosier state for a while now, but, strangely enough, she hasn't yet discovered a third or fourth set of grandparents down in Poland, Ind., or talked fondly of munching breaded-tenderloin sandwiches at Nick's in Huntington when she was in third grade, or reminisced about visiting Uncle Luther's old cottage on Lake Maxinkuckee. It's confusing. Here I thought she hailed from every state in the Union. [Henry Gallagher Fields] (April 2008)

Bill on the Bosnia trip. OK, wait a minute. Bill Clinton is a much better liar than this. How many immediately obvious untruths did he pack into his defense of Hillary's Bosnia lie? Three? Four? And not only that: he went on to suggest that Hill may have been having a senior moment when she produced her fairytale! Over on the Republican side der alte Feldmarschall must be cackling.

Is Bill deliberately sabotaging his wife, trying to get her to withdraw? [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2008)

Once again, government chefs do their best "To Serve Man." Lest stranded American Airlines ticket holders forced to camp out in fusty airline terminals and dingy airport hotels think that their sacrifices are in the service of air safety, allow me to draw their attention to the following article at Bloomberg.com:

In the FAA spot checks that began on April 7, inspectors found that the attachment of the wiring bundles didn't match agency specifications such as the orientation of certain clamps and ties, [company executive vice president Dan] Garton said.

Mechanics "had taken certain latitudes" in the work, Garton said, not realizing the "greater emphasis on strict compliance" at the FAA since U.S. lawmakers began raising questions last month about its oversight of airline maintenance. ("American Air Had 'No Choice' About Grounding Jets a Second Time," by Mary Schlangenstein, April 10, 2008)

There has been no indication that the installation violations actually affected safety. Almost certainly, they would not have caused an unsafe condition in the couple of weeks it would have taken American Airlines to correct them on a more normal schedule.

But that didn't matter to the geniuses at the FAA. The tens of millions of dollars lost by the airline, and the even greater costs imposed on its passengers, are acceptable — even desirable — because they draw attention away from the agency's manifest failure to prevent or correct actual safety problems, and its disastrous failure to update the United State's ancient, creaky air traffic control system.

But our guardians of airline safety are on the job now. And those thousands of flight cancellations and the suffering of would-be travelers prove it! [David T. Wright]

Utopian Watch. I expect the sages of the Consensus World to assure us that this latest disaster of regulation proves — the need for more and better regulation. [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2008)

Latest Noose: the jig is up for black professor. It has been a very strange affair, even for an Orwellian "hate crime," ever since a 4-foot noose was discovered on the office door of Columbia Teachers College professor Madonna Constantine in October. She is one of only two tenured black profs at the school.

First, the college forced the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force to obtain a warrant for the video surveillance tapes from the building, leaving everyone wise in the history of "hate crimes" to conclude that the most likely suspect was a Negro, and likely the "victim" herself. Providing additional fuel for those speculations was the fact that the cops maintained a studied silence for months after they obtained the tapes.

Now, finally, the other shoe has dropped. Some weeks ago the college "victimized" poor Madonna yet again by finding her responsible for at least two dozen instances of plagiarism of both text and ideas from the works of fellow faculty members and her students. (She still denies the charges.) It turns out that this 18-month investigation was quietly being conducted at the time the noose was discovered, making irresistible the assumption that the hate hoax was designed to deflect the probe, or at least create sympathy for the thief.

Now a Manhattan grand jury has issued a subpoena to the college for all the prof's records, including documents relating to the school's investigation, which was contracted out to a private investigator and a law firm.

It would seem that only two relevant questions remain:

(1) Did Madonna do the "hateful" deed herself, or did she have a friend do it?

(2) Will the perpetrator of this anti-white hoax be charged with a "hate crime" for faking a "hate crime"? [Douglas Olson] (April 2008)

Daughters of Charlemagne, or, We have to understand how far down we are. By now I expect we've all seen some of the tape of the cheerleader assault in Florida, if we could stand to watch it. In a story at Local6.com, the local sheriff is quoted as saying, "Shocking. I've never seen anything like it. [The girls] seem to have absolutely no remorse at all. I don't understand the sheer violence."

The photos posted by Sun-Sentinel.com (see link on that page) reveal that five of the girls arrested appear to be white, like their victim. One arrestee, Kayla Hassell, 13, is nonwhite. Both of the boys involved, who are accused of standing lookout, appear to be white. All have American-sounding names, with the possible exception of Miss Nichols, 16, whose first name is Mercedes.

I agree with the sheriff: it is intensely shocking that some young girls in America, including white girls, are now capable of perpetrating sadistic, protracted criminal beatings.

But the violence itself is not the most shocking aspect of the story. That distinction is reserved for the attackers' encouraging someone to tape their crime with the agreed intention of posting it on YouTube and MySpace. The girls are now to be tried as adults on a collection of major felony charges, including kidnapping, and given the existence of the tape one must pity their defense attorney, if he is not a wizard at getting evidence excluded.

We have to grasp, here, not only the collapse of morality among the attackers and the collapse of their family culture but also the collapse of their very mind. Apparently they were unable to envision the complete disruption of their lives that would result from their act and the sabotaging of their legal defense that would result from their taping it. If they did envision all of that, they didn't care. As I find myself asking all the time these days, in various contexts, How is that possible?

Youths have always been wild and heedless compared with adults, I may be told. Well, look. Forty years ago — even twenty-five years ago — if we had seen tape of such an attack we could not have believed that it was carried out by "normal" suburban high-school girls, all but one of them white. We would have assumed it originated in a back ward of the Hospital for Criminally Insane Girls, during a lapse of vigilance by the inmates' keepers. I'm 58. I'm old enough to remember the America that was.

Honestly, in light of stories such as the one out of Florida, I wonder what the point is of our continuing to analyze imperial crimes in distant lands, neocon lies, racial politics, ruling-class exploitation, bureaucratic tyranny, and all the rest of it. But I suppose we must persevere. [Nicholas Strakon]

Ed Tom's take. In No Country for Old Men, set in 1980, Cormac McCarthy has his tired old sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, observe:

I read in the papers here a while back some teachers come across a survey that was sent out back in the thirties to a number of schools across the country. Had this questionnaire about what was the problems with teachin in the schools. And they come across these forms, they'd been filled out and sent in from around the country answerin these questions. And the biggest problems they could name was things like talkin in class and runnin in the hallways. Chewin gum. Copyin homework. Things of that nature. So they got one of them forms that was blank and printed up a bunch of em and sent em back out to the same schools. Forty years later. Well, here come the answers back. Rape, arson, murder. Drugs. Suicide.

So I think about that. Because a lot of the time ever when I say anything about how the world is goin to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I'm gettin old. That it's one of the symptoms. But my feelin about that is that anybody that cant tell the difference between rapin and murderin people and chewin gum has got a whole lot bigger of a problem than what I've got.

Forty years is not a long time neither. Maybe the next forty of it will bring some of em out from under the ether. If it aint too late.

Welcome to Hell, Geraldine! Welcome to hell, Geraldine Ferraro — a hell of your own making, you and the leftists who have worked for two generations to criminalize thought and speech in this once-free country. Long a champion of the rights of minorities over the majority, you now know — albeit only in a very small way — what happens to the "mere" citizen who dares to speak out against the engine of anti-white oppression that you helped set in motion.

You have been thoroughly "spanked" by both the media and your fellow Democrat politicians for your comment that "if Obama was [sic] a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was [sic] a woman, of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."

Your offense is all the greater for the fact that your statement was absolutely and undeniably true.

As part of the hellishness of your situation, Miss Ferraro, I want you to know that Obama himself agrees with you! In an adulatory 2005 Chicago Tribune story, reporter Jeff Zeleny tells us:

In winning the Democratic Senate primary in Illinois, Obama drew as many as two white votes for every black one, showing nearly unprecedented crossover appeal for a black candidate in a statewide race.

Obama acknowledges, with no small irony, that he benefits from his race.

If he were white, he once bluntly noted, he would simply be one of nine freshmen senators, almost certainly without a multimillion-dollar book deal and a shred of celebrity. Or would he have been elected at all? ("When it comes to race, Obama makes his point — with subtlety," June 26, 2005)

Anti-Semitism among the MSM? By now we've all seen the tape of Joe Lieberman whispering instruction into the ear of old man Bombs Away on the difference between al Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgents. One wiseacre of our acquaintance points out that if that image were translated into cartoon form it would be the sort of thing that got Julius Streicher hanged. (April 2008)

She "misspoke." Hillary Clinton's recent declaration that in 1996 she was met at a Bosnian airport by sniper fire rather than by a little girl proferring flowers is more evidence that these power-maniacs differ radically from normal people. They think differently, if in fact they can be said to think as we understand thinking. Some of us here at The Ditch have wondered in the past whether any of them can be said to have actual ideas or beliefs, apart from the belief that it is pleasurable and profitable to wield power over their fellow humans.

Now we may question whether Hillary Clinton, in particular, has actual memories, as normal people have memories.

I suppose that I ought to leave room for an alternative to sociopathy or self-induced amnesia. Perhaps Senator Clinton is just a robot who will reflexively read aloud anything that ignorant or dishonest scriptwriters shove in front of her. Sort of like a TV newsreader.

Whichever Clintonistas are actually manufacturing the current untruths, it must be said that in the past they lied much more deftly. Either that, or the media just let them get away with it much more easily. [Nicholas Strakon]
 

"Normal people," Strakon? Is that really a good description of the millions of Americans who troop out at every opportunity and vote for such creeps? [Modine Herbey] (April 2008)

Where's Marshal Stalin when you need him? Constitutionalists, among others, may wish to meditate on something Hillary Clinton said in a speech on March 27. It is with respect to this sort of thing, unfortunately, that we may reasonably fear that she has real beliefs and is describing them accurately.

She said that what Americans need is a president who is commander-in-chief of the economy.

And some continue to insist — even after seven years of Marshal G.W. Bush — that America's political culture is not totalitarian! [Henry Gallagher Fields] (April 2008)

© 2009, 2008 WTM Enterprises

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* Not yet, anyway. In a few years the American Likudniks may well put Bush on the list for failing to achieve the neocons' purported goals of bringing peace, stability, and democracy to the Middle East. Some neocons, including Bill Kristol, have already been dinging Bush. Life can be tough for a shabbas goy, especially if he's being used as a human shield. [Back]