The View From 1776

Liberal-progressives, expanding the Marxian socialist international into the goal of a one-world government, have to deny the inconvenient truth that barbarism of the Islamic religion is the real cause of the world’s terrorism.  Somehow terrorism must be attributed to unequal distribution of the world’s income and wealth and the Marxian class struggle between workers and their capitalist employers.

The Obama administration’s ploy is Orwellian-NewSpeak refusal to use honest English words to describe reality.  That’s hardly surprising, given the utopian (definition: nowhere, non-existent) quality of liberal-progressivism doctrinal faith in the secular and materialistic political state as the only source of social salvation.

Read Charles Krauthammer’s The Cowardice Of Not Calling Them Enemies.

Bill Greene reports: Chomsky Turns To The Right !!!: Chomsky Joins Fox News and Sarah Palin to Fight Obama and the Evil Bankers

Professor Chomsky was a prominent critic of our involvement in the VietNam war and one of the most prominent opponents of our counter-measures against Al Queda terrorism in the wake of 9/11.

In the past, if he had anything complimentary to say about the United States, it was not widely reported.  For example, in America’s Dumbest Intellectual, by Stefan Kanfer in CITY JOURNAL, Summer 2002 | Vol. 12, No. 3:

The goal of America, Chomsky charges, “is a society in which the basic unit is you and your television set. If the kid next door is hungry, it’s not your problem. If the retired couple next door invested their assets badly and are now starving, that’s not your problem either.” Prisons and inner-city schools, Chomsky maintains, “target a kind of superfluous population that there’s no point in educating because there’s nothing for them to do. Because we’re a civilized people, we put them in prison, rather than sending death squads out to murder them.” Another example: “When you come back from the Third World to the West—the U.S. in particular—you are struck by the narrowing of thought and understanding, the limited nature of legitimate discussion, the separation of people from each other.”

Another example: The New Criterion, May 2003,The hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky, by Keith Windschuttle.

Noam Chomsky was the most conspicuous American intellectual to rationalize the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The death toll, he argued, was minor compared to the list of Third World victims of the “far more extreme terrorism” of United States foreign policy.

According to the latest Gallup poll, 52% of voters oppose the president’s intention to bypass the 60-vote super-majority traditionally employed in the Senate for passage of major measures, such as Obamacare.

Nonetheless, when Senator Lamar Alexander requested that President Obama respect the will of the majority , the president dismissed the request.  “You know, this issue of reconciliation has been brought up. Again I think the American people aren’t always all that interested in procedures inside the Senate. I do think they want a vote on how we’re going to move this forward,” he said.

Attempting to cram socialistic health care down our throats calls to mind the Soviet Communist Party elite claiming that, as the dictatorship of the proletariat, they were compelled to force compliance with their measures.  In that vein, the president has said that once the cram-down has been effected, people will discover that they really love Big Brother’s medicine.

At our elite Ivy League schools, grade inflation has been a scandal for a decade or so.  Nearly everybody gets at least a grade of B, and a substantial portion of every class graduates cum laude.  That might explain why constitutional law scholar and Harvard Law Review president Barack Obama, in his State of the Union address, completely misstated the law respecting corporate free speech.

Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University, doesn’t buy liberal-progressives’ self-portrait as superbly educated, intellectually brilliant, and therefore entitled to rule conservative and traditional dimwits. 

See Mr. Ignatius, Meet Mr. Bok:

Yale University historian Donald Kagan in an article he wrote for Commentary Magazine quotes former president of Harvard University Derek Bok and dean of Harvard College Harry R. Lewis, along with the late Allan Bloom, to opposite effect.

Mr. Bok:

Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education. Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy. And those are only some of the problems.

For a sample of what passes for critical analysis in liberal-progressive circles, read Frank Rich and the State of Liberal Commentary, by Dennis Prager.

Shades of Bismarck’s kulturkampf and Hitler’s pogrom to impose Aryan purity. 

Germany has criminalized home schooling, demanding that parents place their children in state schools, where they will be suitably indoctrinated in the religion of socialism.

California is moving in the same direction.  In an appellate court decision last year (In re Rachel L.), California judges ordered the lower court first hearing the case to compel parents to cease home schooling and to enroll their children in public schools or certified private schools.

A superficial difference between Germany and California in this regard is that the latter is probably motivated in the main to preserve the monopoly of teachers’ unions.  The final effect is the same in both cases, however.  Teachers’ unions, supported by the Federal government, are dedicated to teaching the moral relativism of secular socialism.  In both Germany and California, we are dealing with state imposed politically-correct thought control.

In contrast to the California appellate court, an immigration court judge recently granted political asylum in the United States to a German family, who had been home schooling their children.  In Germany, home-schooling parents can be jailed and have their children taken from them, because socialist Germany wishes to eliminate vestiges of Judeo-Christian morality that interfere with the political state’s socialistic collectivism.

Our hate-crime legislation has criminalized not just actions, but private thoughts.  The way is open under the Democrat/Socialist Party for a future Federal police force, a sort of Gestapo to criminalize spiritual religion.  We need only a future crisis and a Rahm Emanuel who will not waste the opportunity presented.

Don’t dismiss that threat as impossible.  Before 1933, no one in the United States could have dreamed that a farmer would be imprisoned for raising food on his own land to feed his family, on the grounds that he was not authorized to do so by Federal bureaucrats. 

President Obama’s tutors Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, in their leadership days in the Weatherman underground, advocated wiping out the Constitution and our entire social and political structure at gun point.  Mr. Obama’s determination to nationalize the healthcare industry in the face of overwhelming public disapproval, and his rationalization that people will learn to like it, are eerily reminiscent of George Orwell’s novel 1984.  At the end, the main character, having been worked over by government agents, tearfully declares that he loves Big Brother.

During the height of the Cold War, sweet-on-the-Soviet-Union liberal-progressive-socialists pushed for unilateral disarmament.  They didn’t want to impede socialistic progressivism in the USSR, and they believed, as does the Obama administration today, that being nice and polite in our dealings with foreign enemies will lead them to reciprocate.

The Obama administration’s treatment of murderous terrorists as if they were people suspected of traffic violations is more of the same.

In the next terrorist attack, American victims will die, presumably happy in the knowledge that full legal rights will be granted to terrorists captured by our military forces (who, of course, must read them their Miranda rights in the midst of life-and-death combat).

The Obama administration’s switch from preventing terrorist attacks to granting foreign terrorists the same legal and procedural protections as those granted to our own citizens explains why large red flags of caution were ignored in the case of the Detroit airliner bombing attempt.  It is of a piece with Attorney General Holder’s policy to grant constitutional legal rights to Gitmo terrorists, while prosecuting intelligence community agents who attempted to prevent terrorism.

Wall Street Journal columnist L. Gordon Crovitz explains:

Sen. Joe Lieberman’s Homeland Security Committee heard an explanation of how U.S. intelligence agencies decide when to put suspected terrorists on a watch list or a no-fly list.

Timothy Healy, the head of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, explained the unit’s “reasonable suspicion” standard like this:
“Reasonable suspicion requires ‘articulable’ facts which, taken together with rational inferences, reasonably warrant a determination that an individual is known or suspected to be or has been engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to, terrorism and terrorist activities, and is based on the totality of the circumstances. Mere guesses or inarticulate ‘hunches’ are not enough to constitute reasonable suspicion.”

If this sounds like legalistic language, it is. Indeed, a quick Web search was a reminder that this language is adapted from Terry v. Ohio, a landmark Supreme Court case in 1968 that determined when Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches allows the police to frisk civilians or conduct traffic stops. In other words, foreign terrorists have somehow now been granted Fourth Amendment reasonableness rights that courts intended to protect Americans being searched by the local police. Thus was Abdulmutallab allowed on the airplane with his explosives.

The difference between law-enforcement procedures and preventing terrorism could not be clearer. If a well-respected banker takes the initiative to come to a U.S. embassy in Nigeria to report that he thinks his son is a terrorist, we expect intelligence officers to make “hunches,” such as that this person should have his visa reviewed and be searched before getting on a plane. Information is our defense against terrorism, but evidence of terror plots is often incomplete, which is why intelligence requires combining facts with hunches.

The result of prohibiting hunches was that Abdulmutallab was waved through. Information about suspected terrorists flows into a central Terrorist Screening Database, which is then analyzed by the Terrorist Screening Center, where FBI agents apply the “reasonable suspicion” standard to assign people to various watch lists including “selectee” lists and the “no-fly” list. It’s at this point where an approach based on domestic law enforcement trump prevention, undermining the use of information.

This CYA excess of caution by intelligence community operatives is not a reflection of obtuseness in the intelligence community.  It is a product of the president’s liberal-progressive policies, the same ones that lead him to bow and scrape to foreign dictators and to blame conduct by the United States for the Islamic jihad.