The View From 1776

A New Way for Democrats
By Jack G. Gilbert

I want to say a useful word to the Democrats.  Will they listen to me if I come to Washington with my 95-year-old mother?  She suffers from congestive heart failure, from being nearly 96 and from having a son who is pretty old himself, 72.  We are the kind of people the Democrats like to help, but it would help most if they listened to me for a minute. 

The Democrats present the fullest development of political pity, or making people feel sorry for themselves in order to get their votes. 

The Democrat suffering group my mother and I belong to is old people, supposed to be living with endless miseries like bills and inadequate medical care.  Consider the delicious pleasure of telling a group of “seniors” about the injustices they suffer. Then assuring them that though God and their children may have left the scene, the Democrat party loves them.  Relish the thought: elder care and the four seasons by a Democrat Congress. 

Implicit in this pity is that we old people cannot think of anything but ourselves. 

We would never consider the public good, the commonweal. 

We would never be grateful for the comforts of our age, such comforts that never existed before: wonder drugs, pain killers, tight warm houses, tight cool houses, blissfully comfortable shoes, ultra-light eyeglasses, quiet cars, movies, telephone, internet, cheap flights--in general, the bonuses of living in a time of inventiveness and plenty. 

Is there a cure for the partisan addiction to helping victims--whether they need it or not, whether the help really helps, whether it makes anyone happy at all?  Reality sometimes intrudes.  The supply of big groups of victims is running out. 

In desperate times a new idea may not hurt, a program of Democratic Mega-Pity.  The goods of this world are poorly distributed, and too much is had by too few. The goods include money, health, intelligence, good looks.  The evils of this world are likewise poorly distributed.  These include poverty, disease, disabilities, lack of intelligence, ugliness.  Too much is had by too few.

So the next liberal social policy must move past “victimization.” Invariably divisive, it annoys the advantaged and teaches the disadvantaged to feel aggrieved.  The goal is an Equalization of Good and Evil by means of a Calculus of Mega-Pity. 

This would work on the national level as follows: an annual census
evaluates each person in terms of (a) income, (b) general health (c) other personal advantages (good looks, talents in painting, music, writing,
dexterity, cunning).  The government assigns a number (0-100, expressive
of his or her relative advantages) to each person, who will be
taxed on the basis of his or her position above 50 on the scale. Those highest will pay most. 

The fluidity of money makes it the easiest factor to adjust; anyway “it is written” that the poor are not healthy and not talented because they do not have enough money.  Ways of reducing one’s position in health and talents will predictably show up, like smoking, overeating, reckless sex and disfigurement of person (as in tattooing).  There will be a dynamic social movement, up and down the scale from year to year, as individuals seek the relative position most satisfactory to themselves. 

Those below 50 will receive compensation based on their relative lowness, the lowest receiving most.  Thus 1’s would be recompensed roughly as much as 100’s are taxed.  (I say “roughly” because all transfers would be reduced by the cost of the government doing business both ways, up and down.) 51’s would give to 49’s.  50’s would make do with what they have. 

And the US would push to have this replicated on a Universal Basis by the UN for all countries, each likewise assigned its place, annually, on a scale of income, general health, and other personal advantages.  Fortunate nations would contribute according to their rank above 50; unfortunates would receive according to their rank below 50.  Disasters like floods, tidal waves, monsoons, hurricanes would of course be factored in, so that there would be an even painting across the globe of good things and miseries. 

Emigration would not disrupt the scheme.  An influx of rich into poor changes the relative position of the country.  Likewise an influx of poor into a rich.  Every country would perceive that an advantage lies in losing position on the scale.  Eventually the result would be that the spread formerly expressed as 0-100 would become 49.999999 to 50.000001. 

Who would then be an aggressor?  The lions would not lie down with the lambs, rather lamblike lions would lie down with leonine lambs.  The first would be nearly last, the last would be nearly first.

Who are Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers?  And why would Senator Obama wish to associate his political beliefs with those of Dohrn and Ayers? 

Might his friendship with these Weatherman terrorists of the 1960s and 70s be a clue to the voting record that led National Journal to rate Mr. Obama the most liberal member of the Senate?

The New York Times reported on September 11, 2001, ironically, the day the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were bombed:

Life With the Weathermen: No Regrets for a Love of Explosives
By Dinitia Smith

“I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. “I feel we didn’t do enough.” Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970’s as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings.

...[Mr. Ayers] writes that he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972.

...Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at,” is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago…

He went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.’s 10 Most Wanted List. J. Edgar Hoover called her “the most dangerous woman in America” and “la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.” Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married.

In his book Mr. Ayers describes the Weathermen descending into a “whirlpool of violence.”

“Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,” he writes… He goes on to provide details about the manufacture of the bomb and how a woman he calls Anna placed the bomb in a restroom. No one was killed or injured, though damage was extensive.

Between 1970 and 1974 the Weathermen took responsibility for 12 bombings, Mr. Ayers writes, and also helped spring Timothy Leary (sentenced on marijuana charges) from jail.

Today, Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn, 59, who is director of the Legal Clinic’s Children and Family Justice Center of Northwestern University, seem like typical baby boomers, caring for aging parents, suffering the empty-nest syndrome.

To understand Senator Obama, and Senator Clinton as well, it’s necessary to revisit the radicalism, exemplified by Ayers and Dohrn, that formed their philosophical and political orientation in the 1960s and 1970s.  That orientation can be traced back to the European revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848, and to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Implementing social justice necessitated rooting out religion and morality from public life.  And that is what intellectuals in the United States set about doing at the end of the 1800s.  The process gained momentum after World War I, then the Depression in 1932 brought us Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, dedicated to implementing socialist state-planning.  But the partial results of the New Deal were not enough to satisfy the radicalized Baby Boomers who became the student activists in the late 1960s.

Radicals were a fairly small part of the Baby Boomer generation, but their influence radiated widely and deeply, because American society was already prepared to accept at least the superficialities of their message.  Not everyone passionately believed that American society was a tyrannical conspiracy to oppress the blacks, Third-World peoples, and college students.  But American intellectuals had been preaching since the 1880s that our Constitution had to be changed in order to bring about social justice.  Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Weatherman, SDS’s more radical offshoot, just struck a match and lit the fuse already connected to the dynamite.

Student radicals were recycling the anarchism in the United States of the 1890s to 1920s that had preached the virtues of dynamite, killing and wounding hundreds of innocent people across the nation.

In addition to dynamite, anarchists and socialist advocates of social justce historically have favored any behavior, such as sexual promiscuity and indulgence in drugs, that challenged accepted standards of social and political conduct.

After the riots, burnings, lootings, and bombings of that period, the Boomer ethos metamorphasized from terrorist action into self-absorbed sensual gratification.  Dropping out and doing drugs became a replacement for dynamite in the war to destroy old ideas of civic virtue. 

Today those radicals of the 60s and 70s are passionately ready to follow a new leader who promises to change everything. 

The alarming question is what hidden agenda for change does he represent?

Black liberation theology, the theology of the church attended by Senator Obama and his family for two decades, may reflect justifiable resentments by black citizens.  But its hateful rhetoric towards outsiders sounds alarmingly similar to that of Islamic jihad.

Squaring black liberation theology with the Senator’s campaign rhetoric about “bringing us together” is simply impossible.  Either Senator Obama hates white America and wishes God to destroy whites, or he is a hypocrite who panders to blacks without believing what he professes.

See Senator Obama and the Transformation of Human Nature and read Obama and Black Liberation Theology.

A key quote:

Why does Barack Obama belong to a church known to be a leader in a seemingly radical, black-centric, movement known as black liberation theology? And the follow-up question is this: How will Mr. Obama’s association with this movement influence his beliefs, ideas, and actions as president of the United States?

Mr. Obama has said that he has not heard many of the statements made by Mr. Wright. But it is likely that Mr. Obama knows about the philosophy, principles, values and teachings of black liberation theology, which is the foundation of his church — the wellspring from which Mr. Wright’s divisive rhetoric flows. Mr. Obama’s veracity and integrity, or at least his judgment, will be subject to question if he denies having detailed knowledge of black liberation theology. And if he knows about the movement, why would he align himself and his family with such a theology for some 20 years?

Only Love Can Drive Out Hate: Just Words?

By Marie Jon’

Barack Obama first appeared on the national political scene as a uniter with hope and promise in his words. In 2004 when he gave his now-famous keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, Americans saw Obama emerge as someone special and unique. He was young and oozed poise and charisma. Without a doubt, the Democrat Party had their future presidential candidate in its sights.

Today, the Democrat National Party is stuck with nothing more than a leftist ideologue politician who uses empty words to astound those who sought after him.

Obama has lost his “Angel of Light” status, and he will never get it back. Today we see the Senator for what he is, a Marxist socialist with ties to highly questionable people. By November he will not be electable.

It is obvious that Obama welcomed Rev. Jeremiah Wright into his personal and professional life as long as it was politically expedient. Indeed, he sought to have him there. Americans are not so naive as to fail to notice that certain cast members in the Obama drama life were Wright’s doing. The Reverend knows who is who in Chicago, and he opened doors for his highly-talented prodigy.

Obama’s close business affiliation with Tony Rezko, now on trial for corruption, is just the tip of the iceberg. Then there is William Ayers “I don’t regret setting the bombs” In a most perverse twist of fate, we have a radical home grown terrorist who should be behind prison bars to this day. Instead, he is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Amazing! Yet Obama claims to know less about Ayers than he did Wright.

During the campaign we’ve become privy to quite a few things we did not know about Obama. It is enough to conclude that he is not made of presidential timber. Americans ought to be opened-minded, but we must be informed as well.

Mr. Goodbar (in this case, Mr. Obama) had people fainting at his campaign events. What happened to their messianic figure? Looking for the wrong kinda love in the wrong places; like in the movie, Democrats have wound up dancing with the devil.

Barack Obama’s image was created by the media and based solely on his charisma. We have now seen enough of this elitist counterfeit to draw an educated conclusion: The real Obama can be known through the words of his bigoted, anti-American ex-pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Wright did us all a huge favor by making appearances throughout this past week. He provided us insight into the mind of Barack Obama. Through the personage of Wright, Americans have come face-to-face with the man who wants to become President. There is nothing left to ponder. America gets it. The heart of the suave, charming and well-spoken senator from Chicago is as twisted as the man who spiritually damaged Obama (and countless others) beyond repair.

In the midst of all this political disarray, Hillary Clinton will be tossed aside to satisfy the base of the Democrat Party. If Obama does not emerge the winner at the DNC Convention, Al Sharpton will conduct another Million Man March. Heaven forbid…

Be warned, however! Do not forget Rev. Wright’s words: He will heckle and dog Obama throughout the entire campaign; should he win the Oval Office in November, Wright has promised to make matters even worse.

Obama betrayed his followers, clinging to the worst side of human nature, harboring hate and bigotry behind the facade of an attractive, promising personality. He can denounce Wright to Kingdom Come, but people will never trust the man again.

For 20 years, Barack Obama sat in a church were Black Liberation theology was preached and practiced. It is not Christianity, but Marxism with Holy Scripture tossed in here and there to make hate speech sound like the language of a noble mission.

“The goals of BT are to turn religion into sociology, Christianity into a political agenda, Jesus into a black Marxist rebel, and the gospel into violent revolution. They are more interested in politics than preaching the gospel.”

From The Truth About Black Liberal Theology by Dr. Robert A. Morey, an internationally-recognized scholar in the fields of theology and apologetics, 1994.

Obama stayed at Trinity United Church for two decades without denouncing what he heard and witnessed. By doing and saying nothing, he allowed Rev. Wright’s demeaning and tragic conduct to continue before his little girls and wife, the latter of whom adopted notions that America was a bad country.

Where, is this man who would take on the ultimate responsibility for all of America’s citizens, was the protection and concern for his own precious family? If Obama had been a dutiful father and husband, he would have sheltered them from such bitterness and corruptive hatred.

Why did Obama permit Wright to taint the spirit of his immediate family and fill their minds with hateful thoughts regarding people who were not of color? Obama’s cold and calculating actions (and inactions) were rites of passage within Chicago’s leftist circles. Obama perceived that all of this was necessary in order to reach his ultimate goal. He put himself and his quest for political power before the welfare of his own family.

Obama was supposed to be the candidate that transcended race, yet we’ve never seen his entire family standing alongside him. Why? Because he is not who he has portrayed himself to be. Obama’s white relatives ? grandmother, cousins, aunts and uncles ? have never appeared with him. It is arguable that he has treated them shabbily and by virtue of this indeed does identify himself in mind as “the black candidate.”

Are Americans to believe that such a man has what it takes to lead our nation? In the words from “Dreams of My Father” lie answers to many of the questions Americans have been asking themselves. Read Obama’s thoughts and understand that this is a man who rejects his own flesh:

“I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, which I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.

“I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother’s race.

“It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.

“And, from “The Audacity of Hope”: “I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”

If unchecked, the Democratic National Committee’s course has the very real potential to set our country back forty years in race relations. It is all too clear that the Democrats have bred a race problem within their own party. Now they wish to infect all of America.

Let us send a clear message with our votes that we are not interested in having a continual, specious dialogue about race issues that were addressed years ago. America has only gotten better, not bitter, as some would have us believe.

The first black president will come from the party of Abraham Lincoln. Rest assured that this individual is well worth waiting for. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Huge areas of New Orleans still are wastelands.  New Orleans’s liberal-progressive-socialist Senator Mary Landrieu has grabbed far more than her share of Congressional pork.  Hundreds of millions of Federal dollars spent for rehabilitation have produced far too little beneficial result.  People were without electric power for months; the police department contained more thieves than honest law enforcers; drug-dealing and prostitution remain major enterprises; and the city still retains its crown as the nation’s murder capital.  One of the city’s few “legitimate” businesses is casino gambling. 

City and state administrations have yet to coordinate rebuilding plans, as politicians fight over who gets what share of the spoils.  The best that the city’s Mayor Nagin can do is to demand that the Democratic-socialist Party presidential candidates pledge to send even more pork to New Orleans.

What accounts for this dismal record?

The answer is simple.  New Orleans abandoned God and personal moral responsibility, turning instead to worshipping the atheistic, secular political state.  That secular god has failed miserably, notoriously so in the aftermath of Katrina.

Today, rebuilding devastated poor areas of the city is the work largely of church groups from elsewhere in the nation who send missionary construction teams.  Ultimately this may make for a better city in which people learn to help each other and to look to their own individual efforts and to Christian love for succor, rather than to the welfare-state god.

The Lord God, our Creator, is putting the god of socialism to shame.

Having been the largest and wealthiest city in the South after World War I, New Orleans after the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 stopped being fruitful and multiplying (Genesis 9:7).  Sugar plantations and other sources of economic activity surrounding the city were devastated, as they were three years ago by Hurricane Katrina.  The city’s ruling social clique settled into a self-centered, sensual social life.

Unhappily for New Orleans, Huey Long became Louisiana’s governor in 1928 and began building one of the nation’s first, full-bore, socialistic welfare systems.  Franklin Roosevelt became President five years later, nationalizing and expanding the welfare state.  Since then, generations of New Orleanians have made a career of living on welfare.  Poorly educated blacks, who comprised a large percentage of the population, remained poor and uneducated.

Instead of the American heritage of individual responsibility and moral probity, the city’s large welfare population was taught to sit at home and wait for the welfare-state dole.

While Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Mobile, and Memphis grew and prospered after World War II, New Orleans remained essentially stagnant.  The old-time social leaders, who also controlled politics and the press, were content to let New Orleans deteriorate into the “city that care forgot,” while singing “laissez-rouler les bons temps.” Apart from the brief few years in the 1980s of off-shore drilling activity headquartered in the city, the city has steadily lost more business than it retained.

Since 1978, the city has had only black mayors, and blacks have controlled nearly all of the city’s major political offices.  One might have expected them to do something constructive for the city’s poor blacks, such as cutting the crime rate, stopping the drug rackets, and improving education.  Instead, black leaders followed the precedent of the erstwhile white ruling class.  They adopted the old Louisiana conception of political reform: turn out the fat hogs and let in the lean ones.  Black leaders became just as centered upon getting rich and powerful at the expense of the public treasury as had been their white predecessors.

Unfortunately, black church leaders are excluded from the halls of power in the secular welfare state.

Responding to Labor Union Perspective, Peter A. List, Editor & Chief Blogger of the EmployerReport.com website, referred me to his essay The Labor Movement is Brain Dead (and it’s time to pull the plug).

Dying or not, labor unions remain, along with the extortionate, class-action tort lawyers, the largest contributors and get-out-the-vote organizations wedded to the Democratic-socialist party.