What It Means To Be a Democrat Today...

It means that in a joint session of Congress, you permit the leader of a foreign nation to come before you and bash the Governor and the citizens of one of your states - a state under attack from that same foreign nation. And then you give the man a standing ovation.

It means that you permit the leader of a foreign nation to come before you and lecture you about putting the interests of foreign criminals ahead of the interests of citizens of the United States. A man whose own country has some of the strictest immigration laws in the world - which are methodically and brutally enforced. And then you give the man a standing ovation.

It means that you permit the leader of a foreign nation to come before you and mischaracterize a law that protects the sovereignty of the United States, in essence telling you that your borders no longer exist, and therefore, your country is no longer a sovereign nation. And then you give the man a standing ovation.

We will remember in November.

We will remember this sickening image.

The Argument of Tyrants.

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves.”

Those familiar with this quotation from William Pitt the Younger, who was the British Prime Minister around the time our Founding Fathers were penning the Constitution, might shake their heads sadly when contemplating the uncanny relevance of his words some 227 years after they were delivered in a speech to Parliament.

It would have been apt had he spoken them in the United States Congress in 2010.

After forcing us to witness the parade of unfortunate victims of medical insurance horror stories, used so despicably by Democrats as political props, we are being cajoled into believing that the intrusion of the federal government into our health care system is a “necessity.”

Now, go ahead and read the quote again.

How stupid do they suppose us to be? The current administration, with the help of its adoring media, harangues us daily with the necessity of dealing with the “crisis” of uninsured Americans. Of course, their big-government preferences for dealing with any problem, large or small, triggers a huge and inevitably malformed growth on the body politic – one with a trillion dollar price tag, a price tag the United States can ill afford in this time of the one true crisis: a faltering economy and high unemployment.

Lost in the wailing and hysteria during this latest power-grab by an Administration of elitists so smug as to believe that we, the unwashed masses, cannot possibly merit the freedom to pursue life, liberty, property and happiness without their guidance and direction, is the fact that the American free-market system would make this problem disappear if left to its own devices.

Simply put, markets work much better than manipulation.

If freed of the heavy hand of mandates and regulation, and if they wish to survive, health insurance companies would by necessity be more responsive to the needs of health consumers - in the same manner as an automobile manufacturer, or indeed, an automobile insurance company. They would be forced by consumer demand to be sensitive to the price and quality of the goods and services they provide to their customers.

All the things that free-market companies do to win and keep customers, coupled with common sense reforms including tort reform, competition across state lines and the lifting of the ridiculous anti-competitive mandates, would certainly result in lower premiums and hence, more coverage for more Americans.

But that does not feather in with the goals of this administration and the Democratic majority in Congress; goals which include dramatically expanding the power of the government over every aspect of our lives.

And so it has come to pass that those of us who oppose government-run health care because we find the abridgement of our individual liberties to be a crushing oppression are labeled as heartless.

Soon, we will be labeled as dangerous.

American men and women have died beneath a flag of stars and stripes for over 200 years, not for kings or presidents, but for the ideals represented by that flag – the recognition that the natural state of man on earth is freedom, and that no government has may impinge upon that freedom under any guise, including that of a perceived “necessity.”

Necessity does not give anyone a “right” to anything, a fact often obscured in debates such as this.

The rights given to us, according to the Declaration of Independence, by “nature and nature’s God” include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These rights, take notice, are rights to action, not rights to the fulfillment of needs or desires.

Rights cannot impose obligations upon other people, except the obligation to leave us to pursue our own interests unimpeded. Basically, we have the right to be left alone, so that free from obstructions, we can work for what we want, need and desire.

My right to life does not oblige my neighbor to feed and clothe me or my family – it merely gives me the right, no matter how hard the struggle may be, to feed and clothe my family by the sweat of my own brow.

My right to liberty ensures that I may act for my own benefit, keep the fruits of my labor, and that my neighbor – or my government – may not steal them from me. Conversely, I have no right or claim to the actions or property of another.

And finally, I have the right to pursue happiness, but may make no claim on others to provide me with it. If a “right” were to impose a duty upon another, it would be a violation of that person’s basic rights; we would become a society of master and slave.

When something is given for nothing it is charity; let’s not be afraid to call it what it is. Even if such charity is provided by the government, they must confiscate the wealth of others to do so, and so within the framework of our moral code in the United States, charity is not a right – no matter how much those in Congress wish to portray it that way.

Our country of free men and women has been wounded by this incursion into our liberties, and so this is a time for action; we have an obligation to our forebears, ourselves and our posterity. We’ve been asleep for far too long; we need to get up, get educated and vow to educate others. We must pledge to teach our children that entitlement programs such as the one being rammed down our throats are a curse, and in the long run a tool of enslavement.

Like those brave men and women of colonial America, we need to pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor to the cause of liberty – because without freedom, without our rights, what do we really have?

We will rally again my friends, on April the 15th. We will use our strong hearts and our strong voices to tell this government that we will not be cowed, that we will never give up, and that we will put this right again.

And finally, I leave you with the final, breathtaking words of William Pitt, uttered on his deathbed in 1806. I would ask you to never forget them. I know I won't.

“My country! Oh my country! How I love my country.”

YOU may be next....

...the next defacto "leader" of the Republican Party, that is. The Dems and the MSM are done focusing on Rush and Newt; currently they're gnawing on the bones of Dick Cheney in an attempt to divert the focus from the hijacking of America by the Obama administration.

While the United States constitution is sacrificed on the alter of globalism, the Democrat Party is sending out solicitations. The most recent one asks contributors for $202, the cost of a one-way ticket to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. "We need to help him [Cheney] off the national stage and back home to Wyoming. Please take a look at the itinerary we put together and then chip in to get him on a Greyhound bus out of town."

With the able assistance of the MSM, Obama is rapidly pursuing the change that he promised. Slow-witted as I am, I have finally come to realize that he makes no policy "mistakes" that might threaten his re-election - all his policy decisions are calculated to usher in a new era of American socialism. The constitution be damned; he knows that if he gets more than 50% of the voting population to be government-dependent, his party will never lose another election.

However, for the time being, it helps to "pick a target, isolate it, paralyze it and destroy it," as he learned from Saul Alinsky. This is the equivalent of the gladiatorial games used so effectively by the Roman emporers to distract the masses. The flavor-du-jour is Cheney.

Hypocrisy, thy name is DEMOCRAT!

I think there are probably very few people in this [Congressional hearing] room or in America who would say that torture should never, ever be used, particularly if thousands of lives are at stake. Take the hypothetical: if we knew that there was a nuclear bomb hidden in an American city and we believe that some kind of torture, fairly severe maybe, would give us a chance of finding that bomb before it went off, my guess is most Americans and most Senators, maybe all, would do what you have to do. So it’s easy to sit back in the armchair and say that torture can never be used. But when you’re in the fox hole, it’s a very different deal. And I respect, I think we all respect the fact that the President’s in the fox-hole every day. So he can hardly be blamed for asking you, or his White House counsel or the Department of Defense, to figure out when it comes to torture, what the law allows and when the law allows it, and what there is permission to do.

So who do you think uttered these eminently logical words? Don Rumsfeld? John Bolton? No, no. These are the words of Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) during a 2004 hearing on the subject of torture. Yes, that Senator Schumer. It just points up what many of us have suspected all along - Democrats are capable of logical thinking, but only when it suits them.

Obama's release of memos and photos accomplishes nothing, and is, of course, designed to demonize the previous administration - horns that the Republican Party and former administration officials would be foolish to wear. Somewhere along the line the definition of torture, when applied to the United States during the Bush administration, has been dumbed down to a level close to that of a frat-boy hazing; none of the techniques used so effectively rose to the level of REAL torture - like cutting the heads off kidnapped Western journalists with serrated scimitars. Is waterboarding frightening? Oh, yes. But torture? Oh, no. By now, I'm sure you all know that thousands of our military personnal undergo waterboarding as part of their training.

If you want proof that waterboarding was and is not torture, look no further than the fact that Christopher Hitchens, journalist, volunteered to undergo the procedure. True torture, in the sense that you and I understand it, is not something for which you volunteer in pursuit of a sidebar, but, having undergone it, Hitchens declared that waterboarding was, indeed, torture. It is possible that later that same day he went out for Chinese food with his wife, and I suspect he railed at the immorality of the United States somewhere between the wonton soup and the eggroll.

Torture, or in the case of the actions our country employed, enhanced interrogation techniques, cannot be viewed in a vacuum, but rather as an important cog in our entire intelligence apparatus. We are all aware of the "ticking time bomb" scenario, and those who would tell us that even if torture was necessary to defuse a nuclear weapon in an American city it should not be used, are guilty of a far, far greater level moral turpitude than those of whom they accuse it. There is a certain morality in protecting the lives of tens of thousands of innocent civilians, even it it means the temporary discomfort of a mass-murdering jihadist, don't you think? I do.

One could even make a case for moral turpitude if the practice was used arbitrarily, overly-often, or against low-level operatives with little or no intelligence value - but htis was never the case. we know now that, out of the thousands of enemy combatants that were detained, it was used against fewer than a handful, three, to be exact. And it was used succesfully: "“High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding [of al Qaeda]." The speaker of these words? Dennis Blair, Obama's national intelligence director. According to former National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, “We have people walking around in this country that are alive today because this process happened.”

All of this means nothing to the Democrats who are pushing for prosecutions, and that fact should forever paint them with shame, were they capable of feeling such an emotion.

Democrats have been guilty of these sorts of mentals hiccups for about 6 or 7 years now, forgetting that what they so roundly condemn today, they ardently supported when they actually thought, you know, that the security of the country they supposedly serve was paramount.

One can only wonder how many weapons that were previously at our disposal, and effectively used, BHO is going to proscribe. But here's a certainty - there is a tipping point beyond which our enemies will strike us with impunity, and thousands of Americans will pay for this recklessness with their lives.

The Clear Thinking of VDH.

VDH is, of course, Victor Davis Hanson: farmer, author, classicist, military historian, Democrat - and the clearest thinker and writer on the American political scene.

Mr. Hanson is also a self-described "contrarian."

I. I am not on the Obama bus

I followed the Obama senatorial campaign and even his early career in Chicago, and confess I was not impressed. I think on any occasion he announces a moral standard it is reactive—not proactive—and we can be sure it serves as cover for something of questionable morality. So when he says he won’t do something, it usually means he already has. Let us count the ways:

a) “Highest ethical standards” are proof we will get Richardson, Geithner, Daschle, Solis, etc. nominated who cannot or do not pay all their taxes—among other things. There will be only praise for, not silence about, tax-cheats and unethical players in Congress like Chris Dodd, John Murtha, or Charles Rangel. To suggest otherwise is to be cynical, sharp, partisan; most on the Left who preach about the Wall-Street/DC nexus and the “big guys” at the trough are silent on this disturbing new big money/Democrat connection.

b) Christian, Sermon-on-the-Mount declarations about forgiveness and ‘moving forward, not backward’ indicate that “Bush did it” is the now the standard throat-clearing before every speech abroad. Suggesting that we do not wish to drudge up the past is assurance that we will try to humiliate lawyers in the Justice Department who years ago gave opinions at a time of national crisis. Do we try federal judges whose opinions we don’t like?

c) Talking about “financial sobriety” and “halving the deficit” guarantee that we will triple the annual deficit, and add more to the national debt in eight years than we did in aggregate since the founding of the republic.

d) Soaring rhetoric about the reset button, a new softness, more listening, a new page, etc. assure us that we will have no moral compass, and treat Venezuela like Columbia, Georgia like Russia, Iran like Iraq—the more we hear of a new morality, the more we know there will be no moral distinctions.

e) The demonized percentile who makes over $250,000 who alone will be taxed—won’t be alone to see new taxes. Confiscate all their cash and you still cannot pay off debts piling up at $1.7 trillion per year. So gas, cigarette, alcohol, taxes will climb and soon even that will not be enough. The more we do not hear that, the more it is coming

f) The more Bush gave us “false choices” and shredded the constitution, the more Obama will adopt FISA, email intercepts, wiretaps, renditions, Bush’s Iraq plan, the same old in Afghanistan, etc. Let us see whether Guantanamo closes within a year: watch especially the reaction to the poor teen-aged Somali pirate and ask yourself whether this administration wishes to repeat that again and again—or whether other countries wish to have their framed, railroaded, tortured, and misunderstood pseudo-terrorists back on the streets of Berlin, Paris, or Cairo. Again, when one on Team Obama trashes Bush the law shredder, then assume that we have already adopted his security protocols.

g) We are postracial, transracial, multicultural, etc. and rightfully so don’t talk about ‘Hussein,’ or one’s ethnic background, etc. But abroad? All that qualification simply means YOU don’t dare do it, but HE does, all the time, everywhere, both to sway world opinion and ever so gently to distance himself from America’s past when convenient : so the first thing on the Latin American summit table is “race.” Arabs are told to be comfortable because of Barack’s names, first and second and third, his Muslim father, his non-traditional background. In other words, anytime anyone in the US is told that racism is lurking its ugly head around every corner, be assured that Obama will broadcast his race and heritage to Europeans, Turks, Arabs, and Latin Americans. The two behaviors are joined at the hip. The warning always follows its antithesis.

II. I do not understand the morality of the Left. Let me get this straight: catching the beheader and architect of mass murder Khalid Sheik Mohammed and waterboarding him in Guantanamo at the zenith of worry about more 9/11s, anthrax attacks, and the European bombings is outright torture, an horrendous stain on the US (cf. what FDR did to saboteurs caught on the east coast during WWII). But blowing up the heads of two Somali pirates during negotiations or incinerating houses of suspects in Waziristan (lots of “collateral” as they say in Hollywood) is ok? Did I miss the habeas corpus, Miranda rights, Army Field Manual rules, appeals, etc. that were followed in the nano-second between the trigger pulling and the heads exploding?

More of this brilliant essay is here.

Administration Deals American Public a Left Hook, a Right Cross and an Uppercut.

If you’ve been scratching your head wondering just what the hell this administration is doing, I think you had better start wearing a hat before you give yourself brain damage.

In a week of stunning cluelessness, our government has strung together three haymakers, once again utterly baffling right-thinking Americans across the fruited plain. Right-thinking Americans who want to stay alive, that is.

Let’s do this in no particular order. First the left hook: The President and his crew have decided that a symbol synonomous with the name of Jesus needed to be hidden when Obama spoke at Georgetown University, which, for those of you who have not picked up on this, is a Catholic university. Having taken away the risk of offending atheists everywhere, Obama has managed to offend Christians everywhere.

But, really, from this man did you expect anything different? If Obama is at the podium, his handlers certainly don’t want the public reminded that there may be someone greater than he. MAY be. They’re not sure.

Here comes the right cross: In a memo to the nation’s law enforcement agencies that would qualify as the most damaging, divisive, derisive, demeaning and never-to-be-topped-were-it-not-for-the-fact-that-we-still-have-almost-four-years-to-go, Obama’s Homeland Security czar has smeared the military, Christians, anti-immigrationists, states-righters, pro-lifers and those that “are antagonistic towards the new presidential administration.”

The report, entitled Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment pretty much paints you as apotential domestic terrorist if you hold views that are not in line with the administrations. Dangerous stuff, to be sure. Great way to thank the active military, too - pointing them out as potential recruits for extremist nut-jobs. Extremist nut-jobs being, of course, those who disagree with Obama's policies.

And finally, the uppercut. The Justice Department is releasing never-before-published documents describing “harsh” interrogation procedures used by the CIA when questioning terrorist madmen who think the only thing better than massacring a thousand Americans is massacring ten thousand Americans.

I’m not making this up. I wish that I were.

The JD promises no prosecutions. Big deal. In one of the most disgusting acts of political grandstanding it has ever been my misfortune to comprehend, the demonization of America, by Americans, becomes more important than protecting the lives of American citizens. If you’re not sick, I mean really sick, to be reading this, I don’t know what to tell you.