“Be conservative, live well within your means, avoid leverage”

Actually; now might be the time for some. Money is cheap now and if you are going to repay your fixed rate loan in a high inflation environment….. which, hopefully, will be taking in money at current [inflated /ing] prices / rates….

Brave New World leads to 1984, it’s the only way to sustain it.

I agree that it’s not either/or, it’s both/and. The problem however is that the cultural battle has already been fought and won, by the left. The 2012 election and the opinions of the young demographic, confirm that regrettable fact.

Demography is destiny, when cultural trends support it.

Obama IMO, intends to run the table and in his ideological hubris shall lead us into a very dark place. America is not going to like its coming depression nor the foreign ‘adventures’ that await us.

But in four years he will exit the stage and leave us with the consequences of his ‘policies’. At that point, it will be hard to rationally sustain the memes he and the democrats have used.

But man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal. So the question is, will enough Americans in 2016 put aside their pride, face the consequences of their prior choices and willingly if reluctantly pay the price for their choices or will they rationalize once again and demand, that convenient scapegoat ‘the rich’ pay the cost?

Oh good, that will be a monumental failure. Just as M. Obama’s school lunch program is turning out to be.

99.9% of children are not in the least interested in those things. They will not pay attention, nor do their homework and the outcry from parents will be deafening when they see what their children are being ‘taught’.

It’s encouraging to see that degree of ideological tone deafness upon Obama’s part. Children are not robots, nor can they be made to be without the degree of oppression N. Korea employs.

America is far from ready for that, Obama’s hubris is leading him to really overplaying his hand. This will do more to alienate liberals than almost anything else he could do.

Counter-intuitively, this is an outstanding development. If American liberals ever do awaken, (before its too late) it won’t be due to conservative efforts, it will be because the left crossed a bridge too far.

But speaking to your main point—in order to even have a chance at winning that fight at the ballot box that you speak of, that’s where the cultural battle comes in. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.

That may well be true. But while its certainly needed, it’s fatally incomplete. Until we have a really tough, Balanced Budget Amendment, we will not be able to stop the growth in entitlements and the growth of our dependency class.

The only way to stop a representative democracy’s susceptibility to Tocqueville’s dictum; “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” is to cut off Congress’ ability to bribe the public by Constitutionally limiting America to having to live within its economic means.

Prior generations understood the need for fiscal sustainability but the Gramscian march of the last 50 years has changed that.

Clearly, we do not currently have the votes needed or the political consensus to achieve that amendment and we may never have it but there is no other option for fiscal sustainability.

Fiscal collapse into sovereign bankruptcy is now mathematically unavoidable.

When that occurs, the struggle will be between the advocates of liberty and a return to fiscal sanity and those who wish to sell their heritage for the false promise of socialistic security.

That conflict will be settled at the ballot box. Which does not bode well for America.

1984 looms on the not too distant horizon. By 2084 we shall most probably have it.

Knowingly or not, America is voting for it.

Of the 50 states, 46 have agreed, as well as D.C.

Was there a vote of the people or the legislatures? No.

The Obama administration said you have to participate to get the grants. The money was part of Obama’s stimulus plan.

the Bill Gates Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave more than $100 million to develop the plan, and it’s parceled out to publishers, public television, George Soros’ “Center for American Progress,” universities, school districts and even teachers’ unions.

Think back to just before Obama’s first presidential election.

Remember, his telling a cheering crowd, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

What did that mean?

http://www.wnd.com/2012/12/obamas-stealthy-education-takeover/

Of course they have a choice. They choose not to exercise it because it would offend those whose financial support for the Republican party is the largest. The Republican leadership is protecting the financial status quo. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, they’re doing this primarily because they believe that the political survival of their party requires it. To win elections requires the financial leverage that money provides.

Were that not their motivation, Boehner could easily take the ‘raise taxes on the rich’ off the table by immediately agreeing to them, which then places the cuts on the table.

By taking raising taxes on the rich off the table, Boehner could then credibly state; no cuts, no deal and make that characterization irrefutable because he pulls the ‘rug’ out from under Obama by taking away Obama’s meme.

Obama can play political theater with the fiscal cliff for the reasons neo just stated. Republicans can ‘do nothing’ because Obama is threatening their financial base and they’re convinced that, to stay politically viable, they must have that financial base.

What both they and their big donors don’t see is that every incremental ‘compromise’ with Obama, brings closer the day when they won’t have any money to donate because Obama plans to implement changes that will result in continual redistribution of their wealth.

Obama understands, as few supporters of socialism do, that socialism, in time must become communistic. It must because when it runs out of “other people’s money” i.e. their income, it turns to their assets (by raising the death tax) to continue the ‘shell game’ that natural economic laws show socialism to be…

You write:

ultimately what your watching is not what most think they are watching. they are watching the president exercise control over the other party and make one party. ie. the other party has no choices but to do what he wants. period. this is the key step for Gliechshaltung. now that society is on his side, the press is on his side, white women are on his side against their mates, races are against white men as the scapegoats, the economics is about to get bad (and outcomes in control of the power base), and so on and so on… he needs them to fold… or be crushed if they refuse.

once this happens, then you will see everyone run for the doors like a bon fire was lit… from there on, no one has any alternative representation and so on one wants to be on the wrong side.

the point is bigger than anyone realizes…

I don’t know where you’ve been for the last month in terms of your reading, but that is exactly and precisely what a huge segment of the right has been saying (and thinking, including me) ever since the election. So, people do realize.

You continually make the strange error of thinking nobody sees this. Plenty do (in fact, we’re seeing a small taste of it right now in willingness of some of the Congressional Republicans to cave to Obama). The only part of what you write here that many (if not most??) people on the right are unaware of are the details of how these things played out in Soviet times. The rest has been fairly clear, at least as a strong possibility, since the election. That’s why the right has been so devastated by it. And that’s why people are focusing on cultural changes (education, media, entertainment etc.) as the only possible way out.

Granted, some people on the right don’t see it that way and think we’ll come roaring back in 2016. But I think that group is a small minority. The real argument on the right is whether there is anything we can do that can reverse these trends over the long haul, or not—and if so, what. And from my reading, there isn’t really too much argument about the “what,” because most people seem to think it’s trying to do something about those Big Three—education, media, and entertainment—and the messages they send.

Some combination of those two things gives him the strength to refuse to compromise. I’m well aware of that, and that the situation is very unusual and perhaps unique in terms of US presidents who have come before him (for example, even FDR was stopped when he tried court-packing). So I know why Obama feels empowered to do this.

My question was a different one, and more about history: had another president ever taken such a hard line with a House controlled by the opposite party?