Liberal fascism rising

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a lovely sentiment found in the comments section here at RealClearPollitics (I can’t seem to find a way to link it directly, but it was posted on March 23 at 2:55 AM). I include it because I think it’s an excellent example of the mentality of the most rabid variety of Pelosi/Obama supporter, mask removed.

You may recognize the type. The ascendance of tyranny always unleashes the aggressive fantasies of punkish thugs, who then sometimes become the willing aggressive (and often violent) repressive tools of the new regime, if the new regime happens to require their services, which it usually does:

We are in control now, doofus. And there ain’t a @#$%& thing you can do about it, so just keep throwing your silly little online temper tantrums. For what it’s worth I hope it made you feel better.

Think you’ll vote us out? Go for it! We might lose some seats this November but no worries, we’ll get them back soon enough. Because thanks to amnesty – which WILL pass before the 2012 elections, you can bet on it – there will be another twenty million reliable and highly motivated voters on our side, which is more than enough to tip the electoral balance permanently. Know what that means, hillbilly? It means your side will never control Congress, Senate, or the White House again. Ever.

Fight us in court? Dream on. As you well know, the courts already lean more to our side than to yours. And that will only become more solid as time passes, for the very same reasons that “conservative” votes are more futile every year.

Civil disobedience? Please, by all means get yourself arrested. You won’t achieve anything else. And believe me, we’re OK with that. At least then you’ll be off the streets for a while. (And getting three hots and a cot – and guess what, FREE MEDICAL CARE – from the generous progressive state you profess to detest.)

Armed rebellion? That’ll be fun to watch. Can you say “squashed like a bug,” Wolverine? Bring on your popguns and bean shooters. You’ll soon learn who controls the BIG guns. (Here’s a hint: it ain’t you.)

Secession? Oh, please! See Armed Rebellion, above.

Your best bet is to quit your pathetic posturing and get with the program, because I assure you there are plenty of us on the left who won’t waste their time talking to you as I did. Failing that, you really should emigrate, assuming you can find a country evil and desperate enough to admit your kind of right wing fascist scum. (Try Myanmar. Or maybe Saudi Arabia.) Honestly, the sooner you face the reality that people like you have no future in America the better off you’ll be.

WE are in control now, little boy. FOREVER.

Troll sounds like a cross between O’Brien in 1984 and a gangbanger. They are emboldened and drunk on recent events.

Stop the whining about “it can’t be repealed”

The New Neo Posted on by

I usually like Charles Krauthammer. But sometimes I find him incredibly and unnecessarily negative. Such as, for example, last night:

It can’t be repealed? Why not? I’m not going to answer that question in depth right now, but I’m working on a draft of a long essay about it.

I hear this defeatist attitude nearly everywhere. I could understand it if the nay-saying came from Democrats as a taunt, but it comes from Republicans as a lament. I disagree with the idea. One thing’s for sure, though—if most conservatives and Republicans have the same attitude as Krauthammer, it certainly won’t be repealed.

So I think this sort of talk needs to stop. Remember, there is no precedent for this bill and how it was passed against the will of the people, and we should not imagine that any precedent about not repealing entitlements would hold, either. As I’ve said several times, we are in uncharted waters. Let’s try not to lose our compass—and we may need our celestial navigation, as well.

HCR: Obama the Orwellian liar

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s something about the quality of Obama’s lies that is especially galling. They are not just ordinary lies, but outrageous inversions of the truth, almost a mockery of the truth.

Take a look at the following selections from his victory speech last night and you’ll see what I mean (my interpolations are in brackets):

Tonight’s vote is not a victory for any one party…

[This is said of the most partisan bill in history. It garnered not a single Republican vote and not even all of the Democrat votes. Thirty-four of the latter were given permission to vote “no” in an attempt to save their own butts in 2010.]

It’s a victory for the American people.

[This said of a bill that was opposed by over half and as much as two-thirds of said American people, depending on the polls. I bet most of them don’t feel all that victorious right now.]

And it’s a victory for common sense.

[This said of a bill that is unbelievably Byzantine, fails to incorporate obvious fixes such as tort reform and portability of private insurance, and violates the common sense knowledge that there is no free lunch by hiding its true costs in accounting tricks and games.]

About Massachusetts and the HCR vote: I just realized…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that Democrats in Congress just gave a big FU to the people of Massachusetts, arguably the most liberal state in the union.

Think about it—it was Massachusetts that only two short months ago elected a Republican senator to fill what had long been Teddy Kennedy’s seat, for the express purpose of sending a message to Washington that it didn’t want this bill. It is Massachusetts that has a special burden and no need for this legislation because it already is being stressed to the fiscal max by Romneycare. And it is Massachusetts that has supported the Democratic Party perhaps more strongly than any other state, ever since the second half of the twentieth century—which included being the only state to have voted for George McGovern in 1972.

Some thanks Massachusetts gets. Under the bus with it!

Dog bites man once again: health care reform passes the House 219-212

The New Neo Posted on by

So the dirty deed is done. A sad day for this country, but now another fight—actually, series of fights—begins. We need to be energized and not discouraged.

Every single Republican in the House voted against this bill, and there were 34 Democrats joining them. I am not a Congressional historian, but it seems to me that this type of split has never occurred before—certainly not for any major transformative legislation. So it’s “historic” in that way as well.

That sort of vote breakdown is beyond non-bipartisan: passage without even a single opposition member’s vote to provide cover as well as over 13% of the members of the majority party against it! If I am correct about the unprecedented nature of such a split, there’s a reason it’s not happened before—we’ve never had a party with such huge majorities that was so ideologically extreme and out of step with the people, and therefore so committed to passing a widely unpopular bill and dragging Americans down a road they don’t want to traverse.

I hope it comes back to destroy them as a force in politics for a long long time to come.

[ADDENDUM: I didn’t see it because I could not bear to watch the proceedings, but I keep reading that Boehner made a great speech. I realize a great speech at this point is quite irrelevant—perhaps it always was, once the election results of 2008 came in. But I note it because it indicates to me the possibility that Republicans and conservatives, both in politics and on the street, will be energized as never before by the passage of this bill, joined by simpatico independents and even Democrats who don’t like it either. That’s the coalition that elected Scott Brown in Massachusetts.]

Pro-choice Democrat women…

The New Neo Posted on by

…are angry at Obama (see also this) because he threw them under the bus.

But why, why, why would they be the least bit surprised? Actually, here’s an answer from the comments section at Firedoglake:

They’re idiots if they didn’t see this coming a mile back down the road. NOW and the other women’s groups were duped by our photogenic fuhrer. He could care less about us and our stinking rights.

They are learning one of the first rules about getting into bed with a tyrant: his word means nothing, he could care less about anyone and their stinking rights, and he will betray allies if it seems expedient.

But they already knew that if they been been paying attention. Either they weren’t, or they must have thought it was okay because the crocodile would eat them last.

Inspirational quotations for the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Mark Twain time travels:

…Rome’s liberties were not auctioned off in a day, but were bought slowly, gradually, furtively, little by little; first with a little corn and oil for the exceedingly poor and wretched, later with corn and oil for voters who were not quite so poor, later still with corn and oil for pretty much every man that had a vote to sell””exactly our own history over again.

And here’s de Toqueville, from Democracy in America Part II:

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives.
—
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?…

The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits.

And finish up with my favorite (I know, I know, you’ve seen it before)—Dostoevsky,from the “Grand Inquisitor” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov:

Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?

Passing health care reform by hook and by crook

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I’m not planning to watch this thing live on TV; don’t want to start throwing heavy objects. But I will keep up with it periodically as the day wears on.]

By the title of this post you can see that I have virtually no doubt that health care reform will pass today (although I would dearly love to be wrong). For quite some time I have felt that, even if Pelosi/Obama didn’t quite have the votes yet, or know exactly how it would be accomplished, it would be done—if they had to use every trick in the book and invent a few besides. But once the vote was actually scheduled I became about as certain as a person can be of such a thing in this uncertain world.

And so it goes. And so they have. And so it will.

The details matter because they show us what the Democrats are capable of: even if ploys such as the Slaughter solution are not used in the end, it seems pretty clear that they would have been employed if needed. We are in a purely pragmatic and strategic world here.

Stupak will be placated one way or another (if he is needed, that is; if not needed he will be allowed to vote “no”). Right now it appears that Stupak may be in the process of changing his vote to “yes” by means of President Obama issuing an executive order that specifies there will be no federal funding for abortion in the HCR bill.

That strikes me as odd on two counts. First, why would Stupak believe that Obama wouldn’t just issue that order, and then another a day or two later that takes it back, once the vote is over? It’s not as though the President has shown a marked proclivity to stick to his word.

Of course, the answer to that may be that Stupak doesn’t much care—he just wants temporary cover to justify his own vote “yes,” no matter what ends up happening on the merits. If the deal ends up falling through, he can say he was duped but acted in good faith to protect his principles—and perhaps someone somewhere will actually believe him. I doubt the pro-life folks will swallow it, however (see this).

Second (and please forgive me for the quaint attention I’m about to pay to what is fast becoming an archaic and outdated concern—constitutionality and separation of powers) would this be legal? If so, I’m sure previous presidents would have loved to have known that they too could have overridden/re-interpreted any provision of an act of Congress merely by issuing an executive order saying voila! It does not exist! (And no, this executive order as described would not be the equivalent of a signing statement.)

What’s more, even if Obama could perform that particular magic trick, what would happen during reconciliation (assuming, of course, that there ever is a reconciliation process for this bill)? The Senate has a majority that seems to want federal funding for abortion, and at least does not want to forbid it outright. If Senators refuse to incorporate a provision banning federal abortion funding in the new Senate bill, does Obama then issue a new executive order banning it once again? And then what happens when the whole thing goes back to the House? Or does none of that happen, and this present bill gets signed into law, and those House members who think it will be amended just get thrown under a waiting fleet of buses in time-honored Pelosi/Obama tradition? Or will it all be “fixed” by subsequent bills?

And what of Obama’s and Pelosi’s far left supporters, who will be none too happy with this executive order? And what of all those right-to-life Representatives who told Pelosi a while back that they would refuse to vote for the present HCR bill if it contains Stupak language? Would they be likely to vote for it knowing about Obama’s contemplated executive order? Will the bill and the order occur simultaneously? If not, which will come first? And if the bill comes first, why would Stupak vote for it on a mere promise of Obama’s executive order, and why would the anti-Stupak faction vote for it with the threat of the same executive order hanging over their heads?

I must confess I have no idea how this would all wash, but in that respect I bet I’m not all that different from everyone else on the planet. We are in uncharted waters here—in fact, this entire administration and Congress represents uncharted and dangerous waters for America.