Last Night's Speech from the Throne

The pomp and splendor that attends a State of the Union address befits a king more than a chief executive of a constitutional republic.

Then again, what does our Constitution have to do with our increasingly regal presidency, which has incrementally appropriated monarchial powers for well over a century?

Since Wilson, every president has (with occasional exceptions, e.g. Carter in 1981) declined to simply send a letter to Congress conveying the state of the union. They've all opted for an ostentatious entry into the House chamber, transforming an administrative duty into a royal pageantry.

The President-King ascends to the dais and admonishes his subjects. The nation curtsies. Every network preempts regular programming - unthinkable that his majesty might appear on just one channel.

Washington kept his address to about ten minutes. Jefferson declined to appear, on grounds that doing so was akin to the English monarch's "Speech from the Throne."

Modern presidents, who mostly wouldn't make pimples on the aforementioneds' arses, tend to speak for an hour or so, demagogueing for the Welfare State, the Warfare State, or both (FDR, LBJ, both Bushes). No attempt is made to justify the various expansions of government on constitutional grounds. Always, there is a crisis in need of government action.

The very staging of such an event precludes humility, or even a modicum of the restraint that our Constitution was designed to impose on government.

The Imperial Presidency is not new. Culpability for this lamentable fact runs across the spectrum.

Blame the Supreme Court for abandoning Original Intent in favor of some contrived, organic constitution which inhales and exhales with every statist scheme emanating from academic pinheads. Instead of amendments, this constitution has shadows and penumbras, which one has to have special dispensation to read.

Blame the Congress, for abdicating it's duties and responsibilities. Members inveigh against unpopular wars, but fail to exercise their obligation and power to defund them. They recoil in mock horror at abuse of power from the executive branch, while creating evermore executive departments. They place sole blame on the president for budget deficits, when spending bills originate exclusively in the House.

Blame We the People. We don't vet candidates. We don't read the Constitution. We stay loyal to one of the parties, when both have proven to be the chief threats to our liberties.

While presidential hubris is well entrenched, Barack Obama carried it to a new level last night.

For seventy minutes he waxed petulant and imperious, lashing out at the Senate, the Supreme Court, oil companies, affluent people, Constitutionalists, and opponents of global warming dogma. Here was his broadside against the latter:

I know there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change.

Our radical young president acknowledged and dismissed his opponents all in one breath. You can't do that and make a credible claim to being open to the ideas of others.
Oh, but you can dissemble - claiming to eagerly desire dialogue, while what you mean is: "we are going to discuss the matter, and then we are going to do it my way."
Truth is relative, according to the original Chicago organizer, Saul Alinsky. Insolence, he taught, is the proper attitude for a change agent. Obama, as a Chicago organizer, taught Alinsky's methods. Now he is using them against the Constitution, and anyone who in any way opposes him.
Even after pushing federal deficits to unprecedented levels, Obama continued to blame our debt problem on Bush. Then he told the most blatant of several lies - that he is going to bring down the deficit beginning in 2011. Obama knows that those who can count and connect dots will make the following observation:

Taking spending to record levels over the next year, then freezing a portion of said spending, WILL NOT REDUCE THE DEFICIT!

"The politics of change," Alinsky's concept as applied by Obama, calls for masses of people to be mobilized in the cause of deliberately vague ideology. The hope is that the masses will be naive enough, or too busy, to notice that the Emperor has no clothes.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.!

In other words, the Wizard doesn't want you to notice the specifics of what he says about the deficit. Just trust him to be your brain, your heart, and your courage.

And get that damn Toto out of here before he gets on talk radio or Fox news and exposes the whole charade!

Class Envy: Tool of Tyrants

Alinsky, patron saint of community organizers, including our current president, saw life as a struggle between Haves and Have-Nots. Freedom is found by the Have-Nots taking power away from the Haves.

The theory works well in the classrooms of tenured Marxist professors. In history, not so much. The Have-nots rid France of King Louis XVI. The result: an obtuse monarch was replaced by a bloodthirsty mob. Order was restored by the imperious tyrant, Napolean. In Russia, the Czars were autocratic and out of touch with their subjects. Lenin rallied the Have-nots, then he and Trotsky instituted a reign of terror, which gave way to a tidal wave of terror in the person of Stalin. Life is not a struggle between Haves and Have-Nots. It is an inner struggle between flesh and spirit. Does Christ rule in my heart, or does my own corrupt flesh rule?

Obama is still blaming the out of control federal deficit on Bush, even though he will add as much debt in his first two years as Bush did in eight. Obama ran for president as an advocate for the Have-Nots against the Haves - yet bailouts for the uber-rich continue, while the unemployed are basically told, "be thou warmed and fed." Obama ran as the fill-in-the-blank candidate. "Hope" and "change" - deliberately vague terms. What were you hoping for? Unsophisticated voters inserted every pipe dream they ever held, and looked to their Messiah (he did run with a messianic theme) to fulfill....

Oops. Obama-flesh is no more sanctified than Bush-flesh, although it promises much more.

Let's pray that a Stalinesque figure doesn't step in to pick up the mess.

One full year of Obama

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works...

One year ago today, President Obama directed this cheap shot at advocates of constitutional government. His comments - dismissive of those who would reduce the central government back to its legal limits - echoed candidate Obama's bigoted remarks about people in mid-America who "cling to their guns and their bibles."

Out of the other side of his mouth, Obama made conciliatory remarks about working with opponents and receiving their ideas. He meant, of course opponents who agree with him about an unlimited role for government.

Marginalizing the millions of Americans who don't like the ongoing nullification of the tenth amendment apparently wasn't enough.

All major news outlets were expected to spread palm leaves, and make a straight path for the One.

One news outlet offered token resistance (they allow air time for dissidents). Obama's minions declared war on Fox.

The war didn't go so well. It only enhanced Fox's standing as the favored source for news broadcasts, and increased the profile of their mostly conservative programming.

This entire episode was emblematic of the ineptitude of the new administration. There was the terror inflicted on Manhattan by the surprise flyover of Air Force One, the appointment of Wall Street insider/ tax evader Tim Geithner to run Treasury, and the appointment and firing of self avowed Communist and "truther" Van Johnson as one of the "czars."

Finally an Islamic jihadist in our own army killed 14 people at Ft. Hood, and Obama responded with less vigor than was shown against Fox.

All of this contributed to a Republican victory in the Massachusetts Senate race yesterday.

Contrary to the chirpy Sean Hannity's annoying comments today, Brown's victory does not amount to a repudiation of big government in America, least of all in Massachusetts.

The electorate of Massachusetts, which inflicted five decades of Kennedys in the Senate on us, has not turned away from its love of Statism, or its affinity for Socialism.

Harvard elitists - reflecting the mindset of most New England voters - accept big government as a given, but have judged Obama as a failure in implementing it. It might even be unfortunate if this setback causes the administration to learn discretion, thus hiding its contempt for those who deign to dissent.

The risk is that Obama will learn to hide his contempt for working Americans and succeed.

That would be bad for America.

Three Courageous Southerners

This week marks the birth dates of three courageous Southern men:

Martin Luther King - January 15th

Robert E. Lee - January 19th

Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson - January 21st

King is honored with a national holy day. For the growing percentage of working people who are employed by government, or by government regulated business, (full disclosure: I'm in that favored category) it's a welcome day off. Federal employees enjoy ten of these national holy days, courtesy of the involuntary donations the government collects from less privileged Americans.

Personally, I'm not enthused about holy days in honor of flawed humans. Christmas commemorates the birth of the only flawless human, and is an exception, with one caveat: Jesus was certainly not born around winter solstice. Nevertheless, hearing "...come let us adore him..." - in public, in post-Christian, lawyer-laden, America - blesses my soul.

Objecting to holy days for humans - Columbus Day, MLK Day, Presidents' Day (nee' Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays) - doesn't negate the fact that birth dates of great people do afford opportunities to reflect on their legacies.

Enter Martin Luther King, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson.

The three have two things in common: They were Southerners, and they were remarkably courageous.

Many Conservatives object to honoring King because of his philandering, plagiarism, and Communist associations. Count me among those that see those things as fair game for discussion.

And to reiterate, I don't care much for holy days that honor mere men, anyway.

Where I part with many Conservatives is in my genuine admiration for King's courage. I also happen to appreciate his oratorical skills.

Martin Luther King knew for several years that he was a likely target for assassination, yet he continued to speak out boldly, publicly, for what he believed.

While King's consorting with communists is censorable, let's save some contempt for certain of his contemporaries…like the cowardly reprobates who killed four little girls in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, eh?

I also happen to admire him as an orator. For me, words like, "I have a dream....," and judging men by "the content of their character, not by the color of their skins," are keepers, rightly preserved for the ages. Our current crop of race mongers - Sharpton and Jackson; Eric Holder and Jimmy Carter - are frauds largely because their collectivist politics lead them to regard color over character.

My other two courageous Southerners are at least as worthy of honor as MLK. But there character is often impugned because of their association with the lost cause of Southern Independence.

Lincoln referred to both Lee and Jackson as traitors, which is remarkable because in the spring of 1861, he offered Lee command of the entire Federal army, on the recommendation of then top General Scott, who regarded Lee as the finest officer in the Army.

Lee declined the offer, resigned his commission, and the rest is history...

...Except that history has been distorted.

The average person has been greatly misinformed about the War for Southern Independence.

But in school we learned Lee and Jackson fought to preserve slavery.

Wrong! They fought to preserve Virginia, when she was invaded by what was to become the most powerful army ever formed up to that time. These invaders marched through Washington D.C. singing John Brown's Body, an ode to the terrorist who once pulled four men out of their beds and murdered them in cold blood.

(Julia Ward Howe, whose husband helped finance Brown's ill-fated takeover of the Harper's Ferry arsenal, changed the words of John Brown's Body into a horrendous ditty celebrating the slaughter of secessionist southerners. Millions of Christians have sung The Battle Hymn of the Republic in church, oblivious to the fact that they are equating the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of other Christians with God's work.)

Lee unequivocally opposed slavery. Jackson – the Rosa Parks of his day - demanded that the young black people in his Sunday school class be allowed to sit with him in the front of the church (for context consider that Lincoln regarded blacks as inferior and advocated sending them all out of the country).

If Lee and Jackson fought for slavery, Ike and Patton fought for Stalin.

Robert E. Lee carried on friendly correspondence with Lord Acton, the British statesman who said "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton wanted Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia to prevail, because he saw that Lincoln's victory would be a victory for "might makes right."

Where are the wise and courageous of our age who will overcome the ignorance and cowardice that threatens to enslave from it's fortress in Washington D.C?

Inane Race Baiting while they destroy our economy

It's somewhat gratifying to see the Democratic party's hypocrisy on race relations so blatantly displayed in the Harry Reid matter. The unique dance stylings of Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, and their ilk have given some comic relief as the party in power is momentarily diverted from their quest to destroy our nation's economy.





Every political or religious group has its double standards; but nobody models hypocrisy with as much elan as modern Progressives.





Let's make one thing perfectly clear: Harry Reid's comments about candidate Obama's "light-skinned" appearance and speaking patterns "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one" were simply Senator Reid's unvarnished appraisel of current Realpolitik; they weren't racist by any reasonable standard.



They were only racist according to criteria advanced by Progressive race hucksters to slander Conservatives.


Trent Lott made a comment on Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday to the effect that Thurmond should have been elected president when he ran as the "States' Rights" candidate back in 1948. Because Southern states rights' advocates supported racial segregation, Lott's remarks were taken out of context, and he was forced to resign his post as Senate majority leader.


Common sense would tell you that Lott was just trying to say something complimentary on a momentous occasion - the Senate was not on the verge of reinstituting segregation. Furthermore, Thurmond had long since renounced segregation, and would certainly not have won reelection so many times had he not done so.


Moreover, States' Rights, sans segregationism, was and is a valid political position, according to our national Constitution.



Harry Reid ought to resign his leadership position, just to maintain the delusion that his party's posturing on race relations has merit.



Then, hopefully, the good folks of Nevada can throw his sorry butt out of our government - not for these bogus charges of racism, but for his efforts to destroy our nation's economy, by creating record amounts of fiat money.



Said fiat money will result in inflation of our currency, which will lead to higher prices for neccessary items, including food and energy. This will hurt low and middle income people the most, and will belie the idea president's promise not to impose further taxes on them.



Let's not forget bipartisanship.



Throw out the Republicans, too!