America has always been a great and grand country. Her enormous expanse is a direct reflection of the enormous heart of Her people. There is a generosity in the American spirit that is matched only by Her wildness; she is born of an inherent restlessness that over the course of two short centuries has spurred both jaw-dropping exploration and seemingly miraculous innovations, and the founding freedoms that encourage them have been a beckoning inspiration to the rest of the old and weary world.
I see America today standing at a crossroads, for Her generous and trusting heart may be Her undoing. She has always struggled to balance her fierce, wild independence with the human need for the safety of the collective; the last few tumultuous decades culminated in the 2008 election of someone who used soaring rhetoric to speak directly to that human need to belong. It was rhetoric the likes of which the younger generation had never heard and both wary and weary of the realities of responsible citizenship, they eagerly fell under the spell of its hypnotic rhythms.
Those who actually listened to the words knew there was nothing good afoot. And, indeed, the first 200 days of Obama’s presidency have proved this to be true. The progressive, liberal, left-wing ideologies of Pater Knows Best came fast and furious, crushing an already crashing economy and promptly sunk this nation into mind-boggling, multiple generations of debt. Policies previously derided and formerly vocally and visibly protested have been hypocritically (even if rightly) adopted and adapted by this new administration, while promises of transparency are countered by an ever-increasing number of presidential appointees who are no longer accountable to the people or to those in Congress sent to represent them.
But like any wild animal, no matter how seemingly tame, that inherent American wildness remains intact. As the differences between the words and actions of President Obama and his administration make clear an ideology so at odds with the United States Constitution, those who could not find the words for their initial unease are now at last starting to come to terms with it. They are beginning to identify it, and to call it by its real name: enemy. And though it confuses and chagrins them to see that enemy is within America’s own borders, they have begun to speak out.
The reemergence of America’s untamed spirit has taken the left by surprise. They mistook tameness for tacit agreement and they have been unable to reconcile their gloating “I won” perspective with the August recess townhalls filled with citizens questioning their Congressional representatives. Blinking like proverbial deer in the headlights they have been taken aback by the very core of the questioning:
When did you stop serving US?
And to their discredit, because they are incapable of feeling shame, they have not handled it well at all.
Hip-hop President Obama got himself all “wee-weed up”, beating his chafed campaign stump harder than ever to try to salvage his plummeting poll numbers. Nancy Pelosi has taken to dismissing average American citizens, even her own constituents, as “astroturf”, while Robert Gibbs finds himself lumbering in tap shoes two sizes too small as he tries to wave away both the dangerous and the stupid actions of his boss. And he who represents both the best and the most unaccountable worst of both capitalism and simple humanness1, Obama supporter George Soros, is bankrolling television ads and hiring people to go to health care reform townhall meetings to try to silence the questions and opposition protests of ordinary citizens. And all the while self-proclaimed communists now seated within the Obama inner circle call on their homies to boycott the advertisers of cable news opinion shows who dare to ask questions and who dare to connect the dots and who – in direct contrast to the countless spineless, so-called professional reporters in the mainstream media – then dare to tell America exactly what is going on behind that curtain in Oz.
It is time to ask the tough questions. And it is time to demand answers. What could possibly be the reason for President Obama and certain members of Congress to surround themselves with self-avowed Marxists, communists, socialists, revolutionaries, and anti-capitalists? While freedom of speech and thought is everyone’s right and therefore are certainly to be supported, are Marxists, communists, socialists, revolutionaries, and anti-capitalists really the kind of people ordinary Americans want advising the President, effectively running the country by writing legislation?
“This legislation [stimulus bill] is the first step in building a clean energy economy that creates jobs…. The Apollo Alliance2 has been an important factor in helping us develop and execute a strategy that makes great progress on these goals and in motivating the public to support them.”
(Harry Reid)
Why does America need “a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as our military? A civilian national security force under the control the government, of course, and intended to fight against…who? We already have the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force, and the National Guard to protect our country. Does President Obama and his administration see Americans now standing up in protest of their cadre of Marxists, communists, socialists, revolutionaries, and anti-capitalists and the ideas spewing forth from them as some sort of enemy against whom force will be necessary? Based on the immediate reactions to squelch any kind of criticism of the President, based on Homeland Security Reports that continue to flag conservatives and veterans as “right-wing extremists”, based on their requests for citizens to “snitch” on fellow citizens who disagree with health care reform legislation, based on their use of taxpayer dollars to send propaganda to people who never expected to get an email from the White House, based on efforts by the FCC’s “diversity czar”3 to shut down conservative voices in the media, I believe this is a valid question. The United States is financially broke yet the President wants to stand up what amounts to little more than his own private army solely for the purpose of…exactly what? Forcibly stamping out political dissent?
Tyranny by any other name is still as evil. Americans are guaranteed the right to bear arms in order to protect themselves, in particular against a tyrannical government. This is an important point when we are faced with a government that won’t let a “good crisis” go to waste, even if – as many are now beginning to suspect – it has to manufacture it and likely is planning even more. It should go without saying that any attempts to legislate such a “civilian national security force” must be stopped before they even begin, and all its sneaky beginnings in the form of “government service” like AmeriCorps and the “GIVE Act” be yanked out by its roots.
“[I]f circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude[,] that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens. ”
(Alexander Hamilton, 1788)
For many years, America has slowly and stealthily been encircled and She is now being backed into a corner. Like any lazy-assed hunter who uses bait or dogs, the enemy has been oh-so-careful to disguise its true motives but cornered is cornered and living in a cage instead of living free is still living in a cage instead of living free. America must now make a choice. Will She heed the siren call of the Constitution’s guarantee of life and true liberty, allow her wild instincts to come to the fore and once again stand up and fight for Her freedom, or will She fall asleep with begging hands outstretched to the government?
“Hey, Obama has just nationalized nothing more and nothing less than General Motors. Comrade Obama!
Fidel, careful or we are going to end up to his right!”
(Hugo Chavez)
1 CBS’ 60 Minutes interview with Steve Krofton December 20, 1998:
KROFT: (Voiceover) You’re a Hungarian Jew…
Mr. SOROS: (Voiceover) Mm-hmm.
KROFT: (Voiceover) …who escaped the Holocaust…
(Vintage footage of women walking by train)
Mr. SOROS: (Voiceover) Mm-hmm.
(Vintage footage of people getting on train)
KROFT: (Voiceover) …by–by posing as a Christian.
Mr. SOROS: (Voiceover) Right.
(Vintage footage of women helping each other get on train; train door closing with people in boxcar)
KROFT: (Voiceover) And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps.
Mr. SOROS: Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that’s when my character was made.
KROFT: In what way?
Mr. SOROS: That one should think ahead. One should understand and – and anticipate events and when – when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a – a very personal experience of evil.
KROFT: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.
Mr. SOROS: Yes. Yes.
KROFT: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.
Mr. SOROS: Yes. That’s right. Yes.
KROFT: I mean, that’s–that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?
Mr. SOROS: Not – not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t – you don’t see the connection. But it was – it created no – no problem at all.
KROFT: No feeling of guilt?
Mr. SOROS: No.
KROFT: For example that, ‘I’m Jewish and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.’ None of that?
Mr. SOROS: Well, of course I c– I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was–well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets–that if I weren’t there – of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would – would – would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the – whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the – I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.
2 Jeff Jones, a leader of the Apollo Alliance, was a founder of the Weather Underground (alongside Bill Ayers), and a leader of the infamous “Days of Rage” in October 1969.
3 Mark Lloyd, FCC Diversity Chief, has proposed that radio companies pay 100% of their operating budget each year as a tax that would then be transferred to the state-run radio, NPR. If not paid, you’d lose your license and it would be sold to minority group. (And by the way, the FCC just approved the sale of another radio station — this one on Long Island — to ACORN.) He has previously and admiringly said, “In Venezuela, with Chavez, really an incredible revolution — a democratic revolution — to begin to put in place saying that we’re going to have impact on the people of Venezuela, the property owners and the folks who were then controlling the media in Venezuela rebelled — work frankly with folks here in the U.S. government, worked to oust him and came back and had another revolution. And Chavez then started to take the media very seriously in this country.”