The Politics of Fear 3

Colin McEnroe fears that if you criticize Barack Obama you may be a KluKluzer.

The Politics Of Fear 2

Sen. Joe Lieberman, the scourge of progressive (anti-war) Democrats, once again has been caught engaging in “the politics of fear,” this time in the editorial section of the Hartford Courant.

Lieberman and his Republican pal, Sen. John Warner of Virginia, have together produced a bill “that will sharply reduce America's output of greenhouse gases responsible for global climate change and drive the technologies that will make us energy-independent.”

Attached to the bill is a warning: “The act puts the U.S. on a trajectory to help the world avert the catastrophic effects of unchecked global warming.”

Yes, catastrophic! Now there’s a word that raises the hairs on the back of your neck.

Over in Australia, at least one scientist is warning that we are about to enter a new ice age. Something to do with sunspots, which are not behaving as they should.

All this is bound to provoke a discussion of the Robert Frost poem:


Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Chilling, really chilling.

Endtimes

Iran is not only a state that facilitates terrorism.

The United States, as President George Bush’s opponents in the U.S. Congress never tire of reminding us, is engaged in a hot war in Iraq. Many of the Democrat primary presidential candidates – including, to mention just two, U.S. senators Barcak Obama and Chris Dodd - and their media supporters continue to favor an unconditional withdrawal from that war patterned after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, an “orderly” withdrawal followed by mayhem, murder, the slaughter and imprisonment of innocents, and the humiliating betrayal of those in Vietnam, such as the Hmong tribesmen, who supported our actions.

A similar turn of events has been anticipated in Iraq should American troops be forced to withdraw at this stage of the war. By precipitously withdrawing its troops, the United States would leave all in Iraq who had supported its military actions at the mercy of vicious terrorists supported by Iran and Syria. The innocents who would most suffer under such a regime would be, to mention just one group, the Kurds, once Saddam Hussein’s principle victims -- who have done everything we have asked them to do and perhaps would prefer to remain unslaughtered.

A precipitous withdrawal from a war theatre in which American and Iraqi troops have lately been successful also would destabilize the entire Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, from which Europe and the United States receive the energy products needed in order to keep the printing presses at the New York Times humming.

Iran is a state that has pledged to destroy Israel, supports with training and munitions terrorists operating in Iraq that have targeted American troops, and has been developing a nuclear weapons program that easily may be reinstituted soon after the American troops have withdrawn, at which point the so-called “president” of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, true to his word, may be expected to make Israel go poof.

Both Ahmadinejad and the so called “president” of Syria, Bashar al-Asad, are ambitious men; their aim and ambition is to do in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and perhaps Turkey what they are doing now, successfully, in Lebanon.

Ahmadinejad, the wackier of the two, will not be satisfied until the hostilities in the Middle East usher in the Endtimes, the age of the twelfth Imam, after which Islam will recover the splendor it lost when Queen Isabella chased the Moors out of Spain in the 15th century.

In its rapid move north from Medina, Islam was checked in what is now France in 732 by Charles “The Hammer” Martel, whose military methods in the battle of Tours would not have passed muster with the current U.S. Congress. From its beginnings in the early 7th century to the defeat of the Ottoman Turks in 1918, Islam was first a dominant then a retreating force in North Africa, Spain, Italy France, Russia, Persia, the Balkans and India.

Some of this has become a proper subject for discussion in the American presidential election now under way.

The universally reviled outgoing President George Bush contributed his mite to the discussion when, addressing the Israel Knesset on the 60th year of Israel’s bloody birth, he said: “Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

In fact, the allusion to the Nazis is not at all implausible. Everyone is familiar with Hitler’s “final solution” to the Jewish problem. Ahmadinejad foresees a similar “solution,” and he has not been hiding his vision of a future without Israel under a bushel basket; it has been prominently displayed in his speeches and addresses.

Increasingly, as the presidential campaign lumbers on, Democrats have raised aloft the slogan, “the politics of fear” every time Republicans and the much reviled Senator Joe Lieberman point to the dangers of appeasement. But the slogan is little more than a rhetorical devise designed to wedge out of office those who support what ought to be called the resistance to a form of Islam that is profoundly anti-Western. If we wake to find an intruder rummaging in our bureau drawer, should we not be at least “wary” that a theft is in progress? If after calling the police we find that the thief’s comrades have bombed the police station and stoned the mayor’s wife as a kafir, should our emotions not move beyond wariness to something else – not fear, which freezes the senses, but a fierce resolution to resist with our minds, our hearts and our blood? At what point will Chris Dodd and Barack Obama become -- if not fearful -- then at least less placid about the aims and ambitions of such as Ahmadinejad and Asad?

In an attempt to quiet the very real fears of Israelis and Jews here in the United States, Obama has given assurances hat he will defend Israel militarily. Having retreated from a hot war in Iraq to Camp Lejeune, he ought to be asked “From where?”

The New Good And Bad Rules Of President Obama

The new rule under Barack Obama, agent of change in Washington, is this: If you’re connected with a lobbyist, that’s no good. If you are running for president on the Republican ticket, and you establish a guiding rule according to which everyone connected with your campaign who has lobbyist ties in Washington must leave the campaign, you become a target for accusations that you are supporting the status quo in Washington. If you are connected to either a black racist preacher, a terrorist who has not repented of his terrorist activities or an indicted moneybags Chicago politician who had contributed oodles of cash to your campaign and later helped you purchase a million dollar home – not so bad. If you mention these things in print – bad. You are engaging in the dreaded "politics of fear."

The Courant, Court Ordered Legislation, Gay Rights And Polygamy

In connection with gay rights, the Hartford Courant is untroubled by the fact that a California court has vetoed the vox populi.

Rolling over the legislature, California’s state Supreme Court has decided that the right to marriage is a constitutional right.

The Courant heartily agrees.

The paper cites a dissent by Justice Marvin R. Baxter, who argued that the justices had “substituted ‘judicial fiat’ for democratic change.”

No problem, the Courant argues: “…that's what courts do when people's rights are long denied. In the celebrated Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court — headed by Californian Earl Warren — jump-started school integration in parts of the country that had been slumbering since the Civil War.

“The majority of justices found that marriage is a constitutional right and that the state had no compelling interest in denying that right to same-sex couples. ‘In contrast to earlier times,’ wrote Chief Justice Ronald M. George in the majority opinion, ‘our state now recognizes that an individual's capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual's sexual orientation.’”

By some strange judicial calculus, the court has determined that because California has through statute provided additional legal rights for gays in “civil union” relationships, these provisions, add up to a constitutional right, even though other statutory regulations create a bar to marriage for gays. Apparently some statutory regulations are more “constitutional” than others.

The paper hopes for a similar ruling here in Connecticut and mentions that “California's decision does not require clergy to perform same-sex marriages, nor does it invalidate the state ban on polygamy.”

To which one is tempted to retort – why not?

If gay marriage is a constitutional right, why should churches be permitted to violate the constitution in their unconstitutional religious practices. Or, to put a finer point on the question: Why shouldn’t the governing authority force religious institutions to align their civil practices, other courts having determined that marriage is a civil right, with the constitution?

As for polygamy, there are no laws in Connecticut prohibiting what the Courant in a previous story called polyamory, polygamous relationships outside of marriage.

If marriage is a constitutional right, why should those perfectly legal relationships not be brought under the court ordered law? Are not polygamous relationships in other cultures "long term" and "loving," and have not polygamists here in the United States been unjustly discriminated against?

If love makes a marriage, why cannot love make a poligamous marriage?

And finally, what is the point in having legislative debates on such questions if legislators are not permitted by the courts to decide such issues as the courts themselves seem ill prepared to decide?

A question not considered by the courts is this one: In putative gay marriage relationships, how does the state test for fraud? But that question cannot be considered until the courts have established "by judicial fiat" a constitutional "right" to marriage for virtually anyone who fraudulently claims to be gay in order to obtain the rights bestowed by the courts on genuine gay marriage partners.

Caruso Sings The Blues

At the end of the “do nothing” legislative session, Rep. Chris Caruso and Senator Diana Urban, the co-chairs of the Government Administration and Elections Committee, had a press conference the subject of which was ethics reform, but another senator, Edward Meyer, unexpectedly showed up, commandeered the microphone and rained on their propaganda parade.

“I want to state a different opinion,” Meyer said as reporters recorded the interruption of an otherwise placid media opportunity.

According to a report in the Journal Inquirer, “The Guilford lawmaker then charged his two House colleagues on the GAEC panel with producing a ‘watered down’ pension sanctions plan designed to shield unionized state employees, questioning their resolve to affect a linchpin of the Democratic base. ‘It looks self-serving,’ Meyer said. ‘It looks union-biased.’”

The king was stripped naked of his trappings and the two co-chairs of GAEC gasped with astonishment. Of course, it didn’t take Caruso long to recover the use of his tongue.

"That was just bush league," Caruso said. "I have never had a colleague do that."

A suitable punishment for Mayer’s bad taste in exercising his right to criticize Caruso in a public forum might be to deprive him of his parking space at the Capitol.

The two co-chairs of the GAEC panel had come together to resolve a difficulty caused mostly by Caruso. At first, Caruso had insisted that pension revocation for corrupt government officials should be made retroactive, the better to seize the ill gotten gains of former Gov. John Rowland, one among other government officials who actually did time for having used their offices corruptly for personal gain. Rowland -- along with former Mayor of Bridgeport Joe Ganim, child molester and former mayor of Waterbury Phil Giordano, the sweet talking state senator Ernie Newton, and a handful of others –spent some time in the clinker reflecting on their misdeeds.

Everybody who was anybody warned Caruso that retroactive punishments were unconstitutional. A law cannot be written to punish activities that were legal at the time they were performed: First comes the law defining a breach of legality, then follows the breach, then follows the punishment, except for the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, those who think laws were intended to punish pre-illegal rather than post-illegal acts – and Caruso.

Caruso relented on the point but soon drilled a hole in the ethics reform boat that for the moment sunk the bill.

On the Orwellian theory that all animals in the political barnyard are equal except the pigs -- who are more equal -- Caruso favored a system of pension revocation in which everyone but unionized employees of the state would have their pensions revoked upon the commission of an illegal act.

When the legislature reconvenes for a special session, it will restore an elapsing tax cut and once again consider ethics reform. Apart from increasing taxes, no one is betting much else will get done.

Labeling The Enemy

V.I. Lenin used to say that if you label an idea properly, you do not have to argue with it. On a similar line, if you find that a proposed amendment in Connecticut’s General Assembly is “not germane,” even when it is germane, you do not have to consider it.

That is what was done by Majority Leader in the House of Representatives Chris Donovan in the case of a Republican alternative budget submitted by Republicans as an amendment after Democrats and Governor Jodi Rell had decided to skip school.

Rather than confront the serious problems facing the state, which include but are not limited to a vanishing surplus and mounting spending, the Rell-Democrat combine chose not to tinker with a budget that later will require either severe spending cuts or crippling increases in taxes. This dereliction of duty, some have speculated, is related to the coming elections. Democrats, some critics have said, are loathed to raise taxes to cover anticipated deficits and burgeoning spending increases before the election, because they do not want the black mark on their resumes before plucked taxpayers march to the polls to vote.

Republicans this year proposed an alternative budget that did not permit Rell or the Democrats to bury their heads in deficit sand. It was quietly dispatched on the floor of the House.

When Republicans attempted to resurrect their alternative budget as an amendment to another bill -- HB 5617, An Act Making Revisions to the Charter Oak Health Plan -- Donovan objected that the amendment was not germane to the bill to which it was attached, an objection dutifully supported by the House chair.

Donovan is the chamber’s proto-typical liberal, though liberals these days have got in the habit of calling themselves progressives. Donovan, who served as House Chair of the Labor and Public Employees Committee, is a key sponsor of health care reform. He has worked strenuously to create a system of universal health care in Connecticut. Donovan’s insurance pool bill, glided through the House on a party line vote shortly after Amann announced he was surrendering his position to Donovan.

Amann, it used to be thought, was a fiscal conservative; Donovan, who earned his liberal badge of honor working for the Connecticut Citizen's Action Group where he focused on environmental, energy and housing issues, is a pro-labor, unapologetic redistributionist.

When the Connecticut Business and Industries Association, a pro business group, began to lobby against Donovan’s health reform measure, they were immediately accused by pro-labor forces in both the legislature and the press of shamelessly padding their own nests; the CBIA offers and insurance program to small businesses.

The chair’s ruling in favor of Donovan’s motion was rebutted by House GOP leader Larry Cafero, but the numbers overwhelmed principled argument and the amendment was crushed by a party line vote of 104-44.



Cafero noted from the floor that if the chair's understanding of "germane" were to prevail in every amended piece of legislation, the House had been doing things wrong for a long while.

It is not necessary that every point in an amendment, Cafero said, should directly relate to the bill to which it is attached. Amendments usually are accepted for discussion on the floor if in some measure they pertain to the bill. The amendment containing an alternative budget proposal introduced by the Republicans contained provisions related to the Charter Oak Health Plan.

The amendment offered by Republicans was deemed not germane for political reasons. Neither chamber of the legislature, dominated by Democrats, favored a discussion of the alternative budget because the Democrats and Rell’s office already had decided that no revisions of an early second year budget would be permitted.



Cafaro’s protest was to no purpose. Numbers rule in the House, not principled argument. The proper answer to Donovan and his minions is not better argumentation but more Republican feet on the floor of the House.

Republicans may be expected to argue during the coming elections that Democrats had refused to consider an alternative budget because by accepting Republican proposals to address serious economic problems as the state enters a time of diminishing returns, the Democrats, led by Donovan in the House and Senate President pro tem Don Williams, wanted to put off a tax increase until they had been safely elected.

Whether that point will resonate with a general public used to voting by instinct rather than a reasonable appreciation of their genuine interests is very much an open question.

What Chocolates And Government Programs Have In Common

Like chocolates, government programs are instantly addictive. They are also difficult to repeal, especially in Connecticut, because every new program creates its own constituency, instant professions; and as George Bernard Shaw reminds us, “Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.” The laity is the world outside the profession. In government, the laity is the collective whose pockets are mined by the profession to extend and continue the conspiracy.

That is how hard pressed and friendless taxpayers in the state should think about new programs.

Old programs involve entrenched constituencies, which are considerably more difficult to uproot and cast into the fires of Hell.

An entrenched constituency is like a mouse in a house. First you see one, then two; then nothing happens for about six weeks. Then the mouse population explodes. Soon you are overwhelmed by boisterous mice chatting in the wall. What a mouse population that threatens to overrun the house needs is a cat – a bright-eyed, sharptoothed, merciless cat. Pity only serves to excite the mouse population's reproductive systems. Smile at one mouse and before you know it you will be the unwilling host to a hord of mice that will spoil your sleep and, worse, upset your wife.

Democrat Grass Roots Want the Primary To Continue, Leaders Fear Committment

According to a Gallup Poll, most Democrats want the primary race between senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to continue. However, nervous Nellies in the Democrat leadership remain nervous. Huge beads of sweat continue to pour from party leader Howard Dean’s forehead, and Chris Dodd continues to hover between strangling Hillary and smooching her.

The longer the primary goes on, Dodd said, the more committed people become. Better to cut the thing off while people are yet malleable: "The problem as this thing goes further down the pike is that your supporters, the intensity, increases. Your loyalty deepens. Your feelings about the other side deepen. ... The question is really whether these other folks out there, who have really invested a great deal of their lives in this effort for the last two years, are going to be willing to sort of pat each other on the back and go charging off for eight weeks."

The tingling at the back of the neck that every genuine reporter and political commentator now feels is caused by the prospect of a brokered convention, a real bang up, cigar smoke and bunting filled, national convention in which selected delegates – the real tribunes of the people – decide who will be their leader in the general election.

The ghost of Henry Mencken, who covered all national conventions for about fifty years and whose reports are high political literature, is twisting in his grave, anxious to be in the maw of one more national buffoon fest, very likely the most exciting convention of the last 50 years.

Mencken himself took conventions, to quote a phrase of Mark Twain’s, “with a ton of salt.” They were exciting, both to him and to the American public, because they represented a distinctively America throw of the dice.

A reporter, once peering through Mencken’s window late at night after a rally, saw him pounding out copy in his hotel room: “He would type a few sentences, read them, slap his thigh, toss his head back, and roar with laughter. Then he would type some more lines, guffaw, and so on until the end of the article.”

Perhaps he was typing this: “The Liberals have many tails, and chase them all.”

Or he might have been laughing at the usual American notion of liberty: “The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man's mind. He can imagine and even esteem, in his way, certain false forms of liberty - for example, the right to choose between two political mountebanks, and to yell for the more obviously dishonest - but the reality is incomprehensible to him. And no wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural manure. More, he must be able to endure it - an even more arduous business. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means the capacity for doing without.”

Or at the resilience of most politicians: “It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.”

Or at the typical liberal's over-generous estimation of the nature of government itself: “[Government] is apprehended, not as a committee of citizens chosen to carry on the communal business of the whole population, but as a separate and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted to exploiting the population for the benefit of its own members. .... When a private citizen is robbed, a worthy man is deprived of the fruits of his industry and thrift; when the government is robbed, the worst that happens is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before.”

The pity of it is that if there were a brokered Democrat national convention, there would be in the hall no one like Mencken to report on it, no one large-minded enough. The purchase price of courage, for most reporters, is too dear:“Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.”

Why Opra Dumped Wright

Television host and mega-celeb Opra Winfrey was, according to a story in Newsweek, “a member of Trinity United from 1984 to 1986, and she continued to attend off and on into the early to the mid-1990s. But then she stopped. A major reason—but by no means the only reason—was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

“According to two sources, Winfrey was never comfortable with the tone of Wright's more incendiary sermons, which she knew had the power to damage her standing as America's favorite daytime talk-show host. "Oprah is a businesswoman, first and foremost," said one longtime friend, who requested anonymity when discussing Winfrey's personal sentiments. "She's always been aware that her audience is very mainstream, and doing anything to offend them just wouldn't be smart. She's been around black churches all her life, so Reverend Wright's anger-filled message didn't surprise her. But it just wasn't what she was looking for in a church." Oprah's decision to distance herself came as a surprise to Wright, who told Christianity Today in 2002 that when he would "run into her socially … she would say, 'Here's my pastor!' " (Winfrey declined to comment. A Harpo Productions spokesperson would not confirm her reasons for leaving the church.)”

Primary Dirt Dished By Democrats

The Democrat primary campaign, writes Noemie Emery in National Review, certainly is not without irony: “A campaign in which a feminist trailblazer [Geraldine Ferrero, once a Vice Presidential candidate on the Democrat ticket] is called a racist by a post-racial healer [Sen. and would-be president Barack Obama] who indulges a racist bible thumper [the silver tongued Rev. Jeremiah Wright] is a little too strange for their minds to keep up with, but it is the long termed result of the world they created. They never dreamed that the diversity codes they cooked up could snap back and attack them. But they could, and they have.”

“We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue,” Obama said some time before he dismissed his pastor as a crank and a demagogue, “just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro in the aftermath of her recent statements as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.”

The “some” to whom Obama was referring were Obama backers, ardent Democrats all.

Ferraro, who left the Hillary Clinton campaign under duress, was not pleased by the characterization.

“To equate what I said with what this racist bigot (the Rev. Wright) has said from the pulpit is unbelievable,” Ferraro returned. “He is spewing that stuff out to young people . . . and putting it in their heads that it’s okay to say ‘God damn America,’ and that it’s okay to beat up on white people.”

Before Obama showed Wright the door, the preacher was defended by supporters such as Bob Herbert of the New York Times, who wrote of George W. Bush’s campaign appearance at Bob Jones University, “George W. Bush could have distanced himself from such venues, but he chose not to. Mr. Bush has dismayed many millions of Americans . . . who have tried hard to move away from the corrosive policies and customs of the past.”

Wright’s corrosive theology and his long standing custom of savaging white folk, “blue eyed devils,” did not prevent Dionne from comparing Wright to Martin Luther King, “another angry black preacher,” Dionne said, who had harsh words for many American policies.

Historians of the period will search the writings of Dr. King in vain for a reference that God "damns" America or that the Romans were "garlic nosed Italians." King is famous for having said that people should be judged on the content of their character, not on the color of their blue eyes.

Who is it, exactly, who has been driving the chariot of division and recrimination so far?

Republicans may plead not guilty; Democrats, one supposes, might want to plead nolo contendere.

When the long, seemingly endless primary contest was but a glint in Sen. Hillary Clinton’s eye, former ambassador to the UN Andrew Young helpfully suggested that Omaba should run up the white flag early because the Clintons were known to have surrounded themselves with do-or-die apparachiks who were somewhat ruthless on the campaign trail.

Ruthless and cunning.

But the Clinton’s do not have a corner on cunning.

Attempting to preempt charges that Wright and the flag stomping Bill Ayers have warts on their noses, the progressive Huffington Post in April reported that Rick Sloan, one of Clinton’s union backers, mailed 40 key unions a message called “What Is Rove Up To?”

The memo, Emery wrote, “detailed a projected campaign by Karl Rove, the former George W. Bush adviser, based on Obama’s connections to both Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers. ‘The drip, drip, drip of Republican opposition research will continue throughout the summer,’ Sloan frothed. ‘Speakers will joke about a color spectrum of light pink to deep red. . . . The bombing of the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and the U.S. State Department will serve as b-roll for his television ads that will have one final visual, as the announcer gravely intones, ‘Their Change — Not What You Had In Mind.’

“…Paul Waldman at The American Prospect: Liberal Intelligence was whipping himself into a frenzy over a supposed conservative ‘hate-based campaign against Obama.’

“’They intend, as they have so many times before, to wage a campaign appealing to the ugliest prejudices, the most craven fears, the most vile hatreds,’ Waldman assured us. ‘They will make sure white Americans know that Obama is not Tiger Woods. He’s not the unthreatening black man, he’s the scary black man. He’s Al Sharpton, he’s Malcolm X, he’s Huey Newton. He’ll throw grievance in your face, make you feel guilty, and who knows, maybe kill you and rape your wife.’”

“There are, in fact, many examples of recourse to fears and prejudice that Waldman could have cited, but he ignored them, since they were all committed by Democrats. Barbed praise is one favorite tactic. Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska governor and senator, said after endorsing Hillary Clinton, ‘I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim, and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal.’ Another method is pious disavowal: ‘The issue related to cocaine is not something that the campaign is in any way raising,’ said Mark Penn, then Clinton’s chief strategist.”

All this dirt has been dug up and vetted by liberals and progressives in the party that will nominate Barack Obama at the Democrat national convention … well, sometime after Clinton withdraws from the race and begins to heal the party’s self inflicted stab wounds.