Statists have a racket going that too few people seem to have figured out.  Though many Americans oppose Obama and his allies based upon specific policy issues, they continue to be naïve about the tactics of these genuine enemies of freedom.  These power-hungry people seek to destroy our historical institutions and principles in order to remake America under an immoral collectivist ideology, but they must acquire more power over our lives and over the states in order to succeed.  As ridiculous as it sounds, their modus operandi involves the simple act of intentional failure.  While their consistent use of this approach demonstrates their low view of the intelligence of Americans, their success with this tactic suggests that they are on to something.

How To Seize More Power By Failing

Step 1: Intentionally let a problem become a “crisis” by either refusing to enforce laws or by enforcing laws that only worsen the situation.

Step 2: Insult every American’s intelligence by pretending to ride in on a white horse to save us from the problem that was in fact intentionally created by the same group of egregiously dishonest con men.

We see this simple statist pattern repeatedly in America, and astute readers may realize that this tactic is right up Saul Alinsky’s alley.  This approach has certainly been co-opted at times by statists in the GOP, but it is now the default MO of the Democrats in their relentless assault on American limited constitutional government.

The Broken System

The Broken System approach involves refusing to enforce good laws that would help solve a particular problem.  The statist knows that the problems associated with non-enforcement will ultimately snowball into something that he can label as a crisis, therefore nothing that could help the problem will be attempted or permitted.  When the problems predictably fester into something that can no longer be ignored, the statist demonstrates Obama-like audacity by claiming that “the system is broken.”  Remember, the statist has refused to enforce laws that would help the problem because he is using his own intentional failure to seize more power and freedom from the people he undoubtedly sees as ignorant proles.

The Broken System fallacy is perfectly displayed in the illegal immigration debate. We have enough laws on the books to close the border, deport those here illegally, and severely punish those who employ illegal aliens.  But the plain truth is that the statist has no intention of enforcing those laws.  The purported failure of those “mean” laws is intended to be used as a vehicle for the Left’s agenda to “fundamentally remake” our country into something that the founding fathers would not recognize.

The President opposes the Arizona law not out of concerns about racial profiling but instead because he knows that the law will work.  If Americans see the Arizona law working, they will reject Obama’s call for a full amnesty, which he euphemistically refers to as Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

Exactly why does the President oppose the Arizona law?  Ignore his rhetoric; Barack Obama is always selling some new snake oil.  The President opposes the Arizona law not out of concerns about racial profiling but instead because he knows that it will work.  If Americans see the Arizona law working, they will reject Obama’s call for a full amnesty, which he euphemistically refers to as Comprehensive Immigration Reform.  Don’t ever forget that so-called Comprehensive Immigration Reform is nothing less than utter capitulation and amnesty.  Why does the President of the United States want this?  He simply seeks the vote inflation that comes with stamping out another 10 or 20 million poor and uneducated citizens.  It’s all about power to the statist.  They are willing to throw anyone and anything under the bus along the way.

Saved by the Antagonist

Another statist tactic involves passing laws that severely undercut the free market system.  When the economics play out just as anyone could predict, the statists claim that this “unencumbered free market” is out of control and that greedy corporations must be reined in.  They write restrictive new regulations that always seem to have special rules and exemptions for people and companies that donate money to these politicians.  Once again, the very people whose actions caused the crisis in the first place claim that they are here to save us.  This statist tactic very clearly played itself out in our debate over socialized medicine.

Government at many levels, though mostly the federal level, put so much onerous legislation and protectionism in place with regard to medical care that the system could not function properly.  Laws against purchasing insurance across state lines, refusal to rein in the trial lawyers (who positively own the Democrat party), and government imposed mandates on coverage constructed an artificial environment that was most decidedly not a free market.  Then, completely true to the original plan, when this system predictably fails to provide reasonably priced health care the statist steps in to take the system over, castigating the “greedy” companies that the statist claims caused the problem.

Another example of the Saved By The Antagonist approach is the housing crisis and subsequent financial meltdown.  On the front-end, the government and rabble-rousers like our current President strong armed financial institutions into making bad but politically correct loans to people who previously would not have qualified for a loan.  On the back-end, they used their control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to require that a certain percentage of purchased loans be so called sub-prime loans, creating a huge market for these bad loans.  Our financial crisis was clearly created by our federal government’s policies, but now people like the deeply corrupt Senator Chris Dodd – who has been called “the Senator from Countrywide Mortgage” – claim that it was all greedy bankers and that the people who really caused this are going to fix it with more market-skewing regulation.

Think about the reality of what is happening.  Imagine an old western movie.  A bad guy rides in to town, shoots the place up, and storms out of town after robbing the bank.  Then he pauses in the woods to change horses and clothes and rides into town telling the people how he can save them from such future problems if they just let him take charge of everything.  Our politicians do not even bother to change disguises when they pull this game with us.

Let’s learn from their failures, even the unintentional examples.  When they fail, we should replace them rather than giving them more power.  Let’s throw them out in November and hold their replacements’ feet to the fire every single day.

When a President nominates a judge for the Supreme Court or an important lower federal court, discussions immediately begin about litmus tests for acceptability.  Historically the issue has typically revolved around the nominee’s position on abortion.

The Wikipedia entry titled Litmus Test (politics) makes a common mistake that I hope to correct here, which is conflating issue positions with judicial philosophy.  They are two very different concepts and one largely supersedes the other.  The Wikipedia entry’s error is in attempting to equate a nominee’s position on abortion with support for strict constructionism, portraying them as equivalent litmus tests.  The comparison is inherently flawed because the former is simply a position whereas the latter is a philosophy.  In fact, in most cases the philosophy should form the position.

After successfully stepping back from an issue-based perspective to a philosophy-based perspective it becomes obvious that there is only one litmus test that matters when it comes to a nominee to a federal court.  That question is does this individual subscribe to the philosophy of originalism?  If not, that person is wholly and inherently unqualified to sit on a court that acts as the final arbiter on issues of Constitutionality.  No other questions are required.  An Originalist simply argues that the United States Constitution means what it says, while the diametrically opposed so-called Living Document crowd argues that the text can (and should) be finagled to achieve desired results.

When Bill Clinton was still President I started using a home mortgage analogy in an attempt to explain my Constitutional philosophy while making the case that it is the only perspective that makes sense.  Over the last year or so I have heard the best talk radio host in America present essentially the same analogy, and it is a good one.

If your bank contacted you to let you know that they had decided to increase your interest rate, you would categorically reject this change in the terms of the agreement.  You would sensibly point to the words in the contract and would expect those words to mean what they say.  You would not be impressed with claims by your bank that some vague wording about their management of the account has now been decided to construe an ability to change the rules.  You would once again point to the words in the mortgage paperwork.  Even if they made the argument that increasing your interest rate would allow them to provide mortgages to the less fortunate, you would tell the greedy banker to take a hike.

[Keep thinking like the angry consumer against whom the bank is trying to play word games!]

The Commerce Clause

[The Congress shall have power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes;

When the federal government – or one of its leftist myrmidons – tells you that the commerce clause (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3) gives it the power to regulate every single aspect of your life, you should sit down and spend some quality time with your Constitution.  Ask yourself with a clear head why the founding fathers would have taken the time to get so very specific in Article 1, Section 8, which includes the enumeration of powers like coining money and running the post office, if they were granting wide ranging powers to regulate at will by including a grant of power to regulate commerce “among the several states”.  Ask yourself if those preeminent guardians of liberty would agree that those words legitimately confer the power to regulate your light bulbs or toilets or, most recently, to grant the federal government the new power to make health care decisions for you.  The obvious answer, known even by those in the living document crowd, is that the founding fathers intended no such thing and would be appalled at the success of the commerce clause based power grab.

Lawyers and politicians who recklessly bend and misrepresent the words of the Constitution in an attempt to contort them into something that will achieve their desired political agenda are no different than a slimy lawyer redefining the definition of the word is.  They are egregiously dishonest and selfish, regardless of the results of their judicial activism.  In fact, they are a danger to the future of the republic.

So, in summation, my Supreme Court Litmus Test is really quite simple:

Does the Constitution mean what it says?

I wrote most of this before President Obama nominated Elena Kagan to replace John Paul Stevens on the high court.  Though Ms. Kagan has no judicial experience whatsoever –certainly Mr. Obama’s clumsy attempt at a stealth candidate – an intelligent observer should know that the President would never consider nominating a judge who subscribes to Originalism.

Not being an Originalist, Elena Kagan is categorically unqualified to sit on the Supreme Court.

UPDATE: Last night my son and I listened to Friday night’s Mark Levin show podcast on the way to little league practice (I always listen to them a day or two later) and Mark was talking about Originalism as well.  Further, pointing out that Ms. Kagan seems to be uniquely unqualified to be a justice – she has never been a judge nor argued a case before an appellate court – Levin calls on the GOP Senators to filibuster her nomination.  We all know that they do not possess the cojones for that.

The consistent and continuing energetic opposition to ObamaCare in the face of its forced passage poses an interesting question.  Is it ever acceptable for the federal government to force unpopular and unwanted legislation or rulings down to the states and the people?  Given that this is a limited government that allegedly governs only with the consent of the governed, is that the sort of thing that we tolerate in America?  In fact there are situations in which this is legitimate, but certainly not in the broad and dangerous way being demonstrated by the freedom loathing Marxists now running our government, who view the American people as a simple-minded herd of cattle living on their government collective.

When the founding fathers crafted the US Constitution they were faced with the challenge of creating a system that attempted to balance a very legitimate fear of an abusive central government with the reality that the weak Articles of Confederation had been an utter failure.  To address these observed shortcomings while remaining true to the underlying principles of the American Experiment and its Declaration of Independence, the proposed Constitution delegated very specific powers to certain branches of the nascent federal government.  Additionally, providing a balance to the long list of powers and limitations in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights listed specific protected rights of the people and related limitations on government.  Making a final point, they underscored this underlying limited-government philosophy with the all too often ignored 9^th and 10^th amendments, which make it crystal clear how limited the central government was intended to be.

The founding fathers clearly believed that the biggest threat to liberty came from a powerful central government and that most issues should be handled by the several states.  In most cases this is a prudent approach.  But if the central charter of our government involves a commitment to individual rights, what can that federal government do – and what should it do – when the truly fundamental rights required for that civil society are being violated?

After the American Civil War, slavery was finally prohibited in America with the ratification of the 13^th amendment.  However, contrary to the principle so eloquently stated in our founding document that “all men are created equal”, the non-white citizens of many states continued to live as second class citizens, lacking voting rights and the ability to run for elected office.  In short, the states were depriving many American citizens of rights that our system claimed to champion.  At the same time, these very states wished to count these people for purposes of congressional representation.  This unacceptable chasm between the inherent rights so clearly spelled out in our founding documents and the contrasting reality faced by many Americans living without those rights drove the next amendment to our Constitution.

In response to egregious violations of Americans’ individual liberties including acts such as the Black Codes, which were attempts by some states “to control the labor, movements and activities of newly-freed slaves”, the 14^th amendment was proposed to the states.  The first clause of the 14^th amendment demands that the citizens of all states enjoy the constitutional rights of American citizens:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

When the racist Democrats in many southern states would not protect the legitimate constitutional rights of some of their citizens, the federal government rightly stepped in many times.  Most recently, when the Supreme Court declared Chicago’s handgun ban to be unconstitutional in McDonald v. Chicago, they leveraged the 14^th amendment’s privileges or immunities clause.  In both examples the federal government contended that Americans have inherent constitutional rights and that not even the states can violate those unalienable rights.

I provided these as legitimate examples of what you could rightly call guidance from above, in which the federal government is playing its appropriate (post-14^th amendment) role in protecting our liberties – even from the states.  Put simply, we have a basic constitutional template for certain rights and privileges and the 14^th amendment was passed in order to ensure that the states play by these rules.  While there is certainly no shortage of abuses of the 14^th amendment, this legitimate use of what is commonly called Incorporation is in clear contrast with the dangerous and egregiously dishonest manipulations of the Commerce Clause used to justify limitless power grabs by the Obama administration.

The Commerce Clause:

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

Seriously, that is the entirety of the commerce clause that is being used by statists to gut the Constitution.  You truly have to be a destructive wordsmith capable of skillfully warping the language in order to bend that short clause into the idea that Congress can regulate everything it sees fit, as evidenced by the Obama administration’s contention that the commerce clause gives them the power to force Americans to purchase health insurance.  From the utterly indefensible Wickard v. Fillburn to the current attempts by the Left to control more of our lives, the commerce clause has been abused by tyrants for decades in pursuit of more power.  While reasonable people can see that the intent was to encourage commerce among the states, the left makes the case that any product made can be regulated if it is bought or sold, even if it never crosses state lines to become interstate commerce!  In addition to countless far less benign abuses, this clause is actually used to legitimize Congressional control of the amount of water in your toilet.

In his excellent opinion in US v. Lopez, Justice Clarence Thomas perfectly points out the danger of embracing such an expansive view of the commerce clause:

if taken to its logical extreme, would give Congress a “police power” over all aspects of American life. Unfortunately, we have never come to grips with this implication of our substantial effects formula. Although we have supposedly applied the substantial effects test for the past 60 years, we always have rejected readings of the Commerce Clause and the scope of federal power that would permit Congress to exercise a police power; our cases are quite clear that there are real limits to federal power.

Accepting the Left’s interpretation of the Commerce Clause means that absolutely nothing is outside the legitimate control of the federal government.

Standing in stark contrast to the legitimate protection of constitutional rights, that is nothing less than tyranny from above.

The title of this post makes the provocative statement that liberalism is not simply wrong, it is inherently immoral.  To examine this argument we must first define some terms.

Though they are often lumped in with each other as the same thing, the fact is that liberals and democrats are not necessarily the same thing.   Liberalism is a freedom-loathing philosophy, whereas the Democrat party is simply the vehicle that statists use in an attempt to force their flawed anti-freedom agenda on the rest of America.  It is very important to note that liberalism is not different in kind from the other slave-to-the-state “isms”.  It is simply different in degree.  Liberalism shares an anti-individual agenda with its cousins of socialism, collectivism, Marxism, Maoism, etc.  It is simply a watered down version of statism that the left feels is palatable enough to ease otherwise freedom-loving Americans into living under a soft tyranny.  All of these anti-freedom ideologies, including rank and file liberalism, involve a reverence for centralized control that is anathema to historical American freedoms.

As many have noted, and Mark Levin so eloquently pointed out in his fantastic book, the best umbrella term to use when describing all of these immoral leftist “isms” is statism.  Statists (when I use that term I absolutely include people like the President and every single member of his party in Congress) believe that you are not a free individual but are instead owned by the State.  Virtually all of their harmful entitlement programs and wealth redistribution schemes are premised on an un-American and unconstitutional view of the appropriate relationship between the government and the individual.  One simply cannot believe that the government has the power to take over your health care choices, even forcing you to purchase health insurance under penalty of law, without accepting the implicit premise that we are all just livestock living on the government collective.  In the eyes of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, you are just another cow living on the government farm and you will be milked according to the whims of nameless, faceless statist bureaucrats who genuinely believe that they know better than you.  Even worse, they do not give a rodent’s posterior about the people they claim to represent.  They simply seek the power that flows from increased government dependency.  Does anyone really believe that Barack Obama cares about the quality of any American’s health care?  If you do, you are simply a naïve, Kool Aid drinking myrmidon… or a loser who just wants someone else to subsidize your lifestyle.  In either case, this quote from Sam Adams is for you:

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!  – Samuel Adams

In a rather long post that I wrote last fall titled On Taxes and Socialism, I put it this way:

I mentioned earlier that I believe collectivism to be inherently immoral regardless of the results of an implementation of that system.  Churchill once said that “the inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”  In practice these results have proven to be true time and time again.  To Churchill’s first point, we will always have an unequal sharing of “blessings” when those blessings are based upon a free market meritocratic system, but we also always have incredible opportunity to better ourselves.  But Churchill’s second point properly points out that the results of socialism are better for a few people at the expense of everyone else.  In this sense collectivism is immoral because it turns the entire system upside down, structuring things to be best for and most conducive to the needs of the least productive, least successful, and all too often least ambitious among us.   Often lost in the debate is the sad fact that often the mere reality of government involvement results in a worse situation for all involved, including the unavoidable creation of less ambitious people with no incentive to work harder.

Socialism is immoral because at its core, once you strip away the camouflage of false compassion, it requires an acceptance that the government owns you, that when the rubber hits the road you are simply a number, and that if you are more productive than most other people you will be regarded as a cash cow to be milked for what some group of statists considers The Common Good.  You can dress that up in the “party dress” of alleged compassion but it remains un-American and immoral.

Statism (i.e. liberalism) is immoral.  Independent of debates on spending or the size of government or even Constitutionality, statism is inherently anti-freedom and anti-American.  I know not what course others may take; but as for me I choose to fight these statist elitists, their myrmidons, and their immoral slavery to the state until the end.  To do anything less would be cowardly, un-American, and a slap in the face to the people throughout our history who laid down their lives for the idea that is America.

There is no doubt that wresting control of Congress away from these power-drunk government-loving statists will clearly be a good thing, and no sane person would suggest anything less than a full-bore attempt to win every possible seat.  Frankly, the future of the Republic depends on it.  But perhaps simply being close enough to a 50/50 split would be a better long-term result for the GOP as long as they can still obstruct the statist agenda of Obama and his minions.  While controlling at least one half of Congress would go a long way toward stopping Comrade Obama’s frantic rush toward socialism, let’s not forget that undoing the damage done by this administration is going to require control of the White House.  Even a lame duck Obama wields a difficult-to-override veto and there is no chance of gaining a two-thirds majority of both houses in 2010.  Our primary goal is to remove the most radical President in US history from office after one term, and being the minority party in 2012 would allow the GOP to adopt a different position as complete outsiders.

Rasmussen makes some other points about Evan Bayh’s retirement and the Scott Brown election that are worth watching as well.  But his point about the strategy of remaining the minority party has some real merit.  The perfect solution would be a 50/50 split in the Senate, which would give the dumbest man in politics something to do, and perhaps being down only a vote or two in the House would suffice.  A second term for the least qualified, most radical President in history would likely be the death knell of American Exceptionalism and may also be the final nail in the statist-built coffin for the American Experiment, a liberty first philosophy in which the freedom-loathing Mr. Obama simply does not believe.

Proposed changes to the North Carolina high school history curriculum have many people upset with critics correctly pointing out that the state is simply cutting out the first half of U.S. History.

This article on the Charlotte NBC affiliate’s web site includes the video of their news story on the controversy and gives a good synopsis of the controversy.

One quote from Rebecca Garland, the chief academic officer for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, really rubbed me the wrong way.  From an article at FoxNews:

We are certainly not trying to go away from American history.  What we are trying to do is figure out a way to teach it where students are connected to it, where they see the big idea, where they are able to make connections and draw relationships between parts of our history and the present day.

The changes being considered would apply to eleventh graders in the state, who currently study American history beginning with the nation’s founding.  Garland would seem to prefer that this “big idea” understanding of America and why it is special be formed by constraining the young people of North Carolina to examining the second, far more statist half of our nation’s history.  Educators are actually hurting their students and their country when they mislead our young people into believing that the Big Idea of America has something to do with labor unions or progressivism or redistributing wealth or the ideas of Fabian socialists like Wilson, FDR, or Obama.  In fact, the most important concepts of American history are the founding ideals, and the key to understanding American Exceptionalism is in knowing enough about our history and our founding principles to realize how special this country truly is.

Remember that many of these eleventh graders will soon be off to face progressive (Marxist) professors who seem to hate everything about America except their own cushy and often subsidized academic positions.  Authority figures like that are all too often a part of what Mark Levin correctly labels the counter revolution, with goals and ideologies that are diametrically opposed to our founding principles.  Knowing that today’s high school students will be facing off against this bevy of Ward Churchill types tomorrow, we should instead be teaching the incredible historical significance of the revolution on which our country is based.  It is vitally important to stress that the American Revolution was not simply a revolution against English rule.  It was a revolution against the idea that people were subjects at all.  It was a revolution against a long-standing and almost unbroken world acceptance of an inappropriate relationship between the State and the Individual.  If students have only one take-away from US History it should be that simple fact.  Many have correctly argued that the American Revolution was not truly complete until the abolition of slavery in 1865, and even that part of America’s history would be left out of the proposed curriculum.

An article by the Heritage Foundation argues that this history-finagling is SOP for the Progressives:

Early 20th century Progressives also taught that nothing before 1877 has meaning for today. In his new book We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future, Matthew Spalding recounts Progressives attack on America’s First Principles. The Progressives sought to remake America, so that the Declaration’s Founding Principles, the Constitution’s institutional structures, and the Civil War’s meaning as a victory for Founding principles would no longer ring true. The progressives argued that equal, natural rights were non-existent; government creates rights. They replaced representative government with the administrative, bureaucratic state.

There is no reason to believe that Ms. Garland or any others in the education establishment in North Carolina are part of a Progressive conspiracy to create adults without a deep appreciation for the Founding Principles.  The unfortunate case is that in many cases liberal thinking seems to naturally, even if unintentionally, flow in the direction of results that are favorable to those who seek to redefine our country and in many cases reject its traditions and institutions.  Whether sinister or just misguided, these proposed curriculum changes would force formative North Carolina students to build their perspectives of America – and their understanding of what makes America special – on a skewed view of America in which progress is presented as acceptance of Fabian socialist ideals and exponential increases in government involvement in the lives of individuals.

The potential changes involve more than just compartmentalizing the first half of American history out of the North Carolina high school curriculum.  As the FoxNews article points out, rather than studying world history ninth-graders would instead pursue something called global studies which would focus “in part on issues such as the environment”.  In a real sense this change seems to be an even wider version of the accompanying changes to the American history curriculum for eleventh graders.  An appreciation of what makes the American experiment so special requires an understanding of the historical evolution of the country’s founding and the principles underlying its formation.  Similarly, an educated understanding of the significance of western civilization requires a study of the history of the Greeks and the Romans and the British and their interactions with the other powers in their respective times.  Though I have not been able to locate details about this potential change to the world history classes, the fact that the name of the class would change from World History to Global Studies suggests that North Carolina’s ninth graders are not going to be learning of Pericles or Hannibal or William the Conqueror.  No, Global Studies sounds a little more… squishy.

In order for America to stay special, Americans have to know why they are special.  Anything that seeks to undermine the teaching and appreciation of the American founding is a threat to the American Experiment.  In fact, there should be an entire class on the American Founding including the Articles of Confederation and how its failures led to our incredible Constitution.  That would certainly prepare our young people to go defend their country against the counter revolutionaries that we inexplicably permit to mold the minds of our college students.

On a positive note, at least one elected official in North Carolina has said that the state legislature will step in if the state board decides to implement these changes.

Shapiro then points out the inherent dishonesty of how they are presenting this ”freeze”.

First of all, I hate the “we’re saving $250 billion over 10 years” line. It is a piece of crass political rhetoric and I’m disappointed that the administration would use it. If they actually implement a three year freeze on the portion of the budget they’re talking about (which is a big if, but let’s assume the best), why measure the effects in the space of 10 years?

The answer is “To make the freeze look bigger”. They’re basically just basing the extended savings off of projected interest payments and “savings” due to the fact that the baseline on that portion of the budget hasn’t moved. It is setting a dangerous data precedent where politicians realize that all they have to do is calculate a projection out as far as they need in order to get the numbers they want.

Seriously.  This is a three year freeze but they stretch it out to ten years in their calculations simply because 10x is a larger number than the real number, a mere 3x.  Your intelligence is being insulted and it should piss you off.  The statist triad of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi tell you that they believe that you are a moron every single day with their shallow obfuscations and pathetic word games, such as their tortured destruction of the word ‘reform’.  They clearly confuse us with their myrmidons.

Shapiro also points out how ridiculous it is to claim that you are saving money simply because you are not spending it:

As a slapdash example, a politician could project that they will increase spending by 5% next year and then decide at the last moment to increase it by 3%. They could then spin that decision to increase by a smaller amount as a decision to “cut” their spending (which wasn’t real spending, only projected spending) by 2%.

I remember a version of this audacious dishonesty back when the GOP held the house in the mid 90s.  Medicare spending was slated to increase by something like five percent and the republicans wanted to instead increase spending by only three percent.  The Democrats and their fawning media spun it as the GOP slashing medicare spending.  For the most part, the leftist scare tactics worked.

Check out the Political Math Blog, and follow him on twitter at @PoliticalMath.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

I was utterly disgusted in the 2008 election when it became clear that John McCain had decided to metaphorically keep the gloves on in his presidential campaign against the always vacuous Barack Obama.  Anyone paying attention was aware of the list of radical positions and associations that should have discredited the legitimacy of candidate Obama from the very beginning of the Democrat party primaries, but rather than pointing out these crazy positions, the McCain campaign decided to take the self-congratulatory “high road”.  As those of us in flyover country saw, in case after case where Mr. Obama should have been legitimately attacked for his radical friends and past comments, Senator McCain’s campaign made it clear that in their eyes they would prefer to lose with “class” than win by pointing out what a radical statist Barack Obama had already proven himself to be.  From his associations with Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers and Rashid Khalidi and Frank Marshall Davis, it was obvious even early in the Democrat primaries that candidate Obama was a radical anti-American hardcore leftist whose ascension to the presidency should not be allowed to occur.  Seeing the results of electing this Manchurian candidate today, it all seems even more obvious.

As we all know, John McCain’s misguided high road approach, combined with America’s inexplicable gullibility in believing the “say anything to win” Obama campaign strategy, and the historic nature of the potential first black American president created a perfect storm that swept the least qualified and most radical president in US History into the White House.  Too many Americans are only now realizing what an historic mistake it was to get swept up in that red tide.

Many of us remember the last time that a liberal took the presidency.  In 1992 Bill Clinton managed to win the election with the aid of a complicit media which made a huge deal out of a minor dip in the economy, and though President Obama makes Bill Clinton look amazingly realistic and centrist, we all worried about his far left ideology and where it would take the country.  As is often the case with liberal politicians, Mr. Clinton got momentarily intoxicated with power and pushed a little too far to the left only to be corrected by the American electorate in the elections of 1994.  Unlike Barack Obama, who is utterly blinded by his radical ideology, the consummate politician that was Bill Clinton responded by moving to the center and in many ways successfully triangulated against the opposition party.  Contrast Clinton’s rational political response to the seemingly politically suicidal route being taken by the current ruling cabal.  It did not seem to make sense, but then I read a chilling but spot-on article in American Thinker titled Understanding the Democrats’ Scheme.  In this article the author attempts to explain why the President and the congressional leadership seem so utterly unconcerned with the unprecedented push-back from Americans, most visibly represented by the widely reported and consistently denigrated Tea Party movement.  The author’s conclusion: the Democrats do not believe that they will have to face a real election again, and he makes some very chilling and valid points.

The reader understandably wants to dismiss this.  After all, this is America!  We may make some electoral mistakes, but when we do we throw the bums out, right?  When we can, we do.  The author of the article, John F. Gaski, makes some very cogent points about the tactics being employed by the Democrat party, now undeniably the party of statism.

Grant amnesty to the illegal aliens (the correct term for lawbreaking invaders, regardless of their natural and rational motives) which will create up to 30 million reliably Democrat voters — especially after being registered at least once each by ACORN. That is cushion enough to carry any national election. Why else could Dems be so fixated on this agenda item? 

This is a tactic that I like to call vote inflation.  Allow me to explain the monetary analogy.  Observers of the financial system know that when the U.S. government needs more money it often simply prints more currency which seems counterintuitive, but it works for them.  The end result is that like any commodity, more dollars in circulation means that each dollar is worth less, and many commentators have pointed out that this intentional inflation is perhaps the most insidious and hidden tax that they can levy on the American taxpayer.  Similarly, if the Democrats can legalize these undocumented workers as they euphemistically refer to them, they are in effect causing vote inflation, lessening the value of every other vote cast in America.  Though it will destroy the America that we love, it has a certain sinister brilliance to it.  These statists are playing hardball all while looking like bumbling idiots.

Many laymen still don’t understand how the ACORN scam works. To them, ACORN’s excuse that they are merely committing voter registration fraud, not vote fraud, seems plausible. Here’s the deal: Register 100,000 phony voters such as Mickey Mouse and the Seven Dwarves, thus expanding the nominal voter rolls, and the Democrat vote counters then have the latitude to create 100,000 extra votes out of thin air on election night. This is what “community organizer” really means, and Barack Obama is forever stained by his ACORN background. Not that it matters to him. 

America should brace for the biggest vote fraud and election theft caper of all time on election night 2010 — and in the months following. We now know as well that the Dems are guaranteed to win any statewide recount where there is a Democrat Secretary of State. And who, we must ask, is there to enforce the election laws now?

This is exactly how they managed to scrape up enough votes in Minnesota to ensure that Stuart Smalley secured the critical 60^th vote which has been very effectively used to steamroll over the rights of Americans who polls show are firmly against their statist health care agenda.  Why else would Democrats so thoroughly oppose laws that require that voters show identification in order to vote?  Historically, the Democrat party is the party of voter fraud.  To the left, the ends always justify the means.

As if they need it, the Dems will be secretly encouraging (maybe even hiring) third-party candidates wherever they need them, because they know that is the way to split the opposition vote. It almost always happens that way to the Democrats’ benefit. If people such as Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck don’t realize this soon, instead of talking up the third-party route, they will only help to ensure a permanent Democrat stranglehold on Congress and the presidency — although any one of this litany of methods would probably be sufficient for that. So the Dems are actually conservative in the sense of wanting some built-in redundancy!

Every time I hear a conservative-minded voter or pundit mention a third party, the hair stands up on the back of my neck.  Anyone who knows anything about the history of third parties in America knows that they simply split one party and hand the election to the other party.  When Teddy Roosevelt lost the Republican nomination to Taft in 1912, he chose to run on the Bull Moose Party ticket.  The result was that Roosevelt split the conservatives and allowed the progressive intellectual Woodrow Wilson to take the presidency with only 42% of the popular vote.  Another example of third party naiveté, in this case a debacle that I was a part of in my youth, was displayed in 1992 when Ross Perot ran on the Reform Party ticket.  Once again the result was a split of the conservative vote and the election of Bill Clinton who garnered only 43% of the popular vote.  History shows that any talk of a third party on the right will simply hand elections to the Democrats, and they know it even if naïve conservatives do not.

What do we suppose the extra trillion dollars of “stimulus” money to be spent from 2010 to 2012 is really for? Just a coincidence, or a ready-made election slush fund? How much has already been committed to ACORN and SEIU?

The so-called stimulus package was little more than a payback for union support and a mechanism for the creation of more people dependent on the government headed by Barack Obama.  There is little doubt that the jack booted purple-shirted thugs of the SEIU will be front and center during the next election cycle attempting to ensure that the Democrats maintain their statist grip on power.  ACORN and the SEIU are the enemies of every single freedom loving American.

Then there is the “universal voter registration” plan that the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund has spotlighted, granting automatic voting privilege to anyone who has ever registered for practically anything, anywhere, anytime. The Democrats and their henchmen could work with that, couldn’t they? Or why are they so eager to enact it? Their entire history has been to oppose laws that prevent vote fraud, after all. (What could be their motive for that particular laxity?)

These five strategies should be enough to ensure permanent Democrat control of our federal government — a virtual dictatorship. For them, it is a royal flush. But another part of the scheme may be the most pernicious of all. The worst is yet to come.

Before you continue, please read this article referenced in the quoted section above on the Democrats’ universal voter registration scheme.  Once again, they are playing hardball while too many naïve Americans continue to believe that this is just the normal cyclical swing to the left that we see every decade or so.  By the time that conservative Americans come to their senses, the game will be over with our cherished freedoms lost forever to the tyranny of the newly manufactured majority.

When you become dependent on the decision of a Democrat bureaucrat for crucial medical treatment — after the health care takeover — how much power does that give the Democrats over you? Elderly voters tend to vote more conservatively than younger voters, so letting the elderly die because care is “too expensive” can reshape the political profile of the electorate. But can we reasonably foresee that party registration or political contributions might enter the bureaucrat’s calculus? Might it occur to the intense partisans of the Obama administration to grant lifesaving treatment to those they regard as “their people,” but not to others? What a neat way to eliminate the opposition! Party registration is already public information. And if they can overturn the secret ballot for union elections via “card check,” how long before they try to impose the same more generally, so they will always know how you have voted? Do not trust the judiciary to save us, either, after President Obama packs the courts with more ultra-leftists. 

Chilling, isn’t it? But not extreme: Obama himself has notoriously displayed his disregard for human life by the stated willingness to sacrifice “grandma” to a pain pill and his coarse support for unrestricted abortion — even opposition to the Infant Born Alive Act, which he has tried to subvert. 

When the Democrats achieve literal death-grip power over the lives of all our citizens, that’s when they also achieve their long-cherished dream of absolute power in a virtual one-party state. Now is it becoming transparent (so to speak) what the real scheme behind their mania for “health-care reform” is? Now does it all make sense? This is not your father’s Democrat party. 

This issue is not about health care, ultimately. It is about raw political power and the long-promised radical takeover of the United States. For anyone who hasn’t thought of all this before, I guarantee that Obama and his party’s other leaders have.

Anyone who has read this far likely knows that the so-called Health Care Reform legislation has nothing to do with health care or compassion but is simply the best route to dependency-based power and control over government subjects.  I cannot stress strongly enough my dread at the reality that these statists in the Democrat party are playing permanent nation-changing hardball while too many Americans think that this is just the normal give and take while dejectedly flipping from Fox News to go watch something asinine like The Biggest Loser.  Wake up, people, before it is too late!

In addition to the points made by Gaski that I quoted above, consider how the Democrats have pursued their agenda since President Obama took office.  They have held votes on health care in the middle of the night and on holidays to try to slip them under our radar.  They have bribed egregiously dishonest politicians like Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson with our money to secure their votes on health care legislation that Americans do not want.  At the time of this writing there is just over a week until a special election in Massachusetts to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, and it has been reported that a win for the Democrat will result in immediate swearing in whereas a Republican win will incur a long enough delay to pass the health care bill first.  In the executive branch, we have seen Chicago gangster style politics on display in the White House (remember that 3 of the last 7 governors of Illinois went to jail for corruption, not counting Blagojevich) and President Obama refusing to demand that the reconciliation process for the health care bill be televised on C-SPAN, even in the face of widespread coverage showing him making that promise 8 times during his deceitful presidential campaign.

This gaggle of elitist beta males and statist myrmidons who run the country are playing for keeps, and too many people on the freedom side of the equation remain in denial.  Your grandchildren are going to ask you what you did in this battle for the soul and future of America.  What will you say?

Though spoken in a different context, this quote from Winston Churchill is perfectly fitting:

Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.

Once it becomes automatic to more skeptically analyze the arguments that people make, it becomes quite apparent that there is no shortage of people who stubbornly hold beliefs based on fallacious logic.  Though a seemingly harmless result like believing in ghosts or psychics is often the outcome of such flawed reasoning, it ceases to be entertaining when one absorbs the reality that nation-changing decisions are being made on the basis of what amounts to illogical half-thinking.  American politics and punditry are rife with examples of logical fallacies that are routinely utilized to skew our perspectives.  More often than not the results are unwise, ill-informed decisions with long lasting unintended consequences.

The slick and relentless utilization of one such logical fallacy, the false dichotomy, is a key part of an attempted wholesale destructive change to the historical American philosophical view of the proper relationship between the State and the Individual.  The SGU list referenced above defines a false dichotomy as “arbitrarily reducing a set of many possibilities to only two”, in other words claiming that there are only two choices in situations where multiple alternatives exist.  An argument can be made that statists long ago perfected an art form implementing this particular logical fallacy, and this flawed logic is regularly on display during our ongoing great debate about the socialization of health care in America.

Those who have debated the so-called Health Care “Reform” now being foisted upon an unwilling American populace have seen this false-choice tactic employed time after time.  Virtually every socialized medicine debate of any depth or duration will ultimately demonstrate the last-ditch logical fallacy that underpins proponents’ fierce support for any piece of legislation that manages to be labeled as health care reform.  Even after yielding on cogent criticisms involving costs and historical government inefficiency, proponents of socialized medicine quite often fall back on one consistent but intellectually bankrupt response:

“Doing nothing is not an option.”

That statement encapsulates the knowingly dishonest statist myth that there exist only two choices in this debate.  The arguments from many supporters of socialized medicine strive to reduce the debate to one of choosing between massively increased governmental intrusions into our health care system or simply leaving the status quo in place.  As employed in this case and in many other proposals from American progressives, that classic false dichotomy argument attempts to force people into choosing between socialism or inaction, soft tyranny or nothing.  Various counterproposals have been discussed at great length in many other places, but it is safe to say that the collection of alternative ideas from conservatives including tort reform, portability, easing of mandates, and interstate sale of health insurance certainly constitutes a middle ground that does not conform to the dishonest false dichotomy presented.

In Atlas Shrugged the author admonished readers to check their premises in order to ensure that the things that are “known” are not built on false ideas or flawed logic.  Unfortunately, much of what many people “know” is often based upon sets of rationalizations and positions that too many of those people intellectually cemented in place long ago, never to be reexamined.  In the current health care debate this phenomenon is often demonstrated when people continue to repeat the allegation that 46 million Americans cannot get health insurance even though that claim has been consistently proven to be flawed and deceitful.  Clever politicians are very adept at contriving proposals based upon flawed premises, always subtly manipulating the public in the direction of increased government power. 

Public opinion polls continue to show increasing opposition to any government health care plan.  At the same time there is a frantic partisan push in the Senate to get this egregious bill passed, including Landrieu-like bribes being thrown around to buy votes.

It is clearer than ever that the sole aim of so-called health care reform legislation is to significantly increase government power over the lives of its subjects.  Nothing else makes logical sense.

[I originally posted this on my other blog but decided to cross-post it here as well]