I’ve never had to wonder about that again.  Writer’s block is no threat, when eventful days are spent in a fountain of creativity like Hot Air.  There have always been more things to write about than hours available to write… until now.

I’m honored to report that I’ve been hired by Human Events, to become a full-time writer at www.humanevents.com.  My first essay as a staff writer is online now: The Mind of America.

This is a grand experiment for everyone involved.  For me, it’s nothing short of a miracle: the discovery of an entirely new destiny, halfway through my life.  It’s humbling to become a part of such a revered institution, especially in these remarkable times.  The pages of history are turning before us.  I’ve just been handed a pen, and invited to scribble in the margins.

I can’t begin to tell you how much the writers and readers of Hot Air have meant to me.  It was a rare privilege to be given such a high-profile spot to begin my blogging career.  I hope with all my heart that I have been worthy of this privilege.  Rarely has a writer been gifted with such swift and insightful feedback, from such a perceptive and spirited community.  You have taught me a hundred lessons, in the comment forums to every post I have written.  Both words of praise, and polite disagreement, have been priceless treasures.  Impolite disagreement has been a guilty pleasure to read, when it comes with a dash of wit.

Whatever skill I possess at writing has been gained by studying the best.  Michelle, Ed, Allahpundit, and everyone else involved with Hot Air have created something truly special.  I consider myself second to none in my admiration for their work.  With heart, humor, and keen insight, the Hot Air crew makes sense of overwhelming events.  The gifts of laughter and wisdom are given with wondrous regularity here.  I remain a most devoted reader, eager to receive those gifts every day.

You have changed my life. I hope I’ve contributed something to yours, and may continue to do so.

As Human Events is not the sort of place where people write under the names of hopelessly obscure super-heroes, I am “Doctor Zero” no more.  (Well, except on Twitter, where I’m still Doc_0.)

Yours with enduring respect and affection,

John Hayward

Government payrolls, are the only thing that expanded during the past session of Congress.  Public sector jobs multiplied like a virus, and the number of six-figure government employees skyrocketed.  Meanwhile, real unemployment in the private sector – including seasonal adjustments, long-term discouraged workers, and the underemployed – hit 22% nationwide.  The lights burned bright and merry in the plush offices of K Street lobbying firms, while the rest of the economy slid into darkness.

This Congress demonstrated its economic wisdom with the Cash for Clunkers program, which wasted billions of your dollars in a futile attempt to shovel new car sales from one quarter to another, giving them a “success story” to tout for a while… until they realized nobody was gullible enough to consider it successful.  Meanwhile, it drained sales from healthy industries, destroyed the used-car market, and provided incentives for low-income buyers to rack up more debt they cannot afford to repay.

The 111^th congress stank with the corruption of Christopher Dodd, Jack Murtha, Maxine Waters, Charlie Rangel, and Harry Reid.  The ruling Party made it clear that it would go to any lengths to protect its worst members from investigation and punishment.  The agenda of this Congress was conducted behind closed doors, or slipped like poison into the legislative bloodstream, to escape the notice of the American people.  Fat bailouts for loyal union allies were hidden inside bills that were supposed to fund the military.  Nobody knew what this Congress was really voting on… including members of Congress, who didn’t bother to read the bills anyway.

The House of Representatives was presided over by a Speaker of astonishing arrogance, who recklessly abused her power for personal convenience.  Caught in a trap of her own making, after trying to score political points against terrorist interrogation techniques she had been fully briefed on, Nancy Pelosi tried to weasel her way out by claiming the CIA lied to her.  The disgraceful “leadership” of Pelosi and Reid will be studied by generations to come, in the kind of class future kids only have to take when they’re caught skipping more interesting classes to fool around on their hoverboards.

This was a Congress at war with American business, which is a war against American liberty, since business is the instrument through which we invest the hours of our lives.  The 111^th Congress spent its term menacing the private sector with disastrous, economy-killing ideas like cap-and-trade, Card Check, and value-added taxes… then wondered why nobody was creating any jobs.  There’s no point in taking risks and doing the hard work to be a winner, when the losers get taxpayer bailouts, provided they have employees from the right labor unions.

Of course, this is the Congress that shoved ObamaCare down our throats.  Drafted in secret, hidden behind fraudulent cost estimates, and understood by none of the people who voted on it, ObamaCare is the most shocking dereliction of Congressional duty in recent history.  Its architects flirted openly with violating the Constitution to inflict it upon us through reconciliation, before they managed to buy enough votes with our money.  It has already destroyed thousands of jobs, and inflicted painful new costs on hapless workers who thought their health insurance was supposed to get cheaper.

The passage of ObamaCare shattered the myth of the “moderate Democrat” for a generation.  Every one of them is an accomplice to this radical offense against the American people.  Private comments from Congressional representatives made it clear they knew exactly what they were doing to us.  They saddled us with a system designed to fail, and pave the way for something even worse: single-payer socialized medicine.

Faced with electoral destruction at the hands of an enraged populace, the Democrats of the 111^th Congress spent their last days calling the voters stupid and insane.  They scurried out of town without even passing a budget, leaving a recessionary economy tied to the ticking bomb of the expiring Bush tax cuts.

Remember the arrogance.  Remember the cowardice.  Remember the ugly hatred of middle-class America.  Remember the sheer blind stupidity of those who demand the power to write our destiny, when they’re not yelping in surprise at the latest piece of “unexpected” economic news.

Remember the 111^th Congress this Tuesday, and render your verdict in the voting booth.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

“If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s going to be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.”

Referring specifically to Republicans such as Senator John McCain, who formerly supported an overhaul but now are stressing border security and supporting strict immigration laws like Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration measure, Mr. Obama said, “Those aren’t the kinds of folks who represent our core American values.”

Did you ever imagine you would witness a President using this kind of rhetoric?  Well, get used to it.  He was dumping a fresh load of shame upon the office he occupies, but Barack Obama was also giving Latino voters some perfectly reasonable advice.

The power of the State is the power of compulsion.  In a free country, this power is used to protect the rights of citizens.  The “core value” of the Left is the embrace of “positive rights.”  They believe citizens have a “right” to health care, affordable housing, and various other benefits.  The State has a moral duty to use compulsive force to secure these “rights” for everyone.

What does a “right” to health care imply about the rights of doctors and insurance companies?  The progressive taxation of income, which funds the State’s quest for social justice, compromises the right of highly taxed citizens to ownership of their time and property.  The “right” to affordable housing unleashed the Godzilla of Fannie Mae upon the downtown Tokyo of the American economy.

It is logically impossible to provide a positive right to some, without compromising the rights of others.  If cheap health insurance is compelled for those with pre-existing conditions, the right of insurance companies to run their business in a prudent, profitable manner is negated.  If “free” health care is seized by government and distributed as it sees fit, the medical industry will become first indentured, and then nationalized, without regard to the will of its members.  In a land where food is “free,” farmers are slaves.

A socialist government becomes an arbiter of rights.  The State decides whose rights must be discarded, so that others can be satisfied.  Naturally, politicians will make these decisions in accordance with their political interests, for as long as they must suffer popular elections.  An individual’s rights become contingent on the influence of their political collective.

A highly organized group with well-connected leadership can expect its “rights” to be honored, at the expense of others. No doubt you thought of at least half a dozen examples while you read the previous sentence.

President Obama was entirely correct to advise the Latino voting bloc to hang together, obey its leadership, and trade their votes for rewards from the ruling class.  When rights are balanced against each other, in an equation resolved by the use of compulsive force, those who belong to opposing groups are your enemies.  Your prosperity comes with their defeat.  Holding interest groups together becomes vitally important for success under the total State.  The force which binds those groups will inevitably sour into hatred.

This is not a core American value, but it is a core value of the modern Democrat Party.  Their President gave his Latino audience a taste of things to come.  Tomorrow is France, and the day after is Greece.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

The latest films to tickle our collective anxieties belong to the Paranormal Activity series.  The first is available on DVD, while second opened in theaters this weekend.  Our homes have become castles, fortified with giant plasma screens and high-speed internet, but the malevolent spirit haunting these movies walks right through our best electronic defenses.  It doesn’t even bother knocking until it’s already inside.

The central conceit of Paranormal Activity is brilliant in its simplicity: an average suburban family uses video equipment to capture the increasingly disturbing late-night adventures of a presence they initially believe to be a ghost… but which turns out to be something far more terrifying.  The first movie is filmed largely with a camcorder, set up to record the weird things that happen around a young couple while they sleep.  The sequel, which is actually more of a prequel, widens the scope to include footage from multiple security cameras, and ups the ante by placing a larger family in peril… including a baby boy who proves to be the main interest of the phantom intruder.

The goosebump factor of these movies should not be underestimated.  I saw the original on DVD, and the sequel in theaters.  It’s a lot more fun to see them in theaters.  Even if you have a little difficulty finding the chills in a door that slowly opens itself, you can surf the waves of tension rolling through the audience.

The reason so many people find Paranormal Activity scary is that it presents a familiar situation, which they can easily relate to.  You won’t have trouble replacing the sketchy characters with your own friends and family.  Everyone knows how unsettling it can be to hear sudden loud noises at three A.M.  Everyone has seen a baby or animal stare into empty space, and wondered what they were looking at.

We pride ourselves on the comfort and security of our carefully wired homes, and shiver at the thought of our privacy being violently invaded.  Paranormal Activity 2 begins with the family discovering an act of vandalism, which probably isn’t the work of the evil spirit – it’s too weak to trash the whole house at the beginning of the story.  It’s still a creepy scene.  I could see many members of the audience shifting uncomfortably in their seats.  A lot of us have been there.  The supernatural invasion of privacy which follows is a fantastic extension of a very understandable anxiety.

There isn’t a lot of plot or characterization in these movies, but the two husbands are interesting.  The male protagonist of the first movie is a man-child who attempts to appear courageous by taunting and provoking something he should be running away from.  The husband in Paranormal Activity 2 appears more capable at first, and has an engaging sense of humor… but when the situation deteriorates, he responds with an act of callous selfishness, a human evil to match the inhuman hunger of the demonic spirit.  Sure, he’s scared and worried about his family, but he’s still a complete bastard.  Not only are the two sisters at the heart of the story haunted by a creature of the pit, but they have lousy taste in men.

Part Two has some important differences from the first movie.  It takes a lot longer to get going, but once the spirit starts feeling its oats, things spiral out of control more quickly.  The new movie pushes a lot of buttons designed to manipulate fans of the original film, including a brief encore by the oh-crap-here-we-go video fast forward.  The multiple cameras allow for more elaborate storytelling, an opportunity not fully exploited by the director, but used quite effectively in a few scenes.  The conclusion seems rushed, and I found myself expecting a teaser for Paranormal Activity 3 after the credits.  Apparently, this evil spirit is only subtle when it has to be.

I liked the slow build of the first movie, but Paranormal Activity 2 may work better for some, because the climax feels so wild and out of control.  Like all horror films, it won’t work for everyone, but the popularity of the Paranormal Activity series testifies to a certain commonality of the horror it offers.  No matter how sophisticated and sturdy your home might be, you may still find yourself wondering what happens in the darkness around you while you sleep… or what your dog is barking at, three hours before sunrise… or why your baby is suddenly crying like he’s scared out of his wits.  The normal adult response is to tell the baby everything is all right.  Paranormal Activity thrives on the icy suspicion that you might be wrong.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

NPR also received a boatload of the sinister foreign money President Obama has been hyperventilating about, from billionaire George Soros, and all that imported cabbage probably bought him some editorial influence.  He might have insisted on a standard of ideological purity that Juan Williams could no longer meet.

Political correctness may have prompted a reflexive dismissal from the mindless drones running NPR, who were last heard musing that Williams should be reviewing his opinions with a psychiatrist.  The Volturi do not give second chances.

Fear of criticism by the Islamic front organization CAIR, which the Left takes very seriously, could certainly have been a factor in their decision, as could anticipation of even more pointed criticism from less elegantly tailored sources.  NPR certainly isn’t afraid of Juan Williams, and its CEO is no Megyn Kelly.

For the record, NPR stated that Williams’ remarks were “inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices,” which is an understandable position for them to take.  In his conversation with Bill O’Reilly, Williams slandered a Republican congressman with an idiotic, easily debunked conspiracy theory, stating he had advance knowledge of the Oklahoma City terrorist bombings but did nothing to prevent them.  Wait, sorry, my bad.  That was Rachel Maddow, over at MSNBC, and she’s still got her job.  Williams said this, in response to O’Reilly’s assertion that “jihad, aided and abetted by some Muslim nations, is the biggest threat on the planet:”

“I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

I think one of the reasons the hardcore liberals who run NPR terminated Williams is their desire to abort a preference cascade.  This is one of the major reasons black conservatives, or those like Williams who express some appreciation for the conservative viewpoint, are treated so harshly by the left.  The Democrat Party, political vehicle of the Left, depends on nearly-absolute support from black voters for its very survival.  Second thoughts from such a captive constituency would be deadly.

As described by Glenn Reynolds in a classic 2002 essay, a preference cascade occurs when people trapped inside a manufactured consensus suddenly realize that many other people share their doubts.  Preference falsification works by making doubters feel isolated and alone.  In a totalitarian society, the dissenter fears that if he speaks up, his will be a lone voice, easily squashed by the enforcers of the regime.  When dissenters realize they are not alone, and the true strength of their numbers becomes apparent, “invincible” regimes vanish with astonishing speed.

The same effect can occur without brutal oppression, when fear of ostracism and ridicule cause people to suppress their own doubts. This kind of preference falsification requires strict discipline from the makers of opinion.  Since a free society makes it very easy for individuals to change their opinions, they must be prevented from even considering such a change.  Manufactured consensus is very fragile in a competitive arena of ideas, when there is no fearsome penalty for a “Fresh Air” listener who decides to switch over to Rush Limbaugh.

The manufactured liberal consensus about Islamic terrorism rolled off the assembly line a long time ago, complete with a serial number and a limited warranty… which will instantly expire on the date of the next successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil.  Islam is held hostage by a tiny minority of extremists.  Juan Williams is more likely to be struck by lightning in midair than share a plane with one of them.  The War on Terror was largely the invention of a paranoid and divisive Bush Administration.  We repaired much of our rift with the Muslim world by electing Barack Obama, and the rest will be filled in with billions of foreign aid dollars, since poverty is the primary cause of terrorism.

A credentialed, taxpayer-supported NPR liberal cannot be allowed to question this consensus.  It will shatter too easily if the clients of liberalism begin connecting dots between underwear bombers and pistol-packing Army psychiatrists.  They cannot be left to nod quietly in agreement with the earnest musings of Juan Williams… then look around the room and see all the other faithful liberals nodding at the same time.  It’s especially threatening when you consider the enormous increase in audience Williams gains by appearing on Fox News.  He wasn’t just an employee of NPR.  He was well on his way to becoming the public face of the organization, and his prominence would only increase in the wake of a November wave that destroys the relevance of his peers.  This would put him in a position to threaten even more leftist dogma with mild questions.  Liberalism has no shortage of fragile beliefs.

Juan Williams came too close to understanding ideas he was supposed to hate.  The Left is deathly afraid of what happens when its constituents begin to understand the Right.  They didn’t like the idea of millions watching an NPR contributor break the biohazard seal on strictly quarantined ideas.

Williams will be just fine.  He’s got a new $2 million deal with Fox News.  Getting fired from NPR when you’re a fixture on Fox is like Will Smith learning he’s been kicked out of his local dinner theater company.  With a secure position, and considerable sympathy from conservatives who know all about the closing of the liberal mind, he’ll be in a perfect position to get those preference cascades rolling.  I have plenty of disagreements with Juan Williams, but I think we can unite in our appreciation for the awesome power of an honest mind.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

This crisis has cultural and international dimensions.  The election of a supposedly “post-racial” black President was meant to achieve a level of racial harmony the public had wearily concluded it could not reach on its own.

We could see no remainder from the horrors of the civil-rights era, and public statements of prejudice against preferred minorities resulted in immediate exile from civic life… but the credentialed representatives of minority organizations assured us things were worse than ever.  Lacking the cultural confidence to ignore these voices when they degenerated into meaningless blather, Americans outsourced the quest for racial enlightenment to a politician, who the media presented as a kind of messiah.

On the international front, the American public was told its strong resistance to terrorism had earned the sullen resentment of the Western world.  Taking the United Nations seriously earned its contempt.  Faced with the aggressive confidence of the expanding Islamic world, the West began negotiating the surrender of its ideals.  The American people have been taught from an early age that freedom of speech is the most sacred principle of an advanced democracy… but they watched the institutions of Europe kneel fearfully before the threat of Islamic violence, and now their own “free” press has begun following suit.  Self-censorship is presented with the queasy false bravado of children trying to justify surrender to the class bully as an act of heroism.

Last month, the cartoonist who kicked off “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” ceased to exist.  The utter collapse of American confidence in the freedom of speech and religion was commemorated with a chilling five-word epitaph: “there is no more Molly.”  Instead of responding with outrage, the American media quietly went back to inventing elaborate artistic reasons for suppressing anything that might be upsetting to Muslims.

These cultural and international moments of doubt are symptoms of a more deeply rooted crisis of confidence.

America no longer believes in freedom.

We haven’t lost every shred of that belief, but freedom is not nourished by qualified, tentative faith.  The current ruling Party demands faith in the State, which necessarily comes at the expense of belief in ourselves.  When we expect the State to provide our sustenance, using funds extracted from our neighbors by force, we have broken our communion with freedom.

We have been presented with a gigantic bill granting the State control over our health care.  It was clumsily assembled, like a hostage note, using pieces torn from the Constitution.  Its many unformed clauses and unexpected consequences make it an open-ended demand for control: the government will assume whatever powers it finds necessary to provide health care.  The remarkable extension of waivers to select organizations, shielding them from the most destructive aspects of this legislation, makes it clear these will be arbitrary powers.  The State will not allow itself to be bound by any commitments.  ObamaCare is a demand, not a promise.

Accepting this health-care takeover is a concession that free people cannot provide such services to one another through commerce.  A system that was already hobbled and distorted by government intervention is replaced by one that operates completely at the whim of the State.  Health insurance used to be a rickety contraption of senseless regulations, constructed over a bottomless pit of liability, where vast schools of trial lawyers waited with mouths full of shark teeth.  Insisting on a more free and flexible system would have been an expression of confidence in ourselves.  Instead, we declared ourselves unfit to handle our health needs.  We didn’t even insist on reading the entire bill before it was fastened around our throats.

Socialism is a virus, quickly destroyed by the healthy immune system of a confident people.  Americans have long forgotten the vital importance of capitalism as the material expression of freedom.  Once they allowed themselves to believe meaningful freedom could exist in the absence of capitalism, they started down a road which led, inevitably, to renouncing their unqualified belief in freedom.  Liberty exists now in the spaces government has not yet chosen to occupy.

The upcoming elections represent a final opportunity for America to recover its confidence.  To allow the Democrats continued power in Congress, after the staggering incompetence of the past few years, would be a crippling blow to what remains of our esteem… a concession that, no matter how bumbling and corrupt these acolytes of the total State might be, their continued stewardship is preferable to managing our own affairs.  They have made this clear through the narrative that voters are too stupid and cowardly to appreciate their wisdom.  Anyone, in any state, who votes Democrat is accepting that narrative.

If you believe in yourself, you will command the government to respect your rights to your own property, and the wealth produced by your labor.  If you believe in your family, you will not suffocate your children beneath the burden of financing your security.  If you believe in your neighbors, you will seek prosperity in the free exchange of goods and services, instead of looking for subsistence in the promises of politicians.  If you believe in America, you will look around and see the same land where your grandfathers worked miracles, and wrote legends.  If you believe in capitalism, you will put your faith in a marketplace that works to win your business, rather than a government that commands your obedience.  Growth and innovation cannot occur without risk, and only people who believe in the future take risks.

We must resolve the crisis of confidence, right now, or it will be the end of us.  This Administration tells us that double-digit unemployment is now a permanent feature of American life, and our children will never experience the prosperity we enjoyed before the coming of Barack Obama.  I don’t believe them. I believe in you.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

It’s funny, and it’s dead serious. Stewart may rely on the cover of being “just a fake news program,” but at least since he went off on Crossfire in 2004, he’s also had a very earnest distaste for the media personalities and politicians whose sole purpose, it seems, is to whip people into psychosis. You would think, looking at the way the country runs now, that America took the movie Network not as a cautionary tale but a how-to manual. Maybe Stewart can give a voice to the people who are not “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore” but rather, you know, pretty ticked off yet willing to keep giving it a shot.

Guess what, Stewart fans?  “Pretty ticked off yet willing to give it a shot” means you’re not even speed bumps to the ambitions of this carnivorous government.  You’ve already lost a shocking amount of freedom in just two years.  The mandarins who imposed ObamaCare couldn’t care less about your willingness to give it a shot.  You will obey, completely, or you will be fined and jailed… unless you work for a favored corporation or union that secured a waiver.  Your health-care options and employment opportunities have already been severely damaged by ObamaCare.  The only way to repair that damage is to resist with all your might, and insist on repeal.  Anything less is meaningless, and makes you useless.  Have fun at your rally.

Stewart says he wants to “take back the conversation from screamers and conspiracy theorists”:

“We live in troubled times,” Stewart announced, “with real people facing real problems, problems that have real if imperfect solutions that I believe 70 to 80 percent of our population could agree to try and could ultimately live with. Unfortunately, the conversation and process is controlled by the other 15 to 20 percent.”

Dissent is so rude, isn’t it?  We should all just close our eyes and quietly join the herd.  Ignore the polls that show over 60% resistance to every item on the ruling Party’s agenda. Trust Stewart’s assurances that 70 or 80 percent of us could live with it, if the other 20% would just shut up and submit.  The majority should rule in all circumstances.  It’s not like we have a Constitution that says anything different.

You’ve got to love how all this handwringing about screamers and conspiracies appears whenever effective resistance to the “progressive” agenda is happening.  No amount of shrill hysteria or mindless paranoia could have moved Jon Stewart to host a rally in support of George W. Bush.  Time says this is a rally for “people who can disagree with other people without comparing them to Hitler.”  They had absolutely no problem with people who disagreed with Bush by comparing him to Hitler.

Calling Stewart’s event a “Rally to Restore Sanity” should provoke contempt from those aware of the issues behind this election, rather than laughter.  There is nothing sane about wild, unsustainable deficit spending, or the deliberate destruction of the health-insurance industry to further a political agenda.  There is nothing sane about the spectacle of a comedian intervening to protect an incompetent, power-hungry President from judgment by voters he openly derides as stupid and uninformed.

Pick your favorite flavor of madness, and you’ll find it displayed by this President.  Obama was recently diagnosed with delusions of shovel-ready jobs.  There is abundant evidence of megalomania – “I won,” the difference between grabbing control of health care in 2009 vs. 1994 is “you have me,” etc.  When he asked for more stimulus money, after squandering and stealing over $800 billion, he was filling Einstein’s famous definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, while expecting different results.

The President’s paranoia is evident through his repeated tendency to describe opponents, and even inconvenient citizens, as incarnations of evil.  Everyone who questions him is ignorant, violent, racist, or un-American.  Those who challenge him, from the health-care town halls of 2009 to today, are nothing but the tools of sinister corporate interests – defined as any special interest that doesn’t give Obama bags of campaign money.

His tendency toward projection is pathological.  He rails against American business while shifting his coat to conceal a pocketful of checks from Goldman-Sachs.  His other pockets are stuffed with a variety of foreign currencies, the kind of money he damns the Chamber of Commerce for taking.  Under pressure, the President reverts to infancy with frightening speed, desperately blaming all his problems on a predecessor who quietly retired two years ago.

Obama’s Party is equally insane.  From frothing lunatics like Alan Grayson… to shameless liars like Dick Blumenthal, Barney Frank, and Chris Coons… to Patty Murray – the idiot who said Osama bin Laden has been “making lives better” by “building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day-care facilities, and building health-care facilities” – the Democrat Party is brimming with people mentally unfit to come anywhere near the halls of Congress.  Every public utterance of Democrat leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi makes it seem as if they just arrived from an alternate dimension, and would bleed mercury if their skin was cut.

The Republicans have an ample supply of loons as well.  It has been the sober determination of the Republican base, not the lazy sarcasm of hip comedians, which plucked so many nuts from their Party mix during the primaries.

Nationalizing industries is crazy.  Passing thousand-page bills based on deliberately falsified deficit projections is crazy.  Passing those bills without even reading them is crazy.  Racking up a $13 trillion national debt is crazy.  Accepting 10% unemployment as the “new normal” is crazy.  Dropping gigantic tax increases on a recessionary economy is crazy.  Fleeing Washington without even voting on those tax increases is crazy.

Paying serious attention to a rally “Oprahturfed” by billionaire entertainers and liberal activists, as if it represented some outpouring of popular support for the lunatic agenda of this President, would be completely nuts.  Enjoy your afternoon on the Mall, Mr. Stewart.  There will be a much bigger Rally to Restore Sanity on November 2^nd.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

There is no question that our centralized government is gigantic.  Those who support the idea of a gigantic State believe our affairs should be managed by a concentration of power and money, at the disposal of a brilliant and moral ruling class.  Only a giant government, staffed with selfless and highly educated public servants, can prevent our economy from collapsing, or provide us with affordable health care.

Intelligence requires information.  The most brilliant intellect cannot make meaningful decisions in a state of sensory deprivation.  False knowledge passes through a perfect system to emerge as useless garbage.

Where does the leviathan State get its information?  It relies on the testimony of “experts,” even though many of them – climate change advocates, lobbyists, political appointees with connections to aggressive outside interests – have agendas that make their input unreliable.  The State spends a lot of time listening to the media, who are also unreliable sources, their data warped by agendas and preconceptions.  The ideology of politicians tells them what should be true, and they proceed to cherry-pick data to support their prejudices.  Very little of the State’s information comes from the kind of dispassionate scientific analysis it always pretends to be conducting.

The free market, on the other hand, has access to a rich stream of high-speed data, coming from the last input Big Government is willing to consider: you.

You have virtually no input into the decision-making process of the national government.  You might reply that you wouldn’t expect to have very much to say, since you’re one voter among millions… but you would be underestimating the problem.  It’s not just that you personally have limited input, any more than you personally control the behavior of Microsoft or Wal-Mart.  Rather, we have very little input collectively. The desires of your family, plus everyone you know, plus the membership of every organization you belong to, can barely scratch the thick hide of a titanic central government.

This is not merely a question of arrogance or elitism.  A single central authority cannot consider the input of all the opposed interests in a huge, dynamic national economy.  It doesn’t matter how genuinely selfish or compassionate the executives and legislators of the State might be.  There are too many people, moving in too many different directions, for the eye of the State to follow them all.  Instead, compromises must be struck between the demands of powerful constituencies.  Groups hostile to the ruling Party are marginalized, paying the price for supporting the opposition, as the Chamber of Commerce could tell you.

Small, eccentric groups and individuals have no input into the decisions of the State at all.  This is not to say they are ignored.  No one is ignored.  Big Government is absolutely horrible at dealing with dissent.  No one can be allowed to go their own way.  No one can decline to participate in taxes and regulations.  Certain large and powerful interests might be granted waivers from a horrible law like ObamaCare, but no such consideration will ever be extended to individuals.  The passage of ObamaCare was the official end of the State’s interest in hearing your thoughts about the way health care should be administered.  You will not be permitted to disregard the State’s opinions on the matter.

In a free society, even the largest businesses have competitors, and grow jealous of their market share.  The biggest player in any industry can bet that small, hungry competitors are designing business plans to attack their weaknesses.  The decisions of consumers become an incredibly powerful stream of data, which companies must interpret and respond to within a matter of days or weeks.

Decentralized, limited government can also tap into this data stream, in a more limited fashion, as populations and businesses abandon unfriendly environments and poorly-managed municipalities, or correct local governments with relatively competitive elections.  Local voters can become truly informed about the issues.  Popular will has a real chance to alter the destiny of towns and counties.

All of this priceless information is nothing but water lapping at the toes of the blind federal giant.  Even massive “wave” elections, driven by the most passionate and informed electorate in a generation, may not be enough to reverse the effects of radical power grabs, or halt the feeding frenzy of lame ducks in a shallow congressional pond.  The current ruling Party has taken to explicitly stating that voters cannot possibly understand the issues, and are not qualified to pass judgment on their betters in Washington.  Massive bills have been passed over deafening howls of popular opposition… and in some states, the opposition has already faded away, leaving voters ready to re-elect politicians who hold them in open contempt.

It will take an incredible, historic election merely to slow the relentless advance of the blind giant.  It has paused, in these last weeks before November.  It can dimly hear the screaming of people with pitchforks and torches, far below.  It must be cut down to its knees before it can understand a word they’re saying.  The senses of the State are so dull that it only pays attention to miracles.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

Death comes for us all in the end, but that is no reason for despair.  Our victories matter, even if the ultimate outcome of the contest is certain.  Life always matters.  We are each a tiny spark of light against the great dark sweep of entropy, but together we are a galaxy.

Your parents won a great victory for the living world in the moment of your birth.  You exist in defiance of incalculable odds.  The reality of human life is highly improbable.  Considering the billions of factors that must combine to produce atmosphere, life, and awareness, the birth of humanity was a sucker bet.  But here we are… and a billion of us beam with joy as we watch thirty-three more long shots rise from a hole that should have been their tomb.

These are not the only men to rush into the arms of their families after escaping incredible hardship and peril.  The same scene plays out every day as wounded soldiers pass through airports on their way home from combat duty, injured police officers take their first shaky steps out of hospital beds, and firefighters crawl from burning rubble.  A soldier just returned to my home town without his legs.  I was watching a news report of his reunion with family and friends when the Chilean miner story broke.  I was struck by the wonderful similarity of the miners hugging their wives.  A man who survives such a trial, to reach safe harbor in the arms of his loved ones, might be a little closer to understanding why the universe was created, and why it endures.

The miners have said religious faith helped them through their darkest hours.  It seems collapsed mine shafts harbor no more atheists than foxholes.  I’m not a member of any congregation, but when I witness a miracle like this rescue, I am reminded that I have questions about the nature of Creation, and such questions imply a measure of faith.  Only the true atheist is completely certain.

When Death deals the cards, the odds are stacked in favor of the house… but we keep winning. Faith begins when we doubt the murderous power of a world filled with fire, pressure, and poison.  We shouldn’t be here… but we are.

Death has no shortage of allies, acolytes, and lovers.  Life is the banner good people should never hesitate to rally around.  I’m tired of dreary harangues about overpopulation and the burden of child rearing.  The world doesn’t have enough good people in it.  Today we celebrate the determination and ingenuity of those who pulled 33 souls from a rocky grave, and the strength of spirit and will that allowed those trapped miners to survive.  Today, life is triumphant.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

Standing watch on that bloody frontier is perilous duty, especially in this new age of asymmetrical warfare.  The Cole is a guided missile cruiser.  Her crew stood ready to answer any challenge, and her advanced weapons made her a match for any ship in her class, or a few classes larger.  No one challenged her on the twelfth of October.  Two animals masquerading as civilians sailed a tiny boat alongside her hull, and blew a hole at the water line while she took on fuel.

The attack took place on a sunny afternoon, but there were dark shadows on the water that day.  A year later, the same terrorist organization took box cutters to the throats of civilian women, and turned commercial airliners into guided missiles.  Perhaps we could have averted that tragedy by responding to the act of war against the Cole. Bill Clinton chose not to, the last dereliction of duty in a long string of failures.  He chose to treat the incident as a crime. A wiser man would have understood that those who have no appetite for law harbor no fear of it.

Those who volunteer to protect us, both home and abroad, no longer face professional soldiers after a lawful declaration of war.  Instead, they live under the threat of murder, delivered by seemingly unarmed civilians.  A hunger for indiscriminate slaughter provides a tactical advantage against the highly skilled defenders of life.  The first strike of a barbaric aggressor rarely fails to draw blood.  The question is whether civilization answers by destroying them.  Barbarians never tire of asking that question.

Those who wear America’s colors into battle against terrorism understand their right to vengeance… to justice… may vanish into the jaws of global politics.  They don the uniform anyway.  The shadows of terror melt before the light of their courage.  God forgive us for deploying them under rules of engagement that jeopardize their lives.  God bless them for entering the theater of battle anyway.

Ten years ago, 17 sailors died aboard a ship named for Sergeant Darrell Cole, a Marine who attacked two gun emplacements on Iwo Jima single-handedly, before falling to an enemy grenade.  The Cole was carried home on a Norwegian transport, nursing a wound that could have filled her heart with seawater.  She’s back on duty now.  When she was deployed to Lebanon in 2008, Hezbollah screamed that she was a “threat.”  Good.  The USS Cole, like every American warship above and below the waves, is a threat, and a promise.

Let us today offer a promise to every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine, in memory of those we lost in the waters of Aden ten years ago: None of you are disposable.  None of you will ever be forgotten.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

The acolytes of Big Government will always deploy the politics of hate and envy when they feel threatened.  It’s built into the basic programming of corporatist and socialist systems.  The free market is filled with competitors, while the State has only enemies.

Consider the rivalry between computer giants Microsoft and Apple.  Apple is no threat to the market dominance of Microsoft’s operating system, but they don’t have to be.  Apple’s success does not depend on destroying Microsoft, although I would imagine the idea is kicked around at some of their livelier board meetings.  Apple has done extremely well for itself by carving out a niche for its Macintosh computers, and satisfying a dedicated fan base.  The same thing happens all the time, in many different industries.  The cost of entry may reduce the number of players, but there is always some market share up for grabs, if a competitor is tough and creative enough.

Note that Apple did not establish its market position just by damaging Microsoft.  They had some good fun with their Mac-vs-PC ad campaign, needling the competition during the turbulent rollout of its Windows Vista operating system, but this campaign only worked because Apple had something to offer computer buyers.  You can loosen up some potential customers by talking smack about the competition, but you need quality goods and services to reel them in.

Now, suppose the government decided to spend billions of “stimulus” dollars to design its own PC operating system, and muscle its way into the computer market.  It would quickly see Microsoft and Apple as enemies, not competitors.  Government cannot make the hard choices, or shoulder the burdens, necessary to compete in the free market.  It’s far easier to use taxpayer funds to cover its losses, and rewrite the rules to disadvantage inconvenient elements of the private sector.  Microsoft and Apple would soon find government regulations congealing around the personal computer industry, forcing them to shoulder gigantic compliance costs, or making certain elements of their business models impractical.  They would also receive the Chamber of Commerce treatment, and find themselves pounded by the unlimited free media available to politicians.

This process is well under way in the health-insurance industry, as certain provisions of ObamaCare were designed to force private insurance companies out of the market, by dropping unbearable mandates for price and coverage on them.  In the long run, only the State will be able to remain in the health insurance business.  The State will never face the kind of agonizing decisions that will turn into a pressure cooker for private industries.  It will slather taxpayer money over its losses, handing them to future generations through deficit spending.  It will respond to resistance from the insurance industry by declaring them heartless bastards who want to watch children die from pre-existing conditions.

The State sees itself surrounded by enemies, because a politicized economy becomes a zero-sum equation.  Government produces nothing.  It rations. It can only take from some, and give to others.  Redistribution is a coercive act, and resistance is met with anger.

Competition produces cost and quality benefits that increase the size of the market – look how far the use of personal computers has spread, as they became incredibly cheap and powerful.  Government rationing makes a limited market contract, as the profit incentives for production and innovation disappear.  The State carefully divides a stale and shriveled pie, and recoils in surprise when the supply of pie proves “unexpectedly” smaller than its calculations.

The truth behind this week’s attacks on the Chamber of Commerce is that Democrats represent a narrow group of powerful interests, some of them foreign.  The mission of the Party is to secure benefits for their clients, at the expense of everyone who does not contribute money and power to their campaigns.  Politically connected industries receive subsidies, funded by those who are not connected.  Unions receive benefits at the expense of non-unionized workers.  Wealth is transferred to favored constituencies that provide bundles of reliable votes.  None of these blessings are secured through competition. They are seized through the power of the State.

In a politicized economy, the hungry clients of the ruling Party look out from their circle of influence and see, not competitors, but enemies.  Their success requires the defeat and subjugation of these enemies.  That is why the President and his minions require you to hate the Chamber of Commerce, and the specific Big Business entities they designate as evil.  If the government continues to grow, the level of hatred needed to sustain it will increase, because space inside that circle of influence will become increasingly valuable… and scarce.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

The story follows the quiet bloom of romance between two lonely, outcast twelve-year-old kids named Owen and Abby (Oskar and Eli in the original film.)  Owen lives with his divorced mom, who doesn’t understand him, and plays only a background role in his life.  A nice visual touch in the remake is that her face is never seen clearly – she’s reminiscent of the unseen, incomprehensible parents in the “Peanuts” comic strip.

Abby moves into Owen’s apartment building with a shy, creepy older man who appears to be her father, but the true nature of their relationship is far more complex.  Abby is a vampire, and the older man is her caretaker, charged with protecting her during the day, and bringing her the blood of surgically murdered victims each night.

The caretaker is killed during a botched blood harvest, leaving Abby to fend for herself… and her methods are far less clean and painless.  Owen wrestles with his growing love for Abby, and his horror at her monstrous nature, leading to an unforgettable climax where he learns what both of them are truly capable of.

As with Gore Verbinski’s remake of The Ring, the Hollywood production values of Let Me In are its own worst enemy.  Expensive but unconvincing CGI effects are used in place of the original film’s cheaper but more effective stunt work.  The new version works much harder to make Abby frightening when she cuts loose.  I thought the child ghost from The Ring became much less unsettling when she turned into ten million dollars’ worth of computer animation, and the same is true here.  The scenes where Abby attacks adult victims appear to have been directed with a Nintendo Wii controller.  The climactic scene raised more goosebumps when it was understated, and half over before the audience realized what it was seeing.

Leaving special effects aside, the other creative decisions in Let Me In are interesting.  The original film left the history between Abby and her caretaker vague, while the remake is very explicit, building a concrete narrative that was originally left to the imagination.  We have a much clearer idea of how long the caretaker has served his youthful mistress, and what motivates him.  He’s a more solid, intriguing character, well-played by Richard Jenkins.  For better or worse, American remakes of horror movies tend to be less subtle than the originals.

The remake puts the kids center stage, moving all of the adults – except a cop played by Elias Koteas – into the background.  A subplot about a woman accidentally turned into a vampire is compressed into a single scene that effectively demonstrates why Abby prefers to let her caretaker do the hunting.  Abby and Owen are a bit older than Eli and Oskar were in the original, and their relationship includes more elements of preteen romance familiar to American audiences.  The relationship between the young leads, like the Stockholm scenery, was more sterile in the first movie.  Let Me In wants us to see Owen as a bit less weird and distant than Oskar was, making his deepening attachment to Abby more dangerous and disturbing.  We find ourselves offering quiet “attaboys!” when this lonely, awkward lad scores points with his first girlfriend… only to recoil in horror when we remember what we’re applauding.

Both versions of the story are driven by the young vampire, a fascinating character who haunts our imaginations long after the credits roll.  As she tells Owen, she’s twelve years old… but she’s been twelve for a very long time.  She’s a cunning predator who has survived for many years in a hostile world, and she loves solving puzzles.  Abby is more feminine than Eli was in the original, played with wistful charm by Chloe Moretz in a performance that seems more shallow at first… but are we, and Owen, seeing only what she wants us to see?  Does she have any real capacity for human feeling, or has experience simply made her exceptionally good at faking it?  Is Owen falling in love, or filling out a job application?

Carefully watch the scenes where Abby encourages her new friend to fight back against the bullies who have been tormenting him.  Is she trying to help him… or is she setting up a test?  The original film made these questions harder to answer.  The remake tips its cards through little details like the carefully provocative way she shows Owen what happens when she enters a room uninvited – an action presented as a passionate display of stubborn affection in the earlier movie.

The best horror stories inspire us to think forward, beyond the final pages or images.  The author shows us the way, and we find terror in an epilogue we write for ourselves.  Let Me In lights that path with flashing neon, by humming a few bars from a chillingly repurposed advertising jingle.  Let The Right One In was content to use candlelight.  Obvious or subtle, it’s a path worth following for horror fans.  Whatever else you can say about Abby, she doesn’t brood, and she doesn’t sparkle.  Vampires are scary again.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

How else to describe a massive government that demands complete control over the economy, but reels in surprise from each new burst of “unexpected” economic news?  The weary joke about “unexpected” downturns in employment and gross domestic product dates back to the early days of this presidency.  We’re talking about dozens of consecutive “unexpected” developments.  It is clear from the shocking ignorance displayed by every member of this Administration that they have no idea how any sector of the economy functions… and yet, they demand absolute control over every transaction that draws their attention.  They seek to consume the free market, not manage it.

The signature “achievement” of President Obama’s first year was the trillion-dollar failure of his “stimulus” plan, which was nothing more than a theft of money from the future to fund today’s bloated government operations.  Stimubucks vanished into pork-barrel projects, and settled into a thick sludge at the bottom of political coffers, nourishing fat government payrolls that otherwise might have faced cuts in a time of austerity.  Now we’ve learned millions of dollars in “stimulus” money were sent to imprisoned felons and dead people.  If Obama were a private-sector CEO responsible for such a monumental fraud, he wouldn’t just be unemployed right now… he’d be sitting in a prison cell, waiting for a stimulus check so he could buy cigarettes.

Obama’s political party defaulted on their Congressional duties by adjourning without even passing a budget resolution, despite spending more money than any Congress in history.  They didn’t even set the tax rates for next year – they scurried out of Washington without voting on extension of the Bush tax cuts.  They could have voted those tax cuts into oblivion, and returned to their districts to face honorable judgment for their decision.  Instead, they ran from the halls of Congress in disgrace, a dereliction of duty that should serve as Nancy Pelosi’s letter of resignation.  The same Congress that claims the right to compel your purchase of health insurance, and dictate a thousand aspects of your life according to the ideology of the ruling party, abandoned its essential duty to prepare a budget for this $3 trillion government.

When Congress does pass bills, they are shapeless masses of legislative lard, packed with billions in hidden earmarks.  Reasonable-sounding bills turn out to be stuffed with wealth transfers to the constituents of powerful representatives, and massive hidden changes to the social contract.  Voters are expected to support their incumbent representatives without having any clear idea of what they’ve been doing for the past few years.  Was your senator voting for defense appropriations, the DREAM act, or the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell last month?  It’s hard to say which shell the pea is under, when there are a dozen shells, and Harry Reid shuffles them too quickly for the eye to follow.

The consent of the governed, crucial to the maintenance of a lawful and just Republic, has become a sad joke.  The most expensive, intrusive, un-Constitutional bill of the past century, ObamaCare, was rammed down the throats of a protesting populace, whose sustained resistance clearly demonstrated they did not vote for any such thing in 2008.  The bill was drafted behind closed doors, by ravenous politicians who cared about no details beyond the power and money it would allow them to seize.  It’s such a colossal failure that Obama is already granting waivers to excuse select companies, and favored unions, from its most crushing provisions.  This is a frank admission of ObamaCare’s blind ambition and lousy design, a last-ditch attempt to keep the flame of American prosperity – and the electoral fortunes of Democrats – from being extinguished beneath its smothering weight.

This government not only fails to carry out its duties to the public.  It declares war on them when they oppose the ideology of the ruling class.  The Obama Administration has made it clear that it values the interests of foreign governments, aliens who violate our immigration laws, and businesses hungry for cheap undocumented labor above the lawfully expressed will of Arizona citizens.  The federal government is not merely derelict in protecting our borders.  It actively punishes local governments and citizens who step forward to take up the slack.  Obama and his allies are not trying to build public support for radical changes to our immigration laws.  They’re imposing their politics above the law, and then trying to rally enough support to hang on to their seats.

In its zeal to transform the public, this government has consistently failed its duty to them.  It is concerned with agenda and ambition, not responsibility and restraint.  The failure of the State has been building for many years, through many previous Administrations.  It has become too obvious to conceal from even casual observers, which explains the inexorable tide of resistance rushing toward the polls.

There is a plan afoot for the Democrats to seize our retirement plans during the lame-duck session of Congress, and use the money to bail out their union allies.  That’s the kind of economic plan Robert Mugabe would understand.  Because this is not a banana republic, there is no need for us to follow the acolytes of the total State into the cold future of diminished opportunity they promise as our inevitable fate.  In November, let us withdraw our consent from this government and dissolve it, so that we may commission one more suitable for a nation that does not accept failure.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

Daniel Foster at National Review Online finds this episode an uncomfortable lesson in the perils of libertarian government:

I have no problem with this kind of opt-in government in principle — especially in rural areas where individual need for government services and available infrastructure vary so widely. But forget the politics: what moral theory allows these firefighters (admittedly acting under orders) to watch this house burn to the ground when 1) they have already responded to the scene; 2) they have the means to stop it ready at hand; 3) they have a reasonable expectation to be compensated for their trouble?

The outrageous image of firemen standing idly by and watching a home reduced to cinders, for want of a lousy seventy-five dollar fee, produces an immediate emotional response.  Couldn’t they have extinguished the fire and billed Mr. Cranick a hefty fee, as he begged them to do?

What sort of fee would we be talking about?  If the price ran into thousands of dollars, it is unlikely Cranick could have whipped out his checkbook and paid it on the spot.  The fire department might have put a lien on his house for the amount, but a lien is not the same thing as cash in hand.  In this new age of foreclosure and bankruptcy, it might take the fire department years to see their first dollar… and in an era when politicians compel banks to settle mortgages for a fraction of their value, the entire fee might never be collected.

In any event, a fire department certainly could not maintain its budget on the basis of huge liens on homeowner properties, after collection proceedings that amount to a high-stakes game of legal blackjack, played over months and years.

What if the contingency fee was more modest, say a few hundred dollars?  The department would stand a better chance of quickly collecting such a fee… but that would make the homeowners who paid the regular $75 fee into chumps.  Paying on an annual basis would make less sense than taking your chances and coughing up a couple hundred bucks in the unlucky event of a fire.  Once again, the firemen would be unable to run their department when its only income stream came on a contingency basis, paid after they were finished putting out fires.

A great deal of our economy has degenerated into chumponomics: a system that assumes people will act against rational self-interest, because it’s the “right thing to do,” or they just haven’t worked out the numbers.  Income tax returns are the perennial example.  Each spring, people dance with joy as they receive their tax refunds… which are nothing more than repayment of a loan they extended the government, for an entire year, at zero percent interest.  Some people plan their financial lives around those rebate checks.  They even request additional withholding from their paychecks to get larger refunds, using them as the world’s worst savings account.  It makes far more sense to owe a small amount at the end of the tax year, making the government give you that “loan” at zero percent interest, but many people are honestly confused by the idea that writing a check on April 15 is better than receiving one.

Our huge, rickety tower of entitlements and subsidies rests on a foundation of chumps, playing by the rules and funding a system that is increasingly less interested in their opinions about how much they should pay, or how the money should be spent.  Our federal wallet is stretched to the limit by illegal aliens getting welfare, food stamps, medical care and other benefits, often without paying taxes.  Safeguards like welfare and free medical care are in place to boost Americans in need of short-term assistance.  These programs were not meant to entice freeloaders and scam artists from around the world.  (Does that sound harsh?  Don’t blame me – the previous three sentences were spoken by Democrat Majority Leader Harry Reid in 1993, as quoted by Thomas Sowell in his most recent column.)

The understandable emotional response to the plight of Gene Cranick is exactly the kind of leverage politicians use to impose chumponomics on us.  It’s just not fair that the poor man’s house burned down while firefighters stood idly by!  But there are reasonable questions to ask, once we set emotions aside.  Why doesn’t Obion County have its own fire department?  Presumably it was more cost-effective to lease fire control services from South Fulton.  Why doesn’t Obion County tax its residents and pay South Fulton on their behalf?  Because it would cost a lot more than $75, once a typical government bureaucracy got involved… and you can bet that fire protection fee would quickly vanish into a morass of other taxes, blending into a bloated pudding that soon made it impossible for anyone to know how much they were paying for any given service.

Allowing its residents to pay a voluntary $75 fee to South Fulton was the most inexpensive and efficient means for Obion County to provide fire protection to its residents… assuming they acted like responsible homeowners, instead of crybabies and chumps.  If we expect maternal government to save us from ourselves in all circumstances, we had better be ready to pay the high cost of our day care.  Most of that bill will be footed by the dwindling number of people who remain productive and responsible, despite the absence of logical reasons to do so.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

On the off chance you haven’t seen it, “No Pressure” depicts global warming fanatics cheerfully requesting a show of hands from those who agree with them… and then happily using a little red button to blast the few skeptics into clouds of blood, meat, and bone.  This grisly scenario is repeated three times, followed by a voice-over from X-Files actress Gillian Anderson, who is then eviscerated due to her insufficient enthusiasm for the cause.  The final image shows Anderson’s eyes sliding down the blood-soaked window of her recording studio.

Oh, and the first part of the video takes place in a grade school, where young children are receiving global-warming indoctrination from a perky teacher.  Two of the kids express doubts, so the teacher hits her red button, and the room is quickly splattered with bloody chunks from the murdered students.

The insane violence of this propaganda film has understandably provoked much commentary, but I find its utter banality more interesting.  The grisly special effects can’t disguise how tedious it is.  The ham-fisted message is repeated three times, to increasingly diminished effect.  By the time Gillian Anderson gets mulched, you’re yawning and checking the progress bar to see how much longer this thing will drag on.

Was this film an expression of radical environmentalism’s murderous id, as James Delingpole of the Telegraph suggests?  It certainly has an aura of savage, juvenile wish fulfillment.  I prefer to view it as a graphic illustration of the Left’s hollow inability to deal with dissent.  The film is designed to enforce groupthink by portraying dissenters as contemptible jokes.  They’re organic garbage, easily disposed of with the push of a red button.  The kids who get blown up are apathetic, a few seconds away from falling asleep during their teacher’s important lecture about reasonable steps good people can take to reduce their carbon emissions.  The office workers in the second skit are pathetic losers with sunken eyes.  The soccer coach in the third skit is a self-absorbed jerk.  In a perfect world, the elite would be able to sweep these useless people aside.  They’re so disgusting they should be squashed like bugs.

To the global-warming fanatic, doubters have already thrown their lives away.  If they insist on their lavish capitalist lifestyles, and thwart the efforts of all-knowing environmentalists, they’ll drown in the rising seas, or get flash-fried when the ozone layer peels back.  There is no need to engage the arguments of such traitors to the biosphere, or respect their “freedom.”  Note the recurring “joke,” repeated mindlessly throughout the video, in which the victims are assured they have complete freedom to make up their own minds, and should feel “no pressure.”  This is the idea our filmmakers find so absurd they dismiss it with a geyser of adolescent blood.  The point is made repeatedly: you’re a contemptible idiot if you think you have free choice in the matter of global warming.  You will indeed feel pressure, from the boiling atmosphere.  Virtue can only be found in submission to the Green agenda – the sole alternative is glassy-eyed, apathetic evil.  Climate-change deniers are consuming air that noble environmentalists could put to better use.

The Daily Caller went looking for reactions from other environmentalists groups, and could only wrangle a tepid condemnation from Greenpeace, who said:

“As an organization committed to non-violence, I think you can imagine how Greenpeace views this material. At this time, the only people promoting the material are climate skeptics and think tanks funded by corporations known for lobbying against climate change legislation.”

In other words, things would settle down, if the sinister forces of well-funded corporate climate-change skepticism would just get out of the way, and let 10:10 finish flushing this turd down the memory hole.  Once again, Greenpeace illustrates the utter inability of the Left to deal with opposing ideas.  They can’t allow for the possibility of honest dissent.  They can’t even handle their own words being repeated back to them.  No group besides Greenpeace had anything to say about this disgusting film at all.  In fact, Greenpeace didn’t really say anything about it.  They just told us to imagine what their response would be, given their sacred commitment to non-violence.

The Left always has trouble dealing with the human remainder from their draconian social calculations.  Environmentalists have been muttering darkly about overpopulation for decades.  Leftist governments, including the current American president, respond to double-digit unemployment with helpless confusion.  Their carefully-designed societies crumble beneath the weight of superfluous people.  Their plans rely on absolute compliance from captive populations.  Given any amount of power, the Left almost immediately begins talking about censorship, in one form or another.

Free people admire renegades who put their money where their mouth is.  Collectivists demand absolute obedience to their agenda, and prosecute thought crimes.  Left to curl up on a thick bed of British taxpayer money, the 10:10 group began daydreaming of little red buttons that could erase the human remainder with grisly explosions.  Totalitarians always find such notions hilarious.  It was a bust in the Western world, but I’m sure “No Pressure” would have the elites of Havana and Pyongyang rolling in the aisles.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org and Death By 1000 Papercuts.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

I would invite those dependents to think about the future.

Freedom and compulsion are mutually exclusive social resources.  Greater compulsion comes at the expense of freedom, and vice versa.  Every society employs a mixture of these resources.  Even the most classically liberal nation would still have laws, which the government must enforce.  The use of compulsion to prevent murder is not tyranny.

The America of 2010 has long passed the point where freedom and compulsion were evenly mixed.  Freedom has dwindled steadily for generations.  Over the last few years, we have witnessed a mad rush to infuse our society with powerful doses of compulsion.  Vast sums of money have been spent – billions wasted, while billions more vanished into thin air.  A skeptical public is told it lacks the intelligence to properly analyze the results.  Hideously complex and ambiguous bills full of unexpected consequences have been passed, creating a labyrinth of mist and lightning that reasonable businessmen fear to enter.  A Congress that could not even produce a budget demands more money.  A government that hides its agenda within layers of fused and blended legislation demands more obedience.

This process will accelerate, if it is not quickly reversed.  Today’s compulsion lays the groundwork for tomorrow’s oppression.  That is the true significance of our titanic deficits.  Deficit spending is an obligation placed on the future, destroying the freedom of a generation which cannot speak for itself yet.  If a just government draws its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, then Obama’s insane deficits destroy the very legitimacy of our State.  The children who will grow up to pay for his programs have not been asked for their consent.  They will be born into a world where freedom has been almost entirely replaced by requirement.  They’ll be forced to work within a network of subsidies and punitive taxes they never agreed to.  A massive, crumbling edifice of entitlements will be dropped on their shoulders, and they will be told they have no choice but to pay for it.  Opportunity will be replaced by compliance.

In the squalid “people’s republics” of the Third World, democracy means one man, one vote, one time.  In America, today’s elections become a true expression of liberty because we know the next round of elections is right behind them, and another round behind that… but if we don’t rise up and make history in this crucial November, what will the next generation be allowed to vote on?

For example, if this election does not produce a historic shift in power, and begin the process of repealing ObamaCare, the voters of the future will be told they can never make their own health care decisions again.  The sales pitch about “keeping your own plan if you like it” has already been exposed as a despicable lie.  The whole rotten law is a mass of lies and delusions… but the ruling class assures us it is permanent. We might be permitted to make an adjustment or two, but as the Democrats like to say about so many of the jobs they’ve destroyed, the free-market health insurance industry is never coming back.

The Obama agenda is meant to be a permanent change in the relationship of the middle class to the State.  As with every artifact of socialism since the New Deal, every one of its miserable “achievements” is promptly declared irrevocable.  We can never “go backward,” no matter how obviously inferior the new way is.  Increasing amounts of compulsion will be poured around those progressive achievements like cement, to hold them in place.  If the Democrats are left in power to “fix” ObamaCare, you can bet your bottom dollar they’ll do it by making more things illegal.

Freedom is motion. It changes and adapts.  Free men find solutions their fathers never dreamed of.  The people who babble about a “living Constitution” complain about the vitality of a nation that refuses to submit to their plans.  Strange they don’t understand how the people must be free to adapt to changing circumstances, greeting new challenges with unfettered imagination. The Constitution must be static, so the people can be dynamic.  There is rich irony in listening to those who demand the right to design our future, for decades to come, sneer about the limited vision of the dead white males who placed chains upon the State.

When freedom is replaced by compulsion, the wonderful random motion of a free society is brought to an end.  Water becomes stagnant when it doesn’t flow.  It hardens into ice when its molecules stop moving.  If you are inclined to support the leviathan State because it takes care of your needs, think about the frozen future you will leave behind for your children.  The machine that sustains you will collapse upon them.  Believe in yourself, and the free people around you.  Take a chance on yourself, so the next generation will have meaningful choices to make.

Look around, and bear witness to the failure of compulsion.  Dooming the future to live beneath even more of it would be cowardly.  Freedom is a far more valuable resource.  It must be tended carefully.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

One closing remark that I want to make: It is inexcusable for any Democrat or progressive right now to stand on the sidelines in this midterm election. There may be complaints about us not having gotten certain things done, not fast enough, making certain legislative compromises. But right now, we’ve got a choice between a Republican Party that has moved to the right of George Bush and is looking to lock in the same policies that got us into these disasters in the first place, versus an administration that, with some admitted warts, has been the most successful administration in a generation in moving progressive agendas forward.

The idea that we’ve got a lack of enthusiasm in the Democratic base, that people are sitting on their hands complaining, is just irresponsible.

Everybody out there has to be thinking about what’s at stake in this election and if they want to move forward over the next two years or six years or 10 years on key issues like climate change, key issues like how we restore a sense of equity and optimism to middle-class families who have seen their incomes decline by five percent over the last decade. If we want the kind of country that respects civil rights and civil liberties, we’d better fight in this election. And right now, we are getting outspent eight to one by these 527s that the Roberts court says can spend with impunity without disclosing where their money’s coming from. In every single one of these congressional districts, you are seeing these independent organizations outspend political parties and the candidates by, as I said, factors of four to one, five to one, eight to one, 10 to one.

Even by the standards of overheated political rhetoric, this is remarkably silly.  Beyond the questionable tactic of motivating his base by insulting them as irresponsible crybabies, take another look at the stakes Obama lays out in that last paragraph.  He wants to “move forward” on the ridiculous climate-change fraud?  Note to the President: It’s over. The con artists got busted.  The country you left swimming in debt will not suffer another dime of its money to be confiscated for the benefit of global-warming carnival hustlers.  The great bid to frighten Americans into handing over control of their lives to a junk-science religious cult has failed.

How do we “restore a sense of equity and optimism to middle-class families?”  I know!  Let’s blow their jobs away and bankrupt their children with a poorly thought out socialized medicine scheme!

The President saves the best for last.  Democrats have to “fight in this election” if they “want the kind of country that respects civil rights and civil liberties.”  That’s the real agenda of the Tea Party movement, all right: reinstating slavery.

Of course, if you translate the President’s remarks from Leftspeak, you’ll see that by “civil rights” he means vast government spending programs and politicized “justice” of the Eric Holder variety.  Besides encrypting their real agenda to lure in “moderates,” the Left loves this kind of language because it lets them pretend to be heroic crusaders against absolute evil.  Every progressive voter sees himself lunging from the shadows and throwing Batarangs into the faces of surprised Klansmen.

The same fantasies fuel the ravings of NAACP chairman Ben Jealous, who has squandered the last of his organization’s credibility to hang a bucket of racist paint over a door the Tea Party will never walk through.  The NAACP purchases influence by performing certain services for the Democrat Party.  They’ve been unable to carry out their mission this year.  The impending defeat of his patrons has driven Jealous to muttering about Kristallnacht.

Hopefully the Tea Party women will remember to wear burqas over their jackboots, lest they provoke the righteous fury of Taliban Dan.  Alan Grayson’s slanderous ad campaign is merely the terminal point on a line of hysteria, stretching from Obama’s dire warnings about the end of civil rights, through Jealous and his delirious tiptoe through nights of broken glass.  It’s the same strategy, executed less gracefully.  Grayson is the eager but dimwitted kid who lights his jack-o-lantern with a stick of dynamite so it will glow extra bright.  The guy who runs his favorite Web site helped him carve the pumpkin.

Everywhere you look this election season, the sales pitch is the same: it’s Democrats or the Devil.  The Party and its President claim the moral and intellectual strength to run every aspect of our lives, and confiscate limitless amounts our income… but they won’t explain or defend their actions, because we can’t handle the truth.  Instead, they campaign by assuring us their opponents are monsters.  If I were one of their voters, I would tire of being treated like an idiot, and wonder why a Party full of geniuses can’t make a single rational appeal.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

“We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening,” Kerry told reporters after touring the Boston Medical Center yesterday.

[…] Kerry made the remarks on voters following questions about U.S. Rep Barney Frank’s re-election campaign and queries about securing federal funding for the Hub hospital.

“I think a lot of the anger today – while it’s appropriate because Washington is broken – is not directed at the right people,” said Kerry. “Barney is prepared, as others are, to explain what we’re doing. I think when people hear the facts and they see what we’re doing, it frankly makes sense.”

This is the last desperate attempt of the Democrats to frighten independents away from the Tea Party movement.  Slandering them as nuts or haters didn’t work – it’s too obviously false, and even the Democrats’ media allies were becoming nervous about throwing bombshell charges without evidence.  The ignorance smear is a logical choice for a Hail Mary pass, just weeks before the election.  It only requires the Left to convince independents that our economy is crumbling due to forces behind their comprehension, and the rubes waving copies of the Constitution at Glenn Beck rallies don’t understand it, either.

I’m here to assure Senator Kerry that we understand the situation perfectly well.  Barney Frank’s role in causing the subprime mortgage crisis, for example, is perfectly clear.  He lied extravagantly to protect Fannie Mae from oversight, both for ideological reasons, and for the financial benefit of his boyfriend Herb Moses, a Fannie Mae executive.  The financial system of the entire planet nearly collapsed as a result.  Barney Frank should have been removed from office before the first bank bailout, and not allowed anywhere near a government office, ever again.  He should have spent the last two years answering subpoenas and facing charges, not slobbering over all the new money he wants his Party to seize from honest Americans.  The same goes for anyone in either party who knowingly participated in the Fannie Mae scam.  A responsible government that took the public trust seriously would have demanded nothing less.  We’ve heard a lot about bad behavior in the private sector during the mortgage crisis, and there was indeed plenty to say.  We haven’t a word about the responsibility of politicians, or seen any of them formally brought to account.

The Tea Party is a large and growing movement that rejects the premise that a morally and intellectually superior government should be given endlessly expanding power over every aspect of our lives.  We reject a media-approved narrative that holds the State blameless for its misdeeds, or gives it unlimited credit for its good intentions.  We are competent and compassionate enough to manage our own lives, and address our problems through willing cooperation with our neighbors.

We’re not lost in incoherent anger because we misunderstand a reality only Democrat Party leaders can see clearly.  On the contrary, we realize that an insane level of willing blindness is necessary to ignore the evidence of their abject failure.  You’ve got to be pretty stupid to think Barack Obama’s only problem is that he’s not superhuman enough to fix the “mess George Bush left him” two years ago.  To accept this critique, you would have to believe Americans are so weak that Bush could permanently destroy us in eight years, and Bill Clinton’s last years in office were some kind of golden age.  You would have to believe the effort of defeating Saddam Hussein mortally wounded us.

We don’t blame ourselves for the nation’s problems, Senator Kerry.  We blame you. We’re not just looking at your Party, either… or have you not been paying attention to the primaries?  We can see how much control the State has asserted over our lives through impenetrable layers of regulation, which even legislators admit they neither read nor understand.  We’re not just laughing off Nancy Pelosi’s comment that we had to pass ObamaCare to learn what was in it.  The Democrats demand we give them vast amounts of power without specifying what they plan to do with it, establishing any means to judge their success, or defining any limit to future expansion of the precedents they set today.  They demand our faith, along with the resulting surrender of faith in ourselves.  We reject those demands.

We know you’re already brainstorming ways to stick us with the tab for Obama’s madcap spending spree.  The seizure of money through taxation is the confiscation of hours from our lives.  We are taking our lives back.  We’re not interested in the shoddy goods you want to “give” us today, because we’re paying attention to the bills that will come due tomorrow.  We will be no more enchanted by a Republican junk sale in 2011, should they be foolish enough to offer one.

Democrat consultant Phil Johnson defended Kerry by saying, “He’s just making the point that people have real lives to lead and most people are not spending a lot of time worrying about politics, particularly in a tough economy.”  That’s exactly the point, Mr. Johnson.  People have to worry about politics now.  They can’t just “lead their lives.”  They are about to feel the weight of a law that will force them to purchase health insurance.  Many of them have lost their jobs to the approaching rumble of that law.  Others have watched the value of their property and investments evaporate due to the mistakes, or deliberate malpractice, of the political class.  If Obama gets his cap-and-trade legislation, a sizable number of Americans will find themselves working in industries which have ceased to make economic sense, because of skyrocketing energy prices.

The stated objective of the Obama Administration was “transforming” the American people.  Well, transformation is an aggressive act, carried out through compulsive force.  We resist, and we will prevail.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

The Wall Street Journal reports that General Motors is once again handing out campaign donations:

The beneficiaries include Midwestern lawmakers, mostly Democrats, who have traditionally supported the industry’s legislative agenda on Capitol Hill, including Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.), Sen. Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio) and Rep. John Dingell (D., Mich.).

The list also includes Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor, the House Republican Whip, who would likely assume a top leadership post if Republicans win control of the House in November.

It isn’t unusual for big companies like GM to spend on political campaigns, but complicating GM’s situation is that the company is majority-owned by the U.S. government. GM is planning to return to the public stock markets later this year, allowing the U.S. to begin to sell off its roughly 61% stake in the company.

Meanwhile, Melissa Clouthier at Liberty Pundits spots the debonair Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, shoveling piles of taxpayer loot at a major Democrat Party contributor:

It appears that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid plans to reward Arcata Associates, a big Democratic donor, a huge no-bid contract on the heels of two separate $10,000 (maximum) donation to the Nevada Democrat party.

Senator Harry Reid, along with his House cohort Nancy Pelosi, promised to drain the swamp when they took full control of Congress. Their behavior since taking office would indicate the exact opposite has happened.

In fiscal year 2010, Arcata won a 1.36 million dollar contract for the Continuous Threat Alert Sensing System (CTASS) according to OpenSecrets.org after spending $50,000 to lobby the Senate. What the site fails to mention are the multitude of Arcata donations to Harry Reid and the Nevada Democrat Party. In addition, Arcata stands to gain another two million dollars in 2011, also a no-bid earmark directed by Senator Reid. The requests for these earmarks can be found here and here.

In North Carolina, we see further evidence of what Ed Morrissey calls “the earmark / endorsement complex.”

Bob Etheridge is now running a TV ad where several of his supporters praise him – but what the ad doesn’t explain is at least two of the Etheridge supporters received ‘Stimulus Fund’ checks, thanks to Etheridge.

Mr. Linwood Parker is an example. Mr. Parker is a partner in a development near Four Oaks and back in August Etheridge handed him a $340,000 check – stimulus funds. Now, in return Mr. Parker has endorsed Bob Etheridge in his TV ad, saying, “Congressman Etheridge did not allow politics to stand in the way of job creation.”

Of course, the fact is, Etheridge’s grant to Parker (and Parker’s endorsement) was nothing but politics.

Plenty more examples of can easily be found.  It’s not an exclusively partisan scandal.  The party in power tends to attract the big payoffs, from contributors eager to turn thousands of campaign dollars into millions in taxpayer loot.  It’s an investment that pays huge dividends, no matter how rotten the economy might be.  As the party dedicated to government growth and central control, the Democrats are more aggressive salesmen, and they can count on general media disinterest, so they can be more brazen.

The sharpest fangs of the Ouroboros are public employee unions, especially the teachers’ union.  Titanic amounts of taxpayer money are poured into the hands of the NEA, and despite generally poor performance, they are politically shielded from reform.  One of the biggest controversies from President Obama’s first year in office was the brutal murder of a popular District of Columbia school choice program, carried out by the Democrats on the order of the teachers’ union.  The NEA buys this kind of influence by donating tens of millions to Democrats each year – over $56 million during the 2008 election season.

These very expensive money-laundering systems have been running for decades, consuming taxpayer billions to stuff millions into the coffers of politicians, who then grab more billions to throw into the machine.  As long as vast sums of money are accumulated in Washington, the politically connected will gather to feast.  Politicians need funding to stay in office, and despite their posturing as selfless public servants, they tend to be greedy and envious… with a strong sense of entitlement to the lavish lifestyle paraded before them by big-money contributors.  They will always lose the battle against temptation to sell their power.  They wrap their sins in self-righteous rhetoric, which they can sometimes convince themselves to believe.  No central accumulation of power has ever escaped corruption on a massive scale, anywhere in human history.

Consider the terrible image of this huge serpent feeding upon itself, and ask yourself: what is the use of a “moderate” agenda that merely causes the beast to chew a little more slowly?  What is the “centrist” position relative to a system designed for automatic, perpetual growth?  Even if the President repaired to the golf course for the rest of his term, and Congress held no further sessions, the growth of the federal government would continue automatically. You can hear the sounds of the serpent’s teeth scraping against its own tail in talk of baseline budgeting, and the term “cuts” used as a curse against reductions in the rate of spending increase.

How will you maintain your “independence” when control over every aspect of your life is fantastically valuable, and politicians have plenty of eager buyers with deep pockets lined up?

It’s not enough to tinker at the edges of this system.  Vast amounts of power must be torn from Washington, and returned to the people.  We must begin the fearsome task of pulling the serpent’s tail from its jaws, or we will all be crushed by its death throes.

“Moderate” voters would be well advised to study the Tea Party critique of our unsustainable government carefully.  As dramatic as it sounds, it’s the truly moderate position.  The Ourboros has shown it cannot be reasoned with, and there are no firm boundaries it respects.  The “living Constitution” is but the tip of its flickering tongue.  Leave it alone for a few more years, and it will teach you the true meaning of “extremism.”

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

There are far more than two players in this game.  The Tea Party has embraced Christine O’Donnell as a brave trooper fighting horrendous odds.  Conservative stalwarts like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin are weary of settling for weak-willed establishment candidates who can’t wait to sell out their base, and reach a profitable understanding with statist ideology.

Meanwhile, elements of the GOP establishment are bizarrely obsessed with destroying her.  The National Republican Senatorial Committee announced it wouldn’t spend a dime to help her, within moments of her primary victory over Mike Castle, but changed its mind after a night of outrage from Republican voters.  Castle has refused to endorse her, and is openly contemplating a write-in challenge.  Republican sages like Karl Rove launch daily assaults against O’Donnell, behaving as if she somehow stole her nomination.  As Lori Ziganto notes, various forces have constructed a sexism controversy around her… some eager to beat the Democrats with their own gender politics cudgel, others belittling O’Donnell for whining she hasn’t actually indulged in.  I suspect some lazy observers are trotting out this narrative just because O’Donnell is good-looking.

In the interests of full disclosure, I sized up the Delaware race and reluctantly concluded it was strategically wise to support Castle, who had a much better chance of taking the seat, and possibly delivering a Republican Senate.  I made this recommendation to play the odds, not predict the future.  Now that O’Donnell is the nominee, I support her candidacy without hesitation.  I dearly hope Senator O’Donnell and I can meet up in Hogsmeade someday, and have a laugh about my lack of faith over a butterbeer.

Too many of the pundits who weighed in against her candidacy have interests that trump the success of the Republican Party, or indeed the country.  Opposing her during primary season was fair enough – in fact, it was vital.  Primaries are the season for testing and measuring candidates.  Hitting them hard is the only way to judge their strength… but once the primary is over, you stop hitting them. No one is obliged to fake enthusiasm for a candidate they dislike, but actively sabotaging the Republican candidate, with the stakes as high as they are, is madness. The Democrat Party needs no reinforcements to inflict more damage on America.  Republicans in Delaware would be wise to ask if letting go of a few odd comments from O’Donnell’s past is a fair price to pay, if it means keeping the rest of the state from ending up like New Castle County.  For that matter, I’d advise Delaware Democrats and independents to ask themselves the same question.

Some of the animosity toward O’Donnell is blowback from the rather… fiery enthusiasm her supporters displayed in the last days of the primary.  Some flows from a desire to teach Tea Party insurgents a lesson about backing long-shot candidates in the name of ideological purity.  To this group, I would say that we don’t have time for such lessons.  The next two elections are far too critical to jeopardize any seat, in service to an argument about who we should nominate in 2014.

Like other Tea Party favorites, O’Donnell earns the enmity of an establishment that wants its turn piloting the statist machinery we aim to dismantle.  They think the reason America is headed for a cliff is that our current President is stomping on the gas pedal, but he can’t quite reach the steering wheel.  They have cynically concluded that real change is impossible, and the rusted machinery of the New Deal is eternal.  Flights of fancy about little girls in Minuteman costumes are a distraction from serious business, like negotiating small reductions in the rate of spending increases.  Better to have a sensible Democrat holding the seat from Delaware, until a marginally more sensible establishment Republican with the proper credentials can be advanced in a few years.

Some of the most persistent O’Donnell critics are pundits who see their influence and reputation on the line.  They announced with absolute certainty that she cannot win this race, and by hook or crook, they’re going to make that prediction come true. I’d be delighted if events prove I was wrong about O’Donnell in the primary… but there are Republican commentators who hope Senator Chris Coons will save them from being wrong about her in the general election.  When a fortune teller predicts you’ll die by fire, check behind his back to see if he’s holding a gasoline can and some flares.

Things are still looking pretty grim for Christine O’Donnell.  Sniping at her now will cripple her chances with independent voters, who often make up their minds right before the election, no matter what they tell pollsters several weeks out.  They tend to be heavily influenced by the prevailing media narrative, so making it more toxic will do real damage to her prospects.

No matter what you thought about O’Donnell during the primary season, there’s no doubt the conservative cause would benefit tremendously from seeing her rake in the chips from the high-stakes Delaware game on Election Day.  The Senate certainly doesn’t need another tired old lefty who pretends to be a moderate for a few months every six years.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

Once the ritual denunciations of his predecessor were out of the way, the President made a few revealing comments.  Responding to a question about the perception of business leaders that his policies are hostile toward them, Obama field tested a new meme about how the recession has really been over for a year:

Well, first of all, even though economists may say that the recession officially ended last year, obviously for the millions of people who are still out of work, people who have seen their home values decline, people who are struggling to pay the bills day to day, it’s still very real for them.

And I think we have to go back to what was happening when I was first sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. We went through the worst recession since the Great Depression. Nothing has come close. In fact, if you look at the consequences of the recession in the ‘80s, the recession in the ‘90s, and the recession in 2001, and you combine all three of those, it still wasn’t as bad as this recession that we went through.

Translation: Experts say we’re all being irrational.  The recession’s been over for a year!  We should stop being such ingrates to the dazzling heroes who saved us from the Bush Great Depression, and get back to our assigned duties of creating jobs and pumping out tax revenue.  By next week, this meme will go swirling down the memory hole, since it will dawn on Obama that he’s insisting the recession ended before he and his Congressional accomplices swindled us out of that trillion-dollar “stimulus.”

After the moderator served him up a softball about “fearful voters” mistrusting him due to racism and blind envy of his Ivy League education, Obama dropped this boilerplate onto the stage with a deafening thud:

The whole reason I ran was because my life is a testimony to the American Dream. And everything that we’ve been doing since I came into office is designed to make sure that that American Dream continues for future generations.

I think the challenge right now is that I’m thinking about the next generation and there are a lot of folks out there who are thinking about the next election. If I were making decisions based on November, then I wouldn’t have done some of the things that I did because I knew they weren’t popular. But they were the right thing to do. And that’s got to be my top priority.

“Future generations?”  You mean the kids who will be born into bankruptcy because of your irresponsible spending, Mr. President?  The truth is that Obama’s policies are entirely based on the concept of robbing future generations blind, to pay off current constituencies and expand government power.  There are intravenous tubes reaching into the future to suck blood from the next generation for the nourishment of ObamaCare.  Cap-and-trade energy policies will transform the mobility we take for granted into bedtime stories, which the children of 2020 will be told by candle light.  No President has cared less about the freedom and prosperity of future generations than Barack Obama.

The President stammered uncomfortably during exchanges about tax cuts, repeating the tired leftist cant about how we “can’t afford” to give tax cuts to “millionaires.”  By “millionaires” he means people who make over $250k per year, although they should be thankful to the government for trying to find them a little tax relief on that first two-fifty.  His attempt to defend sky-high taxes on top income earners reveals a staggering level of economic ignorance:

Now, what we’ve said is that we should extend tax cuts, tax relief, for middle-class Americans — like most of the audience here — because, first of all, you’re the ones who didn’t see your wages or income rise. Second of all, you’re the folks who are most likely to spend it on a new computer for your kids, or in some other fashion that would boost demand in the economy.

[…] What the Republicans are proposing is that we, in addition to that, provide tax relief to primarily millionaires and billionaires. It would cost us $700 billion to do it. On average, millionaires would get a check of $100,000.

And by the way, I would be helped by this, so I just want to be clear. I’m speaking against my own financial interests. This is a — it is a irresponsible thing for us to do. Those folks are the least likely to spend it and –

Let that sink in for a moment.  He thinks the vital medicine for healing this economy would come from low-end retail purchases.  The wealthy are “the least likely to spend money?”  Those bloated fat cats just sit in bathtubs full of treasure all day, scrubbing themselves with gold and gems.  The middle class can generate all necessary investment capital by saving its lunch money, and solve our unemployment woes by hiring each other… but they’d better make sure they don’t earn over $250k per year by doing so, or they’ll turn into revenue targets!

Obama’s most revealing moment came when he discussed the Tea Party movement:

The problem long term are the problems that I talked about earlier. We’ve got — we had two tax cuts that weren’t paid for, two wars that weren’t paid for. We’ve got a population that’s getting older. We’re all demanding services, but our taxes have actually substantially gone down.

And so the challenge, I think, for the Tea Party movement is to identify specifically what would you do. It’s not enough just to say, get control of spending. I think it’s important for you to say, I’m willing to cut veterans’ benefits, or I’m willing to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits, or I’m willing to see these taxes go up.

What you can’t do — which is what I’ve been hearing a lot from the other side — is say we’re going to control government spending, we’re going to propose $4 trillion of additional tax cuts, and that magically somehow things are going to work.

Mr. President, let me make this very clear for you: our freedom is not contingent on telling you exactly what we plan to do with it. Trillion-dollar spending plans are not the only acceptable alternatives to trillion-dollar spending plans.  Our Constitutional freedoms are not a primitive superstition you can dismiss with sneering insults.

Controlling government spending will be difficult indeed.  Step one is wiping out the Democrat Party, and replacing Barack Obama with a responsible chief executive.  The President and his Party have made it very clear that this will be a necessary precondition of meaningful reform.  The American spirit of individualism and limited government are wholly incompatible with their vision of the future… and since they haven’t been shy about imposing their vision through force, we would be foolish to leave them in a position of power.

Step two is dismantling the mechanisms of permanent State growth, like public employee unions, and unsustainable programs like ObamaCare.  After those steps are completed, the free people of the United States will set about solving their own problems, in a process of willing co-operation for mutual benefit that seems as “magical” to a socialist as space travel appears to a tribal shaman.

Isn’t it fascinating to hear the guy who ran as the avatar of Hope and Change attempt to shield himself from the rising tide of the Tea Party… by insisting the critical problems of his dying super-State are utterly hopeless, and our only course of action is stasis? Our only choices are supposed to be cutting veteran’s benefits, cutting Social Security and Medicare, or raising taxes?  What a pathetic lack of vision.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

Elevate Sarah Palin? How much higher can she go? Everyone knows her.  Some of Obama’s advisers have argued in the past that the attention paid to Palin by Americans in the last stages of the 2008 campaign is one reason why Obama was able to win so cleanly.

Palin and the Tea Party movement are not the same thing. The movement, evolving out of movement conservatism, is principally about government and the economy. Palin revels in the culture wars. But when that part of the Tea Party that does care about social issues becomes the story, linking the two in the public’s mind is easier.

Yes, the election is about control of Congress. But at a larger level, it’s about competing visions of the world. John Boehner v. the Democratic agenda is a boring contrast. Many Democrats couldn’t tell a Boehner from a Cantor. But everyone knows who Sarah Palin is.

He’s right that low-key, largely unknown politicians like Boehner and Cantor don’t make very good targets for the politics of personal destruction.  The effort to inflate stuff Boehner into a Darth Vader costume over the past few weeks was comical.  If the Democrats want to run some more plays out of Alinsky’s faded old handbook, they’ll need to focus on someone exciting.

Palin is linked to other high-profile female candidates, like Sharon Angle and Christine O’Donnell, so she looks like an inviting target.  The subtext of the media narrative Democrats are trying to spin is that outspoken female conservatives are somehow unnatural.  Comfortable, maternal leftism is the natural philosophy of caring women, you see, and the State is their only ally in the quest to shatter those increasingly transparent glass ceilings.  A woman who would enlist in the heavy infantry of the regressive fundamentalist Republicans must be crazy.

I hope the White House takes Ambinder’s advice, because it would be suicidal.  His crack about Palin’s “reveling in the culture wars” betrays his ignorance.  He is confused by the details of her biography, and the sincere affection she earns from her admirers.  His Palin Card is drawn from the wrong suit.  She’s the Queen of Diamonds, not the Queen of Hearts.  Her most impressive statements over the last two years have been on matters of economics, policy, and politics.  She has shredded the Administration over health care, the Gulf oil spill, and unrestrained government spending.  She’s endorsed dozens of primary candidates, with something like a 70% success rate.  Her most notable clashes with “culture” have involved asking it to stop making rape jokes about her daughters.

If you want to criticize someone for reveling in culture wars, I suggest you take a look at the power-drunk clowns tossing around gigantic bills that “control the people” right down to the menus at fast-food restaurants.  Just wait until they start rolling out the class-war arguments for higher taxes to sustain their frenzied spending.  That will be some serious revelry.

Obama would be making a deadly mistake by calling out Sarah Palin for a political cage match.  Let me put this bluntly: virtually no one in America gives a damn what Barack Obama says about anything at this point.  What could be more predictable, and less interesting, than Obama’s opinion on any given subject?  Who wants to contemplate the economic wisdom of a guy who looted the Treasury for a trillion dollars, with less benefit than we could have achieved by stuffing hundred dollar bills into random cereal boxes?  Who’s excited to hear about the next plan to convert taxpayer dollars into Democrat campaign funds?  Who’s hungry for another hour of tedious excuses about permanently broken markets and the titanic dead hand of George W. Bush?  Who wants a lecture on ethical business practices from the titular head of the party that gave us Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters?  What use is another hollow foreign-policy speech from a man who sees no global adversary to rival the menace of Arizona?  Even Obama’s supporters don’t hear anything he says any more.  There’s nothing left to hear.

Palin, on the other hand, commands attention.  Lots of it comes from people who dislike her, of course, but she definitely gets people talking.  Many of her detractors have a surprising ability to quote her verbatim, stretching back for weeks.  Obama’s critics need Google searches to remember what he said yesterday.  They can only recall that it was boring, and expensive.

The strategy behind playing the Palin Card is to capitalize on her approval ratings, which liberals incessantly remind us are lower than Obama’s.  They misunderstand the reason why.  Most Americans aren’t political junkies.  They hear news about politicians spending big bucks and getting things done.  The wisdom of spending the big bucks is almost never questioned.  Meanwhile, private citizens are portrayed as merely talking. They have no vast departments or nine-figure budgets.  They are part of the sideshow, while elected officials are the star attractions.  Those who are not dedicated supporters know them primarily through popular culture’s impression of them.

This is Palin’s situation at the moment.  Average people don’t read her Facebook page, and they won’t hear speeches like the one she gave in Iowa on Friday.  They know who she is, but mostly they hear about her, rather than listening to her.  All that will change if the White House points at her and commands the media to attack.  Clubbing someone with a microphone is a mistake if they have something interesting to say.

There are lots of colorful personalities making news during this election season, but these elections are not about personality.  Describing them as expressions of unreasoning anger against the Democrats underestimates the thoughtfulness and determination of the Tea Party movement.  Voters are not just looking for scapegoats to punish for a lousy economy.  They are preparing to act against the system itself, in a manner without precedent in modern history.  Palin understands this better than any other frontrunner for the 2012 Presidential nomination.  Her presumptive rivals have ties to various aspects of that system, as with Mitt Romney’s precursor to ObamaCare in Massachusetts.  Too many of them treat the repeal of ObamaCare as a sensitive topic, while Palin uses it as a battle cry.

The last thing Obama should do is pull Palin onto the stage as his chief rival.  She might talk about the perpetual corruption engine of “stimulus” dollars protecting union payrolls, and filtering down into Democrat campaign coffers.  She might ask “centrists” how they can find the center of a system tumbling over the left edge of a cliff.  She might ask “independents” how much independence they think they can retain after a few more years of wild government growth.  She might ask how a President with so little faith in the American people dares to complain when they show him anything less than complete trust and unquestioning obedience.

The President’s plan to overcome the Tea Party is to make voters afraid of them.  Incubating fear and hatred of those who want to disassemble this dysfunctional State requires us to doubt ourselves, and our ability to survive without the protection and nourishment we are given in exchange for our freedom.  Let the President share the stage with someone whose belief in her fellow Americans is boundless, and whose philosophy of governance begins with the cheerful invitation to share that belief.  Let us see which one the public wishes to hear more from.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

Let me make this simple for the confused herds of policy wonks stumbling around the nation’s capital, trying to figure out why a disappointing populace won’t create jobs and shovel more revenue into the Treasury.  I think the message thundering towards the establishment this November can be summed up in three simple, powerful words:

No more control.

Political control is what’s killing us.  It is expressed in hundreds of ways: high tax rates with carefully tailored exceptions, massive bailouts, laws rigged to favor government-controlled industries, restrictions on resource development, and a vast poppy field of subsidies and penalties.  The Democrats have added thousands of pages of fabulously expensive legislation since Obama took office.  Two messages echo through those pages: Obey and be rewarded.  Resist and be punished.

This is not appropriate behavior for a government that was meant to live in awe of the people’s boundless freedom, and work carefully with limited powers to accomplish its sworn duties.  Even the most apolitical citizen can now see that it’s also disastrous behavior.

Who are the President and his congressional allies, to lecture us on what products to buy, or investments to make?  Who are they to demand even more of our wealth to fund their next round of grand designs?  Their failure is obvious and complete.  I don’t believe any group of brilliant central planners can legislate prosperity… but if such a group exists, it sure as hell isn’t this bunch.

It’s not surprising that command economies are weak.  Business is a thing to be pursued and won.  Control is a thing to be feared and avoided.  A pile of stimulus dollars, dangled on the end of a string, is not a revenue stream.  All the “infrastructure” nonsense sounds good to a community organizer – communities need roads and trains, right?  It’s all temporary, though.  Prosperity is about careers, not paychecks.  It flows from the development of opportunities, not the collection of rewards.  What few opportunities the government can truly create depend on the continued exercise of power to maintain.  Redistribution is inherently destructive, for it relies on the use of compulsive force… and that force itself consumes a sizable chunk of the wealth it redistributes.  All those bureaucrats have got to be paid, and these days, they are paid very well indeed.

Economic strength comes from innovation, which is produced by intense pressure.  Businesses seek creative ways to increase their revenue, and transcend the burden of their expenses.  The super-State feels no such pressures, so it does not innovate.  It believes it can siphon limitless revenue from its subjects, and defer the cost of its failures forever… so it spends extravagantly, and continues wasteful programs until the voters force it to stop, by holding sharpened ballots to its throat.  Only rarely can the voters muster that level of pressure.

No group of people can ever force itself to prosper.  Substituting the limited vision of a few, for the innovation and risk-taking of many, will always impose a steep price.  We speak approvingly of “thinking outside the box.”  Washington makes boxes.

The devilish thing about control is that it blames all of its failures on its absence.  The “stimulus” didn’t work because it was too small.  The flabby and useless ObamaCare program just needs a few thousand more regulations to achieve perfection.  Now that the State controls our health care, it owns our bodies, and the First Lady would like to have a word with us about our diet.  The free market withers beneath the strain of its freedom, but politicians assure us they can chain it down and cure its ailments with a hundred more surgeries.

Listening to the President who bankrupted a generation prattle about all the wonderful things he could do with another $50 billion reminds us that his blind ideology will never consider a solution that makes the government less powerful.  Even his idea of tax cuts are targeted to preferred constituencies, or awarded only in exchange for compliance with a political agenda… in other words, more control.

There are no warranties on the “gifts” of the State, no escape clauses from unsatisfactory contracts, no way to opt out of unwanted programs, and absolutely no refunds.

We should not be interested in studying any more official lists of fellow citizens we’re supposed to envy and hate.  We don’t need any more lectures from millionaire politicians on the heartless greed of people who work their tails off for six figures.  We don’t want a government that insists it can’t make do with a penny less to sell us reduced expectations for a threadbare future.  Every economic forecast from the Obama Administration sounds like a letter of resignation we shouldn’t have to wait until 2012 to accept.

Here’s the deal, Democrats: you don’t get any more billions to spend.  You don’t get to pick the next group of winners and losers in the free market.  You don’t get to decide who “deserves” a tax cut.  You don’t get to hand us the invoice for this bloated government and tell us we need to figure out a way to pay for it.  You don’t get to blame deficits on the people who haven’t surrendered enough of their livelihood to you.  You do not get to insist every piece of this government’s sprawling machinery is indispensible, while every slice of our lives is negotiable.

We own our lives.  We own the State.  The future is ours to discover.  The solutions that will forever evade the political class are already humming through our eager minds.  To be controlled is to spend eternity at each other’s throats, for free people must accept their own inferiority before they can accept domination… and they will always prefer to be told someone else is inferior, and deserves domination.  The control of a free society requires strategic infusions of sin and condemnation.  It also calls for controlling the information free people use to make their decisions, transforming the command economy into an endless con job.  The State survives by managing expectations, while free people compete to exceed them.

No more lies.  No more poison.  No more imperial judgments.  No more despair.  No more control.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

Castle’s conservative primary challenger, Christine O’Donnell, received the coveted Sarah Palin endorsement recently, but current polling shows her losing to Coons by double digits.  This polling is consistent with the overall mood of Delaware voters, who appear ready to be part of the GOP wave in November, but don’t want to ride the crest on the edge of a surfboard.  As Palin points out, O’Donnell has the right stances on a number of critical issues, but that won’t make much of a difference if she can’t get elected.  She’s got some bizarre behavior in her past, and no significant legislative experience.

As the poli-sci class is wrestling with the situation, the professor smiles wickedly and drops the final bomb: control of the Senate might just hinge on the outcome of this race.

It’s a tough call… but many pundits seem unwilling to acknowledge that.  Some, like Michelle Malkin arguing for O’Donnell or Baseball Crank laying out the case for Castle, are commendably willing to concede the difficulty of puzzling out the race, before offering their most carefully reasoned opinions.  Many others act as if the correct choice is obvious, and disagreement is either stupidity or treason.  People are drumming each other out of the conservative movement, pointing at formerly solid allies and doing the Invasion of the Body Snatchers howl.  Promotion to the “ruling class” has become so easy that I’m thinking of endorsing Castle just so I can join the aristocracy.  I’ll settle for a barony.  I’m a cheap date.

The outcome of tomorrow night’s primary is not the only reason so many swords are being drawn over Delaware.  There are deeper issues reflected in both of these elaborately damaged candidates.  Supporters of O’Donnell fear the prominence “reasonable, moderate” Republicans like Castle would gain through the media, after the GOP takes control of Congress.  The ghost of Jim Jeffords rides through their backyards each Halloween, tossing its severed head between its hands.  Cleansing the party of people like Castle isn’t just a mindless obsession with purity.  It’s part of presenting a coherent message to voters, and offering a real contrast with the bankrupt lunacy of the Democrats.  It will be tough for the party to deliver a rousing St. Crispin’s Day speech to voters while the media’s new favorite Republican capers in the background, waving his Strange New Respect award and calling them extremists.

Castle supporters, on the other hand, are tired of losing on principle.  They understand every race presents a different battlefield.  Joe Miller is a mighty oak in Alaska, but he would wither and die in the thin soil of Delaware.  Furthermore, Christine O’Donnell is no Joe Miller.  The argument for stubbornly throwing races to the Democrats, until the country grows utterly sick of them and seeks rescue from conservative knights in shining armor, is drowned by the deafening crack of America’s back breaking under Obama levels of debt.  The cost of losing our way to victory is more than the nation can bear.

I don’t find either of these viewpoints dishonest or foolish.  Intelligent arguments have been made for both.  I also understand why so many people are getting worked up over this conflict.  Every shift in balance is alarming when you’re perched on the edge of a cliff.  To overcome the massive inertia of the system that produced Barack Obama as our national undertaker, we’ve got to play a perfect game for the next couple of years.  There is little margin for error available to individual candidates, the Republican Party, or the conservative movement.  People start screaming when they’re watching you defuse the deficit bomb, and they think you’re about to cut the wrong wire.

I’m not from Delaware, so I have no vote to cast tomorrow night.  If I did, I would find myself reluctantly persuaded by the argument for Castle.  It’s a pity O’Donnell isn’t a better candidate, and Delaware isn’t an easier state to win over.  Good Republican leadership in the Senate should be able to keep Castle on board for the really important votes, and he might just be the leverage that puts the Senate into their hands.  The damage being done to the country by Obama is so horrific that I can’t consign us to another two years, if the chance exists for a fully Republican Congress to slam on the brakes… even if leaving a divided Senate under nominal Democrat control until 2012 might be tactically preferable for the next Presidential campaign.

Having said that, I disagree with Charles Krauthammer that Palin and Jim DeMint’s endorsement of O’Donnell is “destructive” or “irresponsible.”  They’re big-picture idea people.  Their honest endorsement of a candidate who vocally supports their ideas is not damaging.  On the contrary, it proves they mean what they say, and intend to put serious muscle behind the positions they view as critical to getting America back on track.

I would have been disappointed if Palin and DeMint acted any differently.  I just don’t think O’Donnell can do what they need her to do.  Such are the strange mechanics of the Delaware race that I hope they’re right about her, and I’m wrong.  If she wins the primary tomorrow night, I’ll upgrade that from a hope to a prayer.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

American flags were burned on September 11, 2001 as well.  They dissolved into ash while Palestinians danced around them, singing and passing out candy to celebrate the fall of the Twin Towers.  They were vaporized in the blasts of superheated jet fuel that ripped through the corridors of those towers, and the Pentagon.  They melted on the shoulders of heroic firefighters who ran into a million tons of cascading rubble and never came back.

That grand old American flag has seen her share of abuse.  The sight of her riding the winds of dawn, her beauty unspoiled by a night of cannon fire, inspired the poetry which became our national anthem.  She was made to march along the Trail of Tears, where brave men died of exhaustion in her shadow.  She was carried into battle against her own sons, and drifted sadly over ground soaked with their blood at Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg.  She greeted the morning of December 7, 1941 above the decks of eighteen doomed ships, warmed by their last gorgeous Hawaiian sunrise.  She was burned and spat upon as an insult to the men who carried her honor into the jungles of Vietnam.

And yet, the American flag has never been desecrated.

She is the symbol of a unique nation: born in the defiance of tyranny, baptized in the destruction of slavery, and coming of age when it rescued the world from genocidal evil.  Those who destroy our flag earn nothing but our contempt.  They abuse their freedom of speech to level such an insult… but if you embrace the freedom to perform only virtuous deeds, you will soon find that what you’re holding isn’t “freedom” at all, as the arbiters of “virtue” lay their heavy hands upon your shoulder.

Anyone who seeks to desecrate the Stars and Stripes, on either foreign or domestic soil, is a fool. The power of that flag is far beyond their reach.  It is a flame that warmed the freezing waters of the Delaware, as George Washington and his force of starving yeomen brought defeat to the invincible British army.  It was raised above the bloody rocks of Iwo Jima by men who would have acted no differently if they had known half of them would be dead within a matter of weeks, resting beside seven thousand of their brother Marines.  Our flag rose again above the rubble of the World Trade Center, in the hands of firemen who spent the day pulling survivors from the burning dust.  They wanted to do something for all the people they couldn’t save… a gesture of enduring love, and defiance of the sickening evil that tore them from their loved ones.

The image of those firemen and their flag passed through the lens of photographer Thomas Franklin, and into eternity.  The blood of liberty is made from the remembrance of such moments.  Franklin would later say, “This was an important shot. It told more than just death and destruction. It said something to me about the strength of the American people and of these firemen having to battle the unimaginable.”

That’s what America is: a never-ending battle against the unimaginable.

No cretin with a cigarette lighter can touch the compassion and courage woven into the cloth those firemen raised above Ground Zero.  Burn that flag and prove you are a savage, or a spoiled brat.  Spit upon it and soil yourself.  Stamp it beneath your feet, and diminish.  You might as well try to extinguish the Sun.  Instead of protecting your symbols with promises of destruction and murder, think about what makes the American flag untouchable, and be elevated.

No nation has ever loved the whole of mankind as much as the United States of America.  Our fallen soldiers lie in every corner of the Earth as proof.  Love is patient, and love is kind.  We forgive the world its trespasses.  On September 11^th, we ask its patience and kindness, as we recall the day unimaginable evil descended upon New York and Washington, and we once more took up the burden of doing battle with it.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

When people learn that you are an economist, they often want you to predict which way the economy is going. There seem to be more than the usual number of calls for such predictions lately. But an economist should be more aware than others are of how hazardous such predictions can be.

One reason is that what happens in the economy is affected by what politicians do in Washington– and who can predict what politicians will do?

As Dr. Sowell explains in the remainder of his characteristically brilliant piece, the one thing politicians most certainly will not do is nothing, even if that is clearly the wisest course of action.

Think about the economic disruption caused by the presence of an aggressive, activist government in our markets.  It’s like a great white shark, prowling through a sea of much smaller corporate and individual fish.  It obeys none of the rules binding the other players in the market.  It can suck virtually unlimited funding from private entities… at least, until this suction causes the rest of the economy to implode.  This allows it to shrug off financial wounds that would kill any other fish in the sea, and makes it almost completely blind to the signals of pain that would cause private industries to change their behavior.

The government can rewrite the law to suit itself, or ignore laws it finds inconvenient.  It can rig the marketplace to punish competitors, as the Obama Administration has been doing with the health insurance industry.  It can shape media coverage to smooth over errors in judgment that would be public-relations disasters for any corporation.

As Sowell points out, these factors combine to make the State extremely unpredictable.  Would a company with President Obama’s record of abject failure dare to approach its investors for another $50 billion in funding to continue the same ineffective policies, under the same management?

How should private-sector fish deal with this massive predator cruising among them?  The very smallest fish might initially hope to avoid its notice, but there is simply no way to escape broad national mandates like ObamaCare, Card Check, or cap-and-trade legislation.  The best way to avoid the gaping jaws of the government shark is to stay agile and keep a low profile.  The last thing any small-business owner wants is to grow large enough to draw the direct attention of this Administration.  They can only hope political expedience doesn’t place their industry on the target list for taxation, regulation, or demonization.

For larger companies, invisibility is not an option.  The smart play is to become like remora fish, attaching themselves to the State and feeding on the scraps it leaves behind.  The flavor of socialism practiced by contemporary Democrats relies upon this behavior.  The objective is to bend the private sector into compliance with political ideology.  Only a modest percentage of the private sector can be directly nationalized, unless the government shark is ready to mutate into something even more huge and feral.  This leaves the statist hungry to take on a number of “partners” in the private sector.  It has trillions of tax dollars, plus even more valuable regulatory incentives, to purchase all the partners it needs.  Al Gore became a billionaire selling carbon credits, an entirely artificial industry created out of thin air by oppressive government regulation.  There are more billions where those came from.

Investment is not gambling.  It is a carefully reasoned attempt to predict the future, and profit from anticipated conditions.  When the government directly controls the economy, to the degree ours currently does, scientific prediction becomes extremely difficult.  Who knows what bailouts and injunctions might lie ahead?  Businessmen are reduced to reading tea leaves, like which industries the State is spending the most time slandering, or which states the most powerful Senators hail from.  They become eager to purchase influence, which politicians are equally eager to sell.  Big Business finds it very useful to direct the hungry shark’s attention toward its smaller adversaries.  If corruption is defined as the exchange of financial support for unequal treatment, all large governments are inherently corrupt.

For the remora economy, anticipating the needs and desires of consumers is all but futile.  The smart play is to anticipate the needs of the State, and the desires of its dominant ideology… then latch onto the bloated shark when it swims by, and hang on for dear life.  Businesses attached to the State always find ways to profit from the relationship… and eventually, they become dependent upon it, and actively resist attempts to restrain the government spending and regulation which has become integral to their business model.

When the great white shark dies, everything attached to it will die along with it.  That future is unthinkable, so the State insists no one should waste any time thinking about it.  It’s also less than twenty years away.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

We’re going to “fire up sluggish economic growth” by plowing another fifty billion deficit dollars into roads, rail, and airports?  It’s hard to believe even the American media would be lazy enough to write such a headline with a straight face.

Does anyone seriously think our economy is just waiting for another fifty billion dollars’ worth of roads to come roaring back to life?  I guess business owners have all sorts of property staked out for new factories and shops.  They’re just waiting for someone to build roads leading to them.  Does all of this Administration’s economic knowledge come from playing “Sim City” computer games?

In the fading days of the Democrats’ disastrous reign, we’ve come to a moment when they’re begging us to let them “create economic activity” by hiring one more team of union excavators to dig some random holes, and one more team of union construction workers to fill them right back in.

State governments are still sitting on hundreds of billions in unspent money from the first massive “stimulus” plan.  Why can’t they cut a few bucks out of their slush funds to build these desperately needed roads and airports?  If nearly $800 billion in madcap government spending produced nothing but massive unemployment, plus a bumper crop of road signs touting the glory of the stimulus plan, what good is another $50 billion going to do?

The Administration assures us its little espresso shot of new stimulus spending will be revenue neutral, paid for by “ending tax breaks for oil and gas companies.”  Oh, that’s just wonderful. Those tax hikes on oil and gas will be passed directly along to the consumer, in addition to hindering investment in the development of new energy resources.  The last thing a fragile, recessionary economy needs is an increase in energy costs.  I’m all in favor of tax simplification, but it has to be across the board.  Adding another few thousand pages to our ridiculous tax laws, to target unpopular companies for cash to fund more pork spending, plays up the worst aspects of a dysfunctional system.

We don’t need any more control from this incompetent Administration.  We don’t trust them to pick winners and losers in our economy, deciding which industries should be penalized to fund their latest hare-brained schemes.  We would be fools to trust them with another dime of our money.  They’re insane if they think an electorate prepared to sweep the President’s party out of office would be excited by the thought of purchasing another fifty billion dollars’ worth of failure.

The GOP should make it clear that any further spending from this Administration, including any wild schemes hatched during the lame-duck session of Congress, will be zeroed out when the new Republican Congress convenes.  It’s remarkable to note that, after two years of world-record deficits from unrestrained spending, this President has not proposed a single idea that would reduce the size or scope of our bloated government.  He needs to be sent a message that government will now be reduced. It doesn’t need to chow down on another fifty billion donuts before its crash diet begins.

No more taxes.  No more spending. Hold the stimulus, and pass the Boston Harbor tea, please.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

America’s primary international enemy–Islamic radicalism–insists on government by theocracy, curtails civil liberties, embraces torture, represses women, wants to eradicate homosexuals from society, and insists on the use of force over diplomacy. Remind you of a certain American political party? In American Taliban, Markos Moulitsas pulls no punches as he compares how the Republican Party and Islamic radicals maintain similar worldviews and tactics. Moulitsas also challenges the media, fellow progressives, and our elected officials to call the radical right on their jihadist tactics more forcefully for the good of our nation and safety of all citizens.

It’s refreshing to hear liberals are rejecting that kind of trash, isn’t it?  Unfortunately, the condemnation from liberals quoted by the Atlantic Wire is decidedly conditional.

Jamelle Bouie of The American Prospect says:

Like Liberal Fascism, American Taliban is another entry in the tired genre of “my political opponents are monsters.” Indeed, Moulitsas begins the book with the Goldbergian declaration that “in their tactics and on the issues, our homegrown American Taliban are almost indistinguishable from the Afghan Taliban.”

Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism says nothing of the kind.  The author takes great pains to explain, repeatedly, that his purpose is not to smear contemporary liberals as neo-Nazis.  Instead, his extensively researched and footnoted book puts fascism into its proper historical context as a form of collectivism, related to communism and socialism far more closely than anything on the “right” side of the Western political spectrum.  Goldberg wrote the book because he was tired of people like Markos Moulitsas trying to shout down conservatives by calling them fascists.  He knew he was handling a conceptual hand grenade, and he begins nearly every chapter of his book by checking to ensure the pin is still firmly in place.

All of the five liberal responses to American Taliban quoted by the Atlantic Wire include a drive-by smear of Jonah Goldberg or his book.  Either none of these people has actually read Liberal Fascism, or all of them are liars.  Jamelle Bouie has apparently seen the cover, because his review notes the similarity of the cover to American Taliban.  This testifies to the limits of Moulitsas’ imagination, not the kinship of the subject matter.

Ben Crair of The Daily Beast pauses in his breathless rush to denounce American Taliban to take a swipe at some other well-known intruders running along the walls and ceiling of the liberal subconscious:

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas has long been open about his admiration for the scorched-earth tactics of the conservative movement. So it should not come as a surprise that, after a trip through the looking glass, his new book American Taliban might have just as easily been written by Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. This is a liberal’s attempt at a conservative bestseller.

Sure, Ben.  Rush Limbaugh explicitly compares liberals to murderous cave-dwelling religious fanatics all the time. Ann Coulter is second to none in her contempt for the intelligence of the Left, but she has yet to write an entire book forcefully arguing her political opponents are exactly the same as the terrorists who murdered thousands of Americans on 9/11.  (It’s worth slogging through Crair’s entire review to reach the howler where he says Al Franken “steers clear of sledgehammer rhetoric,” instead “using humor to expose the absurdity and hypocrisy of many conservative ideas.”)

Matt Yglesias, last heard offering the opinion that lying is acceptable when it advances liberal goals, cuts to the quick when he questions the effectiveness of Moulitsas’ hatemongering, rather than its legitimacy:

I tend to think that this is one of the areas where progressives aren’t just doing the right thing, but have a smarter tactical approach to politics. There are scenarios in which tagging your political opponents with smears can be effective, but I don’t see any evidence that the particular apocalyptic “my enemies are totalitarian madmen” strain of Birch/Beck/Goldberg conservatism has helped anyone win any elections. This should be differentiated from the occasional lapse into rhetorical excess that everyone does now and again. I’m talking specifically about the kind of sustained effort to seriously persuade people that Elana Kagan favors sharia or Dwight Eisenhower is a Communist that you see among loons of all stripes but that seems to be granted more respectability on the right.

See how he slipped Birch right in there with Beck and Goldberg?  That’s some clever writing right there!  This kind of casual slander is so typical of the Goebbels/Moulitsas/Yglesias doctrine of politically sanctioned lies.  It’s almost as distasteful as all those mainstream conservative websites pushing their “Red Dwight Eisenhower” scare stories.

These lefty writers spend a lot of time congratulating themselves for their high-minded dismissal of American Taliban. The truth is that Moulitsas has become an embarrassment to the Left.  His slavering diatribes are greatly impeding their efforts to push the new Narrative of Hate, which they hope will save their dying ideology from outraged voters.  By comparing the output of Beck, Limbaugh, Coulter, or Goldberg to inexcusable garbage like American Taliban, they render praise through faint damning.  They need to open a little distance between themselves and Markos, but they can’t resist taking the opportunity to slip in a few shots at the people they really disapprove of.

These liberals might have their boots planted in Moulitsas’ face, but they haven’t climbed very far out of his mud pit.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

The usual caveats apply: campaigns will stumble, local issues will come into play, unforeseen events could change the minds of jittery voters, and skeletons have a habit of tumbling from closets around Halloween.  Still, it seems very likely the GOP will at least take the House.  Thanks to the Tea Party influence, some old RINOs will also be replaced by tough new war elephants.

What then?

The highest priority for Americans is the repeal of ObamaCare, whose damage to our dignity, economy, and health care system is absolutely intolerable.  Outright repeal must wait until Obama has been replaced in 2012, but a Republican Congress can neutralize the worst provisions of the bill, sealing its toxic waste into lead-lined containers until we can shoot it off into space and be rid of it.

There is some concern that a successful Republican Congress will engineer enough prosperity to pump air into the Obama re-election campaign.  Knowing ObamaCare was dead would send a euphoric surge through an economy that has spent the last couple of years curled up in the corner, hugging itself and whimpering as it awaits the next beating from Democrats.  ObamaCare killed tens of thousands of jobs almost immediately, and the weight of its mandates has been crushing job creation, especially among smaller businesses.  It seems reasonable to believe its repeal would produce a far stronger surge of payroll expansion than any of the gimmicks being kicked around by statists today.

This is why the election of solid, articulate conservatives to Congress is so essential.  If the Republican wave in 2010 is an isolated outpouring of voter anger, we’ll have trouble finishing the job in 2012, and could soon find ourselves right back where we started.  It’s not enough for the electorate to “throw the bums out” this year.  We have to teach them to build electrified fences topped with razor wire around the federal government, to keep those bums from ever returning.

It takes nothing away from Obama’s failures as President to point out that he did not create our current situation on his own.  He bankrupted us, but we were already on shaky financial ground when he arrived.  He detonated the deficit to pay off his political allies in the historic “stimulus” heist, but his crew wasn’t the first to roll out of the Treasury with bags of taxpayer swag in their fists.  Barack Obama is the absurd final extension of a system that has been dying for longer than most of us have been alive.  He didn’t change the course of the State.  He just stepped on the gas.

Conservatives underestimate the inertia of that gigantic, doomed engine at their peril.  The apparatus of the federal government is like nanotechnology: self-sustaining and self-replicating.  Powers it has seized are never returned.  Its budgets are never cut.  It howls in agony if the rate of budget increase is even slightly reduced.  In the past two years, trillions of dollars in new commitments have been added to its bulk.  The media will eagerly assist Democrats in strapping the poor and destitute to its hide as armor, to turn away budget-cutting knives.

What will be crucial for Republicans after 2010 is leadership. It is essential to make the voters understand how we got here, and restate the Constitutional principles that render so much of this bloated government utterly immoral, as well as ineffective.  Encouraging voters to pour unfocused anger at Obama is ultimately counter-productive, because he didn’t create the crumbling system he presides over.  Its foundations were laid long before his birth, and it won’t magically improve as soon as he’s gone.

In fact, letting the voters work out their frustrations on an Obama punching bag is dangerous, because once they’re exhausted, there are far too many ways he could talk them out of their anger.  No matter how unpopular he might be now, a Democrat president who enjoys the slavish devotion of the media will always have potent protection against personal criticism.  We will be told that failure to re-elect Obama is a sin… an unforgivable act of racism and bigotry, and a hate crime against the vulnerable people he supposedly represents.  It is necessary to run against the corrupt and venal system he truly represents.

Look beyond that campaign to 2013, and imagine a political environment in which the signature “achievement” of the Obama presidency is seen as one of the worst mistakes in recent history.  The Democrats invested every drop of their political capital in passing it.  They twisted arms, cut seedy backroom deals, and ultimately shoved it down the throats of a protesting majority of Americans.  Imagine a jubilant nation celebrating the repeal of this disaster, and the defeat of the party that inflicted it on us.  Nothing like it has happened in the modern era.  Political parties dissolve after that kind of defeat.  There will never be more solid ground for conservatives to stand upon, as they begin the daunting task of dismantling the out-of-control system that produced the poisonous notion of socialized medicine.  There will never be a better time to return to the just, and effective, principles that guided us before we lost our way in the New Deal and Great Society.

If we fail to create and use that opportunity, our next appeal to the voters will come among the ruins, after a collapse that every one of us should be united in our determination to prevent.  There is nothing patriotic about allowing our fellow citizens – even those who hate us – to live through what is coming next.  Nothing like it has ever happened in the modern era, either.  We stand within a dozen years of watching this mighty nation devour itself in a frenzy of non-negotiable, utterly impossible demands.

Jim Geraghty of National Review relays some sage advice from his political mentor: “This election is not about Obama.  It’s about what Democrats have been since 1972.”  It’s also about preventing them from assuming their twisted and ravenous state in the future.  We need healthy opposition parties.  The long-term prosperity, and perhaps survival, of our nation requires the improvement of the Republican Party… and the transformation of the Democrats.  That is the great task awaiting us, after the fall.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

There are few examples in recent memory of a political party being as comprehensively wrong as the Democrats were about Iraq, every step of the way.  The Democrats insist their miserable performance on the domestic economy should be measured against phantasmal scenarios of doom – the apocalypse that would have happened if they didn’t blow a trillion bucks on the “stimulus,” which “created or saved” zillions of jobs.  When it comes to military policy, however, they’re happy to believe Saddam Hussein was basically harmless, and would have minded his own business if left alone.  Their court jester, Michael Moore, made a movie depicting Iraq as a kite-flying paradise before the Americans showed up and ruined everything.  Their media allies floated stories, during the early days of the Iraqi occupation, tentatively suggesting things might have been better for the Iraqi people when Saddam ran the show.  After all, he left most of his subjects alive.

Although most Democrats supported the invasion of Iraq, they quickly changed their minds when public opinion soured on the war, and they saw a political opportunity.  This led to the tortured birth of the Idiotic Evil Genius narrative, in which the Democrats claimed George Bush was a simian cowboy moron who diabolically tricked them into supporting his neocon war for oil.  Mainstream Democrat politicians made common cause with the wilder fringes of the nutroots.  Anyone who remembers the melancholy Cirque du Soleil of the Kerry presidential campaign could only laugh at President Obama’s assertion tonight that “Americans across the political spectrum supported the use of force against those who attacked us on 9/11.”  In reality, a sizable chunk of the President’s party had no interest in the Afghanistan operation until it became a useful club against Bush’s Iraq policy.  I wonder how the Kos Kidz feel about Barack Obama declaring them completely outside the “political spectrum.”

It is a simple matter of fact that almost every major Democrat, including Barack Obama and all of the other 2008 presidential contenders, opposed the surge strategy that brought us victory in Iraq.  In other words, if Obama and his party had been in charge from 2004 onward instead of Bush, we would have lost Iraq.  A suggestion to any major Democrat, during the 2004 campaign, that victory could be secured in Iraq by sending more troops would have been met with absolute contempt.

During his speech, Obama boasted of sending troops under General David Petraeus to “break the Taliban’s momentum.”  That would be the same general Obama’s dedicated supporters at MoveOn.org called “General Betray Us.”  Obama’s party accused this man of treason for “lying” about the success of the surge strategy.  MoveOn.org has not been denounced or given the John Birch Society heave-ho from the Democrat party.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, spent much of 2007 declaring the war in Iraq a lost cause.  He plainly stated the surge was “not accomplishing anything.”  The only way the Bush White House could get him to shut up was by daring him to vote with the courage of his convictions and cut off funding for the war effort.  Democrats worked relentlessly against the war effort, relishing the political damage inflicted on George Bush.  Here are Obama’s remarks about Bush from his Tuesday night address:

I am mindful that the Iraq War has been a contentious issue at home. Here, too, it is time to turn the page. This afternoon, I spoke to former President George W. Bush. It’s well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one could doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security. As I have said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hope for Iraq’s future.

Note the complete lack of credit for Bush’s winning war strategy.  Obama is only willing to concede that Bush supported the troops and loved his country… and that very statement from Obama is an outrageous lie. “No one could doubt” Bush’s love of country and commitment to our security?  How about Van Jones?  You remember him, Mr. President.  You installed him as one of your dozens of unelected, unaccountable “czars,” and gave him a $30 billion budget.  He was forced to resign after revelations he was part of the sub-moronic “9/11 Truth” cult, which believes President Bush deliberately destroyed the World Trade Center in a murderous conspiracy.

If you’ve forgotten Mr. Jones, perhaps you remember Cindy Sheehan, elevated to sainthood by the Left because she used her “absolute moral authority” to declare the Iraq operation a futile waste of life, and George Bush a subhuman tool of the international Zionist conspiracy.  The Democrat Party treated her as a major celebrity back in the day, but discarded her like so much rubbish once Bush was out of office.

It would have been absurd to expect Obama to offer a humble apology for his personal mistakes during the debate over the Iraq war, and admit his party was wrong to actively oppose the victory he celebrated Tuesday night.  Politicians rarely admit mistakes, or offer apologies for errors in judgment.  To cite another example from Tuesday night, during one of his awkward pivots to domestic politics, Obama said that “to strengthen our middle class, we must give all our children the education they deserve.”  This leads one to wonder what Obama’s lavishly funded friends in the NEA, and the bloated Department of Education, have been doing for the last thirty years, aside from making field trips to attend Al Sharpton hate festivals.  No amount of dismal failure will ever lead Democrats to concede that public education is flawed, or a single dollar of funding for its bureaucracy should be cut.

No mistakes, no apologies, no accountability… why learn from history when you can rewrite it?

Thanks are due to the incredible courage and resourcefulness of the American military, the vision of commanders like General David Petraeus, and the remarkable determination of President George W. Bush.  They overcame stiff opposition from Barack Obama and his party to give Iraq a chance at becoming something greater than a plaything for billionaire tyrants and savages.  The long struggle against Islamic fascism may end in something better than mind-shattering bloodshed, because of their efforts.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

It certainly hasn’t been lost by all of us.  Individuals, families, and communities across America never broke faith with the noble traditions of self-reliance, responsibility, and adventure that forged this honorable nation.  Such people can be found in every neighborhood of every city… but the nation as a whole has lost its way.

We dishonor ourselves when we tolerate the use of our fighting men and women as pawns in a political game.  As long as they stand in harm’s way, we should accept no insult or slander against them.  Robust criticism of the policy makers who declare and end hostilities is fair and welcome… but there is a line between politicians and soldiers, and it is easily visible to honorable people.  We should have nothing but contempt for the likes of Code Pink.  Illinois Senator Dick Durbin’s political career should have ended the day after he compared our service members to Nazis.  There is no place for such creatures in the Congress of a nation that answers the dedication and sacrifice of its veterans with love and respect.  In a rough economy with an uncertain future, Beck’s rally raised $5.5 million to help the families of special-operations soldiers killed in battle.  That is a strong step in the right direction.

We dishonor ourselves when we create massive obligations with unsustainable financing.  This shows disrespect to the future, and a craven refusal to face the realities of today.  If time is money, then madcap deficit spending steals the time of the future… draining it away like so much sand down the neck of a broken hourglass.  As parents love their children, we should be mindful of the future, and eager to shoulder our current burdens instead of passing them along, with interest.  We cannot know the shape of tomorrow, or what hardships they may be facing when the bills for our indulgences come due.

We dishonor ourselves when we declare the rights and freedoms of our fellow citizens to be conditional, and subject to our needs.  Free people do not expect the State to confiscate and ration.  They don’t subcontract the design of the future to political appointees.  They understand such designs require obedience, and obedience requires compulsion.  You cannot “honor” a neighbor you deem unfit to manage his own affairs.  There is no honor to be found in the pursuit of a perfect State to rule an inadequate people.

We dishonor ourselves when we embrace death as the solution to inconvenient people.

We dishonor ourselves when we deny the possibility of progress to embrace tribal hatreds.  Race and feminist hustlers peddle a message that says the vast majority of people cannot be trusted to show common decency to minorities and women.  We’ve had enough of this toxic superstition.  Precious lives have been wasted, and ended, because there is power and profit to be gained in pretending the Civil Rights Act happened yesterday, and slavery ended the day before that.  Where is the honor In shrieking that people who disagree with your politics are “interchangeable with the KKK?”  An ideology so weak that it must resort to these underhanded tactics is garbage unfit for the intellectual consumption of a proud people.  Those who are foolish enough to ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears, and consume that garbage, will rediscover their honor after they find their self-respect.

Most crucially, we dishonor ourselves when we forget we “have the same steel spine and the moral courage of Washington and Lincoln and Martin Luther King,” as Sarah Palin said at the Restoring Honor rally.  We remain the proud inheritors of a revolutionary philosophy, the children of vision and industry.  We have not diminished into timid weaklings, unworthy of the trust of our ruling class.  Our land is still abundant, and filled with parents who want to make a better life for their children.  Why should we listen to assurances that our future will be one of decline, where children hear their parents mourn better times from distant memory?  Why should we accept that ten percent and more of our population must remain unemployed forever?  Why should we excuse the failure of an incompetent Administration by believing we became helpless and destitute in just a few short years, and are now obliged to provide limitless resources to our caretakers?

We have listened too long to the poisonous whispers of those who say we’re too old and feeble to stand up and deal with our own problems.  The doom they have written for us can be swept aside like so many cobwebs.  Honorable people do not fear risk and challenge.  We dishonor ourselves by believing we have no moral claim on the entirety of our labor, or responsibility for the maintenance of our needs.  We dishonor ourselves by paying trillions to hear the same old fairy tale about limitless entitlements distributed by friendly giants wearing power ties.  The American people have wasted enough time reading the elaborate limited warranty on the inside of the coffin lid our Left is preparing to nail shut.

We reclaim our honor by turning away from those who believe the great mass of us are beneath their contempt, and compassion is best expressed through domination.  They have no power we didn’t give them, which means they have no power we cannot take away.  Let us begin.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

Jim Treacher of The Daily Caller points out a hilarious post from Talking Points Memo, where the commenters cling desperately to The Narrative Of Hatred, even after learning the guy who urinated on a Muslim prayer rug was a garden variety drunk instead of a Tea Party storm trooper.  One TPM blogger was so upset by the blood-dimmed tide of right-wing fury that he ran off and firebombed Russ Carnahan’s office.

Ignoring this useless reality, MSNBC ties the wee-weed rug into “a spate of anti-Muslim incidents” and delivers the chilling warnings of a CAIR spokesman that fiery clouds of violent hatred are massing over the Religion of Peace:

FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko told msnbc.com that New York City has not seen a change in the number of hate crimes reported by Muslims so far this year, but every report is taken seriously.

But recent incidents — including the stabbing of a Muslim cab driver and the desecration of a California mosque — have some members of the Muslim community worried that crimes against Muslims could reach crisis levels.

“Without a significant response by mainstream political leaders, this disturbing trend will only continue to grow,” said Faiza Ali, a New York spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Even the Grand Old Party may fall victim of a hateful “insurrection,” as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne sobs from his fainting couch:

Republicans are in the midst of an insurrection. Democrats are not. This vast gulf between the situations of the two parties — not some grand revolt against “the establishment” or “incumbents” — explains the year’s primary results, including Tuesday’s jarring outcomes in Florida and Alaska.

… That the deficit increased primarily because of two tax cuts and two wars was not part of most conservatives’ calculation because acknowledging this was ideologically inconvenient. In the meantime, the election of President Obama by a demographically diverse coalition anchored among younger voters helped unleash the furies inside an older, overwhelmingly white and Southern-leaning GOP coalition.

Leave aside the fact that only a complete idiot would believe the deficit has increased primarily because of tax cuts and wars, and heed the wisdom of Dionne’s warning to his beloved Republican Party.  Last Tuesday’s primaries were the most horrific bloodbath since Blade walked into a vampire disco.  Rick Scott ran a “brutal campaign” to become the Republican nominee for Florida governor.  A terrified Lisa Murkowski was crushed by “right-wing power” and is now huddled beneath her desk, waiting for the murderous avatar of Joe McCarthy to come and devour her soul.  John McCain barely survived his primary by “modifying long-held positions to appease hard-line conservatives,” and unleashing Darth Palin on the fearful voters of Arizona.  Meanwhile, Glenn Beck prepares to lead a horde of his followers across the sacred ground where only duly authorized heirs to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. may walk.  They will spend the weekend dressed in ghoulish makeup and tattered baseball outfits, marching in circles around Congress and taunting Democrats to come out and play.

The Narrative of Hate is a crowbar desperate liberals hope they can use to separate moderates from conservatives.  Moderates recoil from the idea of being pressed into a bloodthirsty mob.  They might be angry about the comprehensive failure of the Obama Democrats, but hateful? No, they’ve got to draw the line at hate.  They might even start feeling bad about being angry.  Maybe they should vote for the people hailed as paragons of tolerance and compassion by the media, or even sit this next election out altogether.

This business of designating inconvenient ideas as “hateful” is also an expression of the collectivist instinct.  It’s a less brutal variation on the way hardcore statists like to declare the opposition clinically insane.  Once you have established the premise that hateful ideas must be dismissed without further thought or discussion, immense power accrues to whoever gets to classify ideas as “hateful.”  Hatefulness becomes a virus, spreading rapidly through association with anyone the elite have identified as a carrier.  You don’t have to argue with the infected, or consider the merits of their arguments… just avoid all contact with them.  Thinking unclean thoughts could cause the contagion to spread.

To be brutally honest: a lot of people are sincerely angry about what has been happening to their country.  They were provoked.  The “transformative agenda” of this Presidency came looking for them, and there is no way to hide from it.  There is no option to step away from the politics of an aggressive State, and live your life in peace.  You may have considered yourself a moderate who prefers not to get involved in nasty political arguments, a desire I understand and respect… but if you think you should be allowed to buy your own health insurance, you’re a right-wing conservative now.  In a few more years, you’ll be an “extremist.”  Your children will be handed the back-breaking invoice for the politics you preferred to stay clear of.

It is pointless to tell people they should not feel certain emotions.  However, we choose what to do with those feelings.  The New Deal is dead, and the question before us is whether we will allow it to destroy America in its death throes.  Anger will not provide the answer to that question.  The task ahead of us requires logic and courage.  I would prefer to temper our anger into resolve, and place passion at the service of reason.  It is difficult to ask people to follow angry leaders into constructive endeavors.

Sometimes people tell me they’re angry and frustrated because they think there’s no way out for us, that we’re doomed to end up in a horror movie whose red-band trailer was filmed in Greece.  To believe that is to lose faith in your fellow Americans.  We are conservatives, so we believe in them. Liberty is not a flame ordinary people are too childish to be trusted with.  I can’t wait to see what they can do, once we unhook them from the political machine that has been sucking them dry.

The Left is frightened and confused.  Nothing that is happening right now makes any sense to them.  It defies all of their elegant theories and deeply held beliefs.  How can the magnificent Lightworker turn out to be hapless empty suit, with no real skill for anything except giving speeches?  How can the brilliant elite of the Democrat Party, with total control of the entire federal government, preside over stagnation and collapse?  The people cannot hope to lead fulfilling lives without the enlightened control of liberals – why are they turning on their saviors with cold eyes and sharp questions the Left cannot answer?  What the hell are those awful thumping and hissing noises coming from the deficit boiler room beneath Capitol Hill?  The cold and fearful Left must work some feeling back into its numb fingers by pointing them at someone.  They must reassure themselves that there are no legitimate points of view beside their own… and no alternatives to the ruinous course they have set for their country.

The massive government Americans will soon begin the battle to control was built entirely on emotional appeals.  Its failed programs are said to be eternal, because every alternative to them is immoral.  The amount of assistance actually rendered to its supposed beneficiaries is beside the point.  We must do it for the children, the science is settled, health insurance is a human right, the rich must pay their fair share, compassion can only be expressed through government spending.  Don’t ask how much money reaches the downtrodden, or where the rest of it goes.  Don’t ask why you should shiver in the dark to “save the earth,” while your betters ride in limousines and private jets.  Questions are a burden to yourself, answers are a burden to others.

Why would conservatives be “hateful?”  Our victory will return liberty and property to everyone, including those we disagree with.  On the other hand, the victory of the Left requires increasing levels of compulsion, to overcome mounting resistance to an agenda based on highly subjective “rights” and obligations, distributed by the central government.  Everyone who clings to leftist ideals will eventually be required to hate the designated enemies of the State.  Many of them have received their instructions already.

Both sides in the coming clash understand they must express their philosophy to voters with passion, of course.  Allowing our passions to be ruled illegitimate is equivalent to disarming ourselves.  The acolytes of a dying philosophy, who ignore reality when it conflicts with their feelings, have no lectures to give about “hatred.”  If all dissent from this President is equivalent to hatred, then no sincere dissent is possible, and quiet submission is the only moral course.  Anyone who makes that argument is a totalitarian, and I am happy to be counted among their adversaries.  I do intend to be a happy adversary.  The man who led America up from the disaster of Jimmy Carter did it with a smile.  Obama’s successor will be wearing a smile, too.  No one who truly understands the character of this nation can stay mad at it for long.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

In its first-ever report to the U.N. Human Rights Council on conditions in the United States, the State Department said Monday that some Americans, notably minorities, are still victims of discrimination. Despite success in reforming such inequities as slavery and the denial of women’s right to vote, the department said, considerable progress is still needed.

Those “successes in reforming the inequities of slavery and the denial of women’s right to vote” occurred 145 and 90 years ago, respectively.  Obama Administration functionaries must have a highly refined disdain for their own country, in order to bring them up as a way of giving a little pat on the head to an ugly, backwards nation.  There hasn’t been much progress on human rights in America since we passed the Nineteenth Amendment, but thank heavens Barack Obama is finally on the case!  He inherited the throne of a miserable country, but perhaps his enlightened leadership can work us up to a solid B+.

The Administration report lists the daunting issues it must overcome to reach the human-rights plateau occupied by China, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and the other deeply concerned members of the U.N. Human Rights Council:

High unemployment rates, hate crime, poverty, poor housing, lack of access to health care and discriminatory hiring practices are among the challenges the report identified as affecting blacks, Latinos, Muslims, South Asians, Native Americans and gays and lesbians in the United States.

As DrewM at Ace of Spades notes, none of these things are “human rights violations.”  The nature of the real violation is implied: resistance to the progressive agenda that will supposedly eliminate these unpleasant realities of life.  The essential absurdity of multiculturalism is the need to drag America down until it can be treated as equal to the thug states infesting the United Nations.  That’s how we end up with the Obama Administration moaning about “lack of access to health care” as a human rights violation, in a report submitted to a council that includes Saudi Arabia, where a court has ruled that a man’s spinal cord can be severed as punishment.

My favorite passage from the report states:

Although we have made great strides, work remains to meet our goal of ensuring equality before the law for all.

The idea of “equality before the law” as the goal of the Obama Administration is ridiculous.

Equality before the law would disintegrate Big Government as we know it.  The entire enterprise is built on unequal treatment, based on race, sex, income level, and many other factors.  The leviathan State would become an anemic corpse if inequality was drained from its bloodstream.

Where was the “equality” in ObamaCare, with its countless exceptions and loopholes for favored constituencies, hammered out in backroom deals?  It will only become more unequal in the future, as care is tightly rationed, and increasing amounts of compulsion are deployed to hold the collapsing system together.  Only a fool would believe the high and mighty will have trouble obtaining the treatments rationed away from the rest of us.

The political class certainly does not face the same treatment before the law as private citizens.  This Administration and Congress are riddled with tax cheats and other scofflaws.  People like Charlie Rangel get slaps on the wrist and fundraising parties, where ordinary people would be looking at prison time.  The great political drama of 1998 involved getting Bill Clinton off the hook for perjury, a crime that would put the little people behind bars.  On a less criminal level, the ruling class routinely exempts itself from laws and mandates applied with relentless enthusiasm to their subjects.

The concept of progressive taxation, central to the survival of a socialist system, is based on the denial of equal property rights.  Those in higher tax brackets must endure diminished rights to their income.  The massive network of bailouts and subsidies constructed over the last few years is a case of profound inequality before the law.  Favored industries are granted benefits, paid with funds confiscated from all those who do not receive the subsidies.  Every subsidy is a tax against those who do not receive it.

True equality before the law is, perhaps, the greatest and most intimidating concept yet produced by human philosophy.   Centuries after our Founders worked to contain this concept within the luminous words of our Constitution, we are still grappling with its ramifications.  Understanding that equality leads to freedom from tyranny, oppression, and discrimination is relatively easy.  It’s far more difficult to accept that it also means citizens cannot impose their demands on each other, using the power of the State… or that free people cannot be coerced into following even the most brilliant and compassionate central plans.

In a nation that fully embraced equality before the law, the compulsive force of government would be used only to protect the citizens from crime and external threats.  Any further exercise of force requires unequal treatment, by definition.  Perhaps we will be the first nation to set aside the crude implements of compulsion and dependency, to embrace the fearsome power of true equality.  That would really be something worth reporting to the human rights council of the United Nations.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

In reality, job creation and economic growth are nowhere to be found on this Administration’s list of priorities.  The “hard pivot” was actually the feeble ring of ruby slippers clicking together.

Anyone who seriously considered job creation imperative would, at a bare minimum, refrain from the wholesale destruction of industries.  Michelle Malkin gives us the bomb damage assessment from the Obama War on Jobs: dereliction of duty on border security, the offshore drilling moratorium, pulling onshore drilling leases, shutting down auto dealerships, and the burden of paying for health insurance “reform” which has become a sucking chest wound in the U.S. economy.  The offshore drilling industry will take decades to rebuild, as equipment begins to move permanently out of U.S. waters.  The Administration knew the ban it fought so hard to impose would kill 23,000 jobs.  Obviously the preservation of those jobs was not a “top priority.”

We’re long past the point where we can afford to indulge expensive environmentalist fantasies, but they remain our official state religion, and donations are mandatory.  Government land-use regulations are literally shrinking the private sector.  Global-warming advocates who should be on trial for fraud remain respected and powerful advisors to the government.  Catering to environmentalists is, clearly, a higher priority than economic growth for the Democrats.  Anyone who says otherwise is lying to your face.

The enrichment of powerful labor unions is a much higher priority than job growth for Democrats.  The odious “Card Check” bill was an attempt to fuel union growth.  Taxpayer subsidies were pumped into General Motors to preserve union jobs.  Massive bailouts of unsustainable union pension plans are on the horizon.  If Democrats are in power when these bailouts hit, they will pass them without hesitation… and without a second thought for non-union job growth, or the effect of massive new taxes and deficits on the economy.

Liberal ideology is much more important to Democrats than your job, or the financial future of your children.  The Bush tax cuts will become implosion bombs when the Democrats allow them to expire.  The owners of small businesses, which are the primary engine of job creation, will be caught in the blast radius.  The Left is busy feeding its tattered old class-warfare sheet music into the media player piano, and stuffing themselves into hilarious “deficit hawk” costumes three sizes too small for them.  Soon the air will be filled with shrill demands to “end tax cuts for the rich” who need to “pay their fair share.”  Anyone who isn’t blinded by ideology can see the folly of sucking more money out of an anemic economy.

Consider the foolishness of people like Paul Krugman, who babble about the power of unemployment benefits as the ultimate economic stimulus, because it distributes spending money to the distressingly large unemployed population:

One main reason there aren’t enough jobs right now is weak consumer demand. Helping the unemployed, by putting money in the pockets of people who badly need it, helps support consumer spending. That’s why the Congressional Budget Office rates aid to the unemployed as a highly cost-effective form of economic stimulus. And unlike, say, large infrastructure projects, aid to the unemployed creates jobs quickly — while allowing that aid to lapse, which is what is happening right now, is a recipe for even weaker job growth, not in the distant future but over the next few months.

This betrays a childish misunderstanding of economic growth.  It is not fueled by short-term bursts of spending, but rather by investment and risk. Low-end consumer spending doesn’t fuel the long-term demand for skilled labor.  At best, it produces the kind of part-time burger flipping, cash-register poking jobs that liberals spent the Bush years sneering at.  The money seized from taxpayers to generate this “stimulus” bleeds away during its long journey through the greasy machinery of Big Government, delivering dimes on the dollar when it finally arrives at its destination.  In many cases, that destination turned out to be a political slush fund, where millions of dollars in hoarded “stimulus” cost the American taxpayer millions in debt service.  Krugman economics transform dollars into antimatter.

Hordes of unemployed people are not going to turn their benefit checks into start-up capital for new businesses.  Investment is best left to the people who earned that money in the first place, and they’re more likely to turn it around into more productive investments when they’re confident the profits won’t be confiscated.  Big Government sucks trillions out of the economy, skims off billions in overhead costs, and plows the rest into expenditures which are guaranteed by definition to be less conducive to growth than private sector investment… because otherwise it would not be necessary to engineer those expenditures with compulsive force.  The heat of a health economy is generated by a million well-fueled furnaces, not a giant central government lumbering around with a flamethrower.

The behavior of an Administration that really did regard jobs and growth as its top priorities is not difficult to imagine.  It would act to reduce the cost of labor, not increase it through back-breaking mandates.  Money would be returned to the population through lower taxes, where it would blossom into wealth through voluntary transactions.   Corporate taxes would be reduced and simplified, creating an environment where investors were eager to generate capital in the pursuit of profit… replacing the dreary confusion of Washington central planners with millions of bold strategies.  Instead of embalming industries with bailouts and moratoriums, the government would aggressively privatize its functions – especially in areas like education, where federal control has been an expensive failure of colossal proportions.  Land would be opened for responsible development.  Reason would replace irrational fear, and respect for the creativity and wisdom of the people would replace stifling maternal control.

It is a simple fact that the government can only grow at the expense of the private sector.  Wealth is created through voluntary transactions, with a mutual increase of value for both parties.  Government has no resources except coercion, no funds obtained through any means but confiscation.  Barack Obama has not taken a single action which has not increased the size of government.  Why is anyone surprised by the resulting contraction of private industry?  The promise of growth is the phantom priority of a leftist President, snappy patter designed to gain time as he does the one thing a successful private businessman never does: spin the economic roulette wheel and hope he gets lucky before he loses his job.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

Some have speculated this was more than just a bureaucratic snafu.  Was the Swedish government co-operating with the military and intelligence services of the United States, hoping to discredit Assange with false rape charges?  I hope nobody working for the CIA is incompetent enough to believe that would work.  Even hard evidence of rape would not “discredit” a hero of the international Left.

The murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner wasn’t enough to “discredit” Mumia abu Jamal.  His release from prison remains a romantic obsession of the hard-core Left, which sees no reason for a soul brimming with the people’s poetry to rot in stir over one little dead cop.

The Left seethes in frustration that small, judgmental minds continue to hold Roman Polanski’s assault of an underage girl against him.  His fashionable politics and artistic talent should have long ago erased the memory of that messy business at Jack Nicholson’s place.  In a 1979 interview, Polanski wailed, “If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”  He was wrong about the “killing somebody” part, as Mumia abu Jamal could explain.

Those foolish enough to take Michael Moore seriously are happy to swallow hypocrisy and deceit that would be obvious to a small child.  They are not repulsed by the spectacle of a greedy man making millions from selling them propaganda designed to keep them bitter and poor.  Profiting from lies told in the service of a “larger truth” does not “discredit” him.

The Left is happy to watch people like Al Gore rake in billions from the global-warming scam.  No amount of hard data, or evidence of fraud, will discredit the clergy of the Church of Global Warming.  Their sacred ideal is the construction of an absolute international authority, empowered to defend the Earth from grubby little people who keep asserting privileges that should be reserved for the elite, such as driving cars.  No action taken in the service of this ideal can “discredit” the priesthood.

The entire point of Julian Assange’s website is to embarrass the United States military, hindering its war effort against a gang of medieval savages who laugh at the very notion of being held accountable for war crimes.  Their victory would draw a shroud of oppression, torture, and murder over the people of Afghanistan, especially the women and gays loudly claimed as clients and reflexive supporters by the Left in developed nations.  Liberals don’t view the Taliban as a dark force to be defeated at all costs.  They’re much more interested in “discrediting” George Bush – you know, the only guy who can save Barack Obama from himself in the NonZero NonMosque controversy.

Personal crimes will never serve to “discredit” a famous proponent of leftist politics.  One of the chief blessings the Left bestows upon its faithful is the sanctification of awful men.  Liberal politics are primarily a moral exercise.  The effectiveness of a given program is secondary to whether it conforms to their ideology.  Their minds can’t even process something like the Laffer Curve, which demonstrates rising tax rates reduce revenue to the Treasury.  Those higher tax rates are social justice, man.  Punishing and controlling the right people is more important than rendering efficient assistance to the downtrodden.

The moral imperative of ObamaCare will sustain liberal support for it, far beyond its abject failure.  The perpetrators of this legislative monstrosity have admitted they lied through their teeth about it, but this troubles the Left no more than the failure of socialized medicine around the world.  Healing sick people was never the point of the exercise.  An ineffective system designed in accordance with socialist principles is better than any challenge to those principles.  Fraud in the service of such a glorious act of collectivist morality is not a crime.  It doesn’t matter that it strips citizens of their right to self-determination – what is the value of a vote based on lies?  To the Democrat Party base, and his admirers around the world, nothing Obama or his accomplices did in the service of their agenda has “discredited” them.

Socialism is based on the premise that a morally and intellectually superior elite can best organize the lives of citizens, through the exercise of compulsive force.  The moral authority of the elite is assumed, along with their intelligence.  It’s an authority that transcends national boundaries, which the Left despises, since they dilute the power of enlightened central government.  A global government would protect the elite from the rude passions of a backward electorate far more effectively than a collection of bloated nations… just as a vast federal government protects them better than fifty states which take their rights and duties seriously.

Those who render valuable service to the cause of enlightened global authority cannot be “discredited.”  A movement that carries sepia-toned photos of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in its wallet will not be disturbed by treason, the rape of a child, the murder of a cop, lies under oath, breathtaking hypocrisy, or the tyranny of fraud against the citizens of our republic.  A great omelet remains to be made, which means a lot of eggs still need to be broken.  The people who will suffer and die because of Julian Assange’s support for the victory of the Taliban are eggs.  So are any inconvenient young women who might be filing statements in Sweden.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

It’s not hard to find evidence against that dismal analysis.  With the official conclusion of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the truth about America is riding home with our returning combat veterans.

Are we a nation of impatient children, without responsibility or endurance?  The men and women of Iraqi Freedom make a mockery of that judgment.  They held their posts for years, even as politicians like Harry Reid declared their cause lost, and begged for someone from al-Qaeda to lay out terms of surrender.  They set up shop in cities where too many enemy forces were allowed to roost, after being allowed to stroll from the battlefield into insurgent cells.  They made do with limited manpower and supply shortages, until the man our Left reviled as “General Betray Us” engineered the surge that brought final victory.

These iron-willed troops were not grown in clone chambers.  They come from families that taught them about dedication and sacrifice.  They carry on a tradition older than any of the failed ideas bleeding us dry.  Don’t tell me the America that produced such people has no idea what to do with the liberty it will soon reclaim.

Are we a nation of ignorant fools who can’t be trusted to manage our own investments, purchases, and health care?  The soldiers returning from Iraq are anything but close-minded simpletons.  They learned, adapted, and improvised in the face of a enemy that respects no rules of engagement.  Their colleagues humbled the supposedly invincible warrior tribes of Afghanistan, fighting in some of the roughest battle space on the planet.  In Iraq, every vile terrorist tactic was dissected, studied, and defeated.  They don’t need to come home and surrender control of their lives to a secretive cabal of politicians with unlimited power to make the tough decisions with half-written legislation.

Are we a nation of benighted bigots who hate and fear everything beyond our borders?  The truth is scattered across Iraq, and countless other troubled areas around the globe, in the form of schools and hospitals built by American hands.  The truth shines from the gallantry of soldiers who treated civilian populations with respect and compassion, even as they searched for the cold eyes of murderers hiding among them.  They brought Iraqi children home to the United States for vital surgeries.  They worked furiously to put children back together, after terrorist bombs took them apart.  No small number of Iraqi soldiers and civilians are alive today because American skin stopped the bullets that would have killed them.  Never has our flag been carried through fire with greater courage or nobility.

Fifty thousand of our soldiers remain in harm’s way, to support a people still blinking in confusion as the bright light of freedom warms their faces, after dark decades of sadistic tyranny.  Saddam Hussein made a deadly miscalculation about American resolve, and our commitment to international order.  The Democrat Party made a similar miscalculation about us being a cut-and-run nation, ready to turn in the last few exceptional pages of our history and settle for a solid B-plus from now on.  Anyone who still believes that is ignoring the reality of those still fighting among the sharp rocks of Afghanistan… and those packing their gear for the return trip to a home that needs their strength and wisdom as much as Iraq ever did.

The truth about America will soon be felt in the warm embrace of families welcoming thousands of their sons and daughters home.  It will shine in the eyes of children who carry the pride of their parents’ achievements for a lifetime… and pass stories of valor along to their own children, in a future that was never meant to be devoured by present-day greed.  It will echo through solemn ceremonies of love and remembrance for those who never came home.  It will ring in the hearts of a great people who are unwilling to settle for a life of weakness and decline, touted as the “new normal” by a dull ruling class that mistakes the poverty of their own imaginations for our inevitable destiny.

Inevitable? Like hell.  The heroes of Operation Iraqi Freedom heard that word a lot over the last few years, but they never paid much attention.  They’re coming home to the early days of an amazing story about the resilience of liberty.  I’m sure their Iraqi pen pals can’t wait to hear about it.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

It’s not going to work.  The next two elections are vitally important, and we remain focused.  I hope we’ll also remember the lesson that all elections are important.  Today’s crisis is the output of many generations of error.

We are not “distracted” by debates such as the Ground Zero mosque.  Expressing opposition to this project is not a mind-melting exercise.  Islam is still infused with too much of the bloody darkness that terrorized the aisles of United 93, United 175, American 11, and American 77 with box-cutters gripped in its tendrils.  The organizers of the Cordoba House project have been unwilling to denounce that darkness without qualification.  “Outreach” and “tolerance” are vitally needed in the Muslim world, not the streets of Manhattan.  This only seems complicated to those who willfully blindfold themselves with ideology, or subordinate common sense to political calculation.

We are not intimidated by sneering accusations of racism.  We will remember those who made those accusations when we vote.  We will consider the weakness of a philosophy that approaches debate by convincing itself there is no legitimate opposition to its views, and no honorable dissent from its leaders.

We do not view every issue through the prism of Barack Obama.  Only the rapidly shrinking Left continues to see him as a Rorschach inkblot for the American soul.  Suggesting that an issue like the Ground Zero mosque is really “about” Obama, as Dave Weigel does, is laughable.  Obama could not be less significant in this debate.  After quickly backpedaling from his first widely-ignored statements, he folded in on himself and disappeared.  This doesn’t provide some kind of clever excuse for Democrats to save themselves by turning our national discussion away from the economy.  Not even a seven-story mosque could hide such monumental failure.

We don’t have “unrealistic” expectations about “oversold” government programs.  We don’t have any more expectations about Big Government at all.  That’s why we’re going to tear it down, and reclaim what it has taken from us.  We aren’t expecting the government to work miracles with our tax dollars.  We expect it to return them.  We’ll handle the miracles.

We are not a nation of cretins, too simple-minded to appreciate the magnificence of our august rulers.  We have watched the designs of our “elite” fail comprehensively, at every level.  We will not accept their substandard performance as the new boundaries of our lives, or their weary projections of debt and stagnation as the new limits of possibility.  We will not live in the grey watercolor they have painted for us.  We demand a future where risk may be taken with careful calculation, and answered with reward.  We will restore the role of fair taxes as the mechanism for funding the limited duties of a lawful government, rather than serving as a method of reward and punishment to ensure compliance with the ideology of the ruling class.  Let them find willing test subjects for their pet theories.  Let their ideas compete in the arena of persuasion, without the heavy iron of compulsion.

We are not helpless pawns, to be shoved through history by the irresistible forces of precedent and dependency.  We will not resign ourselves to an inescapable future of indenture, where every dollar of this bloated government is sacred, and trillions more are demanded… where every benefit is the untouchable property of an angry constituency, and the only question is how much of our time we should be allowed to keep, after working to satisfy their demands.  Each new, eternal government program is a slice of our freedom we are told we can never have back.  We don’t believe that any more.  The destiny of our children will not be decided by corrupt politicians looking to stitch winning constituencies together with golden thread from our Treasury.

We no longer accept the illusion of government as a vast temple of mystery, which all but a wealthy clergy are forbidden to enter.  We will no longer deposit our tithe on the steps of that temple and back away quietly.  We demand accountability, and consequence.  No more trillion-dollar “stimulus” theft.  No more billions appropriated with hysterical cries of alarm, then packed away into slush funds, while taxpayers cough up hundreds of millions in interest.  What is more obscene than the notion of deficit spending to fill a politician’s wallet?

We will not dismiss the corruption of our ruling class with a nervous laugh, and a few jokes about how they’re all crooks.  We are sickened by parties and fundraisers thrown for the likes of Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters.  Most of us won’t get a chance to vote them out directly… but we can rinse their party out of Washington, and demand justice from those who replace them.  We expect a lot of Democrats to begin answering questions under oath in 2011.  We’re not worried about “paralyzing” Washington.  We’re going to hold it down while we cut out the tumors.  It would be best if it kept still until we’re finished.

The monster State is finished.  We can take it apart now, or be crushed beneath its weight when it collapses.  I think those shocking generic-candidate polls, and the vast shift in the electorate they describe, are due to the growing awareness of those alternatives.

The gathering thunder of a revolution is always a little scary.  We will not falter.

The “hope and change” promised last time was a lie.  There was no “change,” just a heavy foot on the gas pedal of a very old machine that was already coming apart at the seams.  Now that all its tires are blown, and we’re headed for a cliff… surprise!  The very same people instruct us that the correct attitude is hopelessness.  Well, “hope” is a prayer for rescue, offered by the powerless.  Only faith in ourselves can give us the courage to welcome an uncontrolled future, as the canvas where we will paint our achievements.  It also provides armor against distraction, and intimidation, which is why the Left is wasting its time by trying to rewrite the story of November 2010 in advance.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

1.  Islam is the most violent religion in the world.  Almost every point of contact between Islam and other religions, or secular government, is damp with blood.

2. Most Muslims do not commit violent acts.  There are over a billion Muslims in the world, and several million living in the United States.  If the majority of them were killers, the situation would be far worse than it is.

3. Few Muslim leaders of any stature will unequivocally condemn violence in the name of Islam.  Those who do deserve great respect, but there aren’t nearly enough of them.  The imam behind the Cordoba House project, Faisal Abdul Rauf, is a Hamas sympathizer who refuses to describe them as “terrorists.”  Isn’t it striking that the man heading up the highest-profile Islamic project in the Western world has such nuanced views about a murderous terror organization which fires rockets at Israeli civilians, from behind Palestinian human shields?  Was there really nobody else who could have headed up this expensive exercise in outreach and understanding?

4. Islam is profoundly intolerant of other religions, within areas it dominates.  Its holy sites and holy cities are scoured clean of Christian and Jewish houses of worship.  When other religions are permitted in Islamic countries, they must operate under severe restrictions.  Clearly Muslims have no difficulty with the concept of hallowed ground.

5. The Islamic religion was deeply involved in the 9/11 terror attacks, and other bloody atrocities around the world.  Muslims around the globe celebrated the attacks, as you could readily see for yourself, if Western media did not suppress the video so effectively.  Many Muslims did not celebrate, and doubtless many of them loathe the horrors perpetrated in the name of their faith… but their objections are muted.

It is a denial of simple reality to insist these attacks represented a “tiny minority of extremists” hijacking the religion, as politicians from George Bush onward have done.  Excusing and enabling the worst instincts of a frequently dangerous faith is not doing anyone any favors… least of all peaceful Muslims, who have the same relationship with the violent elements as decent people trapped in a gang-infested neighborhood.

What percentage of any given belief system must turn violent before we consider the problem might lie with the system itself?  Acknowledging such a problem is not the same thing as saying it cannot be solved.  Indeed, recognizing a problem is generally seen as the first step toward resolving it.

6. Islam endorses religious dominance over the secular world, through a strict code of laws.  It’s not just a religion.  It’s also a political system, with many points of divergence from pluralistic democracy.  We’re currently at war with one Islamic theocracy in the mountains of Afghanistan, while another conspires to commit war crimes against U.S. troops in Iraq.  What other religion sponsors theocracies in the modern world?

The United States is under no obligation to allow the construction of a mosque next to Ground Zero, on the site where wreckage from an exploding airliner crashed to earth.  Given the above points, it has a clear interest in denying permission for this project to continue.

This is not a First Amendment issue.  Our gigantic government is happy to treat every other portion of the Constitution and Bill of Rights as malleable.  In fact, the First Amendment isn’t sacrosanct either, as the Cordoba House organization will discover, if it violates any of our elaborate campaign finance laws.  At any rate, denying permission to build a single structure is not equivalent to suppressing the free exercise of religion.

The organizers of the Cordoba House plan to continue with the project despite 70% opposition from the American public.  This opposition is not difficult to understand.  Those who insist on making it complicated have axes to grind which have nothing to do with religious tolerance.  Clumsy accusations of bigotry, as from New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, spring from the curious arrogance of blindness.  They are the tantrums of people angry because the reality of Islam does not conform to their high-minded theories.  They grow angrier as the American people refuse to accept their moral leadership, and cover editorial-page blackboards with elaborate equations proving America is filled with hateful morons.  Meanwhile, the Cordoba House project pretends to be confused about a reaction it would understand, and respect, if it was truly interested in outreach and understanding.

The problem is not a lack of Western understanding about Islam.  We tolerated it just fine, back when we didn’t think about it very often.  We are cheerfully tolerant of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Shinto, despite most Westerners currently knowing less about them than Islam.  The Muslim world, on the other hand, would greatly benefit from learning more about Western ideals of tolerance and democracy.  Muslims will not learn these lessons in a mosque or madrassa.  The $100 million budget for Cordoba House could inspire much more goodwill toward Islam if spread to various worthy charities, giving Muslim leaders more opportunities to interact with people of good will from other religious backgrounds.  How about a mission to provide medical care to Israeli civilians injured by Hamas and Hezbollah, and American troops wounded while defending the people of Iraq and Afghanistan?

America has no interest in suppressing the practice of Islam, or any other religious faith.  We are concerned with the actions of those who espouse that faith.  They must, to use a familiar word, submit to the Constitutional law that makes all of us free to pursue our beliefs, and live in harmony.  There is significant evidence this is a difficult concept for the Muslim world to process.  Overcoming this difficulty is up to them.  Their efforts will not be assisted by a co-dependent, enabling liberalism that insists we’re the ones with the problem, for refusing to forget the nasty business of September 11, 2001.

The first step to dealing with a problem is admitting you have one.  The absence of a mosque at Ground Zero would be a useful reminder.

The Cordoba House project is about receiving absolution without atonement.  Absolution has not been earned yet.  Too many innocent people are dying around the world in the name of Islam, and not enough Muslims are denouncing it with full and unreserved passion.  There are some brave and honorable voices rising from the Muslim world, but the people behind the Cordoba House are not among them.  May those voices swell into a mighty chorus, which one day earns the right to sing at Ground Zero.  That day will not come until feverish dreams of domination and tepid multicultural fantasies have been swept away, so that we may all confront the truth.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One available from Amazon.com!

Vice President Joe Biden gave a stark assessment of the economy today, telling an audience of supporters, “there’s no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession.”

Appearing at a fundraiser with Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) in Milwaukee, the vice president remarked that by the time he and President Obama took office in 2008, the gross domestic product had shrunk and hundreds of thousands of jobs had been lost.

“We inherited a godawful mess,” he said, adding there was “no way to regenerate $3 trillion that was lost. Not misplaced, lost.”

There’s no possibility those jobs will ever come back?  Really?  The American economy simply decided to wipe out eight million positions?  The real unemployment rate, counting long-term discouraged workers who have dropped out of the labor force entirely, is over 16%.  Some metrics place it closer to 21%.  Does anyone really believe that the free market, of its own accord, would choose to leave a fifth of the working population idle?

Notice the typical, pathetic bleat about how it’s all George Bush’s fault.  Jobless claims hit a six-month high after Biden’s remarks, so I guess dejected businessmen still awaken in the middle of the night, haunted by the memory of George W. Bush, and fumble out their Blackberries to terminate employees until they feel better.

The New Abnormal is becoming a big part of the Democrats’ pre-election spin.  Americans are supposed to accept their reduced standard of living and shrunken economy.  They should lift their watery eyes in gratitude to the noble Democrat Party, which won’t let any semblance of fiscal responsibility stop them from looting the future to provide endless unemployment benefits.  The entire concept of unemployment has become a welfare hammock, with people like Biden essentially telling the jobless that a substantial number of them (eight million!) can expect to spend the rest of their lives that way.  As Chuck Schumer, the tired old hack who will succeed Harry Reid as Senate majority leader unless Americans really wake up and roll to the polls in November, puts it:

“It’s the world we’re in. It’s a much more negative, critical world, and people are sour now,” he said. “The thing they’re most sour about is the future, not the present. In other words, if people were sure that things would be better five years from now, they’d be less sour.

“Given that, I think people are more negative right now across the board — the right wing is more negative, the left wing is more negative, the center is more negative. That’s how it is.”…

Schumer, by the way, arrived in the Senate two years before the election of George W. Bush.  His party has held the Senate majority since 2006.  But try not to think about that.  Just hate Bush, and accept the sad new future over which Democrats preside as mournful, helpless custodians.

There’s nothing terribly mysterious about our high unemployment rate.  The primary engine of job creation in the United States is small business, which is generally held to produce about 70% of new jobs.  This is easy enough to understand.  Large corporations strive to maintain relatively stable work forces.  They might have big layoffs after financial setbacks, or hire new people as they introduce new products or expand sales operations, but their growth is relatively slow.  A large number of small businesses can be expected to grow more explosively, and require more human capital, as they discover market opportunities.

Investment in human capital takes time to mature.  You’ve got to train people after you hire them, and weed out unsuitable employees during their probationary periods.  For this reason, businesses staff to meet future needs.  It does little good for a manager to look around on a Thursday afternoon, and suddenly realize he could use a couple more people.  These decisions must be made in advance.

Large businesses tend to be much more confident about long-term financial predictions than small ones.  They’ve got highly skilled accountants on staff, and consultants on retainer.  The little guy does not have the resources to see quite as far ahead.  This naturally makes small businesses more nervous about uncontrollable forces which might increase costs in the near future.  They can’t absorb cost increases as well as large corporations can.  Small business owners often develop a rapport with their employees, and hate the idea of hiring someone in May, only to find themselves forced to let the new person go in August.

These factors combine to make the small businessman – seated at the controls of America’s engine of job growth – highly responsive to negative income and cost projections.  This Administration has absolutely hammered the small businessman with enormous costs and mandates.  Growing enough to cross the line that triggers the heaviest burdens of ObamaCare can swiftly obliterate a small business.  Reckless deficit spending makes them nervous about monetary policy.  Gigantic bills no one has read – or, in one especially shameful case, named – are packed with buzzing swarms of unintended consequences.  It’s no coincidence that unemployment grew worse as the land mines strewn through the ObamaCare bill began detonating.  Who knows what will come next?  There are some blood-curdling sounds coming from the fetid swamp of that lame-duck session of Congress.  It’s obvious from all the “unexpected” economic news that no one in Washington knows what they’re doing.

If rising labor costs lead to unemployment, then a helping of pork-fried “stimulus” should make businesses hire people, right?  Of course not.  Employment is a long-term relationship.  Businesses, especially small ones, hire people to meet future needs, not to collect one-time subsidies.  Thin curtains woven from taxpayer dollars cannot hide the predatory government currently in power… or the uncertain future of command economics, driven by irrational ideology, it offers.

With politically connected unions and mismanaged blue states teetering on the edge of collapse, they can anticipate even greater transfers of money from private to public sectors… which will mean even greater burdens for what remains of private industry.  Every small business owner knows that his personal income turns him into a target for this Administration and Congress.  Artillery is already incoming from the expiring Bush tax cuts.  Why take risks, when the rewards will simply be confiscated by a ravenous government?

There is no reason for a sensible small businessman to do anything but dig in, protect his assets, and await less greedy, more competent leadership.  The decision to reject the New Abnormal will be made at the ballot box, not in the boardroom.  That’s why nobody is hiring right now.  We all understand that we need to fire a bunch of people in Washington first.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!

The refrain that I hear over and over again at the conclusion of excellent essays such as this (as well as from the well articulated comments that follow on this blog) is sadly the same: “What are we going to do about it? What can be done now?”

That’s a great question.  It’s easy to react, analyze, and criticize.  It’s natural for a writer to spend much of his time doing so, when the philosophy he opposes holds all the power, and makes all the news.  Today’s current events are largely created by the Left.

I write essays like “The Dominion of Liars” because I believe every opportunity should be taken to present the case that statism is fundamentally flawed, from its mistaken premises to its corrupt conclusions.  It’s important to couple that prosecution with testimony about the power and virtue of freedom, along with a fair accounting of its dangers.

The scale of the challenge facing us is formidable.  Like all fearsome things, it is also exhilarating.  In the blood and bile of this dying statist economy, we can see the desperate future of an indentured nation… a truth many of us have refused to see, when displayed in bankrupt socialism around the world.  What is the destiny of a free nation?

It will be a future of responsibility. Irresponsibility leads to dependence, which makes demands.  It is impossible for anyone to be truly free until they renounce the obligation of others to provide their sustenance.  Until then, dependents and providers wear matching sets of chains, and great power resides in the State that decides how long those chains will be.  When resources are taken from each according to their means, and given to each according to their needs, the moral authority of those who balance those needs against each other becomes absolute.

No wonder the constituencies of socialist America regard their political elite as saints, compared to the captains of industry.  The system demands such faith from its subjects.  If politicians are selfish and corrupt, and their bureaucrats are blinded by dogma, who would trust them to fairly and logically ration subsidies and benefits?  Look around you, and learn beyond question that they are selfish and corrupt.  There is no brilliant design behind “stimulus” spending, ObamaCare, the massive federal budget, or central industrial policy.  They were born in the filth of insider deals and payoffs, ideology and greed.

The destiny of a free nation lies in overthrowing its aristocracy.  We have no need of a privileged class that makes plans to increase trillion-dollar deficits in between rounds of golf and lavish Spanish vacations.  It makes no sense to submit to commands from the same people who deliver endless loads of “unexpected” bad news about the economy.  We must decisively reject the feckless greed of a Party that demands billions more in revenue to fund a budget they haven’t even written.  Over two hundred years after our Founders wrote about the transcendent nature of freedom, we are still struggling with the enormous idea that it must be applied universally.

Reaching our destiny will require courage. We are the grandchildren of revolutionaries, both natural-born and adopted through immigration.  Together we are a family of builders, investors, explorers, and warriors.  The American posture is not a frightened crouch.  To discover what we are capable of, we must reject the vision of a hopeless future, where timid clients line up at government offices to receive benefits they cannot be trusted to create or purchase themselves.

Granting the State power over an industry is a concession that it can only be managed through force and compulsion, which are the State’s only resources.  Freedom is the rejection of compulsion, isn’t it?  Your choices are to be free, or be cared for… and keep in mind that the promises of those who promise to care for you can only be funded by taxing the labor of those who choose freedom.  Ask yourself how a system that devours itself to survive could end anywhere other than where Barack Obama has taken us.

Our future will grow from the energetic courtship of ideas. The statist suppresses ideas which challenge his ideology.  Note well how much effort the various organisms of the Left put into shouting people down, and burying dangerous ideas.  Watch them blink in confusion as reality defies their ideology.  Examine their rhetorical toolbox, and you’ll find nothing but the blunt instruments of class and racial insults.  The acolytes of Big Government offer nothing but lists of things free people supposedly cannot achieve.  We are foolish to allow those with such limited imaginations to tell us what is impossible.

The exercise of freedom through capitalism demands ready access to reliable information.  A consumer isn’t making a “free” choice when he’s suckered by a con artist… or when the true prices of goods and services are obscured by a multi-layered veil of subsidies and mandates.  Money is a medium of exchange for the value of your labor.  When money is devalued, prices are hidden, and income is siphoned away through the raw power of government, your time is being confiscated.  Free people seek employment, not servitude.

A destiny of freedom will also be one of accountability. We have been drenched in the proof that Big Government exists to shield its masters from accountability.  Every disaster born from government “partnership” with the private sector, from subprime mortgages to offshore oil spills, has ended with the political “partners” skipping away to even greater heights of power.

We require no further lessons in morality from a political class that throws extravagant parties for its successful criminals, to help them deal with the pain of their wrist slaps.  The elite of a monster government have too many interests to conduct their duties honorably.  We must express our absolute intolerance for wild deficit spending – the ultimate evasion of accountability, in which the cost of buying votes is pushed over a rapidly-approaching horizon.

The American people must choose between control and stagnation, or risk and growth.  No one can impose prosperity.  We will find it together, when we rid ourselves of mandatory “benefits” that crush small entrepreneurs.  We cannot hand over a vast portion of the private sector to government control, and expect the remainder to flourish.  Through our intelligence and industry, we each carry answers to the needs of our fellow citizens.  We can require them to earn our business through competition, or seize our labor through compulsion.  Choose the former, or suffer through the horrible extremes of the latter.  It never works, and it’s an idea that takes a lot of people with it when it dies.

Responsibility, courage, imagination, and accountability: these are both the destiny of a free nation, and the tools required to achieve it.  You will find scant evidence of any of these things in the arrogant, greedy, sanctimonious, and corrupt beast dying of consumption in our national and state capitols.  Embrace these virtues, all at once… show people how each is related to the other, and how they blend into the antithesis of the failed super-State.  I believe they will rediscover the strength to dismantle this broken system, and reclaim the freedom represented by the trillions of dollars it has consumed.  The answer does not lie in a grand central plan.  It will be found after such plans have been shredded.

It won’t be easy, and success is not guaranteed… but haven’t we learned, halfway through this exhausted Presidency, that nothing great is achieved without vision, effort, and risk?

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org

Doctor Zero: Year One now available from Amazon.com!