Dead World

Islam is the religionization of 7^th-century Arab bandit culture.  That’s what it is. If someone professes Islam as their faith, they are saying it’s okay to steal whatever you want and to kill anyone who gets in your way, to kill for land or gold or camels or whatever you fancy at the moment, to burn villages and behead people and carry off slaves and hostages and then celebrate your raid by glutting your appetites for food and alcohol and rape – what did Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi do with Kayla Mueller, a young, naïve American who only wanted to help the Syrians that al-Baghdadi was torturing and killing, but kidnap her, torture her and rape her repeatedly for nearly eighteen months before murdering her? What is Islam’s vision of heaven but an eternal, wine-drenched orgy? (Nobody considers what heaven is like for devout Muslim women, as if being outraged by foul-smelling drunks forever is paradise.) What do ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Boko Haram, Al Shabaab and Iran want to do but raid, slaughter and pillage Western culture and forcibly convert their populations to their bandit religion, creating a global bandit caliphate? And have the warriors of militant Islam actually thought about what that would mean? It would mean – if we take the statements of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Ayatollah Khamanei and al-Baghdadi at face value – that there would be nothing left to loot and plunder, that every human being would profess and display the same robotic devotion to Allah that they do, that the raiding and burning and beheading and massacres so central to their religion would cease, would be obsolete and unnecessary. Whom would they attack? From whom would they steal horses and hostages? If the entire world is dragged into the outhouse of Mohammed’s vision, who would be their slaves?

My guess is that the answer to this question is: Nobody. Nobody in the Islamic world has considered the end result of jihad, that the desired end state of violent Muslim terrorists and governments renders everything they would have done to achieve it absolutely pointless. Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik spent three years planning and dreaming and preparing for jihad, planning and preparing to massacre their neighbors and co-workers and everyone who had helped them while living apparently ordinary lives in the suburbs, enjoying a degree of freedom and prosperity completely alien to the Muslim world. They gathered weapons and ammunition and explosives, plotted their attack, fumed about their hosts’ democratic values while living in perfect security when those activities, if engaged in Tashfeen’s native Pakistan, would have subjected them to summary arrest by the secret police, torture in some dank, nameless prison and then death from a noose, the culture that Tashfeen left behind and to which she and her husband yearned to convert San Bernardino. Farook’s colleagues’ Christmas party, the final provocation, was an unremarkable exercise of First Amendment freedom but was so repulsive to them that they had couldn’t just leave it alone, they had to extinguish it with bullets and pipe bombs, killing 14 people and wounding 22 others before they were themselves killed by the police. And to what end but to create an environment in which their actions would have been utterly impossible? An environment of inescapable and crushing mediocrity populated by automatons, thoughtless, dull, moribund and backward? They used air travel, credit cards, cell phones, computers and the Internet to prepare their attack, conveniences invented by the society they hated, but did this irony occur to them? At some point, did they realize – like the ISIS thugs who murdered 130 people in Paris three weeks earlier – that they were attacking a society that had given them the ability to attack it? That they were, in essence, trying to create a dead society, devoid of freedom, innovation, prosperity and progress?

Probably not. That level of thinking requires independence and originality, concepts forbidden to the ordinary Muslim. They are called by a dead prophet to think dead thoughts, live dead lives and kill anything that isn’t as dead as they are, so they can live in a dead world, a global zombie apocalypse of walking corpses worthy of nothing but extermination. That Barack Hussein Obama and his Leftist fellow travelers refuse to acknowledge this plain and simple fact disqualifies them from legitimate debate on the subject and from the offices they hold, but perfectly qualifies them for tar and feathers. Tell the 1^st Armored Division and the Big Red One to saddle up: D-Day is 20 January 2017.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3227607/U-S-hostage-Kayla-Mueller-fingernails-pulled-repeatedly-raped-ISIS-leader-Yazidi-sex-slave-reveals-torment-aid-worker-s-harrowing-final-months-forced-secret-wife-Al-Baghdadi.html

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427355/clinton-defends-obamas-jv-team-label-isis-brendan-bordelon

http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/14/politics/paris-terror-attacks-obama-isis-contained/

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/7/obama-criticizes-less-than-loving-christians-at-ea/?page=all

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwjq7LaWmvLJAhXIOyYKHYrJB7EQqQIIHTAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalreview.com%2Farticle%2F428864%2Fobama-npr-interview-blaming-media-policy-failures&usg=AFQjCNG2Hop3y_yLHnhZi_qVGNESR_sz_Q&bvm=bv.110151844,d.eWE

El Generalissimo

There’s a certain fascination with those leaders who not only fail but fail spectacularly, men who are so profoundly incompetent yet charismatic that they can convince entire nations to follow them to their doom. Simon bar Kochbar, Peter the Hermit, Robespierre, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, and Nicolai Ceaucescu all come to mind as men who captivated their people with charm and brutality and led tens of millions to their deaths because they didn’t know what they were doing, and although the number of his victims was thankfully far fewer, my personal favorite has always been Generalissimo Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. A master of fiery rhetoric and navigating the dangerous world of Mexican politics, Santa Anna rose to ultimate power not once but twice, wielding a combination of deceit, treachery, egotism and ruthlessness. Dressed in elegant uniforms and styling himself the “Napoleon of the West,” he spent two years putting down revolts during which he never faced an opponent on equal terms until he was defeated by Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto, the result of which was the loss of Texas, the Presidency of Mexico and exile to Cuba. Given the opportunity to return to Mexico to broker the peaceful annexation of Texas by the United States in 1845, Santa Anna promptly violated the terms he had accepted, resumed the Presidency and defiantly announced that any attempt to annex Texas would be considered an act of war, thrilling his countrymen with patriotic fervor against the hated gringos. However, his actions could not equal the passion of his speeches. After wiping out a 63-man patrol of the U.S. Army along the Rio Grande (outnumbering them by at least fifteen to one), Santa Anna proceeded to lose every battle for the next two years until the Americans marched through Mexico City and Mexico was forced to surrender almost everything between the Rio Bravo and the Canadian border, some 500,000 square miles of territory. That being the final straw, what was left of the Mexican government deposed the Generalissimo again, unable to endure the loss of half their land and unwilling to risk the loss of even more. However, there is no explanation as to why so many Mexicans would trust Santa Anna a second time against a far stronger United States when he had already lost Texas to a weaker foe. Such is the lure – and the cost – of personality.

Barack Hussein Obama, 44^th President of the United States, Priest-King and Sultan of the Caliphate of the West, is another of history’s epic failures. A man who, by his own account, enjoyed a sheltered upbringing and has no obvious reason to hate his own country, nonetheless hates it with passion, is ashamed of and embarrassed by it. Mesmerizing the entire world with his predictions of a post-political paradise, he ascended to the most powerful office of the most powerful nation in the history of the world and immediately set about deconstructing it. With America suffering through the worst economic recession in thirty years, he insisted on a massive public spending bill that rewarded his labor union allies but no-one else; issued thousands of new regulations designed to throttle productivity and growth; fanned the flames of racial division; precipitously retreated from Iraq and apologized profusely for America when no apologies were called for; added $9 trillion in debt when we already owed $10 trillion that we couldn’t pay; punished the coal and oil industries and threw $4 billion away on solar energy and pond scum; fired the CEO of General Motors when he had no legal or Constitutional authority to do so; passed the largest entitlement program in the history of mankind, folding the nation’s health care industry into a Federal government already bloated, inefficient and corrupt; used the IRS to flay his political enemies and wiretapped reporters who were insufficiently loyal; changed Obamacare 51 times without legal authority; released over 100,000 illegal immigrants from incarceration and relieved 800,000 others from the threat of prosecution; traded five Taliban commanders for one U.S. Army deserter; blamed a terrorist attack that left four Americans dead on an Internet video that nobody had ever heard of; cut $1 trillion from the Pentagon budget as the world burned from Islamic terrorism and Russian and Chinese adventurism; normalized relations with a Cuban regime that still executes political prisoners;  and contracted an agreement with Iran that gives them $150 billion in frozen assets and relief from international sanctions in exchange for allowing inspections at some sites with 24 days’ notice and trusting Iran to inspect others themselves. If we wrote a script for the most laughably incompetent way to govern the greatest country that has ever existed, a script calling for destroying America economically, socially, militarily and diplomatically, we could do no better.

Like so many failures of the past, Priest-King is deluded. From his youth, he has held a messianic vision of himself, exacerbated by the fervent and repeated assurances of others that he was simply more intelligent, more sensitive, more intuitive, more articulate, more sophisticated, more anything than anyone else.  People like him, they trust him, they believe in him, they do things for him that are unethical, immoral and even illegal because they think he is so transcendent, charting the course from mere hubris to demagoguery, from petty huckster to dictator. The fact that economies behave at odds with his design does not deter him, neither do the realities of war, diplomacy, law or human nature, because it is his intent that matters, not the results. Of course, he would prefer that people could keep their health care plan and doctor and hospital and save $2500 per year and Obamacare itself only cost $1 trillion, but if they can’t and it doesn’t, it’s not important: He intended it to be so. If Russia intervenes militarily in Syria, ordering us to stop our airstrikes and evacuate our personnel so they can bomb our allies, he dismisses their aggression as proof of their weakness and then plays golf because it’s not his failure to assert American power that invited their intervention, but his intent that Syria should be peaceful and united and free of Assad.  Priest-King employs a serene detachment from reality, operating in a sanitized ether (“ISIS is contained”) in which the only permanent element is his ego, standing golden and majestic and aloof from the tragedy he has wrought. And what an ego, validated in 2008 and then again four years later, even after the voters (“the proletariat,” though he dare not utter it) had volumes of proof of his massive ineptitude and unsuitability for his office, even after they knew that he was an ideologically-driven, cardboard cutout! And validated again with the Nobel Peace Prize, simply for being black (a fact that he does not dwell upon, otherwise it might bother him), leaving him unique among the leaders of history! Yes, his “strategy” against ISIS reads like an Ed Wood screenplay, yes, 129 people were just gunned down and blown up in Paris because of his fecklessness (“a setback,” in his words), and France will be leading the fight against the homicidal savages and not the United States, but doesn’t that validate his foreign policy since Day One? The world is working out its own problems without first relying on American money and tanks and isn’t that a legacy worth having?

In fourteen months, if he decides to obey the Constitution, Priest-King will relinquish the Presidency and assume his role as one of the Beautiful People, shuttling from Chicago to Washington to Martha’s Vineyard to Geneva on private jets, dining on poached salmon, sipping champagne and dispensing his wisdom at $500,000 a pop. A Presidential Library and Museum will be built in his honor, he will receive a $400,000 annual pension and Secret Service protection for the rest of his life, an office and staff at the taxpayers’ expense, and he will write a memoir extolling his achievements for $25 million or so. He will establish a foundation and persuade Leftist millionaires to contribute to it, he will appear on television and at movie premieres and swanky social occasions and he will never drive a car again, and he will accumulate fabulous wealth, and as far as I’m concerned, he can have it all: Having left us a weak, impoverished, disrespected, divided and leprous nation, he can have the most lavish exile in the history of exiles as long as he never, EVER returns.

Inauguration Day

Monday, 20 January 2025: It is a cold but sunshiney day in Washington, DC.  Her Excellency the President Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton relaxes in her leather club chair on the West Front of the Capitol, comfortably observing the proceedings as she awaits the inauguration of her successor, President-elect Kamala Harris, as the 46  ^th President of the United States.  It is altogether fitting that the first black woman to hold that office should be sworn in on the Federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, setting yet another milestone in this great country’s history. A great day to be alive, she thinks – indeed, a great day to be an American!

And as she waits, Her Excellency the President reflects on the milestones passed in her own career, the monuments to a career unmatched in American politics, starting with helping drive the loathsome Richard Nixon from office, then First Lady of Arkansas, First Lady of the United States, United States Senator from New York, Secretary of State and finally the brass ring itself, the grand prize, the Oval Office.  No-one else could have done it, no-one else had the combination of intelligence, drive, commitment, supreme patience and ruthlessness required to maneuver through scandal and infidelity and Congressional investigations for forty-five years to the most powerful office in the world, and as she transitions to her next role – Secretary-General of the United Nations – she leaves behind a legacy unmatched in American history:

·         After passing the largest tax increase in world history, unemployment stands at 12%, the economy contracts at an annual rate of -1.5% and the national deficit stands at $30 trillion. However, the minimum wage is raised to $25 per hour, the retirement age is lowered to 55 with a month’s paid vacation every year, Washington, DC, is granted full voting rights in Congress, community college is now free, all student loans are forgiven and a minimum 2.0 GPA upon graduation is guaranteed.

·         When Obamacare goes bankrupt, Her Excellency promptly cancels it and replaces it with the National Health Care System, the single-payer, government-controlled program she’s dreamed of for fifty years.  The Federal deficit explodes and such cancellation and replacement are entirely illegal, as are her other actions, but Congress is afraid to confront her for fear of being called sexists, just as they were afraid of confronting Barack Hussein Obama “unh, unh, unh!” for fear of being called racists, and the Republican Party splits in two.

·         By Executive Order, all convicted felons have their voting rights restored and all illegal immigrants are pardoned and granted full U.S. citizenship.  In addition, Her Excellency appoints the first transgender person to her Cabinet and the first lesbian as Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

·         To prevent corporations from fleeing America’s oppressive tax and regulation regime, Her Excellency places an indefinite “hold” on all corporate moves overseas involving fifty or more employees; moreover, executive salaries are capped at $250,000 and ordinary stock trades are taxed at 15%.

·         California declares bankruptcy,  followed by Illinois and New York.  They then sue Arizona, Florida, Nevada and Texas for “predatory” policies that attracted millions of their citizens to relocate, taking their incomes with them.  The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals awards a $100 billion judgment in their favor.

·         Every oil refinery in the United States is nationalized, all coal-fired power plants are closed and energy rationing is instituted.

·         The United States Supreme Court rules that polygamy is constitutional.

·         Christian churches, hospitals, clinics and community service organizations lose their tax-exempt status and insurance coverage unless they hire homosexuals and Muslims and perform homosexual weddings.  Christian schools and universities lose these benefits but also lose their accreditation, and Christian students are denied Federal student loans.  Christian ministers lose their licenses to preach and some are prosecuted, Christian business owners are jailed for refusing to participate in homosexual weddings and over 1000 Christian organizations of all kinds are forced to close.

·         Concerning foreign policy, Russia overruns Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and although the United States is obligated by treaty to defend the Baltic states from attack, Her Excellency avoids a military confrontation with Russia and NATO collapses.  Iran violates the treaty it signed with Barack Hussein Obama “unh, unh, unh!” and detonates a nuclear bomb.  The Iranians annex Yemen and that part of Iraq not controlled by the Kurds or ISIS, prompting Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to buy nuclear weapons from North Korea and Pakistan for sheer self-defense.  ISIS overruns Damascus, forcing Bashar Assad to flee to Tehran, and seizes Syria’s remaining stockpile of ballistic missiles and chemical weapons.  As she did with Russia, Her Excellency declines to retaliate against Iran and ISIS but as Israel is surrounded by fanatical enemies armed to the teeth, she demands that the Israelis immediately withdraw from the Golan Heights, Gaza and the West Bank in exchange for “peace.” In the background, China annexes the entire South China Sea.

She could go on, but what would be the point?  No other President, not even her despised predecessor (she’ll never forgive the stab in the back in South Carolina in 2008!) had accomplished so much in only eight years, so it was time to move on, time to take her talents truly global, time to ascend the pedestal of world fame and bathe in the glory that she had earned.  Ah, there’s the fanfare!  The President-elect approaches!  The oath is about to be administered, so Her Excellency stands, beaming with pride and satisfaction, knowing that the greatest days of her career were still ahead of her.  “Today, America,” she thinks, “tomorrow, the world!”

Leviathan 2015

It may be useful to review how we got here:

Romer v. Evans (1996):  The United States Supreme Court ruled that an amendment to the Colorado state constitution prohibiting special protection to homosexuals violated the U.S. Constitution.

Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (2003):            The Massachusetts state Court of Appeals ruled that homosexuals have a right to marry.

Then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder refused to defend the Federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which restricts legal marriage to one man and one woman,  against legal challenges although it was his sworn duty to do so (2011).

Priest-King announced his support for homosexual marriage, reversing a position he had vigorously advocated during his first campaign for President (2012).

Sweet Cakes by Melissa (2013): Melissa and Aaron Klein, Christians who operated a bakery in Oregon, refused to serve a homosexual couple who wanted a cake for their wedding, based on their Christian beliefs.  The Kleins were fined $135,000 and ordered not to even discuss their case, and face the loss of their business if they don’t comply.

Gortz Haus Gallery (2013):           Betty and Dick Odgaard, Christians who operated a wedding chapel in Iowa, refused to perform a homosexual wedding, based on their Christian beliefs.  The Odgaards were prosecuted, fined, repeatedly threatened with physical violence and ultimately driven out of business.

Hollingsworth v. Perry (2013):    The United States Supreme Court ruled that Proposition 8, an amendment to the California state constitution limiting marriage to one man and one woman and overwhelmingly approved by California voters, violated the U.S. Constitution.  The Court also ruled that the sponsors of Proposition 8, who defended it in Federal court when the State of California refused to defend it themselves, had no legal standing.

United States v. Windsor (2013):               On the same day that they ruled in Hollingsworth v. Perry, SCOTUS ruled that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act described above was unconstitutional.  The majority insisted that the right to regulate marriage properly belonged to the states, not the Federal government.

Hitching Post Wedding Chapel (2014):    Donald and Evelyn Knapp, Christian ministers who operated a wedding chapel in Idaho, refused to perform a homosexual wedding and are threatened with prosecution.

Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act (SB101, 2015):             An Indiana state law intended to protect Christian business owners from government retaliation if they refuse to provide service because of their Christian beliefs, as cited in the examples above, was met with outrage, street protests and boycotts by the liberal Left, and was rapidly amended.

Obergefell v. Hodges (2015):       Two years after ruling that the states have exclusive right to regulate marriage and after 31 states had either amended their constitutions or passed legislation banning homosexual marriage in accordance with that ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed itself, ruling that those state bans violated the U.S. Constitution and that marriage was so important that only the Federal government should manage it.  SCOTUS redefined marriage to include homosexuals, ruled that states must recognize homosexual marriages performed in other jurisdictions and effectively legalized homosexual marriage throughout the United States and its territories.

And this:

Kelo v. City of New London (2005):           The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government can seize private property under the doctrine of eminent domain and transfer that property to another private owner for economic reasons, grossly expanding government power and undermining individual property rights.  It is worthwhile to note that the property seized by the City of New London, Connecticut, for a waterfront project anchored by the Pfizer corporation, is now an empty lot:

The developer failed to obtain the necessary financing and dropped the project, Pfizer walked away when its tax breaks expired and closed its New London facility at the cost of 1000 jobs, after Hurricane Irene in 2011, the 91-acre property was used as a dump for storm debris and the City of New London, after all the litigation, clearing the property, relocating existing homes and compensation paid, lost $78 million. Instead of creating 3169 jobs and generating $1.2 million annually in tax revenue, the property in question generates nothing.

Between 2008-2013, Priest-King lied at least 37 times about Obamacare, e.g. "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

Since its passage in 2010, Priest-King has arbitrarily changed, delayed or suspended parts of Obamacare 51 times although he has no legal or Constitutional authority to do so.

National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012):                The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that individual citizens can be forced to buy health insurance at their own expense because, in SCOTUS’ interpretation, the word “penalty” in the text of the legislation really means “tax” and Congress has the power to levy taxes, despite testimony and Congressional records indicating that Congress deliberately chose the word “penalty” to mask the overall cost of Obamacare and to minimize political resistance to the law.  The ruling not only saved Obamacare but established a new precedent, that the government can not only regulate commerce but compel private citizens to engage in it.

King v. Burwell (2015):   The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that under Obamacare, the Federal government may establish and operate health care exchanges in states choosing to participate in the program, and provide subsidies to people within those exchanges, although the text of the legislation reads exactly, “an Exchange established by the State.”  This ruling saved Obamacare again and set yet another precedent,  that laws as written do not mean what they say, but may mean whatever the Supreme Court decides they mean.

So where do these two trends leave us? In the first, we see the relentless, jackbooted march of homosexuality across our country, rainbow banners waving, going from mere toleration to protection to radical advocacy to full legalization in less than twenty years.  The full power of government at all levels is wielded against ordinary citizens to force them to accept contemporary liberal orthodoxy, bludgeoning them with lawsuits, prosecution and a few threats of physical violence thrown in for good measure, bulldozing over every barrier in their path.  State laws and constitutions and DOMA itself are overturned, the Attorney General and the President of the United States both abdicate their responsibility, the Supreme Court repeatedly intervenes to further a degenerate lifestyle, the right of the people to govern themselves is annulled, inconsistency and hypocrisy are liberally – no pun intended – employed to achieve the goal of full integration of homosexuality, crushing everything except an individual’s conscience, and they are battering at that.  “You stubborn, stiffnecked Christians better get on board if you know what’s good for you.  You either give homosexuality your unqualified support and celebrate it and approve of it or you’ll lose your job, your business, your home and even your freedom, the First Amendment be damned.”  In the second trend, we see the inversion of the basic principle of the United States itself, that the government is the creation and the servant of the people.  The government can condemn and seize your property now not only for a government purpose but because the government thinks that someone else can make money with it, regardless if that other someone actually does.  Priest-king lies repeatedly to ensure the passage and survival of Obamacare and then capriciously alters that odious law whenever it is politically advantageous to do so, with absolutely zero legal or Constitutional authority.  Not to be outdone, SCOTUS just as capriciously reinterprets the law not once but twice to save it from itself, because God forbid that people be allowed to make their own choices or that words actually mean what they say – Obamacare would collapse if they didn’t intervene!  And if we superimpose these two trends atop each other, we see the growth and menace of Superstate, a Leviathan beyond what Thomas Hobbes imagined:  Congress, the President and the Supreme Court working in concert with each other, merging with each other, supporting and protecting each other, forcing political and economic and social change on the country through any means necessary, seizing property, jailing its opponents, trampling on individual rights, lying, breaking laws, creating laws and reinterpreting laws such that the people have no protection under the law, and if the law provides no security, where are the people to turn?  To Leviathan, of course.  Submit to Leviathan, serve Leviathan unquestioningly and Leviathan will allow you to exist, under whatever conditions Leviathan deems fit.  Your rights mean nothing, laws mean nothing. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE, as the Borg would say. This sort of bondage, of course, is the exact condition the Constitution was designed to prevent through its system of divided government and strict limits on government authority, and was indeed prevented for some 186 years until the Supreme Court discovered a heretofore invisible right to privacy in the Ninth Amendment and then a right to abort human fetuses cloaked within that right to privacy, implementing the will of a hyper-vocal feminist minority with the assent of a liberal Congress and a liberal President.  Alexander Hamilton warned us about such a convergence of power in Federalist #51: “But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others… Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” And again, particularly applicable to the present homosexual juggernaut: “It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens.”  The whole point of divided government is to prevent the urge to concentrate power and destroy liberty, but the assumption of the Founding Fathers that government officials would faithfully discharge their duties in accordance with the Constitution has been superseded by Leftist ideology, for which concentrating power at the expense of liberty is the highest virtue.

Nonetheless, it is not too late.  Further damage to our Republic does not have to be sustained.  We can stem the tide, as it were, by doing three things:

1)      Keep your guns clean and ready

2)      Vote Republican in 2016

And most importantly:

3)      “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”

Naivete with an Arrogance Chaser

I thought that Jimmy Carter was a very intelligent and decent man who was nonetheless the most stupefyingly naïve individual who ever blundered the office of President of the United States.  By the Fall of 1977, it was so blatantly obvious that he wasn’t up to the job but by then, it was too late; wearing sweaters on national TV as an answer to the cold winter; installing solar panels at the White House and agonizing over the tennis court schedule; cancelling the B-1 bomber and handing over the Panama Canal were just the beginning of four years’ worth of self-inflicted, delusional failure. Economies can’t grow when the top earners are taxed at a 70% rate and investors lose their capital gains, no matter how hard you believe otherwise.  Russia invades Afghanistan because they see no cost in doing so.  Fanatical Shiite Muslims storm our embassy and hold 52 Americans hostage for 444 days because they think we’re too weak to stop them.  By the time Carter slunk out of Washington in 1981, a beaten, humiliated man, I thought that nobody in their right mind would ever forget his central contribution to U.S. foreign policy (the presumption that using kind words alone is foolish) but of course, liberals being liberals, what’s the point of a failed strategy if you can’t use it again? Bill Clinton hired Carter’s team of proven losers when he came to town because he believed what they believed and they went right to work, kissing up to and in general groveling at the feet of our adversaries rather than using America’s full military and political power to advance our interests, and they really thought that they would make the world a safer place.  Now, we knew that this was a discredited policy in 1993 and it produced the results we expected: Timidity by Les Aspin – denying tanks for urban combat support – led to 18 U.S. deaths in Mogadishu and an humiliating retreat; non-interventionism in Bosnia led to 250,000 deaths until we finally intervened in 1995; non-interventionism in Rwanda led to the worst genocide in Africa since Rome took Carthage; non-interventionism and humiliation in Haiti was followed by full-throated interventionism to return Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, a demagogue who urged his followers to burn their opponents to death with gasoline-soaked automobile tires around their necks (“What a nice tool! What a nice instrument! What a nice device!”), an intervention so successful that he was deposed again; repeated Al Qaeda attacks in Kenya, Tanzania, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and blown opportunities to arrest and kill Osama bin Laden himself; granting PNTR for China while getting nothing in return; and failure upon failure trying to persuade Yasser Arafat that getting 95% of what he wanted was a good deal.  For eight years, Bill Clinton and his socialist one-worlder colleagues clung to this policy, convinced in the face of mounting evidence otherwise that presenting a weak, preening America groveling for the world’s approval was more effective than projecting overwhelming strength, and which piled upon Jimmy Carter’s legacy of ineptitude – including giving the North Korean two nuclear reactors in 1994, what a savvy negotiator! – left us in a far more dangerous situation, a situation exploited by Al Qaeda on 9/11. 

George W. Bush, for his part, fought back vigorously during his Presidency though up to a point – he refrained from a general mobilization after 9/11 that would have enabled us to fight a truly Global War on Terror, he failed to secure our border with Mexico and throttle illegal immigration once-and-for-all, and he failed to support our ally Georgia when it was invaded by Russia.  Nonetheless, he unapologetically gave U.S. strategic interests top priority during his tenure, enfuriating the Left, but then came the Messiah-in-Chief, Priest-King and Generalissimo of the People’s Revolution, who saw no reason why the embarrassments of 1978 shouldn't be repeated.  With Priest-King, we have a leader who is not only naïve but resolutely so, a leader who believes that the sound of his own voice is enough to change the world, that the United States that won two world wars and through its resolve, prevented a third, the United States that has repeatedly sacrificed its blood and treasure for no other reason than to help other countries in need, is the greatest threat to world peace.  After having criticized George W. Bush for ordering the troop surge in Iraq in 2007 that actually succeeded in stabilizing the country, Priest-King promptly ordered the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces in October 2011, and with the Americans gone, to whom did he think the Iraqis would turn for help? Did he expect Iran not to meddle in its neighbor’s affairs, or Russia not to supplant us as the primary supplier of arms to that embattled nation? Without a strong, proactive American military presence, how did he expect Iraq to protect itself from Al Qaeda and its ISIS cousins, or from the constant probing and thrusting of a greedy Iran? Or is the likeliest explanation for his precipitous decision a belief that the world would simply take care of itself without us? That Iran would confine itself within its own borders, that Russia and jihadists of all stripes would simply ignore the vacuum we created? Based on his approach to other foreign policy issues – the “reset” with Russia that resulted in the invasion of Ukraine and outright annexation of Crimea, China’s annexation of the entire South China Sea, Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, his wooing of Communist, terrorism-sponsoring Cuba and his outright contempt for Israel – this explanation seems the most plausible.  The damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-astern attitude toward foreign relations springs from Priest-King’s Leftist philosophy of nonchalant disengagement, leaving the world to burn not because he hates the world but because he wants to concentrate on finishing the destruction of the United States from within, because he wants to cement his legacy as not only the greatest President in American history but the greatest leader who has ever lived, because he believes that without the United States’ assertive leadership, the world will develop answers to their own problems and usher in a new era of peace and prosperity.  When he says that “the United States is the most respected country on earth,” he really believes that, and that he made it happen, that he spoke and it was so, when all see around us is catastrophe.  “The most respected country on earth” is a figment of his imagination, a hallucination, the concoction of a mind divorced from reality and a superheated ego.  Mosul is taken by ISIS and he calls them a “jayvee team,” Ramadi is taken while the Iraqi Army abandons their equipment and flees for their lives and he calls it “a tactical setback” and refuses to consider deploying U.S. maneuver units to confront ISIS directly, blaming the Iraqi government that he abandoned for failing to protect its own territory, all because he places his superstitious faith in a liberal foreign policy that hasn’t worked in a hundred years of trying ahead of American vital interests. 

The primary mission of the President of the United States is to defend the United States.  We have vital national interests in the Middle East and indeed within our own country that ISIS threatens.  If we want to defend those vital interests, then we must take any action within our power to do so, whether or not the American people are tired of war, whether or not Russia or Iran oppose us and whether or not George Clooney stops inviting us to his house in Malibu, and if that means deploying the 1^st Armored Division to kill these bastards up front and personal, then that’s what we have to do and no cloud cuckooland delusion should stop us.  At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

Sources:

http://congressionalresearch.com/93-931/document.php?study=Haiti+Background+to+the+Overthrow+of+President+Aristide

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3091760/Obama-definitely-not-losing-Iraq-ISIS-storming-Ramadi-just-setback-mistake-send-U-S-ground-troops.html

http://www.breitbart.com/video/2015/06/01/obama-ive-restored-the-us-as-the-most-respected-country-in-the-world/

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/01/20/obama-dismisses-al-qaeda-resurgence-theyre-jv/

Machiavellia

At last, it’s official:  Hillary Rodham Clinton, former First Lady of Arkansas and career scofflaw, is

running for President of the United States and counts her primary qualification the possession of X/X chromosomes.  This, of course, given the prevailing mood of the country for identity/victim politics, guarantees her a resounding win over whichever Republican candidate the GOP decides to field against her but for argument’s sake, let’s assume that the American public actually cares about things like character and integrity and offer them a few things to consider:

• It’s a plain fact that Hillary owes whatever status she enjoys to her husband.  She’s nothing without him and nobody would ever have heard of her after her Leninist commencement speech at Wellesley.  Bill, though an amoral, corrupt and licentious gonad, is a crafty politician with an innate ability to get people to like him, even when they know all about his slimy past, a gene that Hillary clearly lacks.  Cold, calculating and utterly ruthless, Hillary believes she is entitled to power but can’t get it on her own.  She believes that other people exist to serve her, something we expect from Commie dictators but anathema to elected officials in a healthy democracy, yet can’t persuade them to believe that she cares about them, which is easy to understand: she doesn’t.

• Whitewater.  This episode alone should have ended her career and landed her in prison for fraud, obstruction of justice and perjury.  Having lost $40,000 on the original real estate deal, Hillary’s firm was hired by Madison Guaranty to handle legal work associated with it, a clear conflict of interest that should have resulted in professional censure at the very least, and when Congress subpoenaed her billing records in 1994 so they could determine if she had handled work in which she had a personal financial stake, she ignored them for two years until they were mysteriously “found” in her White House office.  Her grand jury testimony was knowingly false and her confederates (Jim and Susan McDougal and David Hale) were convicted on Federal corruption charges.

• Cattle futures trading.  Hillary turned a $1000 investment into $100,000 in only ten months in 1979, using a broker later censured by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for shady business practices. Occurring as it did at the same time that the Clintons invested in Whitewater and were desperate for money – Bill made $26,500 as Arkansas Attorney General and Hillary made $24,500 as a junior associate at the Rose Law Firm – this was a bribe by Tyson Foods for future “consideration,” regardless of what they said at the time.  In fact, in a report published in 1994, the Journal of Economics and Finance found that the chances of an inexperienced investor achieving the same results as Hillary did at the same time and with the same transactions were 1 in 31 trillion, thus the only conclusion we can draw is that Hillary was guilty of conspiracy, securities fraud, bribery and perjury.

• Travelgate. Hillary wanted to give the White House Travel Office business to her crony Harry Thomason as payback for the $1 million in travel services he provided the Clintons during the ’92 Presidential campaign.  Based on the existing employees’ sloppy record-keeping and business practices, she ordered them all fired but that wasn’t enough: They couldn’t be fired for sheer political gain, oh no, they had to be fired because they were a bunch of Bush 41 criminals and they deserved to be fired.  She insisted on an FBI investigation and when the inevitable doo-doo hit the fan, she denied her involvement,  lied to Congress, the GAO and the Independent Counsel and tampered with evidence by having Vince Foster’s records seized after his suicide.

• Vince Foster’s suicide.  She enlisted White House Counsel Bernie Nussbaum to seize Foster’s records and prevent the U.S. Park Police from entering his office for 24 hours after his body was found.  Foster had been a senior partner at the Rose Law Firm, had known Bill since childhood and had hired Hillary as the firm’s first female lawyer.  He knew all about Travelgate and all the dirty secrets from Little Rock, and Hillary should have been indicted for conspiracy, tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice and perjury.

• The health care initiative fell on its ass because Hillary’s haughty, ham-fisted approach alienated not only the Republican opposition but members of her own party, excepting, of course, the Leftist fellow-travelers of the kook fringe.  Congress and the country sensed that Hillary was forcing something on them that they didn’t want, something so massive and dangerous to our democracy that it had to be stopped – kind of like Obamacare.

• “It Takes A Village” – A total joke.  Hillary envisions a culture in which children are essentially state property, indoctrinated and controlled by Leftist social engineers and bureaucrats in Washington. If you don’t mind your kids ratting you out as counterrevolutionary to the KGB, then you’ll love it. Hillary also refused to acknowledge that the book had been written by a ghostwriter who had been paid $120,000 for the project, which is typical – taking credit for someone else’s work is characteristic for an egomaniac like her.

• The Children’s Defense Fund.  Another left-wing outfit we don’t need.  Hillary has known Marian Wright Edelman for 45 years and has helped that nutbag grossly expand the welfare state, abort as many black babies as possible, and undermine the Second Amendment and the rights of parents to raise their children as they see fit. The CDF sees parents as a threat, a bunch of stupid, uneducated, toothless hillbillies who teach their children to pour Mountain Dew on their corn flakes as they clutch their guns and pray, a threat to the socialist paradise that surely must come if only the State controlled the children.  This is how the CDF and Hillary see the future and it’s a future that ought to terrify you.

• As a U.S. Senator from New York, where they apparently don’t care if their elected officials live there or not, Hillary distinguished herself by voting to authorize President Bush’s attack on Saddam Hussein and then bitching about it for six years (“I AM SICK AND TIRED…”), opposing the troop surge in 2007 that actually stabilized Iraq, and ramming through the SCHIP legislation so adults as old as 26 can stay on their parents’ health insurance policy and so people with income 200% of the Federal poverty level can be subsidized, the biggest expansion of Medicaid in forty years.  Of course, the whole point of her Senate tenure was to give her credentials for her Presidential campaign, so for liberals who adore indecision and failure, Hillary is pure catnip, but for the rest of us, her eight years in the Greatest Legislative Body in the World represent the triumph of mediocrity.

• Secretary of State.  An unmitigated disaster on a global scale.  She executed Priest-King’s vision of a weak, fawning, desperate America flawlessly, blowing the “reset” with Russia that led to invasion and annexation of the Crimea, invasion and destabilization of eastern Ukraine, the murder of 298 people on board Malaysia Flight 17 and diplomatic defeat in Syria and Iran; overseeing our paralysis during the Arab Spring and the subsequent backlash in Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as during the pro-democracy protests in Iran in 2009; watching China hack our computers and seize the entire South China Sea with impunity; and surrendering Iraq and Afghanistan to chaos.  Violent Islamic insurgencies now rampage from the Hindu Kush to the streets of Paris, kidnapping, torturing, crucifying, beheading and burning people alive, and, of course, we have Benghazi.  As SECSTATE, she deliberately posted Ambassador Chris Stevens in an exposed position and repeatedly denied requests for additional security because his mission of running guns to the Free Syrian Army demanded a low profile, and after he and three security staff were murdered, she lied as to the identity of the attackers, their motive and her own responsibility for the debacle, which lies we cannot refute because all of her communications ran through a private e-mail server installed in her own home in violation of the Federal Records Act and National Archives policy.  She then had the gall to tell us that “smart power” meant “showing respect, even for one’s enemies, trying to understand and insofar as psychologically possible empathize with their perspective and point of view…”, as if the carnage ISIS wreaks could be cured with an encounter group instead of a cruise missile. Moron.

Hillary Clinton has spent the last forty years breaking the law because, as far as she’s concerned, she’s above it.  Her intellect is so lofty, her intentions so pure, her insight so penetrating, that the ordinary protocols of life don’t apply.  She’s beyond things like loyalty and integrity and justice, she’s entitled to wealth and fame and power and the Presidency, too, and how DARE you criticize her?  She attacks corporations and CEO’s and Wall Street and capitalism while taking a $14 million advance for a book that nobody read, she claims she was “dead broke” when she left the White House in 2001 while she collects $300,000 per lecture and flies around in a Gulfstream, she “fights for the middle class” as she wears Oscar de la Renta and won’t tip the staff at Chipotle, and she feigns sincerity and concern while hundreds of millions of people suffer because of her ineptitude, and while four Americans molder in their graves.  Her campaign is fake, her smile plastic, everything fanatically controlled and staged and choreographed so she looks concerned and looks amused and looks like she gives a damn while every fiber of her being rebels against the charade.  She hates being demeaned, she hates sitting and listening to the worries of other people because she simply doesn’t give a shit.  She hates that she has to persuade people to vote for her, hates that these peons control her destiny, and seethes at the humiliation she has to endure.  She hates that other people know this, she hates that campaigning was so effortless for Bill, that she lost to Priest-King seven years ago and had to serve him to keep her Presidential aspirations alive, she knows that there’s a chance she’ll blow this opportunity, too, so she demands $2.5 billion for her campaign, death-march loyalty from the Democrat Party and preening adulation from her amen corner in the legacy media.  Looking to history for some sort of parallel, she’s certainly as cunning and ruthless as Lucrezia Borgia but certainly not as hot, so Catherine de Medici comes to mind.  Homely but highly intelligent, determined and capable of astounding brutality, wielding power that belonged to someone else and never able to attain it for herself, Catherine dominated France for forty-five years until she was ultimately repudiated so we can only hope that America is so tired of Hillary’s shopworn charms that they deal her a similar fate: We don’t want you to go away mad, Hillary, we just want you to go away.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJxmpTMGhU0

Source: http://freebeacon.com/national-security/hillary-clinton-wants-us-to-empathize-with-our-enemies-even-these-enemies/

Source: https://youtu.be/2zVHgqj8His

Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hereas-a-tip-hillary/

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka0_nz53CcM

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3042448/Scooby-limps-Iowa-Secret-Service-parked-Hillary-Clinton-s-van-HANDICAPPED-spot-huddled-Democratic-leaders-high-stakes-meeting.html

Libellus

On 03 January 250, Emperor Gaius Messius Quintus Decius Augustus performed the annual sacrifice to Jupiter, king of the gods of the Roman pantheon, and in an attitude of restoring Rome’s former glory – reviving the office of censor, repairing the Collosseum, resisting the encroachment of the barbarian Goths in the Balkans – issued a decree that all Roman citizens, wherever they were (with the notable exception of the Jews), would be required to sacrifice to the traditional Roman gods in front of a commissioner employed for that purpose, burn incense to those gods and the emperor, consume the meat thus sacrificed and obtain a written certificate signed by the commissioner and witnesses attesting to the act.  To Decius, part of Rome’s decline was attributable to neglect of the old religion and traditions that had made Rome so dominant in the ancient world: The cult of Mithras, imported from Persia, was popular among the soldiers that defended the empire, druidism ruled the Celtic tribes from Brittania, Gaul and Germania, and there was this pesky superstition called Christianity that despite ruthless suppression, had managed to spread across the empire in the millions.  Decius’ decree, therefore, would serve as a common denominator, a shared platform of belief for all Romans and a foundation for future greatness.

The Christians, of course, saw it differently.  Having professed their faith in Jesus Christ as God Incarnate and their personal Savior, they could not then deny Him and sacrifice to idols and eat food sacrificed to those idols as the edict required, but refusing to obey the emperor exposed them to arrest, imprisonment, torture and death.  What could they do?  How could any legitimate government force them to violate the deepest convictions of their conscience?  In response, some Christians fled for their lives, others gave in and complied with the decree and others, standing on their faith, were martyred, and fortunately, Decius didn’t live long enough to give his order full effect: Like his thirteen immediate predecessors, he died a violent death, killed by the Goths at the Battle of Abritus in June 251.  Nonetheless, for seventeen months, the Roman Empire with all its might and cruelty sought to force Christians to abandon their core beliefs and swear allegiance to pagan gods and it was a watershed moment – the first empire-wide, officially-sanctioned effort to break the Christian faith.

In this country, the state of Indiana, of which I am a native, has sought to give protection not only to Christians but to others who hold deep religious convictions from legal action brought against them by the state and by private entities.  The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, SB 101, allows citizens and businesses to use their religious convictions as a defense if they are party to a court case, in essence restating and affirming our Constitutional right under the First Amendment which is by itself rather plain and unremarkable.  After all, whose interest is served by coercing people to violate their consciences? Who wins when a Christian photographer is forced to cover a homosexual wedding or a Christian church is forced to hire a Muslim secretary or a Christian business is forced to provide insurance coverage for abortions? Is it really in the public interest to create an adversarial relationship between Christians and the rest of society, including their government?

For the radical Left, the answers to these questions are unequivocally, “Mine, me and absolutely yes.” The idea that a bunch of self-righteous snake handlers can refuse to acknowledge one of their favored groups and hide behind “religious principles” is intolerable for them, though they make an exception for Muslims on ideological as well as practical grounds: Muslims are much more likely to cut off your head or burn you alive if they don’t like you.  For the Left, government is their golden calf and they bitterly resent anyone who worships anything else, anyone whose principles don’t change with the times – Paul Begala, appearing on MSNBC on 01 April, stated that, “People can have religious principles, they just can’t act on them,” the most patently stupid remark in the history of patently stupid remarks and emblematic of the Left’s attitude.  As far as liberals are concerned, all trust and confidence must be placed in a faithless, autocratic engine of liberal dogma that consumes and dominates everything, including freedom of belief, in an endless quest for “equality” and “fairness,” which are defined as anything that the Left wants at any particular time, and to have trust and confidence in something else, something changeless and permanent and unmoving and not the work of human hands, say, the supreme God of the universe,  enfuriates  the Left.  How dare you disagree with us?  How dare you refuse to recognize the supremacy of government over the individual and of man over God?  How dare you refuse to validate the absurdity of homosexual marriage as normal, even sacrosanct?  In our outrage (not moral, but an apish mockery of morality), we demand your surrender, we viciously insult you, we threaten to burn your business and kill you because in our pursuit of tolerance, we cannot tolerate disagreement, and we will do this during Holy Week and as Al-Shabaab carefully, systematically murders 147 Christian college students in Kenya.  We don’t care – we hate you and if you refuse to obey us, we’ll put you to death.

Forty years ago, the idea that homosexuals could legally marry each other was ludicrous, as was the idea that Christians would need legal protection for voicing their opposition to it, yet here we are, and who’s to say where we’ll be forty years from now?  From homosexual marriage, we could legitimize polygamy, pedophilia, groups of people marrying other groups of people, Christian ministers being  jailed for refusing to perform such perverse unions,  marijuana sold over the counter at your neighborhood drugstore, and to enforce acceptance of such practices, the government could establish a loyalty oath, administered at, say, the local DMV.  You’d raise your right hand and while the ceremony was recorded by video monitors and microphones, some bureaucrat would administer the oath, you and he would sign it, your driver’s license would be updated accordingly and on your way you’d go, having given the government your approval of whatever depravity they were so inclined to sanction, and in exchange for your approval, you’d keep your freedom.  On the other hand, if you refused such an oath and gave your Christian convictions as the basis for your refusal, maybe you’d lose your license right then and there.  Maybe your car would be impounded and you’d have to walk home.  Maybe you’d lose your job or your house would be confiscated or your financial assets would be frozen, or maybe it would get much worse than that.  Maybe your children would be declared wards of the state and forcibly removed a la Elian Gonzalez, maybe your wife would be arrested and maybe you’d be declared mentally incompetent and be committed to an insane asylum for “treatment,” and after a year or two, you’d be given a chance to recant.  And then, if you still refused, you’d be declared persona non grata and be internally exiled to Alaska because faith in an invisible, changeless, righteous God is incompatible with the wishes of a corrupt, hard-Left and dictatorial state, or, as has happened so often in the past and as happens so frequently now, you’d just be shot: Tolerance, after all, has its limits.

Sources:

http://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2015/03/27/text-indianas-religious-freedom-law/70539772/

http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/sebelius-v-hobby-lobby-stores-inc/

http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/elane-photography-llc-v-willock/

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416297/high-school-coach-anyone-want-help-me-burn-down-pizzeria-wont-cater-gay-weddings

http://www.breitbart.com/video/2015/02/12/cnns-cuomo-our-rights-do-not-come-from-god/

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2015/03/23/yahoo-political-reporter-cruz-talking-about-god-given-rights-bizarre

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/416289/memories-pizza-just-memory-google-least-ian-tuttle

The New Mythology

One reason behind liberals’ psychosis for higher taxes and spending is the persistent gap between

very prosperous and not-very-prosperous people.  Driven, objective-oriented, enterprising people always seem to find new ways to make money while others seldom do, in spite of the heavy taxes levied on those entrepreneurs and the generous subsidies lavished on the middle class and the poor.  This should illustrate simple human nature and the futility of the Big Government paradigm but for the Left, it stokes frustration and anger, frustration that higher taxes don’t stop rich people from getting rich and anger that they would dare to do so.  Don’t they know that a classless society would be best for everyone? If everyone shared the same staid, mediocre standard of living with nobody being super-rich and nobody being super-poor, then class envy would cease and a new era of human life would begin, and though this dream has mesmerized liberals for 100 years, it ignores basic human nature.  If I have no incentive to excel, to invent new things or start a new business or take any kind of risk, then I’ll sit on my hands and wait for my welfare check like everyone else; conversely, if I lack the intelligence or the training or the special skills or drive to excel and I’m one of the people who depend on risk-takers for my welfare check, then I’m in a very precarious position indeed.  The Soviet Union discovered this truth to its cost, China discovered it and adapted before it also collapsed. Cuba and North Korea and Venezuela and Bolivia and Nicaragua may rail against capitalism but they depend on it for their very lives while Europe grapples with the reality that hard-working and thrifty Germans cannot support the rest of Europe on their own: There’s something wrong with asking them to pay higher taxes so Greeks can retire at 45.

Highly intelligent and possessed of rarefied sensitivities as he is supposed to be, however, Priest-King insists that the problems that other countries have had with socialism are attributable to the fact that he wasn’t in charge.  If Great Britain was teetering on economic collapse in 1979, then the problem wasn’t egregiously high taxes and welfare spending but rather he wasn’t there to raise them even higher.  A devotee of the Keynesian school of economic thought, Priest-King believes that government spending stimulates growth, so if you want faster growth, you spend more.  This would be fine if government actually generated its own revenue but everyone, including Priest-King, knows it does not.  Government takes money from people and businesses who’ve earned it and redistributes it as the government sees fit, something like giving yourself a transfusion and about as likely to stimulate economic growth with the exception that, with a transfusion, you don’t incur debt.  It’s an inescapable fact that Priest-King and his coterie of hypnotized followers choose to ignore, instead choosing to believe that if the poor and the middle class are subsidized just enough,  they’ll attain a new level of affluence and security and if the rich are taxed just heavily enough, they’ll stop outperforming their neighbors and accept a lower standard of living for themselves.  Priest-King has vigorously exercised his belief over the past six years, spending over $20 trillion ($8 trillion of which was borrowed), creating a gigantic new Federal construct for rationing health care, spending trillions of dollars on stimulus projects that didn’t exist, home mortgage bailouts and car company bailouts and green energy projects that failed and yet the economy remains punch-drunk.  Over five million jobs have been eliminated during his administration and if unemployment has declined, it has declined because people have either given up looking for work entirely or accepted a part-time job because no full-time jobs were available.  Meanwhile, Wall Street sets records and the gap between rich and poor has actually widened, so given the results achieved, one would conclude that Priest-King’s policies have failed utterly to attain his goal, but that would require intellectual honesty which Priest-King does not have.  His political philosophy is founded on class warfare and using government as a cudgel to beat the bourgeoisie into submission, so rather than abandon an approach that has clearly flopped, he soldiers on, defiantly.  His FY2016 budget rests at $4.1 trillion with at least $438 billion of new debt, he proposes to cancel the sequestration cuts that have only moderately slowed government spending and instead raise spending by 7% across the board; he further proposes to increase taxes by $2 trillion over the next ten years (including a 14% tax on U.S. corporate profits held overseas) and to offer the first two years of community college for free, which of course means that someone else gets the bill.  This is a preposterous budget made more so by the fact that Priest-King suffered yet another punishing mid-term defeat only three months ago.  He faces strong Republican majorities in the House and Senate and in state legislatures across the country and rather than at least attempt to negotiate with the opposition, he raises his middle finger.  This may be red meat to his true believers on the Left but it also defies reason: Colossal taxes and spending have not helped and cannot help the poor because they do nothing about the natural ability some people have toward industry and prosperity and the natural inclination of others to stay exactly where they are.  Saying so may cause Nancy Pelosi’s head to explode but it’s the truth nonetheless.  We would all be better off if Priest-King proposed cutting the top individual and top corporate tax rates to 25% respectively, eliminating capital gains taxes and balancing the Federal budget by 2025, recognizing that doing so would energize prosperous people to expand existing businesses or start new ones, buy new equipment or floor space, hire more workers and invest and create better jobs and thereby help everyone, but he is indeed the Priest-King and he knows better than everyone else and that in a nutshell explains why the suffering will continue, unabated.

Ishmael's Fury

It had to be confusing for him.  He was thirteen years old, the only son of a rich and powerful man, a man who doted on him, who lavished time and attention on him, a man who talked to God.  His mother was his father's slave which wasn't unusual for the time but it didn't seem to matter, his father loved him all the same, spending time with him and teaching him things as fathers do with their sons.  He was shocked and frightened when his father announced that he had to circumcise him because of some promise that God had made to him, and it was painful, but the old man - he was 99 years old! - underwent the same trial, feeling the same pain that his son felt, binding them even closer together than before.  So when his father said that God had promised him another son by his wife, that God would establish a special covenant with this boy to bless him and his descendants forever and not with him, he had to have been bewildered.  What had he done?  Why wasn't he good enough?  Why couldn't God favor him instead of this new kid?  True, he had sometimes been unruly, disobedient, picking fights with other kids, but his mother had told him that was his nature, that God predicted he would be wild yet his father loved him anyway, so again, why wouldn't God choose him?

His father told him that he would be the father of a great nation, the father of twelve princes, but such promises fell short.  He was the oldest!  He was the first!  God should have promoted him, not someone else, and when his father gave a great banquet to celebrate the baby's weaning, he couldn't help but tease the little kid.  After all, what was he supposed to do, just sit quietly while someone stole his inheritance?  But then the old woman retaliated, demanding that his father throw him out, with his mother, right into the desert, like they were trash.  Where were they supposed to go, with just the clothes on their backs and only the food and water that they carried?  As I said, it had to be confusing for him.

Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, survived their journey into the desert, with God's help, and God kept His promise to make him a great nation.  He indeed fathered twelve sons and lived to the ripe old age of 137, the great-grandfather of all the Arab people.  But it wasn't enough.  That God would deliberately subordinate him to Isaac, giving him favored status, that he would be deliberately passed over and then exiled into the wilderness, kindled a bitterness that burns in his descendants to this day.  Year after year, century after century, the anger and envy and resentment seethed and bubbled and boiled until one of his number invented a religion to channel that rage, an ideology that rejected his younger brother's ascendancy and justified his destruction.  Ishmael was God's heir, not Isaac!  The Arabs were God's Chosen People, not the Jews!  The Jews and their cousins the Christians had it all wrong, in fact, Abraham was a Muslim and they were all infidels!  "We will subjugate the entire earth and force you to recognize us as your superiors, you infidel dogs!" they shouted, or words to that effect, and the slaughter of fourteen centuries began.

We face people who worship death, who gas children, who poison children, who behead and crucify children.  The Chechen thugs who machine-gunned children in Beslan, Russia, while they ran for their lives are kin to the Boko Haram thugs who burn children alive in Nigeria, who are kin to the Taliban thugs in Pakistan who shot Malala Yusufzai in the face for the crime of going to school, and are kin to the ISIS thugs who sawed James Foley's head off in Syria.  From Mohammed's first bleary vision, Muslims have killed and butchered and drowned and crushed anyone who resisted them, anyone who refused to convert to their bloody religion, anyone who just wanted to be left alone, anyone who wasn't exactly like them.  They reject our ideas of morality, individual worth and dignity, freedom of expression and democracy.  The concept of separating government from religion is absurd to them, as is independent thought and action.  They aren't students of postmodernism; they hijack airliners and fly them into the World Trade Center.  They espouse the anithesis of Western, Judeo-Christian values:  Rigid, autocratic control of all human activity, the enslavement of the human soul and the dissolution of the self, and thus are our mortal enemies.

Priest-King doesn't believe this.

Priest-King believes that Islam's war against the rest of the world is our fault, meaning America.  We've antagonized them, exploited them, occupied their lands, interfered in their political affairs, supported Israel, invaded Iraq and waged war against them for over thirteen years.  We consistently disregard their complaints and impose our values on them, so his approach is to apologize vehemently for our past actions and then disengage from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Somalia, Yemen and Nigeria and anywhere where decisive American leadership is needed.  He always seems surprised when American withdrawal is followed by brutal Muslim violence, and the fact that he absented himself from the rally of world leaders in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo massacre yet went out of his way to commune with the Saudi princes following King Abdullah's death speaks to his character and his worldview:  Opposing Islam is bad, embracing Islam is good.  Thus we have precisely the wrong man in charge at the moment Muslim savagery is escalating, a man who sympathizes with the perpetrators and who despises the very country he leads, the only country capable of destroying these sociopaths once-and-for-all.

But as I have said, the seething hatred that fuels jihadist atrocities predates Israel and the United States and even the West as we know it.  Muslims have been attacking and burning and pillaging since Emperor Heraclius first confronted them from the New Rome, so democracy and Hollywood movies have nothing to do with their anger.  This relentless drive to destroy has its root not just in a sense of impotence against Western scientific, technological, economic and military superiority but in the insane jealousy Ishmael had for his brother, the outrage at being considered illegitimate, inadequate, cast aside and forgotten.  His descendants want to build a new civilization on Isaac's bones, a civilization that exalts depravity and the subjugation of the human spirit, a civilization that denies freedom and grace and hope and offers bondage, tyranny  and despair instead, a civilization for whom Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban is a model society.  Regardless of ISIS terror and Priest-King's fecklessness, we must resolve to resist this onslaught, to defend ourselves by ourselves, to defend the freedom so dearly bought by our ancestors and lift up the Name of Jesus, by whom all things are possible.  God grant us the wisdom and the strength to do it.