Monthly Archives: November 2014

L’etat c’est moi! Or, Mr. Madison and his worst nightmare, the American Caudillo

November 23, 2014UncategorizedCaudillo, Dictator, Madison's Nightmare, Monarch, Tyrannyjimg614

In these sad days for our Republic, a few days after a President of the United States has assumed the powers of a Monarch, one pleasure I have been glad to have is reading the superb biography by Lynne Cheney of James Madison, often referred to as The Father of the Constitution, that sacred document which the current President so disdainfully trashed in shredding the doctrine of Separation of Powers, and I was struck by a passage describing the reaction of Alexander Hamilton to those questioning some of his policies. She wrote of Mr. Madison’s co-author of the Federalist Papers and Treasury Secretary:

“Hamilton’s grandiosity seems to leap off the page. The idea that opposition to him and his policies was subversive to the Republic smacks of the kingly l’etat c’est moi …….” (p. 233)

What better way to describe the attitude of the current disgrace to the office once held by such men of greatness as, to cite just the most recent example, Ronald Reagan, or, perhaps the description given by the very witty Jonah Goldberg as the title to one of his columns, “My Way or My Way”!

In the outpouring of commentary decrying his recent immigration edict, in which genuine concern and alarm are being expressed over this reckless and illegal action, Rich Lowry, Editor of National Review, referred to Obama as an “American Caudillo”, found here, noted that “the past 400 years of Anglo-American political history can be read as a successful effort to establish and maintain a system tethering the executive to the law. What President Obama is doing will undermine that achievement, through both his own lawlessness and the precedent he will create for later presidents to operate by extralegal fiat.” He concludes: “No matter how much the president’s defenders stretch for a legal justification and a precedent, the conclusion is unavoidable that no one has done this before. President Obama is said to want to build his legacy, and he does– as a man who is shamefully careless of his oaths and constitutional obligations.”

Other titles spell out the same grave concern, a concern which is condescendingly sneered at by liberals in the main stream media (but I repeat myself) such as Andrew McCarthy’s very fine analysis showing that this action is right out of the Alinsky playbook, “Alinsky does Amnesty“, and Charles Cooke’s “Obama’s Imperial Transformation Is Now Complete”, in which he noted that Obama “… will don the robes of the emperor and spin minor discretion into gargantuan usurpation, all norms and touchstones be damned. However convincing are the promises of the ambitious, Lord Acton always has the last laugh.”

But, to me, as a fervent admirer of the astonishing small group of brilliant men who founded this greatest Nation in the history of the world, among whom Mr. Madison was thought to be one of the most intellectually powerful if not at the first rank of all, Mr. Cooke’s other article about this very sad affair, this flagrant breach of trust of this President which simply has no parallel in our History, entitled “Congress Seems Happy to Have its Powers Usurped”, he describes the genius of “The Madisonian settlement that has done the country so proud rests heavily on two presumptions: The first, that the fragmentation of political authority will invariably set the various branches off against one another; the second that, motivated by ambition as they tend to be, almost every representative within the firmament will remain sufficiently jealous of his prerogatives to willingly check the rise of his foes. ‘the accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands,’ Madison writes in Federalist 47, ‘whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.’ ”

This disgrace to the sacred office of The Presidency has most assuredly set us on a path to tyranny, and he has become that which The Founders most feared would develop one day: a rising American Monarch. One can only pray that enough of the new Republicans have sufficiently sturdy spines to turn back this “Small Man in a Big Office”, as he is termed by Kevin Williamson, before it’s too late, as his action could cause irreparable damage to the Nation we love.

The Moral Rot that is the Obama Administration

November 18, 2014Uncategorizedjimg614

One of the most clearly astute political analysts and observers on the American scene today, in my most humble opinion, is Victor Davis Hanson, who writes primarily for the National Review, and he has written a magnificent, if most depressing, piece at National Review Online this morning detailing the “growing chaos” of this Administration (?) in which “[e]verything appears to coming apart.” In this piece, entitled A Moral Primer, which can be found here, he lists the racial animosity of Obama and his truly malevolent “Attorney General” (I consider it a disgrace to have to give him any title, but most of all, the title of the top law enforcement officer in our form of Government), the bufoonery of Biden, Pelosi (Gruber? Never heard of the man! Good Grief!), the moral adolescence of the “top administration official”, probably Susan “it was just a video” “Private Berghdoff served his country with honor and distinction” Rice calling the Head of State of a sovereign Nation which happens to be one of our top three allies in the entire world “a chickenshit” and the “sickness of Barack Obama’s apology tour”. Here is the most telling indictment of this despicable group of Chicago-style thugs:

“A final litmus test: Distinguish between those who blacken their country’s reputation abroad and those who do not. The sickness of Barack Obama’s apology tour was not just in his moral equivalence, or in his ignorance of history that treats the sins of mankind as if they were the supposedly unique failings of the United States, but also that Obama has a propensity to speak ill of the country that gave him everything when he is among those who bear that country such ill will. Do we remember how he sat mute when Daniel Ortega damned the United States at the Summit of the Americas in 2009? Has he ever heard of Churchill’s dictum (offered to the House of Commons in 1947) that “When I am abroad I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the Government of my country. I make up for lost time when I am at home.” How about the deplorable habit of elite Americans traipsing down to Mexico — whose immigration policies are medieval compared to our own — only to loudly trash the immigration laws of their own country? If Americans abroad express no confidence in their country, then why should our enemies fear us or our friends support us? On America’s worst day it is far preferable to any alternative abroad. Unfortunately, those who are most able to travel overseas are often from the very class that finds it fashionable to caricature their homeland. But it is a major character failing nonetheless.”

I recently read an observation by one who obviously knew his American history, which would immediately rule out our first non-American President, to the effect that Barack Obama is exactly the kind of President the Founders most feared and tried to protect against. November 4 proved that their institutions worked, albeit much later than most of us would have liked. Let us pray that this Thugocracy, as it has been termed by another astute observer, Michael Barone, is reined in by the new Congress and that it is not permitted to do much greater damage than it has already inflicted upon the greatest Nation the world has ever known.

Hello, Stupid! That’s what they think of you!

November 13, 2014UncategorizedLiberal Elite, Smarter than thou, Stupidity of the American Voterjimg614

It is of the most enormous satisfaction that I am able to state to the brilliant, super-smart, elite, genius Professor Gruber that on the evening of November 4, 2014, we, and he— 🙂 — , found out the American voter is NOT, after all, quite as STUPID as he thought we were. Thanks for being so solicitous of us in our apparently, to you and your fellow elites, at least, moronic and imbecilic state, but turns out we can do just fine on our own, Prof. Gruber! Have a NICE DAY, [ ] out of respect to the Gentlewomen in our group, as I could not possibly spell out what I really thought of him and still think of myself as a Gentleman.

The Obamacare deception of ‘stupid’ Americans

How the liberal elites rely on lies to pass their paternalistic agenda

By James Bovard – – Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Paternalism is a desperate gamble that lying politicians will honestly care for those who fall under their power. This axiom has been made stark with the controversy arising from a video of Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of Obamacare, admitting that the administration conned the American public and blaming dumb voters for the flimflam.

Mr. Gruber, an MIT economist, received a $297,000 contract for his 2009-10 work on health care reform and helped lead the charge for the Affordable Care Act. In a video from an October 2013 panel at the Annual Health Economists conference,Mr. Gruber explained how Obamacare was sold to the public: “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically, that was really, really critical to get this thing to pass.” In another 2013 appearance, Mr. Gruber declared that one provision of Obamacare was included because “the American people are too stupid to understand the difference.”

Mr. Gruber also expressed his disdain for Americans’ intelligence with a comic book he co-wrote on the virtues of Obamacare. In one panel, he boasts that “I was part of the team that came up with the reform that changed the way Massachusetts handles medical coverage for the uninsured.” Congress should investigate whether Mr. Gruber’s emails and comments as part of the Obamacare legislative team explicitly advocated deceptive packaging or expressed derision for the American public.

The issue wasn’t transparency or voter stupidity, though. The real problem was the systemic deceit at the highest level of the Obama administration. Mr. Gruber admitted that the Obamacare “bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes the bill dies.” Unfortunately, five members of the Supreme Court chose to sanctify this charade, thus exempting Mr. Obama’s masterpiece from federal law and the Constitution.

Mr. Gruber told his fellow economists that “if you had a law which … made explicit [that] healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed.” So the Obama team covered the bill in smokescreens to hornswoggle people into acquiescing to the righteous result. Thanks to sovereign immunity, neither Mr. Gruber nor other Obamacare authors need worry about being prosecuted for fraud.

Obamacare was enacted before the president’s purported idealism became a laughingstock. Shortly before he signed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Mr. Obama told a University of Michigan audience: “When we don’t pay close attention to the decisions made by our leaders, when we fail to educate ourselves about the major issues of the day … that’s when democracy breaks down. That’s when power is abused.” Mr. Obama also declared that “we need an educated citizenry that values hard evidence and not just assertion.”

What we really need is a citizenry that recognizes that politicians are often far more devious than their friends in the media portray them. As comedian Lily Tomlin quipped, “No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.”

Mr. Obama sold his health care bill by promising dozens of times that people would be allowed to keep their doctor and health plans. Millions of insurance cancellation notices later, no one believes the president. The mainstream media was far more gullible on Obamacare than average voters. The administration’s slippery assertions were perennially reported as “hard evidence” when they should have been portrayed as political spin.

While Mr. Obama’s “best and brightest” have openly derided average Americans, it wasn’t “stupid” voters who built the Obamacare enrollment website that crashed and burned last year. It wasn’t “stupid” voters who vastly overestimated Obamacare enrollment. (The administration conceded Monday that enrollment in 2015 will be far less than forecast.) It wasn’t stupid voters who threw private health planning into chaos with a deluge of often senseless, politically motivated federal mandates.

The selling of Obamacare was uncannily similar to how President Franklin Roosevelt’s huckstering on Social Security. The Roosevelt administration railroaded the bill creating Social Security through Congress in 1935 by portraying it as an insurance program that gave citizens vested property rights akin to a private contract. However, in a 1937 Supreme Court brief, the Roosevelt administration confessed that Social Security “cannot be said to constitute a plan for compulsory insurance within the accepted meaning of the term insurance” and characterized Social Security as a “public charity” program under the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution.

The Brookings Institution’s Martha Derthick observed, “In the mythic construction begun in 1935 … Social Security was a vast enterprise of self-help in which government participation was almost incidental.” In 1979, Social Security Commissioner Stanford Ross conceded that “the mythology of Social Security contributed greatly to its success … Strictly speaking, the system was never intended to return to individuals what they paid.” When the feds default on Social Security payments promised to current and future generations, citizens will learn too late that 10,000 political promises are worth less than one wooden nickel.

Politicians do not have a divine right to deceive those they intend to benefit — or at least to control. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as retroactive self-government. Laws are not nullified after the exposure of the deceits that led to their enactment. Will the new Congress have the courage and wisdom to repeal Obamacare before it further ravages Americans’ freedom and health care?

James Bovard is the author of “Attention Deficit Democracy” (Palgrave, 2006) and “Lost Rights” (St. Martin’s, 1994).

James A. George

George and George, Ltd.

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I protest the conversion of OUR National Cathedral into a mosque

November 13, 2014UncategorizedCAIR, First Amendment, ISNA, Muslim, National Cathedral, Radical Islam, Terrorism financiersjimg614

Like many people of all faiths across the Nation, I simply could not believe my eyes when I saw the news that the (OUR!) National Cathedral was going to be turned over to a Muslim Prayer Service tomorrow, and, if that wasn’t bad enough, this misadventure was to be co-sponsored by organizations with proven, not simply alleged, ties to radical Islamic groups such as Hamas and were proven, not alleged, to have been involved in the financing of some of these butchers in the Mid East. I thought about it long and hard and started doing some fairly in-depth research, which revealed that not only was I not alone in the revulsion I felt but that some most highly respected publications felt exactly the same way I did about it. Therefore, I decided to do what I personally wish more citizens would do, even against the often well based feeling that “no one is listening”– if you doubt that, try writing, calling, texting, etc., etc. your Congressman one day– and that is to write a letter to the person I understand from news reports pushed this plan. Here is my latest exercise in putting the First Amendment into practice, no matter whose feathers get ruffled. I only hope it ruffles a lot of them. By the way, indications are, as of this time, some hours after this went out, that, sure enough, “no one is listening”!

Dear Rev. Canon Campbell:

It is with the utmost of respect that I, as a member of the Episcopal Church, protest, as strongly as I know how to use the English language in a civil and respectful manner, the defilement of the National (Episcopal) Cathedral for a Prayer Service by a “religion” one of whose foundational tenets is to “seize them and slay them [infidels—such as Christians and Jews!] wherever you shall find them.” Sura 4:89.

It is also noted that the co-sponsors of this ill-advised (as charitable a descriptive phrase as I can possibly use considering your position) misadventure are:

“Members of known Muslim Brotherhood front groups, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). The Justice Department has identified both as belonging to the Hamas wing of the radical Brotherhood. It’s also implicated them in a Hamas conspiracy to raise millions for Palestinian suicide bombers. These co-sponsors of the National Cathedral jumuah (“for invited guests only”) remain unindicted co-conspirators in a major terror case.”
I also understand that another co-sponsor is the ADAMS Islamic Center, whose Executive Director is Imam Magid, who also serves as President of ISNA, the largest Muslim Brotherhood organization in the United States which was found to be a financial support entity for Hamas in the largest terrorism financing and Hamas trial in our Nation’s history, U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation in Dallas in 2008.

I have carefully read the many news reports expressing various levels of outrage and disgust and dismay about this event, allowing our National Cathedral to be converted into a mosque, and have been more than a little disappointed (another most charitable word for the emotion I really feel) at the fact that your spokesman, Mr. Stapert, “did not know about ISNA and CAIR, even though their official representative will be praying at his cathedral this week”, according to one report, and also said ““I know that there have been allegations about CAIR’s participation in a variety of things [but] I’m not an expert on CAIR”!.

In the event more knowledge might be useful to your Staff, including Mr. Stapert, and perhaps your Good Self as well, I direct your attention to the attached articles which make it abundantly clear that the co-sponsoring organizations of tomorrow’s disgraceful occupation of OUR National Cathedral are closely identified with murderers, beheaders, and practitioners of the most unspeakable acts of barbarism, such as female genital mutilation, the stoning to death of homosexuals, the burning of Coptic Churches in the Middle East – with entire congregations therein!—the kidnapping and enslavement of girls by Boko Haram, the wholesale slaughter of entire Yazidi villages, etc., etc., and your Mr. Stapert should understand these are not mere allegations but are proven facts.

In closing, I could not possibly find a clearer statement of the outrage this episode represents than the opening paragraph of the Editorial in a very highly respected online publication, Investor’s Business Daily, as follows:

“Islamofascism: On Friday, for the first time, the venerable Washington National Cathedral will be used as a mosque, with radical Muslims leading prayers. Islamist infiltration of the Beltway is nearly complete.

Drunk with “interfaith” tolerance, church officials agreed to let the Islamists make “a statement.” About what? How gullible they are?”

It is with the deepest sadness, Rev. Canon Campbell, that I must record you have furnished a loud and clear answer to that question, and based upon the numerous reports I have seen, it is painfully obvious that I am hardly alone in feeling that your action is nothing short of a sheer outrage, as is most plainly illuminated by the following simple question: when will the Dean of the Cathedral be celebrating Holy Eucharist in the ADAMS Islamic Center?

Most Respectfully,