At first glance, one could wonder why an Emir of a tiny desert country like Qatar would risk supporting a “democratic” revoultion in Egypt?

Would he not be risking his own overthrow?

Such are the contradictions of the Middle East, but the Emir of Qatar is apparently willing to take the risk. From certain contacts in Alexandria, who are Coptic Christians and who are deathly afraid (if not downright certain) that the “democratic” revolution will be hijacked into the creation of a state hostile to Israel and Christianity, I have learned that the Emir of Qatar has been funneling as much as $50,000 to assorted protest leaders to lead the revolt toward a radical Islamic state.

Sceptical of my sources (they obviously could well be biased), I began digging into why the leader of a tiny country with no standing army and populated mainly by Bedouins, would be spending his money supporting Egyptian radical Islamists.

It turns that out precisely because he cannot be a major player in the traditional sense (militarily, or through population), the Emir is forced to express his ambitions in non-traditional ways.

In classic Middle Eastern form, Qatar has been playing footsy with both sides for years. After booting his father out of the palace while the “old man” was in Switzerland (“Extend your vacation permanently” was supposedly the message), the present Emir has been backing radical Islam through his support of the Muslim Brothers and through his financing of Al-Jazeera, the infamous pro-Islamofascist TV network started in the middle 1990′s. At the same time, he has allowed the U.S. to establish bases in Qatar: thus he receives protection from the U.S. while simultaneously working for its destruction, along with the Western Christian tradition in general.

Classic Middle Eastern politics indeed!

By supporting Al-Jazeera, the Emir buys a philosophical/theological influence across the Arab world. And through his banks, he is now also buying more direct influence! The Qatar Islamic Bank is the largest global network of banks compliant with Shari’a Law.

In 2008 it announced record profits of $1.6 Billion dollars. They have branches throughout the world, and have expanded greatly in the last 3-5 years. The government of Qatar is its largest shareholder.

None of that has to be especially sinister at all, except that one of the goals of the radical Islamists is the establishment of a parallel banking system following Shari’a law, in the hope of replacing Western capitalism.

SO… the odds that the Emir of Qatar is indeed attempting to buy a radical Islamist revolution in Egypt are extremely good.

And again the incompetence of the West, especially our State Department, in understanding the doublethink mindset of many Middle Eastern leaders is astonishing!

Unless of course certain leftist, anti-Jewish, “we should feel guilty about being Americans” elements in our government are happy with those developments!

Two especially good articles found in my research:

http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=1&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=379&PID=0&IID=2971&TTL=Al_Jazeera_and_Qatar:_The_Muslim_Brothers’_Dark_Empire?

http://www.newsweekly.com.au/articles/2010jun26_cover3.html

Investor’s Business Daily had an article called Duck and Cover: Obama Style (December 17, 2010) on the present administration’s attitudes on a nuclear strike against America. The article compares this present, and new, attitude – which quietly sneers at people who want to make our risk zero by pre-empting terrorist states with nuclear weapons – with the Left’s previous attitude toward the survivability of a nuclear attack/war. If you have forgotten, the Left for decades sneered at the idea of even bothering to try to survive, because it would not be possible. The only solution was total disarmament: only Flower Power would counterbalance the Russians’ weaponry. “All we are aaaskiiiinnng, is give peace a chance.”

An excerpt from the editorial:

 

 

The administration even has a CitizenCorps.gov Web site. “Scientific analysis has shown that today’s threat is different” than the Cold War nuclear threat, the site’s “Planning for a Nuclear Detonation” section assures its readers .

The danger today is “potentially survivable for thousands, especially with adequate shelter and education,” it states. “Spending the first few hours in a good shelter, such as the center of a multi-story building, can keep radiation exposure at a non-lethal level.”

Another soothing reassurance is that a nuclear terrorist blast is a “much smaller explosion than the strategic thermonuclear weapons of the Cold War, though people within a few miles of the blast could still be killed or injured.” No kidding. You think?

“Breathing in fallout dust is only a minor concern,” the nuclear survival Web site says. “The good news is that fallout decays and radiation levels will decrease rapidly over the first few hours and days,” so “spending the first hour in an urban shelter such as a multi-story building can keep radiation exposures at a non-lethal level.”

For years, detente proponents joked that the only reason to “duck and cover” during a nuclear attack was to kiss your posterior goodbye. Now, instead of going all-out to prevent Islamofascist Iran from building a nuclear bomb, the Obama administration is telling the American people: don’t be fatalistic. The “good news” is that nuclear terrorism is “more survivable” than you think.

And so why this change of attitude?

Given the hostility of the Left and of BIG BRObama himself (e.g. read his books) toward America, toward American History, toward American exceptionalism, toward American capitalist and religious culture, I fear there is only answer.

They must believe that America is not worth reducing this threat to zero, or at least as low as possible. It is possible they consciously or subconsciously believe that – for the sake of fairness – America needs to be hit with a nuclear weapon, so that it can receive payback for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so that it can receive payback for developing missiles and nuclear warheads to protect itself from Russian and Chinese Communism (who really were peace-loving, according to the Left), so that it can be paid back for supporting Israel against peace-loving, freedom-loving Islamic states, so that it can be paid back for African slavery, so that it can be paid back for harming the environment, so that it can be paid back for stealing the whole country from the Native Americans, so that it can be paid back for whatever ill The Left imagines we are guilty of!

And so this most questionable administration will apparently do nothing beyond mouth-flapping to stop Iran, North Korea, or any other rogue state from developing nuclear bombs, states which have openly expressed their desire to hit us and other countries allied with us with nuclear weapons. It wants to disarm America (recall BIG BRObama’s infamous speech about his intentions on weapon programs of the future: see the link below) and tie our hands with worthless treaties, like START, which History has shown the Russians and Chinese will instantly violate, while screaming that the U.S. needs to adhere to it.

See:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU4sVQV3Lhk/

http://www.redstate.com/ausonius/2010/12/05/why-treaties-with-the-russians-are-worthless/

The Associated Press posted a small story on December 12, 2010 about John Boehner’s apparent desire to play golf with MAObama.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Golf-loving Rep. John Boehner (BAY’-nur) says playing 18 holes with someone is a good way to get to that person. That might be hint from the House speaker-in-waiting to fellow golfer President Barack Obama.

Boehner is about an eight-handicap golfer and when asked on CBS’ “60 Minutes” about being better than the president, Boehner said, “He understands that.”

Aides say Boehner doesn’t have much time for the game lately, and the Ohio Republican says he’s never had an invitation to play with Obama.

Boehner says the two have talked a number of times about playing, but it just hasn’t happened yet.

Boehner says that on the course, “You can’t be somebody that you’re not, because all of you shows up.”

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” might be the philosophy at work here.

On the other hand…

Does anyone sense that Boehner (a fellow Ohioan whom I would like to trust) just might be succumbing to the old temptation of wanting to be pals with the elite people at the top, since as a future Speaker he will be the newest member of the club?  He seems a little too eager to elicit an invitation, which – thank heavens in my opinion! – has not yet arrived!

One thinks of Gingrich with Pelosi worrying about climate change.  And of Bush Senior getting all warm and fuzzy about Billy Jeff Clinton.  And of McCain and his fellow RINO’s joining Dems and sabotaging the Conservative agenda for progress in America.  How exactly have Conservatives and America profited from these associations?

If Boehner wants to see who the present resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue really is, he should read the man’s books.  He should pay attention to the man’s speeches: the infamous Cairo Speech would be a good place to start.  Or maybe the one written (at least in part) by Mort Zuckerman.  Or maybe the one tippy-toeing around Iran’s nuclear weapons program and idly dreaming about a disarmed world, a speech which so perplexed French President Sarkozy.

From a Wall Street Journal editorial of September 29, 2009:

“I support America’s ‘extended hand.’ But what have these proposals for dialogue produced for the international community? Nothing but more enriched uranium and more centrifuges. And last but not least, it has resulted in a statement by Iranian leaders calling for wiping off the map a Member of the United Nations. What are we to do? What conclusions are we to draw? At a certain moment hard facts will force us to make decisions.”

We thought we’d never see the day when the President of France shows more resolve than America’s Commander in Chief for confronting one of the gravest challenges to global security. But here we are.

But let us be charitable: maybe Boehner will stand up and be counted and oppose the socialist agenda of the Dems. Maybe he wants to play golf with MAObama to show and verify privately that from the Republican point of view there can be no compromise with the twin evils of pusillanimity and socialism.

Yet even that would be a mistake: for it gives the impression that nothing has changed in Washington, that the elites still stick together, that they are “buddy-buddy” no matter which side they supposedly represent.

To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a golf game really is just a golf game, and not a symbol of anything deeper.

But not this time.

I would think if Boehner wants “to get to” the present occupant of the White House, he should confine himself to applying pressure by standing firm for what voters want: reduced taxation and reduced regulation thereby bringing about reduced government interference in our lives and those of our children.

And by refusing any and all invitations to play golf or basketball with a certain man whose initials are B.H.O.

To understand the title completely, a quick overview of Russian History is needed.  After the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Turks in 1453, the Czars, beginning with Ivan the Great, viewed themselves as the inheritors of the Byzantine Christian traditions, with Moscow becoming “The Third Rome,” complete with a messianic mission to protect Orthodox Christianity.  Ivan the Great married a Byzantine princess, niece of the last emperor, to seal this idea.

Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is somewhat mistitled, because a majority of the pages concern in fact Byzantine History, the story of an empire which persisted with difficulty for over a thousand years (Rome falls in 410: Constantinople in 1453).  How exactly does an empire “decline”…for a thousand years?!   The answer is that the Byzantines had periods of resurgence, even if long-term they were doomed.

Byzantine diplomacy was one of their reasons for surviving against such great odds: Arabs, Turks, Slavs, Crusaders, Italian city-states all sharpening their knives against this Greek state.  And this diplomacy was usually predicated on the assumption that treaties and political agreements were instruments of survival: breaking them at any time, even entering into them with no intention of keeping the agreement, was morally justified.

The Russians, themselves surrounded by Tatars, Swedes, Ottoman Turks, learned this lesson well.  While the more Westernizing czars later on became more trustworthy in international diplomacy, there are assorted examples of classic “Byzantine diplomacy” (e.g. Czar Alexander’s allying with Napoleon while simultaneously talking with the British about the future).

With Lenin, Stalin, and the Communists we return to more classic amoral Byzantine diplomacy.  There is a case to be made that Lenin and Stalin followed two German philosophers in their careers: Marx and Nietzsche, the latter with his ideas on the amoral Übermensch being combined with Marx’s akimbo morality for class warfare.

One of the classic observations about the West’s dealings with dictators in the 20th century (and today) is that our high-minded politicians treat murderous tyrants…as if they were high-minded Western politicians.  (Besides Chamberlain’s dealings with Hitler, one remembers with a shiver W. Bush’s claim to see Putin’s re-assuring soul.  Or our present resident of the White House expecting egotistically expecting every tyrant to roll over and play dead for him.)  This attitude has led the West to be continuously shocked and disappointed as soon as treaty violations are discovered:  the SALT II treaty was DOA, because one violation was known fairly early (i.e. Russian troops in Cuba), and one could assume therefore that others existed, and so the Senate never ratified it.

President Reagan nevertheless offered to honor the treaty, if the Soviet Russians agreed to follow it also.  And as could have been predicted, he needed to reveal in the middle 1980′s that the Soviet Russians had violated the agreement.

And so Communism may be somewhat gone in Russia, and a limited freedom is now present: but has anything changed?  For over 20 years America and the West have been expecting the Russian government to become as Westernized and trustworthy as themselves.  This has demonstrably not happened, and it has not happened because the Russian-Communist heritage of international deception has been transferred to Vladimir Putin’s shadow dictatorship.

How exactly is Putin a free-thinking Westerner?

And so again we see the liberals in the West becoming all warm and fuzzy about START and other such agreements.  Why?  Did they not pay attention in History class?  Or are they just so optimistic that this time will be different ?

So, keep talking with the Russians, and keep signing agreements with them: but please stop being shocked when you discover that the Russians…have stayed Russians.

Have you wondered if your one vote, out of several hundred million next week, will really make a difference to America?

Have you wondered if your life, out of several tens of billions of humans who have ever lived, will make a difference, or has any kind of importance?  As a member of RedState, you undoubtedly have wondered about this question with a more religious flavor in your thoughts than members of certain other sites.  You most probably believe that Divinity of some sort exists, that it somehow takes notice of you, and that therefore you play some sort of role in the ongoing History of the Universe.

Keep that last idea in mind!

Perhaps you have written comments here at RedState, and nobody responded.  Perhaps you have written diaries, and they were never commented upon, never recommended, and seemed to have dropped off the list rather quickly by the end of the day.  Let us assume that your comments or your diary were in fact highly insightful and full of inspiring ideas.  And so you become discouraged or even angry that your voice was not heard.

I am here to tell you that you still made a difference, that you helped to improve America and thereby the world, even if not one person read your writing! 

How is this possible?  Because by participating here at RedState you are contributing to an Atmosphere of Righteousness.

Physicists have been wondering about tiny “quantum effects,” i.e. the actions of subatomic particles, and whether they might be involved in human consciousness.  Some scientists have theorized that the quantum world may be how we influence each other.  A good amount of nonsense by non-scientists is available on this topic: true or not, what has been obvious to any student of the human condition is that good examples of behavior tend to be spread slowly, and that bad examples spread quickly. 

“Senators are good men, but the Senate is a beast” was a Roman slogan whose truth no one doubted.  Normally good people could suddenly agree to the stupidest actions under the malign influence of a few.  More recently the Broken Windows Theory (formulated c. 30 years ago by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling), wherein people clean up deteriorated neighborhoods and create an atmosphere of order and cleanliness, was famously used in New York City during the Giuliani years to reduce crime.  This idea has worked in other crime-filled cities as well.

The point here is that RedState is an important fixer of broken windows in America, a creator of an ideational atmosphere where the virtues of personal freedom, personal responsibility, and familial and national duty dominate socialist tenets on reducing those virtues to create a mediocre and nearly robotized world of “Fairness” and “Security,” and where government subtly hijacks the role of a religion. 

When you participate here at RedState, either as a writer of comments or diaries or as a reader, you contribute to the creation of a moral atmosphere echoing, symbolically at least, the words “Let there be light” of the original creation.

And so let us assume that a new visitor to RedState skims through the pages, and notices all these diaries, and all these comments, and your writing is among them.  The visitor reads nothing you wrote (and perhaps neither did anybody else).  No matter!  By adding your words here, simply by having a box with your name and a title on it in the lists, you have participated in the act of creation, and have added a few raindrops to the shower nourishing the desert in an attempt to stop the Sands of Leftism.

If your writing has quality, all the better!

And so yes, as Wisdom has shown throughout the ages, the one small act can have repercussions larger than the act itself.  Your one vote for freedom, your essay on Candidate X, and your perusal of the RedState website, are all important for the preservation of a free, moral, and creative atmosphere in America.

The planet will still rotate and revolve, whether you vote or not, whether you participate at RedState or not.  In a few billion years, we are told, the planet will not exist, absorbed by a swelling, dying sun.  But will the story of the human race be slightly better – or slightly worse – because of your life’s contributions?

Commentators, even ones supposedly on the Republican side, are talking about how the Republican Party is being “dragged further and further to the Right” * by the victories of e.g. Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Marco Rubio in Florida.  This phrase is supposed to be ominous, filling the reader or listener with fear about…what?

The traditional leftist definition is that “The Right” is somewhere near Nazism, which I have always found fascinating, because not one person on “The Right” would ever be in favor of National Socialism, nor of a police state where your rights are severely diminished, nor of killing Jews or other groups.  That definition is reserved for “The Left” with its pseudo-paradises of Cuba, North Korea, Maoist China, and of course the Soviet Union.  Hate groups like the KKK are always called “right-wing” by The Leftists, when in fact hatred and extermination of groups disliked by a self-proclaimed elite are left-wing phenomena stretching back to Robespierre and The Terror of the French Revolution, and proceeding to Hitler and his camps, Stalin and the GULAG, and Mao Tse-Tung and the Great Cultural Revolution with their millions of bodies.

Also implied in post-Communist times by the phrase “The Right” is some sort of theocracy with fundamentalist preachers forcing a Puritanical police state onto everyone: honorable mention should be given to the fantasyland of an America ruled by BIG BUSINESS where about 1% of the population lives nicely, everyone else is a wage-slave at 10 cents and hour, the rivers and streams are chemical conduits, and the sun never shines.  The former describes Iran and Saudi Arabia, the latter partially describes present-day Russia and China, all countries positioned on the Left!

And so why exactly would anyone on “The Right” (or The Left) desire such states?

Conservatives need to seize control of the definition, seize control of the debate, and seize control of the stereotypes.  One of the great lessons from George Orwell’s book 1984 is that control of language is the beginning of mind control.

Conservatives need to emphasize that the conservation of Freedom is where the term “conservative” originates.  It has nothing to do with the protection of a dull status quo, the continuation of injustice, of discrimination, or of hatred between rich and poor. Conservatives “conserve” your basic human rights as written in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Conservatives do NOT “interpret” those documents in ways that limit your freedom.  Conservatives struggle to conserve the original intention of the Founding Fathers, which, as any decent historian will tell you, was NOT to create a modern-day nanny state swallowing ever more of the American people’s wealth and rights.

“The Right” is “right” because it defends personal liberty against governments wanting – even with a gently smiling face offering money for all sorts of seemingly wonderful causes – to limit those liberties.

I once heard a Russian historian muse about his country’s tendency toward oppressive governments: he wondered if the way Russian babies were swaddled might be involved.  Russians, he said, are usually tightly wrapped in blankets, when they are babies, and literally cannot move their arms or legs, or at least not much at all.  The inability to move freely, to be able to kick and wave one’s arms at will, is connected to mothering: he theorized that the message to the Russian child’s mind is, therefore, that the freedom to move is somehow bad.  The idea of freedom becomes tainted and suspect.

America needs to choose whether it wants to be tightly swaddled for our own good, or to risk that freedom is better, even though we might roll around and hurt ourselves now and then. 

Conservatives need to refuse and refute any definition or implication that their positions somehow lead to a worse life.  Being “dragged further and further to the Right” should be seen and understood as offering greater freedom and opportunity to all individuals.  If we let “The Left” define what Conservatism stands for, we have only ourselves to blame.

The time for polite silence is over: it is time for a polite assertion of the truth!

* David Frum, “Republican commentator” quoted in the Financial Times in an article by Edward Luce, September 15, 2012.

“In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance.” from A Coffin For Dimitrios by Eric Ambler in 1939.

Over 70 years have passed since British novelist, engineer, and Lieutenant Colonel Eric Ambler wrote those words. Ambler knew the pessimistic work of German historian Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, and thought that Europe, especially after World War I, was in danger of declining, and perhaps had already entered a terminal phase.

One can debate whether our civilization is dying, or whether it is sick but curable, or simply has the political sniffles. Here I want to point out the unfortunate truth in Ambler’s last sentence quoted above: it was proven in the 2008 presidential election.

Nobody sensible would call BIG BRObama a “shrewd diagnostician” of economics or even politics, despite his success in getting the highest office in the land. The last 18 months have proven that he has no desire to help America economically: when his supposed cures are shown to be worthless, the shrewd diagnostician would find a new cure to treat the disease. “The man with the best bedside manner” has no interest in curing our disease, because he does not know how, or worse, intends on confiscating our property after our demise!

Instead, he simply lies to us and says that we should trust him, and that everything will be fine, as he smilingly injects us with just a little more strychnine, even though we know that strychnine cannot possibly be what we need. But he is such a nice young man, that we trust him, and accept this most curious cure.

The man with the best bedside manner wants the best for us, he says, and when he tells us that “up” is actually “down,” e.g. with unemployment numbers (rf. the deliberate inflation of employment numbers with temporary Census workers), that high taxes and the throttling of businesses make society fair and better for everyone (rf. Joe the Toledo Plumber), that “Wall Street greed” caused all of our problems and that the government’s role was not connected (rf. Dodd and Frank and the other clowns at the imperial court of Fannie and Freddie), that petty dictators are actually to be admired and courted and even imitated (e.g. joining Chavez in condemning Honduras’ attempt to resist dictatorship), that our allies are actually our enemies and must be cast aside (e.g. the constant insulting of England and trashing of Israel), we have to understand that things in our disease have “changed” and we must “hope” for the best!

We see now that this result of mediocrity came from ignorance, the ignorance and gullibility and guilt of the electorate. An electorate who did not read his books, or pay attention to his background, or seek out information about his speeches, e.g. against American defense programs.  An electorate who believed the televised image and saw a thin, young, and (seemingly) dynamic 40-something speaking those calm, soothing bedside lies vs. an old bristly grandpa.

BIG BRObama may be thin, but his youth is fading fast, and instead of dynamism, we see that he is almost pathologically lazy, letting Dem operatives run with the extreme left-wing agenda.

The patient must be told that his doctor is incompetent or worse.

The only way to break mediocrity and ignorance is with energy and persuasion. Conservatives must continue to expose the bedside manner of lies and incompetence: this takes time, money, and constant vigilance.

And it takes style: the mediocre man does not like to be told that he is mediocre, that his mediocrity has led him and his country into choosing disaster, albeit disaster hidden behind a mask of duplicitous sweetness. Conservatives must consolingly and diplomatically explain to the masses, similar to the detective who shows the wife the photographs of the husband at the motel with another woman and reveals an unpleasant truth, that they have a choice to make in 2010 and in 2012.

Do you stay with him, or start the proceedings for a divorce?

(Note on A Coffin for Dimitrios: it was made into an excellent movie in 1944 and re-titled The Mask of Dimitrios with Peter Lorre (as the hero!), Zachary Scott, and Sydney Greenstreet. Available on VHS, but not yet on DVD.)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303491304575188263180553530.html

The above article will give you more details about a new outrage. 

Senator Casey of Pennsylvania has offered a “consolation prize” to unions for not getting “card-check” legislation through Congress (i.e. forced unionization of workers).

He has proposed a $165 Billion dollar bailout of mismanaged union pension funds.  This is in opposition to the administration’s promise that there would be no more bailouts.  One supposes that the fine print on BIG BRObama’s promise said that it is wrong to bail out banks and car companies from now on, but bailouts for unions would of course be quite fine.

We ask: why is this happening now?  Would this not be a bad time to add more negatives to the deficit?

Of course it would, but Dems do not care about that: they can always squeeze us for more taxes.  And where is the outrage?

Because our attention is focused elsewhere: if you follow the news, you are watching the oil opera in the gulf, or the latest Palestinian outrages against Israel.

If you are sick and tired of the constant incompetence and deliberate wrecking emanating from MAObama and his minions, you are watching perfect games in baseball or bikinis (or Speedos) or anything to relieve the chronic gloom coming out of D.C. right now.

Sorry, but we need to focus on this latest attempt to pay off unions for their sycophantic support of BIG BRObama and the Dems.

I myself have not had much time to visit RedState and comment in recent weeks, but this issue has forced to me publish this rather short diary, in the hope that others will spread the word with me.

A chill froze my marrow many moons ago in the 1980’s, when Toys ‘R’ Us produced a commercial with an adult male singing what could be construed as a funeral dirge for America’s future:

I don’t want to grow up. I’m a Toy’s R US kid.There’s a million things at Toy’s R US that I can play with.From trains to planes and video games,it’s the biggest toy store there is.

I don’t want to grow up, cause baby if I did

I wouldn’t be a Toy’s R US kid.

The “baby” referred to in the second-last line refers to the Baby Boomers, the generation born after World War II, a generation already infamous for its self-centered self-righteousness and a generally “spoiled” nature, who were the target of this advertisement. The ad is brilliant of course, and has stayed around for years, because too many members of that and subsequent generations agree with the sentiment.

Symbolically the song joined other similar Peter-Pan paeans to perpetual puberty, e.g. the Tom Waits song (also pushed by The Ramones) called I Don’t Wanna Grow Up.

(Tom Waits/K. Brennan)

I don’t wanna grow up/Open up the medicine chest/And I don’t wanna grow up/I don’t wanna have to shout it out

I don’t want my hair to fall out/I don’t wanna be filled with doubt/I don’t wanna be a good boy scout/I don’t wanna have to learn to count

I don’t wanna have the biggest amount/I don’t wanna grow up

Well when I see my parents fight/I don’t wanna grow up/They all go out and drinking all night/And I don’t wanna grow up

I’d rather stay here in my room/Nothin’ out there but sad and gloom

I don’t wanna live in a big old Tomb/On Grand Street

When I see the 5 o’clock news/I don’t wanna grow up

Comb their hair and shine their shoes/I don’t wanna grow up

Stay around in my old hometown/I don’t wanna put no money down

I don’t wanna get me a big old loan/Work them fingers to the bone

Fall in love and get married then boom/How the hell did I get here so soon

I don’t wanna grow up

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/t/tom+waits/i+dont+wanna+grow+up_20138809.html

Culture, or in this case kulcher, can reflect not only the person producing it, but also the society surrounding the producer. Successful “kulcheral” products are successful precisely because the society agrees with, or at least recognizes, the ideas in the works.

Throughout the following, please be aware that I am generalizing, and that I am speaking of the Baby Boomers who will turn into the future Bill Clintons, Al Frankens, Al Gores, Michael Moores, and Obamas. Specific counter-examples can always be found, of course, but I intend on painting broadly.

The parents of the Baby Boomers, in an effort to spare their children the experiences of the Great Depression and World War II, unwittingly and with the best intentions sowed the winds of change. A rather protected and indulged group of young Americans grew up in the post-WWII era, and took some clues from their immediate predecessors, i.e. the so-called Silent Generation of Marlon Brando and James Dean, of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, on how to differentiate themselves from the adults who had suffered through nearly 20 years of economic depression, warfare, and rebuilding.

And how do you show you are different to people who sacrificed so much and metaphorically scaled the highest mountains in History?

You deny that the mountains were worth climbing!

Like Brando and Dean and Mick Jagger, you perpetually mock and sneer at everything around you!

Working for a living and saving money to avoid economic downturns? How droll! Working implies contributing to an immoral society where people are poor and starving and oppressed! “Workin’ for The Man every night ‘n’ day!” Why would you do that? NOT working for a living is the way to differentiate yourself! Living off the land in harmony with nature in a commune, or earning coins by singing on street-corners in San Francisco, will give you a Jesus-like dominance to repudiate the hypocritical Pharisees around you who are destroying the planet with atomic capitalism!

“Like every great religion of the past we seek to find the divinity within and to express this revelation in a life of glorification and the worship of God. These ancient goals we define in the metaphor of the present — turn on, tune in, drop out.” Harvard Professor Timothy Leary in 1966.

Winning a war? Winning wars is immoral, because all warfare is immoral! The higher, steeper mountain is pacifism! NOT fighting for freedom shows true courage: “Freedom’s just another word for/nothin’ left to lose.” Stopping warfare at any price is a higher calling than fighting for the freedom of others or for your own. Freedom was an illusion anyway: Janis Joplin’s sentiment was being propounded by the Skinnerian Psychology dominant in the universities back then. Humans were not much above the rats in mazes, whose actions could be controlled and predicted by white-coated scientists handing out rewards and punishments for correct decisions.

Victor Davis Hanson and others have noted the arrogant attitude of MAObama and his minions as stemming from Plato’s philosopher-kings, but I suspect that B.F. Skinner and his deterministic world-view are the real background. In either case, the result is the same: the leftists believe that they are the ones ordained to pull your strings for your own good.

For nearly 50 years, Baby Boomer leftists – a minority, but a well-organized and vocal minority – have been convinced of their moral superiority, a superiority raging against the basic nature of what they view as a corrupt America, when in fact their arrested adolescence has now led us to the brink of disaster in MAObama.

We have had 3 Boomer presidents, beginning with Billy Jeff “I can’t keep my barn-door closed” Clinton. The Cheeseburger President gave us the first attempt at Hell-th Care, along with the Lewinsky affair, and many others which were whispered about. “If it feels good, do it,” proclaimed the 1960’s, as if the idea were brand new.

This Idiot in Chief gave no thought about the possibility of being blackmailed, if anyone hostile to the U.S. found out about his extramarital affair(s). His own narcissism and hedonism came first. Self-centeredness wagged Clinton to the brink of impeachment.

Certainly G.W. Bush, the second Boomer president, was a step up from Clinton, in that any faults he had previously indulged were attacked and reformed. W. Bush, however, is not a leftist. Or at least not completely. He may not be a Conservative, and had been scarred by dallying with the nonsense of the 1960’s, but he was obviously better in character. One of his main failings, however, because of the general nature of Baby Boomers, came through in his (in)famous statement that Americans needed to keep on going to Disney World and not let terrorists disrupt their lives. The average person would not need to sacrifice.

The avoidance of sacrifice is the hallmark of the Boomer leftists: unions, Hispanics, Afro-Americans, women, “the poor,” etc. etc. etc. should never have to sacrifice. Only the rich should be forced to do without…because they are rich!

And so we come to BIG BRObama, whose Skinnerian yearning for control and an egalitarian utopia has plugged into every discredited radical tenet from the 1960’s. He is the ultimate Peter Pan, leading Leftist Lost Boys on a crusade against the Captain Hooks of Capitalism and National Defense. His smoking and general slacker persona – please name a real job in his resume’ – plug right into the tattooed lives of too many 20-and-30-something males, themselves partially employed and angry at society for not making them successes after graduating with degrees in the History of Rock Music.

In the movie About Schmidt Jack Nicholson’s character visits the bedroom of the 30-something loser who is about to become his son-in-law. In horror he notices, proudly taped to a mirror, various Certificates of Participation from grade school, and realizes that the loser is another victim of the Everyone’s A Winner (even if they aren’t) atmosphere of American education.

Whom would such people vote for?  Whom would they identify with?  A white-haired grandfatherly war hero, or somebody similar to themselves?  As in 1992 and 1996, Republican candidates were doomed to lose on generational aspects alone: and recall that in 2000 the “fortunate son” Al Gore technically was more popular than Texas National Guard fortunate son G.W. Bush.

And so we begin to understand the leftist wave which is still washing through America: a sneering adolescent rage against the real accomplishments of the previous generations of the Great Depression and World War II, a disparaging of success, an egalitarian resentment of ability and achievement, all of which need to be smoothed out by government bureaucrats, and a belief that victimhood trumps classic American rugged individualism.

I believe that in spite of their “kulcheral dominance” the Leftist Lost Boys remain a minority, that the “Silent Majority” of the 1960′s can reclaim the White House and the Congress, but only by ending their silence.

The Tea Parties and the rise of sites like RedState on the Internet may allow polite, hard-working Conservatives to end their frustration and to shrug off the leftist shackles now being forged in Washington  D.C. by the radicals placed in charge of our country by a Confederacy of Dunces.

We need to explain how human self-respect comes from work and accomplishment and proper behavior toward others: it is not something granted by a piece of paper from a government bureaucrat.

Various RedState members have in the last hours expressed fear and helplessness in the face of the rolling snowball of MAObama’s Hell-th Care Bill.

If it passes, and if the illegality of its passage is declared – improbably – constitutional, and if the FedGov attempts to enforce this monstrosity, you – an American – are not helpless!!!

Because every philosopher and patriot and soldier of freedom – from Epaminondas of Thebes through Charles Martel, Don Juan, John Locke, and Abraham Lincoln to Ludwig Von Mises and our troops in Afghanistan – every one of them would affirm from Heaven above that you would then have the right to stand up and refuse to obey such a monstrosity, and to rebel if necessary against the government!

This is our great Western Tradition, which started when average Athenians rebelled against the dictator Isagoras who was supported by Spartan troops, and drove them out of their city.  Although that happened 2500 years ago, we still bear their torch of freedom!  Or at least we are supposed to bear their torch!

We cannot let cowardly mediocrities like  B. Obama, N. Pelosi, H. Reid, and the other pusillanimous villains make us feel helpless!  We would be disgracing those Athenians who crawled up the rocks of the Acropolis to preserve their freedom.  We would be disgracing every American who has fallen for freedom from Lexington and Concord to Afghanistan today.

If this is the first step in a grab for dictatorial power, remember this: if we are brave, they cannot put us all in jail. If enough of us refuse to become or to remain sheep, and at the same time protest this attempt at dictatorship with a rubber-stamp Congress, we will preserve our Constitution and our freedom to live without a nanny-state micromanaging our lives!

And the odds that our police are unthinking robots, who would follow orders to enforce such a monstrosity, are – I believe firmly – very low.

So, no American should ever feel helpless!  We have too many examples before us to forbid such feelings!