By Timothy Carl
For a number of years I found it difficult to understand how the Democratic Party of 1828 led by Andrew Jackson could become a socialist party led by Barack Hussein Obama. After all, the parties of the early 1800’s were ultra-conservative and supportive of the US Constitution when compared to the two major parties of today. Right?
Aside from the fact that Andrew Jackson was a truly evil and vindictive figure, who mercilessly assaulted the American Indian populations of the United States, he surely could not have been a socialist! While it is true that in 1827 the British subject Robert Owen fathered the cooperative movement, while subsequently others followed a similar course, did Jackson and Martin van Buren (the political architect of the modern party system) actually follow their theories? No, this would be false.
However, the question remains, how did the Democratic Party devolve into a socialist bastion of public ownership, government control, a planned economy, and a lack of faith in individualism, among other socialistic tenants? The answer came to me not through my own devices, but simply by reading “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848” by Professor Daniel Walker Howe.
In his amazing book, Professor Howe states, “The Democratic and Whig Parties took very different stands on the subject of class. Echoing Jackson’s Bank Veto, Democrats called upon the working classes--a term they generally used in the plural and defined to include farmers and planters--to oppose the machinations and oppressions of no producers. Whigs insisted that there was no such thing as class conflict, that the different economic classes, like the sections of the Union, were interdependent, and in any case, class membership was fluid. Rhetoric of class conflict they deplored as demagogic. To some extent, urban workingmen chose their political party according to which analysis of class relations they found persuasive. Where industrialization had de-skilled and proletarianized workers, and where workers felt alienated from their employers because of ethnic differences, labor voted Democratic. Where workers felt that the system worked and that they enjoyed an opportunity to better themselves, they voted Whig.”
Howe goes on by stating that, “The success of the Democratic Party among white wage-earners owed more than a little, unfortunately, to the emphasis it placed on white supremacy. Democratic politicians found an effective way to synthesize their party’s appeal to two disparate groups, the northern working class and the southern planter class. They declared that solicitude for southern slaves distracted attention from the plight of northern “wage-slaves,” who, they insisted, were actually worse off.”
For Jackson and van Buren the party system they created and the course they navigated for the Democratic Party was a matter of power. President Jackson often spoke of the US Constitution, while upholding it only as long as it coincided with his policies. Perhaps there is no greater demonstration of this “convenient” support of the constitution than with the Supreme Courts decision in Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. (6 Pet.) 515 (1832).
In Worcester v. Georgia the Court ruled in favor of the Cherokee nation, stating that the nation was a "distinct community" and one "in which the laws of Georgia can have no force”. This decided federal supremacy over states concerning Indian affairs. It was also one example of a growing number of Court decisions supporting Indian rights.
Many historians attribute the quote, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" to President Jackson concerning the decision. Although many also dispute this quotation, Jackson’s response was to follow-up by initiating a policy Cherokee removal (also called the Trail of Tears). For those who are not familiar with this policy, it was the forced relocation of the Cherokee nation between 1836 to 1839. It was during this forced relocation that approximately 4,000 Cherokees died on their way under brutal circumstances and horrible humiliation from their ancestral homes to present day Oklahoma.
Andrew Jackson may or may not have said "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" However, it is clear when looking into Andrew Jackson’s presidency that he knew that the Supreme Court had no way of enforcing their decisions and that in spite of a short lived exception, the congress was controlled by the Democratic Party, and would turn a blind eye towards any instance when the president behaved in a manor which would be inconsistent with his oath of office. For example, on March 28, 1834 President Jackson was censured by the United States Senate for his questionable actions in removing US funds from the Bank of the United States. When the Democrats were re-instated as the majority party in the Senate, the censure was not just removed, the Democrats ordered it to be expunged, hoping that history would not realize it had ever happened. This reminds me a great deal of what happened in the Soviet Union and other socialist nations in the years to come in dealing with what would be deemed inconvenient history.
It was also the Jackson and van Buren duo who as founding fathers of the Democratic Party created the spoil system which enlarged the Democratic voter base while increasing the dependency of large numbers of citizens on government positions for their livelihoods. These same voters / government workers clearly knew what was expected of them if they were to continue to be paid: support the Democratic Party, its policies and its candidates..
It was also Jackson who instituted a “kitchen cabinet” to often bypass the cabinet which under the constitution had specific powers and had to be approved by the US Senate. Aside from the differences in the times and positions, is this much different than Obama’s czars?
If one would investigate the creation of the Democratic Party in much more depth than is the intent of this article, it becomes crystal clear how the Democratic Party of the early 1800’s could de-evolve into the socialist party of today. It was born of a theory that the best way to power is to make as many people dependent upon government jobs as possible, while simultaneously dividing the nation on class and racial grounds, making sure that such a coalition gives them at least a plurality and hopefully a majority. It is a party that at its inception demonstrated a distain for the constitution when it conflicted with party policies and supported individual rights only if it didn’t conflict with its maintenance of control. In fact, many of the political gimmicks which we look at with distain today can be attributed to the Jackson and van Buren duet of the early Democratic Party and the political system they created.
Looking back at history, it is not so hard to understand how the party of Jackson became the party of Obama and Lenin.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Rage Against the TSA Machine
By Jonah Goldberg 6/29/2011
The backdrop for my favorite science-fiction novels, Frank Herbert's "Dune" series, is something called the Butlerian Jihad. Some 10,000 years before the main events of the story take place, humanity rebelled against "thinking machines" -- intelligent computers -- controlling people's lives. The revolution was sparked because a computer decided to kill, without the consent of any human authority, the baby of a woman named Jehanne Butler.
I bring this up because I'm wondering why we can't have a Weberian Jihad.
Its namesake would be Jean Weber, a woman whose 105-pound, 95-year-old Florida mother was forced by airport security to remove her adult diaper in compliance with a body search. Weber's mother is dying of leukemia. She did not have another clean diaper for her trip.
The Transportation Security Administration belatedly denied forcing the removal of the diaper. Sari Koshetz, a spokeswoman for the TSA, insisted that the agency was sensitive and respectful in dealing with travelers, but she also told the Northwest Florida Daily News that procedures have to be the same for everyone: "TSA cannot exempt any group from screening because we know from intelligence that there are terrorists out there that would then exploit that vulnerability."
That's apparently why Drew Mandy, a 29-year-old disabled man with the mental capacity of a 2-year-old, had his 6-inch plastic toy hammer yanked from him by TSA on his way to Disney World. Mandy used the hammer as a security blanket of sorts. But the TSA agents insisted it could be used as a weapon. "It just killed me to have to throw it away because he's been carrying this, like, for 20 years," Mandy's father told WJBK in Detroit. What his dad doesn't understand is that if Islamic terrorists can't have plastic toy hammers, no one can.
Mandy's father says he wrote to the TSA and got an apology and a promise that agents would be retrained, but horror stories like these keep mounting. I'd tell you how thorough the TSA search was of blogger and advice columnist Amy Alkon (who collects such tales), but this is a family newspaper. Suffice it to say, your government left nothing to chance.
And that's what brought to mind "Dune's" Butlerian Jihad. The holy war against machines was also a war against a mind-set. "The target of the jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," a character explains. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments." In the aftermath, a new commandment was promulgated: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
It seems the first commandment of the TSA is that every mind must be trained in the likeness of a machine. "Garbage in, garbage out," is how computer programmers explain the way bad outputs are determined by bad inputs. Likewise, if TSA workers are programmed not to use common sense or discretion -- surprise! -- TSA workers won't use common sense or discretion.
Why not? One reason is we've institutionalized an irrational phobia against anything smacking of racial or religious profiling. Once you've decided that disproportionate scrutiny of certain groups is verboten, you'll have to hassle everyone equally. Thus we're told that a 95-year-old woman's diaper is just as likely to be the front line in the war on terror as a 22-year-old Pakistani's backpack.
Defenders of the TSA insist we can't abandon such mindlessness because if we do, clever terrorists will start using adult diapers as IEDs. Others say we know that profiling isn't effective because the Israelis don't use it.
Both lines of argument assume security personnel cannot be trusted to be much more than automatons, mindlessly acting on bureaucratic programming. If that's true of the current personnel, it's not because it has to be.
In fact, the reason the Israelis don't do simple profiling is that they use intelligent profiling conducted by highly intelligent screeners. At Ben Gurion International Airport, everyone's interviewed by security. Some are questioned at length, others quickly. The controlling variable is the "living judgment" -- to borrow a phrase from "Dune's" Herbert -- of the interviewers, and not wildly expensive full-body scanners and inflexible checklists.
Does anyone think that the personnel searching Jean Weber's mother honestly thought there might be a threat? Or is it more likely they were, machine-like, just doing what their garbage-in programming dictated?
The backdrop for my favorite science-fiction novels, Frank Herbert's "Dune" series, is something called the Butlerian Jihad. Some 10,000 years before the main events of the story take place, humanity rebelled against "thinking machines" -- intelligent computers -- controlling people's lives. The revolution was sparked because a computer decided to kill, without the consent of any human authority, the baby of a woman named Jehanne Butler.
I bring this up because I'm wondering why we can't have a Weberian Jihad.
Its namesake would be Jean Weber, a woman whose 105-pound, 95-year-old Florida mother was forced by airport security to remove her adult diaper in compliance with a body search. Weber's mother is dying of leukemia. She did not have another clean diaper for her trip.
The Transportation Security Administration belatedly denied forcing the removal of the diaper. Sari Koshetz, a spokeswoman for the TSA, insisted that the agency was sensitive and respectful in dealing with travelers, but she also told the Northwest Florida Daily News that procedures have to be the same for everyone: "TSA cannot exempt any group from screening because we know from intelligence that there are terrorists out there that would then exploit that vulnerability."
That's apparently why Drew Mandy, a 29-year-old disabled man with the mental capacity of a 2-year-old, had his 6-inch plastic toy hammer yanked from him by TSA on his way to Disney World. Mandy used the hammer as a security blanket of sorts. But the TSA agents insisted it could be used as a weapon. "It just killed me to have to throw it away because he's been carrying this, like, for 20 years," Mandy's father told WJBK in Detroit. What his dad doesn't understand is that if Islamic terrorists can't have plastic toy hammers, no one can.
Mandy's father says he wrote to the TSA and got an apology and a promise that agents would be retrained, but horror stories like these keep mounting. I'd tell you how thorough the TSA search was of blogger and advice columnist Amy Alkon (who collects such tales), but this is a family newspaper. Suffice it to say, your government left nothing to chance.
And that's what brought to mind "Dune's" Butlerian Jihad. The holy war against machines was also a war against a mind-set. "The target of the jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," a character explains. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments." In the aftermath, a new commandment was promulgated: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
It seems the first commandment of the TSA is that every mind must be trained in the likeness of a machine. "Garbage in, garbage out," is how computer programmers explain the way bad outputs are determined by bad inputs. Likewise, if TSA workers are programmed not to use common sense or discretion -- surprise! -- TSA workers won't use common sense or discretion.
Why not? One reason is we've institutionalized an irrational phobia against anything smacking of racial or religious profiling. Once you've decided that disproportionate scrutiny of certain groups is verboten, you'll have to hassle everyone equally. Thus we're told that a 95-year-old woman's diaper is just as likely to be the front line in the war on terror as a 22-year-old Pakistani's backpack.
Defenders of the TSA insist we can't abandon such mindlessness because if we do, clever terrorists will start using adult diapers as IEDs. Others say we know that profiling isn't effective because the Israelis don't use it.
Both lines of argument assume security personnel cannot be trusted to be much more than automatons, mindlessly acting on bureaucratic programming. If that's true of the current personnel, it's not because it has to be.
In fact, the reason the Israelis don't do simple profiling is that they use intelligent profiling conducted by highly intelligent screeners. At Ben Gurion International Airport, everyone's interviewed by security. Some are questioned at length, others quickly. The controlling variable is the "living judgment" -- to borrow a phrase from "Dune's" Herbert -- of the interviewers, and not wildly expensive full-body scanners and inflexible checklists.
Does anyone think that the personnel searching Jean Weber's mother honestly thought there might be a threat? Or is it more likely they were, machine-like, just doing what their garbage-in programming dictated?
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Looking back
For those of you who are sick of hearing Obama and the Dems propagate the fallacy that everything is "Bush's Fault", Educate yourselves:
Remember the day...
January 3rd, 2007 was the day the Democrats took over the Senate and the Congress:
At the time:
The DOW Jones closed at 12,621.77
The GDP for the previous quarter was 3.5%
The Unemployment rate was 4.6%
George Bush's Economic policies SET A RECORD of 52 STRAIGHT MONTHS of JOB CREATION!
Remember the day...
January 3rd, 2007 was the day that Barney Frank took over the House Financial Services Committee and Chris Dodd took over the Senate Banking Committee.
The economic meltdown that happened 15 months later was in what part of the economy?
BANKING AND FINANCIAL SERVICES!!!
THANK YOU DEMOCRATS for taking us from 13,000 DOW, 3.5 GDP and 4.6% Unemployment... to this CRISIS by (among MANY other things) dumping 5-6 TRILLION Dollars of toxic loans on the economy from YOUR Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac FIASCOES!
(BTW: Bush asked Congress 17 TIMES to stop Fannie & Freddie - starting in 2001 because it was "Financially risky for the US economy"):
http://www.sportstalkworld.com/showthread.php?16828-Dems-Cause-CRASH%21
And who took the THIRD highest pay-off from Fannie Mae AND Freddie Mac????
OBAMA
And who fought against reform of Fannie and Freddie???
The HYPOCRITE in Chief Obama
So when the kool-aid crowd blames Bush...
REMEMBER JANUARY 3rd, 2007.... THE DAY THE DEMOCRATS TOOK OVER!
Remember the day...
January 3rd, 2007 was the day the Democrats took over the Senate and the Congress:
At the time:
The DOW Jones closed at 12,621.77
The GDP for the previous quarter was 3.5%
The Unemployment rate was 4.6%
George Bush's Economic policies SET A RECORD of 52 STRAIGHT MONTHS of JOB CREATION!
Remember the day...
January 3rd, 2007 was the day that Barney Frank took over the House Financial Services Committee and Chris Dodd took over the Senate Banking Committee.
The economic meltdown that happened 15 months later was in what part of the economy?
BANKING AND FINANCIAL SERVICES!!!
THANK YOU DEMOCRATS for taking us from 13,000 DOW, 3.5 GDP and 4.6% Unemployment... to this CRISIS by (among MANY other things) dumping 5-6 TRILLION Dollars of toxic loans on the economy from YOUR Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac FIASCOES!
(BTW: Bush asked Congress 17 TIMES to stop Fannie & Freddie - starting in 2001 because it was "Financially risky for the US economy"):
http://www.sportstalkworld.com/showthread.php?16828-Dems-Cause-CRASH%21
And who took the THIRD highest pay-off from Fannie Mae AND Freddie Mac????
OBAMA
And who fought against reform of Fannie and Freddie???
The HYPOCRITE in Chief Obama
So when the kool-aid crowd blames Bush...
REMEMBER JANUARY 3rd, 2007.... THE DAY THE DEMOCRATS TOOK OVER!
Friday, May 20, 2011
History of Passive Reserve
Dena M. Campbell
Revoking the authorities and positions of elected officials and abolishing a destructive government is unprecedented in America's history. Since the founding, the people have accepted whatever the Government did with only protests. Why? Many don't know that only the people have the executive authority to abolish any form of government that is destructive to our rights, liberties and the principles of American heritage. The United States of America has always stood as a lighthouse on the hilltop of the world, shining its welcoming and protective beacon into the darkness of despair, giving hope to those drawn to its freedom and liberty.
But there are those who've been dimming that bright light for decades, who've crawled out of their gutters, cloaked in evil radicalism, to impose their own evil wills into the fabric of this nation. I have a fitting poem for every one of them;
And the dead of mind and soul shall reap their sorrow in the dark abyss in their core. Heeding not to the lighted truth of justice, but in the mud of confusion, truth's abstract is adored. Their ideologies stew and is poured into their shell. Deception and lies wrapped in hell's veils. Their days of destruction are numbered as liberty rings its bell. Woe to the liberals, whose folly is expelled.
~Dena M. Campbell
Revoking the authorities and positions of elected officials and abolishing a destructive government is unprecedented in America's history. Since the founding, the people have accepted whatever the Government did with only protests. Why? Many don't know that only the people have the executive authority to abolish any form of government that is destructive to our rights, liberties and the principles of American heritage. The United States of America has always stood as a lighthouse on the hilltop of the world, shining its welcoming and protective beacon into the darkness of despair, giving hope to those drawn to its freedom and liberty.
But there are those who've been dimming that bright light for decades, who've crawled out of their gutters, cloaked in evil radicalism, to impose their own evil wills into the fabric of this nation. I have a fitting poem for every one of them;
And the dead of mind and soul shall reap their sorrow in the dark abyss in their core. Heeding not to the lighted truth of justice, but in the mud of confusion, truth's abstract is adored. Their ideologies stew and is poured into their shell. Deception and lies wrapped in hell's veils. Their days of destruction are numbered as liberty rings its bell. Woe to the liberals, whose folly is expelled.
~Dena M. Campbell
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Our prayer for our Country
Father God, In the name of Jesus, (I) ask for the forgiveness of my sins, Please forgive me Lord, Fore (I) am A sinner with out excuse.
Thank you Lord for this forgiveness.
Father God, in the name of Jesus (I) want to dedicate the place that we all know as our heart of hearts, the very place that makes me what and who I am, to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate my brain, to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate my mind to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate my eyes and ears to Christ.
Father God in the name of Jesus (I) dedicate my whole body to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate all my life to Christ.
Father God in the name of Jesus (I) dedicate my Speech and thought to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate house and home to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate my spouse and children to Christ.
Father God, in the name of Jesus (I) dedicate ALL that (I) own, car’s, motorcycles, boats, land, livestock, buildings, and business, all of my entire net worth to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate the whole neighborhood and development where my home is located, to Christ..
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate the land, houses, people, all their possessions, and live stock of the whole neighborhood to Christ.
Father God in the name of Jesus (I) dedicate the town and city we live in, all the people, all their families, all their homes, all the Government, land, streets, buildings, businesses, churches, schools and utilities, to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate the entire county that our town is located, all the land from border to border, all the people, any farms, ranches, livestock and all the businesses, that is with in its boundaries to Christ.
Father God in the name of Jesus (I) dedicate the whole state that our county is in, from top to bottom side to side all the counties and all the towns, the whole of the state government and all the politicians in the state, all the police agents and fire departments and people to Christ.
Father God in the name of Jesus (I) dedicate our country The United States of America and all its proprieties, Islands, seas, lakes, rivers, oceans, from sea to sea and from border to border to Christ, In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate all the content of this country, every road, every business, every person, every house and home, the entire gross national product, of our God blessed country, to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate all that we are as a country and all that we do as a country, to Christ. In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate our military, and all our military hardware, all our military families and friends, to Christ.
In the Name of Jesus (I) dedicate our government, from the top to the bottom, from the dogcatchers to the president, to Christ. In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate all the courts from the lowest to the Supreme Courts of the United States, all the judges, lawyers, officers of the court and the buildings they are in, to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate all of our founding documents, treaties, laws, all that make us the greatest country on earth, to Christ.
God has promised us this.
(If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.) 2 Chronicles 7:14
I am starting with this simple prayer; our country needs God’s healing.
Steve Rago
Thank you Lord for this forgiveness.
Father God, in the name of Jesus (I) want to dedicate the place that we all know as our heart of hearts, the very place that makes me what and who I am, to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate my brain, to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate my mind to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate my eyes and ears to Christ.
Father God in the name of Jesus (I) dedicate my whole body to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate all my life to Christ.
Father God in the name of Jesus (I) dedicate my Speech and thought to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate house and home to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate my spouse and children to Christ.
Father God, in the name of Jesus (I) dedicate ALL that (I) own, car’s, motorcycles, boats, land, livestock, buildings, and business, all of my entire net worth to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate the whole neighborhood and development where my home is located, to Christ..
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate the land, houses, people, all their possessions, and live stock of the whole neighborhood to Christ.
Father God in the name of Jesus (I) dedicate the town and city we live in, all the people, all their families, all their homes, all the Government, land, streets, buildings, businesses, churches, schools and utilities, to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate the entire county that our town is located, all the land from border to border, all the people, any farms, ranches, livestock and all the businesses, that is with in its boundaries to Christ.
Father God in the name of Jesus (I) dedicate the whole state that our county is in, from top to bottom side to side all the counties and all the towns, the whole of the state government and all the politicians in the state, all the police agents and fire departments and people to Christ.
Father God in the name of Jesus (I) dedicate our country The United States of America and all its proprieties, Islands, seas, lakes, rivers, oceans, from sea to sea and from border to border to Christ, In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate all the content of this country, every road, every business, every person, every house and home, the entire gross national product, of our God blessed country, to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate all that we are as a country and all that we do as a country, to Christ. In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate our military, and all our military hardware, all our military families and friends, to Christ.
In the Name of Jesus (I) dedicate our government, from the top to the bottom, from the dogcatchers to the president, to Christ. In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate all the courts from the lowest to the Supreme Courts of the United States, all the judges, lawyers, officers of the court and the buildings they are in, to Christ.
In the name of Jesus (I) dedicate all of our founding documents, treaties, laws, all that make us the greatest country on earth, to Christ.
God has promised us this.
(If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.) 2 Chronicles 7:14
I am starting with this simple prayer; our country needs God’s healing.
Steve Rago
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Shun the Expert and Pass the Ammunition
By John Ransom
3/17/2011
The market lost 242 points off the Dow on Wednesday, a rather modest down day for a stock market that has seen plenty of catastrophes much greater than the one playing out in Japan.
But by mid afternoon a news reader posing as an expert on Fox was so spun up that he told viewers in a shaky voice that “the only thing that we have to fear is fear itself.” In the context of our generation, that sounded more like the opening in a Nigerian oil-scam email that it did a clarion call to courage.
The difference between what the news reader meant and what we heard makes me glad.
Maybe that giant flushing sound we’ve all felt the last two years is a type of progress for us after all.
70 years after the New Deal, the public is waiting around for a true deal; a deal calculated for real people, not a welfare line for government workers and ideological scamsters.
“No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life” Lord Salisbury told us “as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe.”
For close to a century experts have told us to put our trust in government. We have a host of them in our life everyday: Federal Reserve bankers, Education Department officials, Union economists, scientists on the government dole, Energy Department officials, all here for our own good.
Yet, government doesn’t even pretend to try to solve the very problems they claim to care about. The “experts” at the EPA designed a tax on carbon to combat so-called global warming and even they won’t claim that the tax will bring down the earth’s temperature.
Still, a failed result won’t stop the experts from insisting on this tax for our own good.
As a consequence of the care of so many government experts who insist on doing stuff for our own good, we are now at a point where nothing is true.
Men marry men and we call it marriage. Doctors kill babies and we call it choice. We practice targeted discrimination against certain classes of people, under the law, and we call it justice.
We ban the religion of some in the public square as a matter of taste and call it a moral good.
In the name of safety, the government takes away guns for self-defense, but sues states for enforcing federal immigration laws.
We “improve” public education by lowering standards rather than raising them; and we design a medical and retirement "safety net" that threatens not just life, but everything our country was built on: liberty, opportunity, property.
My religion tells me to fear not. That’s why I cling to it. Others have done the same for 2000 years
My gun too tells me to fear not, although its ammunition isn’t as refined as the word of God. Good men have armed themselves for the 500 years since Europeans first lived in North America.
So, I cling to the gun as well.
Expert government opinion? It’s been king for 70 years and it has a very spotty record.
Truth, I know, always resides wherever brave men still have ammunition. And I'll take truth over experts everyday.
3/17/2011
The market lost 242 points off the Dow on Wednesday, a rather modest down day for a stock market that has seen plenty of catastrophes much greater than the one playing out in Japan.
But by mid afternoon a news reader posing as an expert on Fox was so spun up that he told viewers in a shaky voice that “the only thing that we have to fear is fear itself.” In the context of our generation, that sounded more like the opening in a Nigerian oil-scam email that it did a clarion call to courage.
The difference between what the news reader meant and what we heard makes me glad.
Maybe that giant flushing sound we’ve all felt the last two years is a type of progress for us after all.
70 years after the New Deal, the public is waiting around for a true deal; a deal calculated for real people, not a welfare line for government workers and ideological scamsters.
“No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life” Lord Salisbury told us “as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe.”
For close to a century experts have told us to put our trust in government. We have a host of them in our life everyday: Federal Reserve bankers, Education Department officials, Union economists, scientists on the government dole, Energy Department officials, all here for our own good.
Yet, government doesn’t even pretend to try to solve the very problems they claim to care about. The “experts” at the EPA designed a tax on carbon to combat so-called global warming and even they won’t claim that the tax will bring down the earth’s temperature.
Still, a failed result won’t stop the experts from insisting on this tax for our own good.
As a consequence of the care of so many government experts who insist on doing stuff for our own good, we are now at a point where nothing is true.
Men marry men and we call it marriage. Doctors kill babies and we call it choice. We practice targeted discrimination against certain classes of people, under the law, and we call it justice.
We ban the religion of some in the public square as a matter of taste and call it a moral good.
In the name of safety, the government takes away guns for self-defense, but sues states for enforcing federal immigration laws.
We “improve” public education by lowering standards rather than raising them; and we design a medical and retirement "safety net" that threatens not just life, but everything our country was built on: liberty, opportunity, property.
My religion tells me to fear not. That’s why I cling to it. Others have done the same for 2000 years
My gun too tells me to fear not, although its ammunition isn’t as refined as the word of God. Good men have armed themselves for the 500 years since Europeans first lived in North America.
So, I cling to the gun as well.
Expert government opinion? It’s been king for 70 years and it has a very spotty record.
Truth, I know, always resides wherever brave men still have ammunition. And I'll take truth over experts everyday.
Friday, March 11, 2011
Liberty Defined
"((Democracy)) is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
- Benjamin Franklin, 1759
Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
- Benjamin Franklin, 1759
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Do you remember this
The Conservative Pledge
1. To make sure no funds are appropriated to implement any government healthcare system.
2. To balance the budget for FY 2012.
3. To reduce funding for every federal department (except Defense) by at least 20%.
4. To eliminate every federal program that cannot clearly justify its existence to its responsible Congressional Oversight Committees.
5. To shut down the Department of Education and return that power to the state departments of education.
6. To shut down the Department of Energy and return that function to the states.
7. To shut down the Department of Agriculture, transfer imported food inspections to Customs and remaining functions to state departments of agriculture.
8. To begin the process of privatizing responsibility for one’s own retirement.
9. To de-fund the Environmental Protection Agency and return that power to the states.
10. To de-fund all other agencies, programs and operations of the federal government not specifically authorized by Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.
11. To return use and control of all undeveloped federal lands and coastal territory to the respective states.
12. To respect the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution by returning all power and responsibility possible to the several states.
13. To respect the territory of the United States by fully securing its borders and using our military forces to prevent invasion of our borders.
14. To complete our missile defense system and SELL all necessary components to friendly countries. Also, to bring all our troops home except for those requested, AND PAID FOR, by friendly countries, and station them along our borders.
15. To withdraw from all multi-national alliances and establish new alliances with each individual country based on reciprocal treatment. (We’ll treat you exactly the way you treat us.)
I say get to work doing this PLEDGE. Or be replaced ASAP
1. To make sure no funds are appropriated to implement any government healthcare system.
2. To balance the budget for FY 2012.
3. To reduce funding for every federal department (except Defense) by at least 20%.
4. To eliminate every federal program that cannot clearly justify its existence to its responsible Congressional Oversight Committees.
5. To shut down the Department of Education and return that power to the state departments of education.
6. To shut down the Department of Energy and return that function to the states.
7. To shut down the Department of Agriculture, transfer imported food inspections to Customs and remaining functions to state departments of agriculture.
8. To begin the process of privatizing responsibility for one’s own retirement.
9. To de-fund the Environmental Protection Agency and return that power to the states.
10. To de-fund all other agencies, programs and operations of the federal government not specifically authorized by Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.
11. To return use and control of all undeveloped federal lands and coastal territory to the respective states.
12. To respect the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution by returning all power and responsibility possible to the several states.
13. To respect the territory of the United States by fully securing its borders and using our military forces to prevent invasion of our borders.
14. To complete our missile defense system and SELL all necessary components to friendly countries. Also, to bring all our troops home except for those requested, AND PAID FOR, by friendly countries, and station them along our borders.
15. To withdraw from all multi-national alliances and establish new alliances with each individual country based on reciprocal treatment. (We’ll treat you exactly the way you treat us.)
I say get to work doing this PLEDGE. Or be replaced ASAP
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
How to Understand Rush Limbaugh
Wilfred M. McClay From issue: February 2011
One of the many strategic errors made by the Obama administration in the early days of 2009 was its decision to take on talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh—though it was, perhaps, hard to blame the president and his people for trying. After all, they were riding the wave of a big electoral win and feeling pretty invincible, with large majorities in both houses of Congress and a messiah in the White House, and Limbaugh had just stunned the country, days before Obama was inaugurated, by summarizing his feelings about the new president in four simple words: “I hope he fails.” Limbaugh impatiently brushed aside the happy talk about compromise and bipartisan cooperation and scoffed at the claim that Obama was a pragmatic, post-ideological, post-partisan, post-racial conciliator and healer. Instead, he saw every reason to believe that Obama would aggressively pursue a leftist dream agenda: an exponential expansion of government’s size and power, a reordering of the American economic system, and a dismantling of America’s role as a world power. Limbaugh was not alone in such views, but he was the only major figure on the right willing to stick his neck out at a time when the rest of the nation seemed dazed into acquiescence by the so-far impeccably staged Obama ascendancy.
Such was the mood of the moment that it seemed a sullen breach of etiquette to utter any such criticism. In any event, the White House quickly concluded that Limbaugh’s statement was a rare blunder and that hay was to be made of it. What better way to sow division among the Republicans, and confine them to a tiny corner of American political life, than to identify Rush Limbaugh as the “real head” of their party and brand him as an unpatriotic extremist and sore loser—or, in the light-touch description of longtime Clinton adviser Paul Begala, as “a corpulent drug addict with an AM radio talk show”? If they could succeed in this angle of attack, they would kill two birds with one stone, marginalizing their most popular antagonist while rendering the opposition party impotent with embarrassment and internal squabbling. Each Republican would face a choice of embracing the glittering “new age” of Obama and gathering a few scraps from beneath the Democratic table or following Rush into the fever swamps of an embittered permanent minority and getting nothing at all.
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The Democrats’ strategy backfired. Limbaugh’s vocal opposition to the stimulus package, which he dubbed “Porkulus,” helped galvanize a unanimous Republican vote in opposition—an astonishing achievement of partisan unity that would be repeated in subsequent lopsided votes on health care and other issues—and would lay the blame for these failed policies entirely on the Democrats’ doorstep, culminating in a huge and decisive electoral pushback against the Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections. The question of whether Limbaugh was or is the “real leader” of the Republican Party suddenly became far less interesting to the White House and its friends in the media, perhaps because the answer was turning out to be something different from what they had expected. Limbaugh had goaded them into elevating his own importance; and in focusing on him and other putative “leaders,” they blinded themselves to the spontaneous and broad-based popular revolt that was rising against them.
In retrospect, the amazing part of the story is how thoroughly the White House misunderstood Limbaugh’s appeal, his staying power, and his approach to issues. It also points to a curious fact about Limbaugh’s standing in the mind of much of the American media and the American left. Even though they talk about him all the time, he’s the man who isn’t quite there. By which I mean that there is a stubborn unwillingness, both wishful and self-defeating, to recognize Limbaugh for what he is, take him seriously, and grant him his legitimate due. Many of his detractors have never even listened to his show, for example. Some of his critics regularly refer to him as Rush “Lim-bough” (like a tree limb), as if his name is so obscure to them that they cannot even remember how to pronounce it.
In short, he is never quite acknowledged as the formidable figure he clearly is. Instead, he is dismissed in one of two ways—either as a comic buffoon, a passing phenomenon in the hit parade of American pop culture, or as a mean-spirited apostle of hate who appeals to a tiny lunatic fringe. These two views are not quite compatible, but they have one thing in common: they both aim to push him to the margins and render him illegitimate, unworthy of respectful attention. This shunning actually works in Limbaugh’s favor because it creates the very conditions that cause him to be chronically underestimated and keeps his opposition chronically off-balance. Indeed, Limbaugh’s use of comedy and irony and showmanship are integral to his modus operandi, the judo by which he draws in his opponents and then uses their own force to up-end them. And unless you make an effort to hear voices outside the echo chamber of the mainstream media, you won’t have any inkling of what Limbaugh is all about or of how widely his reach and appeal extend.
The influence is real and pervasive. Like it or not, Rush Limbaugh is unarguably one of the most important figures in the political and cultural life of the United States in the past three decades. His national radio show has been on the air steadily for nearly 23 years and continues to command a huge following, upward of 20 million listeners a week on 600 stations. The only reason it is not even bigger is that his success has spawned so many imitators, a small army of talkers such as Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, and so on, who inevitably siphon off some of his market share. He has been doing this show for three hours a day, five days a week, without guests (except on rare occasions), using only the dramatic ebb and flow of his monologues, his always inventive patter with callers, his “updates,” song parodies, mimicry, and various other elements in his DJ’s bag of tricks.
He is equipped with a resonant and instantly recognizable baritone voice and an unusually quick and creative mind, a keen and independent grasp of political issues and political personalities, and—what is perhaps his greatest talent—an astonishing ability to reformulate complex ideas in direct, vivid, and often eloquent ways, always delivering his thoughts live and unscripted, out there on the high wire. He conducts his show in an air of high-spiritedness and relaxed good humor, clearly enjoying himself, always willing to be spontaneous and unpredictable, even though he is aware that every word he utters on the air is being recorded and tracked by his political enemies in the hope that he will slip up and say something career-destroying. Limbaugh the judo master is delighted to make note of this surveillance, with the same delight he expresses when one of his “outrageous” sound bites makes the rounds of the mainstream media, and he can then play back all the sputtering but eerily uniform reactions from the mainstream commentators, turning it back on them with a well-placed witticism.
There are countless examples of his judo skills at work, but perhaps the most spectacular was the one in the fall of 2007, in which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sought to humiliate Limbaugh only to have the humiliation returned to him threefold. Limbaugh had a caller who complained that the mainstream media would not interview “real soldiers” in Iraq but instead sought out the disgruntled. Limbaugh, in agreement, cited the case of Jesse MacBeth, an Army enlistee who had failed to make it through boot camp but lied about his lack of real military service in order to speak credibly at anti-war rallies. Limbaugh called MacBeth, accurately, a “phony soldier.” But his statement was quickly pulled out of context by Media Matters, one of the Democratic groups that monitors Limbaugh’s every word, and was reframed as a swipe at all soldiers who had misgivings about the war. Limbaugh was denounced in the House for “sliming” the “brave men and women.” Reid used the occasion to address the Senate and deplore Limbaugh’s “unpatriotic comments” for going “beyond the pale of decency” and then wrote a letter to Limbaugh’s syndicator demanding that the talk-show host be repudiated.
But Reid overplayed his hand. Far from running from the controversy, Limbaugh embraced it. He read Reid’s letter on the air, revealing it for the dishonest and bullying document it was, and then, in a stroke of pure genius, announced that he would auction it on eBay and give the proceeds to a military charitable foundation. The letter was sold for $2.1 million, and Rush matched the contribution with his own $2.1 million. Reid could only express his pleasure that the letter had done so much good. He had been flipped onto his back.
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Given Limbaugh’s talents and achievements, one would have thought that even his detractors would have an interest in knowing more about him: who he is, where he came from, and why he has acquired and kept such a large and devoted following. But in fact, there has been a remarkable lack of curiosity on that score and little incentive to go beyond the sort of routine demonization that only strengthens him. It was not until 2010 that a reasonably fair-minded account of Limbaugh’s life and work, by the journalist Zev Chafets, appeared in print.1 As Chafets reports in the book’s acknowledgments, it was not easy finding a publisher willing to take on such a book, unless it had the words “idiot” or “liar” in the title, since, as one friend explained it to him, “I have to go out for lunch in this city every day.” So call it a politically correct lack of curiosity, then; but whatever the reason, it has meant our missing out on a fascinating story of a very American life.
But not missing out entirely, since much of the story comes across in Limbaugh’s own account of himself on his show. Anyone can figure out from listening to the show that he was and is a quintessential radio guy, a product of that fluid, wide-open, insecure, enterprising, somewhat hardscrabble, somewhat gonzo world of the AM radio disc jockey, in which salesmanship and showmanship were two names for the same thing and in which incessant changes of name and employer were the most predictable element of life: “packing and unpacking, town to town, up and down the dial” in the words of the theme song of WKRP in Cincinnati, the 1970s TV sitcom that captured some of the knockout zaniness of that world. Limbaugh was smitten early and permanently with the romance of radio and never really wanted to do anything else with his life, including bothering to go to college, let alone taking on his birthright, the leadership of the family law firm.
It was a business one could learn only in the doing. While still in high school, he started working at KMGO-AM in his hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, spinning discs in the afternoons under the name “Rusty Sharpe.” Later, he was “Jeff Christie,” morning-drive DJ on WIXZ-AM in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, where he hosted “The Solid Rockin’ Gold Show.” There was a move to Kansas City, where he would eventually begin dabbling in political discussion, and then finally KFBK in Sacramento, where he followed in the footsteps of the unpleasantly provocative Morton Downey Jr. and was able to do politically oriented talk as a solo act without guests and using his own name, finally developing the bombastic Limbaugh persona (“El Rushbo” with “talent on loan from Gawww-duh”) and the familiar epithets (“Feminazis” and “Environmentalist Wackos”) applied to his designated opponents. In Sacramento, he perfected his formula and proved a great success, tripling Downey’s already sizable audience and attracting the attention of syndicator Ed McLaughlin, who in 1988 brought him to WABC in New York to do The Rush Limbaugh Program, 21 years after those first broadcasts back at KMGO.
On arriving in New York, Limbaugh immediately set to work building his affiliate network and his general visibility, charging forward indefatigably on all fronts at once. He wasted no time plunging the show into the 1988 presidential campaign, branding Michael Dukakis “The Loser” and assigning him update theme music drawn from the Beatles’ “I’m a Loser,” emphasizing the refrain: “ . . . and I’m not what I appear to be,” a dig at the Massachusetts governor’s futile effort to disguise or downplay his liberalism. He began giving one-man “Rush to Excellence” tours around the country. These efforts paid off very quickly. By 1990, the radio-show audience had hit 20 million; his first book, The Way Things Ought to Be, was released in 1992 and sold 2 million copies in six weeks, making it at that point the fastest-selling volume in publishing history.
But he really hit his stride with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. The two men seemed to have an elective non-affinity, perhaps because they were both baby-boomer know-it-alls from the same general region of the country (Limbaugh from southeastern Missouri, Clinton from Arkansas), and perhaps because Limbaugh’s unprecedented and growing influence was so intensely and visibly annoying to the ambitious young politician. Clinton, after all, had come into office borne on a wave of mainstream hosannas, and expectations were high after the 12-year Republican control of the White House. But Limbaugh turned out to be a serious obstacle to him every step of the way, proving to be a major force in rallying public opinion against Clinton’s own health-care overhaul and helping to lay the groundwork for the anti-Clinton 1994 electoral tsunami. The newly elected Republicans even made him an honorary member of the freshman class of 1995, an honor he coveted, even though he has always thought of himself as a conservative rather than a Republican.
For some time, the early Clinton years represented Limbaugh’s high point. Clinton pushed back, effectively (if outrageously) associating Limbaugh and talk radio with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and winning re-election in 1996 in a walk, running against an aging and ineffective Bob Dole. That did not mean that Limbaugh let up, and the events surrounding Monica Lewinsky in 1998 gave him a rich new target, as did the electoral chaos of 2000. But a cluster of personal issues, including charges relating to the abuse of prescription drugs and a catastrophic loss of his hearing, all seemed to conspire to place a ceiling on his influence. There was a noticeable ebbing of energy in the show at times, and it was not immune to the fracturing effect the Bush 43 presidency had on conservatives, with internal differences emerging on issues ranging from the prescription-drug entitlement to the Iraq war to immigration reform.
But all that seems to have changed, and Limbaugh clearly has the wind at his back again with a newly growing audience. Like the radio guy he is and always will be, he is a survivor. He has wisely chosen to avoid television for the most part after a syndicated television show successful with audiences (and produced by Roger Ailes in the early 1990s in a warm-up for Ailes’s unprecedented triumph as the creator of the Fox News Channel) proved less so with advertisers. Events, too, have moved his way. The abject failure of the John McCain campaign vindicated many of Limbaugh’s longstanding complaints about the more moderate wing of the Republican Party. And the rise of Obama has proved nothing less than a godsend for him—though only because he had the boldness to seize the opportunity it presented.
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Occasionally, Limbaugh will talk on his show about radio, past, present, and future, and you understand that his great success is no accident. Able to draw with minuteness on more than four decades of work experience, he has achieved a comprehensive and detailed grasp of the technical, performing, and business dimensions of the industry, all of which give him an unmatched understanding of the medium and its possibilities. But it is more than a wonk’s understanding. He has a deep-in-the-bones feeling for what is magical about radio at its best—its immediacy, its simplicity, its ability to create the richness of imagined places and moments with just a few well-placed elements of sound, its incomparable advantages as a medium for storytelling with the pride of place that it gives to the spoken word and the individual human voice, abstracted from all other considerations. He probably also understands why he himself is not nearly so good on TV, faced as he is with the classic McLuhanesque problem of a hot personality in a cool medium.
He also understood why predictions of radio’s demise have repeatedly been proved wrong, why AM radio has lent itself particularly well to the kind of simple and easy interactivity on which talk thrives, and why the movement of talk radio into the AM band would have the same revitalizing effect there as an urban homesteader turning a decrepit old townhouse into a place of elegance and commodity. AM radio was supposed to have died off years ago due to its weak and tinny sound. But the takeover by talk in the early 1990s, primarily due to Limbaugh, managed to transform a decaying and outdated infrastructure into the perfect vehicle for the medium’s own aspirations.
It could not have happened without the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. Interactive talk of one sort or another had been around since the earliest days of radio, and there had been, of course, plenty of local talk shows, mostly conservative in flavor, on many stations. But the Fairness Doctrine kept them within bounds, obliging stations holding broadcast licenses to offer equal representation to all sides of a controversial issue and to provide coverage to issues of local importance. They imposed these requirements on the ground that channels were limited and so it was necessary to ensure that they served the larger public interest.
But with the vast and rapid growth of cable and satellite television and radio and other new media, this requirement no longer made any sense. The doctrine was abolished, and the way was opened for a show like Limbaugh’s to go into national syndication. His show could never have been sustained with the doctrine in place, a fact that has helped fuel the occasional expressions of Democratic interest—most recently coming from Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois—in its reinstitution.
It would be hard, though, to accomplish that without sparking something like an actual revolt in this country. Talk radio is, implicitly, talk-back radio—a medium tuned into during times of frustration, exasperation, even desperation, by people who do not find that their thoughts, sentiments, values, and loyalties are fairly or even minimally represented in the “official” media. Such feelings may be justified or unjustified, wholesome or noxious; but in any event they are likely to fester and curdle in the absence of some outlet in which they can be expressed. Talk radio is a place where people can go to hear opinions freely expressed that they will not hear elsewhere, and where they can come away with a sense of confirmation that they are not alone, are not crazy, and are not wrong to think and feel such things. The existence of such frustrations and fears are the sine qua non of talk radio; it would not exist without them.
But that is not all. Without Limbaugh’s influence, talk radio might well have become a dreary medium of loud voices, relentless anger, and seething resentment, the sort of thing that the New York screamer Joe Pyne had pioneered in the 50s and 60s—“go gargle with razor blades,” he liked to tell his callers as he hung up on them—and that one can still see pop up in some of Limbaugh’s lesser epigones. Or it might have descended to the sometimes amusing but corrosive nonstop vulgarity of a Howard Stern. Limbaugh himself can be edgy, though almost always within PG-rated boundaries. But what he gave talk radio was a sense of sheer fun, of lightness, humor, and wit, whether indulging in his self-parodying Muhammad Ali–like braggadocio, drawing on his vast array of American pop-cultural reference points, or, in moving impromptu mini-sermons, reminding his listeners of the need to stay hopeful, work hard, and count their blessings as Americans. In such moments, and in many other moments besides, he reminds one of the affirmative spirit of Ronald Reagan and, like Reagan, reminds his listeners of the better angels of their nature. He transmutes the anger and frustration of millions of Americans into something more constructive.
The critics may be correct that the flourishing of talk radio is a sign of something wrong in our culture. But they mistake the effect for the cause. Talk radio is not the cause, but the corrective. In our own time, and in the person of Rush Limbaugh, along with others of his talk-radio brethren, a problem of long-standing in our culture has reached a critical stage: the growing loss of confidence in our elite cultural institutions, including the media, universities, and the agencies of government. The posture and policies of the Obama presidency, using temporary majorities and legislative trickery to shove through massive unread bills that will likely damage the nation and may subvert the Constitution, have brought this distrust to a higher level. The medium of talk radio has played a critical role in giving articulate shape and force to the resistance. If it is at times a crude and bumptious medium, it sometimes has to be, to disarm the false pieties and self-righteous gravitas in which our current elites too often clothe themselves. Genuinely democratic speech tends to be just that way, in case we have forgotten.
About the Author
Wilfred M. McClay is the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His article “ ‘The Report of our Death was Greatly Exaggerated’: The Conservative Resurgence” appeared in the November 2010 issue.
One of the many strategic errors made by the Obama administration in the early days of 2009 was its decision to take on talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh—though it was, perhaps, hard to blame the president and his people for trying. After all, they were riding the wave of a big electoral win and feeling pretty invincible, with large majorities in both houses of Congress and a messiah in the White House, and Limbaugh had just stunned the country, days before Obama was inaugurated, by summarizing his feelings about the new president in four simple words: “I hope he fails.” Limbaugh impatiently brushed aside the happy talk about compromise and bipartisan cooperation and scoffed at the claim that Obama was a pragmatic, post-ideological, post-partisan, post-racial conciliator and healer. Instead, he saw every reason to believe that Obama would aggressively pursue a leftist dream agenda: an exponential expansion of government’s size and power, a reordering of the American economic system, and a dismantling of America’s role as a world power. Limbaugh was not alone in such views, but he was the only major figure on the right willing to stick his neck out at a time when the rest of the nation seemed dazed into acquiescence by the so-far impeccably staged Obama ascendancy.
Such was the mood of the moment that it seemed a sullen breach of etiquette to utter any such criticism. In any event, the White House quickly concluded that Limbaugh’s statement was a rare blunder and that hay was to be made of it. What better way to sow division among the Republicans, and confine them to a tiny corner of American political life, than to identify Rush Limbaugh as the “real head” of their party and brand him as an unpatriotic extremist and sore loser—or, in the light-touch description of longtime Clinton adviser Paul Begala, as “a corpulent drug addict with an AM radio talk show”? If they could succeed in this angle of attack, they would kill two birds with one stone, marginalizing their most popular antagonist while rendering the opposition party impotent with embarrassment and internal squabbling. Each Republican would face a choice of embracing the glittering “new age” of Obama and gathering a few scraps from beneath the Democratic table or following Rush into the fever swamps of an embittered permanent minority and getting nothing at all.
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The Democrats’ strategy backfired. Limbaugh’s vocal opposition to the stimulus package, which he dubbed “Porkulus,” helped galvanize a unanimous Republican vote in opposition—an astonishing achievement of partisan unity that would be repeated in subsequent lopsided votes on health care and other issues—and would lay the blame for these failed policies entirely on the Democrats’ doorstep, culminating in a huge and decisive electoral pushback against the Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections. The question of whether Limbaugh was or is the “real leader” of the Republican Party suddenly became far less interesting to the White House and its friends in the media, perhaps because the answer was turning out to be something different from what they had expected. Limbaugh had goaded them into elevating his own importance; and in focusing on him and other putative “leaders,” they blinded themselves to the spontaneous and broad-based popular revolt that was rising against them.
In retrospect, the amazing part of the story is how thoroughly the White House misunderstood Limbaugh’s appeal, his staying power, and his approach to issues. It also points to a curious fact about Limbaugh’s standing in the mind of much of the American media and the American left. Even though they talk about him all the time, he’s the man who isn’t quite there. By which I mean that there is a stubborn unwillingness, both wishful and self-defeating, to recognize Limbaugh for what he is, take him seriously, and grant him his legitimate due. Many of his detractors have never even listened to his show, for example. Some of his critics regularly refer to him as Rush “Lim-bough” (like a tree limb), as if his name is so obscure to them that they cannot even remember how to pronounce it.
In short, he is never quite acknowledged as the formidable figure he clearly is. Instead, he is dismissed in one of two ways—either as a comic buffoon, a passing phenomenon in the hit parade of American pop culture, or as a mean-spirited apostle of hate who appeals to a tiny lunatic fringe. These two views are not quite compatible, but they have one thing in common: they both aim to push him to the margins and render him illegitimate, unworthy of respectful attention. This shunning actually works in Limbaugh’s favor because it creates the very conditions that cause him to be chronically underestimated and keeps his opposition chronically off-balance. Indeed, Limbaugh’s use of comedy and irony and showmanship are integral to his modus operandi, the judo by which he draws in his opponents and then uses their own force to up-end them. And unless you make an effort to hear voices outside the echo chamber of the mainstream media, you won’t have any inkling of what Limbaugh is all about or of how widely his reach and appeal extend.
The influence is real and pervasive. Like it or not, Rush Limbaugh is unarguably one of the most important figures in the political and cultural life of the United States in the past three decades. His national radio show has been on the air steadily for nearly 23 years and continues to command a huge following, upward of 20 million listeners a week on 600 stations. The only reason it is not even bigger is that his success has spawned so many imitators, a small army of talkers such as Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, and so on, who inevitably siphon off some of his market share. He has been doing this show for three hours a day, five days a week, without guests (except on rare occasions), using only the dramatic ebb and flow of his monologues, his always inventive patter with callers, his “updates,” song parodies, mimicry, and various other elements in his DJ’s bag of tricks.
He is equipped with a resonant and instantly recognizable baritone voice and an unusually quick and creative mind, a keen and independent grasp of political issues and political personalities, and—what is perhaps his greatest talent—an astonishing ability to reformulate complex ideas in direct, vivid, and often eloquent ways, always delivering his thoughts live and unscripted, out there on the high wire. He conducts his show in an air of high-spiritedness and relaxed good humor, clearly enjoying himself, always willing to be spontaneous and unpredictable, even though he is aware that every word he utters on the air is being recorded and tracked by his political enemies in the hope that he will slip up and say something career-destroying. Limbaugh the judo master is delighted to make note of this surveillance, with the same delight he expresses when one of his “outrageous” sound bites makes the rounds of the mainstream media, and he can then play back all the sputtering but eerily uniform reactions from the mainstream commentators, turning it back on them with a well-placed witticism.
There are countless examples of his judo skills at work, but perhaps the most spectacular was the one in the fall of 2007, in which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sought to humiliate Limbaugh only to have the humiliation returned to him threefold. Limbaugh had a caller who complained that the mainstream media would not interview “real soldiers” in Iraq but instead sought out the disgruntled. Limbaugh, in agreement, cited the case of Jesse MacBeth, an Army enlistee who had failed to make it through boot camp but lied about his lack of real military service in order to speak credibly at anti-war rallies. Limbaugh called MacBeth, accurately, a “phony soldier.” But his statement was quickly pulled out of context by Media Matters, one of the Democratic groups that monitors Limbaugh’s every word, and was reframed as a swipe at all soldiers who had misgivings about the war. Limbaugh was denounced in the House for “sliming” the “brave men and women.” Reid used the occasion to address the Senate and deplore Limbaugh’s “unpatriotic comments” for going “beyond the pale of decency” and then wrote a letter to Limbaugh’s syndicator demanding that the talk-show host be repudiated.
But Reid overplayed his hand. Far from running from the controversy, Limbaugh embraced it. He read Reid’s letter on the air, revealing it for the dishonest and bullying document it was, and then, in a stroke of pure genius, announced that he would auction it on eBay and give the proceeds to a military charitable foundation. The letter was sold for $2.1 million, and Rush matched the contribution with his own $2.1 million. Reid could only express his pleasure that the letter had done so much good. He had been flipped onto his back.
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Given Limbaugh’s talents and achievements, one would have thought that even his detractors would have an interest in knowing more about him: who he is, where he came from, and why he has acquired and kept such a large and devoted following. But in fact, there has been a remarkable lack of curiosity on that score and little incentive to go beyond the sort of routine demonization that only strengthens him. It was not until 2010 that a reasonably fair-minded account of Limbaugh’s life and work, by the journalist Zev Chafets, appeared in print.1 As Chafets reports in the book’s acknowledgments, it was not easy finding a publisher willing to take on such a book, unless it had the words “idiot” or “liar” in the title, since, as one friend explained it to him, “I have to go out for lunch in this city every day.” So call it a politically correct lack of curiosity, then; but whatever the reason, it has meant our missing out on a fascinating story of a very American life.
But not missing out entirely, since much of the story comes across in Limbaugh’s own account of himself on his show. Anyone can figure out from listening to the show that he was and is a quintessential radio guy, a product of that fluid, wide-open, insecure, enterprising, somewhat hardscrabble, somewhat gonzo world of the AM radio disc jockey, in which salesmanship and showmanship were two names for the same thing and in which incessant changes of name and employer were the most predictable element of life: “packing and unpacking, town to town, up and down the dial” in the words of the theme song of WKRP in Cincinnati, the 1970s TV sitcom that captured some of the knockout zaniness of that world. Limbaugh was smitten early and permanently with the romance of radio and never really wanted to do anything else with his life, including bothering to go to college, let alone taking on his birthright, the leadership of the family law firm.
It was a business one could learn only in the doing. While still in high school, he started working at KMGO-AM in his hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, spinning discs in the afternoons under the name “Rusty Sharpe.” Later, he was “Jeff Christie,” morning-drive DJ on WIXZ-AM in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, where he hosted “The Solid Rockin’ Gold Show.” There was a move to Kansas City, where he would eventually begin dabbling in political discussion, and then finally KFBK in Sacramento, where he followed in the footsteps of the unpleasantly provocative Morton Downey Jr. and was able to do politically oriented talk as a solo act without guests and using his own name, finally developing the bombastic Limbaugh persona (“El Rushbo” with “talent on loan from Gawww-duh”) and the familiar epithets (“Feminazis” and “Environmentalist Wackos”) applied to his designated opponents. In Sacramento, he perfected his formula and proved a great success, tripling Downey’s already sizable audience and attracting the attention of syndicator Ed McLaughlin, who in 1988 brought him to WABC in New York to do The Rush Limbaugh Program, 21 years after those first broadcasts back at KMGO.
On arriving in New York, Limbaugh immediately set to work building his affiliate network and his general visibility, charging forward indefatigably on all fronts at once. He wasted no time plunging the show into the 1988 presidential campaign, branding Michael Dukakis “The Loser” and assigning him update theme music drawn from the Beatles’ “I’m a Loser,” emphasizing the refrain: “ . . . and I’m not what I appear to be,” a dig at the Massachusetts governor’s futile effort to disguise or downplay his liberalism. He began giving one-man “Rush to Excellence” tours around the country. These efforts paid off very quickly. By 1990, the radio-show audience had hit 20 million; his first book, The Way Things Ought to Be, was released in 1992 and sold 2 million copies in six weeks, making it at that point the fastest-selling volume in publishing history.
But he really hit his stride with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. The two men seemed to have an elective non-affinity, perhaps because they were both baby-boomer know-it-alls from the same general region of the country (Limbaugh from southeastern Missouri, Clinton from Arkansas), and perhaps because Limbaugh’s unprecedented and growing influence was so intensely and visibly annoying to the ambitious young politician. Clinton, after all, had come into office borne on a wave of mainstream hosannas, and expectations were high after the 12-year Republican control of the White House. But Limbaugh turned out to be a serious obstacle to him every step of the way, proving to be a major force in rallying public opinion against Clinton’s own health-care overhaul and helping to lay the groundwork for the anti-Clinton 1994 electoral tsunami. The newly elected Republicans even made him an honorary member of the freshman class of 1995, an honor he coveted, even though he has always thought of himself as a conservative rather than a Republican.
For some time, the early Clinton years represented Limbaugh’s high point. Clinton pushed back, effectively (if outrageously) associating Limbaugh and talk radio with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and winning re-election in 1996 in a walk, running against an aging and ineffective Bob Dole. That did not mean that Limbaugh let up, and the events surrounding Monica Lewinsky in 1998 gave him a rich new target, as did the electoral chaos of 2000. But a cluster of personal issues, including charges relating to the abuse of prescription drugs and a catastrophic loss of his hearing, all seemed to conspire to place a ceiling on his influence. There was a noticeable ebbing of energy in the show at times, and it was not immune to the fracturing effect the Bush 43 presidency had on conservatives, with internal differences emerging on issues ranging from the prescription-drug entitlement to the Iraq war to immigration reform.
But all that seems to have changed, and Limbaugh clearly has the wind at his back again with a newly growing audience. Like the radio guy he is and always will be, he is a survivor. He has wisely chosen to avoid television for the most part after a syndicated television show successful with audiences (and produced by Roger Ailes in the early 1990s in a warm-up for Ailes’s unprecedented triumph as the creator of the Fox News Channel) proved less so with advertisers. Events, too, have moved his way. The abject failure of the John McCain campaign vindicated many of Limbaugh’s longstanding complaints about the more moderate wing of the Republican Party. And the rise of Obama has proved nothing less than a godsend for him—though only because he had the boldness to seize the opportunity it presented.
_____________
Occasionally, Limbaugh will talk on his show about radio, past, present, and future, and you understand that his great success is no accident. Able to draw with minuteness on more than four decades of work experience, he has achieved a comprehensive and detailed grasp of the technical, performing, and business dimensions of the industry, all of which give him an unmatched understanding of the medium and its possibilities. But it is more than a wonk’s understanding. He has a deep-in-the-bones feeling for what is magical about radio at its best—its immediacy, its simplicity, its ability to create the richness of imagined places and moments with just a few well-placed elements of sound, its incomparable advantages as a medium for storytelling with the pride of place that it gives to the spoken word and the individual human voice, abstracted from all other considerations. He probably also understands why he himself is not nearly so good on TV, faced as he is with the classic McLuhanesque problem of a hot personality in a cool medium.
He also understood why predictions of radio’s demise have repeatedly been proved wrong, why AM radio has lent itself particularly well to the kind of simple and easy interactivity on which talk thrives, and why the movement of talk radio into the AM band would have the same revitalizing effect there as an urban homesteader turning a decrepit old townhouse into a place of elegance and commodity. AM radio was supposed to have died off years ago due to its weak and tinny sound. But the takeover by talk in the early 1990s, primarily due to Limbaugh, managed to transform a decaying and outdated infrastructure into the perfect vehicle for the medium’s own aspirations.
It could not have happened without the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. Interactive talk of one sort or another had been around since the earliest days of radio, and there had been, of course, plenty of local talk shows, mostly conservative in flavor, on many stations. But the Fairness Doctrine kept them within bounds, obliging stations holding broadcast licenses to offer equal representation to all sides of a controversial issue and to provide coverage to issues of local importance. They imposed these requirements on the ground that channels were limited and so it was necessary to ensure that they served the larger public interest.
But with the vast and rapid growth of cable and satellite television and radio and other new media, this requirement no longer made any sense. The doctrine was abolished, and the way was opened for a show like Limbaugh’s to go into national syndication. His show could never have been sustained with the doctrine in place, a fact that has helped fuel the occasional expressions of Democratic interest—most recently coming from Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois—in its reinstitution.
It would be hard, though, to accomplish that without sparking something like an actual revolt in this country. Talk radio is, implicitly, talk-back radio—a medium tuned into during times of frustration, exasperation, even desperation, by people who do not find that their thoughts, sentiments, values, and loyalties are fairly or even minimally represented in the “official” media. Such feelings may be justified or unjustified, wholesome or noxious; but in any event they are likely to fester and curdle in the absence of some outlet in which they can be expressed. Talk radio is a place where people can go to hear opinions freely expressed that they will not hear elsewhere, and where they can come away with a sense of confirmation that they are not alone, are not crazy, and are not wrong to think and feel such things. The existence of such frustrations and fears are the sine qua non of talk radio; it would not exist without them.
But that is not all. Without Limbaugh’s influence, talk radio might well have become a dreary medium of loud voices, relentless anger, and seething resentment, the sort of thing that the New York screamer Joe Pyne had pioneered in the 50s and 60s—“go gargle with razor blades,” he liked to tell his callers as he hung up on them—and that one can still see pop up in some of Limbaugh’s lesser epigones. Or it might have descended to the sometimes amusing but corrosive nonstop vulgarity of a Howard Stern. Limbaugh himself can be edgy, though almost always within PG-rated boundaries. But what he gave talk radio was a sense of sheer fun, of lightness, humor, and wit, whether indulging in his self-parodying Muhammad Ali–like braggadocio, drawing on his vast array of American pop-cultural reference points, or, in moving impromptu mini-sermons, reminding his listeners of the need to stay hopeful, work hard, and count their blessings as Americans. In such moments, and in many other moments besides, he reminds one of the affirmative spirit of Ronald Reagan and, like Reagan, reminds his listeners of the better angels of their nature. He transmutes the anger and frustration of millions of Americans into something more constructive.
The critics may be correct that the flourishing of talk radio is a sign of something wrong in our culture. But they mistake the effect for the cause. Talk radio is not the cause, but the corrective. In our own time, and in the person of Rush Limbaugh, along with others of his talk-radio brethren, a problem of long-standing in our culture has reached a critical stage: the growing loss of confidence in our elite cultural institutions, including the media, universities, and the agencies of government. The posture and policies of the Obama presidency, using temporary majorities and legislative trickery to shove through massive unread bills that will likely damage the nation and may subvert the Constitution, have brought this distrust to a higher level. The medium of talk radio has played a critical role in giving articulate shape and force to the resistance. If it is at times a crude and bumptious medium, it sometimes has to be, to disarm the false pieties and self-righteous gravitas in which our current elites too often clothe themselves. Genuinely democratic speech tends to be just that way, in case we have forgotten.
About the Author
Wilfred M. McClay is the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His article “ ‘The Report of our Death was Greatly Exaggerated’: The Conservative Resurgence” appeared in the November 2010 issue.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Canadians: "Build a Damn Fence!"
Once in a while I find someone on line that is,,, FUNNY AS HELL
THIS IS WAY TO GOOD TO PASS UP....
authors name is Tom on TOWN HALL
The flood of American liberals sneaking across the border into Canada has intensified in the past week, sparking calls for increased patrols to stop the illegal immigration. The recent actions of the Tea Party are prompting an exodus among left-leaning citizens who fear they'll soon be required to hunt, pray, and to agree with Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck.
Canadian border farmers say it's not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, animal-rights activists and Unitarians crossing their fields at night.
"I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn," said Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota . The producer was cold, exhausted and hungry. He asked me if I could spare a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn't have any, he left before I even got a chance to show him my screenplay, eh?"
In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. He then installed loudspeakers that blared Rush Limbaugh across the fields. "Not real effective," he said. "The liberals still got through and Rush annoyed the cows so much that they wouldn't give any milk."
Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet liberals near the Canadian border, pack them into Volvo station wagons and drive them across the border where they are simply left to fend for themselves." A lot of these people are not prepared for our rugged conditions," an Ontario border patrolman said. "I found one carload without a single bottle of imported drinking water. They did have a nice little Napa Valley Cabernet, though."
When liberals are caught, they're sent back across the border, often wailing loudly that they fear retribution from conservatives. Rumours have been circulating about plans being made to build re-education camps where liberals will be forced to drink domestic beer and watch NASCAR races.
In recent days, liberals have turned to ingenious ways of crossing the border. Some have been disguised as senior citizens taking a bus trip to buy cheap Canadian prescription drugs. After catching half a dozen young vegans in powdered wig disguises, Canadian immigration authorities began stopping buses and quizzing the supposed senior citizens about Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney to prove that they were alive in the '50s. "If they can't identify the accordion player on The Lawrence Welk Show, we become very suspicious about their age." an official said.
Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants are creating an organic-broccoli shortage and are renting all the Michael Moore movies.
"I really feel sorry for American liberals, but the Canadian economy just can't support them." an Ottawa resident said. "How many art-history majors does one country need?
THIS IS WAY TO GOOD TO PASS UP....
authors name is Tom on TOWN HALL
The flood of American liberals sneaking across the border into Canada has intensified in the past week, sparking calls for increased patrols to stop the illegal immigration. The recent actions of the Tea Party are prompting an exodus among left-leaning citizens who fear they'll soon be required to hunt, pray, and to agree with Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck.
Canadian border farmers say it's not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, animal-rights activists and Unitarians crossing their fields at night.
"I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn," said Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota . The producer was cold, exhausted and hungry. He asked me if I could spare a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn't have any, he left before I even got a chance to show him my screenplay, eh?"
In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. He then installed loudspeakers that blared Rush Limbaugh across the fields. "Not real effective," he said. "The liberals still got through and Rush annoyed the cows so much that they wouldn't give any milk."
Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet liberals near the Canadian border, pack them into Volvo station wagons and drive them across the border where they are simply left to fend for themselves." A lot of these people are not prepared for our rugged conditions," an Ontario border patrolman said. "I found one carload without a single bottle of imported drinking water. They did have a nice little Napa Valley Cabernet, though."
When liberals are caught, they're sent back across the border, often wailing loudly that they fear retribution from conservatives. Rumours have been circulating about plans being made to build re-education camps where liberals will be forced to drink domestic beer and watch NASCAR races.
In recent days, liberals have turned to ingenious ways of crossing the border. Some have been disguised as senior citizens taking a bus trip to buy cheap Canadian prescription drugs. After catching half a dozen young vegans in powdered wig disguises, Canadian immigration authorities began stopping buses and quizzing the supposed senior citizens about Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney to prove that they were alive in the '50s. "If they can't identify the accordion player on The Lawrence Welk Show, we become very suspicious about their age." an official said.
Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants are creating an organic-broccoli shortage and are renting all the Michael Moore movies.
"I really feel sorry for American liberals, but the Canadian economy just can't support them." an Ottawa resident said. "How many art-history majors does one country need?
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