Democracy requires protection from tyranny

A leading columnist for the Washington Post says Republicans are losing faith in democracy. No, we're trying to protect constitutional democracy from those who want to win elections "by hook or by crook." @crampell @washingtonpost pic.twitter.com/8qcfHcIKDg

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) June 2, 2021

The Plot Against Democracy

Daniel Greenfield

Here’s the good news.

It’s 2017 and Republicans control the White House, the Senate, the House and more statewide offices than you can shake a big bundle of fake news papers at. And, potentially soon, a Supreme Court that takes its guidelines from the Constitution not Das Kapital and the National Social Justice Party.

Here’s the bad news, Republicans are still Republicans.

The media throws some chum in the water and sits back and watches the bloody fun as Republicans go after Republicans for the entertainment of their enemies. Scandals are manufactured and then strategically aimed to divide and conquer Republicans. But the real target is the conservative agenda.

At the heart of the controversy over all these manufactured fake news scandals are two vital questions.

1. Was the last presidential election legitimate?

2. Should anyone to the right of the left be able to govern?

The left has answered “No” to both questions. The first question was answered in the negative because the second answer was “Never”.

Republicans have varied reactions to Trump. Leftists have only one reaction to anyone to the right of them. It’s the same reaction you get if you send an ISIS member into Temple Beth Shalom. If President Kasich were in the White House, you would be reading in the Washington Post how he singlehandedly brought back the Klan, causes Bursitis and is secretly doing the bidding of the Brazilians.

It’s a swamp of innuendo based on anonymous sources, investigations fed by illegal eavesdropping, scandals in which the outrage comes before the evidence whose purpose is to overturn an election. These aren’t investigations. They’re a coup by the losing side that refuses to admit it lost a presidential election. The coup isn’t just aimed at President Trump or any single member of his administration.

It’s aimed at America, at democracy and at any policy to the right of free entitlements and no freedoms.

...

Yes, the left really hates you. It doesn’t care that you’re socially liberal and fiscally conservative or the other way around. It doesn’t care if you agree with it on 99.9% of the issues. It will still hang you from a lamppost in Portland or Berkeley because of that 0.1%. If you doubt that, look at how many Communists survived Stalin and Mao. Or how Joe Lieberman went from the vice presidential nominee to a right-wing extremist because he believed that terrorism was a bad thing or how Joe Manchin is an honorary Republican because he does controversial things like vote to approve a president’s cabinet nominees.

There’s no room in the Democrat Party for democrats. There sure as hell isn’t any for Republicans.

NUNES: FBI IS NOT COOPERATING WITH OUR INVESTIGATION INTO TRUMP CAMP SURVEILLANCE

The FBI is not cooperating with the House of Representatives' investigation into the NSA's surveillance of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, the chairman of the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), said today.

During an explosive press conference outside the White House, Nunes told reporters that communications from the Trump team were picked up and disseminated within the government during the 2016 campaign. Nunes said sources within the intelligence community presented him with the information. He spoke to the press after briefing the administration.

"We don’t actually know yet officially what happened to General Flynn," Nunes said of how communications from Gen. Flynn's calls were leaked to the press. "We just know that his name leaked out but we don't know how it was picked up yet. That was one of the things that we asked for in the March 15th letter, was for the NSA, CIA, and FBI to get us all the unmasking that was done."

"And I'll tell you, NSA is being cooperative," Nunes continued, "but so far the FBI has not told us whether or not they’re going to respond to our March 15th letter, which is now a couple of weeks old.”

Democrats have been demanding proof of Trump's claims that he was wiretapped. But what happens if he orders government agencies to provide him with information ... data from the Deep State ... and the Deep State does not follow orders? What we have here is a mutiny ... a coup by the bureaucracy. This can't be allowed to go on or the republic will fall.

Politicization of the FBI Threatens American Democracy

There are so many threats to Democracy that the Republic is on its death bed.  Fundamentally Transformed.

The Press Fears the Country

The media organs are getting hysterical about the Ebola Anti-hysteria hysteria. Shouting “stay calm” at the top of their androgynous voices, they portray the American people as irrational boobs with the vapors.

As I make my way around my community and speak to people throughout the country daily, the only evidence of hysteria about Ebola is in the press. The press takes any concern that Ebola should not be imported from Africa as an indication that people are panicked. The press - print and electronic - are obsessed with Ebola stories. Many of them include reassurances that “all is well.” Even as tens of thousands are catching it and dying in Africa.  Even as doctors and nurses are catching it, the non-doctors in the press assure us that Ebola is very, very hard to catch.

That’s not what most people I know have observed. That’s not what a few moments of refection tells us. I’m not concerned about contracting Ebola primarily for statistical reasons. There have been few cases so far. What I am concerned about is the multiple failures on the part of public health officials. From the President to the CDC to the "Ebola czar" on down they have failed to predict what has happened. Their vaunted “protocols” have been failures. Their repeated reassurances that they have things under control have been wrong.

There is no panic in the streets, but people would like to know that public officials are taking the obvious steps to keep a disease with a 70% fatality rate out of the country. The obvious step is to temporarily stop commercial air travel from those countries where Ebola is an epidemic.  And for this the media is siding with the administration against the people, accusing the people of being hysterical.  For being anti-science.  Science is the new religion, the thing that must not be questioned or be branded as an heretic.  

This may be a teachable moment. Why is the mainstream media so exercised about the people’s natural desire not to be exposed to a deadly disease? A working hypothesis is that the press fears the people.  The people are viewed them as a dangerous animal that must be kept calm lest it rampage out of control.  My theory is that the press see the American people in a negative light. In their view, people in flyover country are a potentially dangerous mob that must be controlled. This feeling of fear is heightened just now because the people they despise are engaged in an election, and it appears that they are going to turn the country away from the direction at the press lords favor. So they call them irrational, citing “government scientists” who tell them that the fear of Ebola is worse that Ebola itself.

The press is losing control of the national conversation. They are afraid. And they are revealing that fear.

Death by government

Power kills; absolute Power kills absolutely. This new Power Principle is the message emerging from my previous work on the causes of war and from this book on genocide and government mass murder—what I call democide—in [the 20th] century. The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the more power is diffused, checked and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide. At the extremes of Power, totalitarian communist governments slaughter their people by the tens of millions; in contrast, many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute even serial murderers.

Death by government in the 20th century cost 169 million lives. That’s at least four times more people killed by their own governments than by war. In the 20th century 38 million lives—both military and civilian—were lost in all conflicts combined.

Obama's vision of America: "America the beautiful is really America as hell"

Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal examines Obama's "inequality speech" and points out what Obama believes about America.

The president's thoughts on income inequality deserve comment for a reason other than the substance of the issue itself. The speech said a lot, a whole lot, about Mr. Obama's idea of America itself.

The speech, by my reading, was an odd wallow in presidential pessimism. Mr. Obama believes that the deck in America has been irredeemably stacked against individuals. Those are his words: "It's rooted in the nagging sense that no matter how hard they work, the deck is stacked against them." Before America can move forward, Mr. Obama thinks its people must be reeducated to believe they inhabit a country that is fallen and unfair.

...

He wonders "whether or not our children will grow up in an America where opportunity is real." Life wasn't too bad after World War II, but "even in those years . . . the top 10% consistently took home about one-third of our national income." Even the Greatest Generation violated economic justice.

Mr. Obama admires the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, "when millions died without health insurance." But the postwar American achievement ended about then. "Starting in the late '70s, this social compact began to unravel." That, of course, means not only that the high-growth years of the Reagan presidency commenced the downward spiral but that the disintegration continued even during the Clinton presidency, which traditional Democrats once claimed as a plus.

"Investments in things that make us all richer, like schools and infrastructure, were allowed to wither." "We took on more debt financed by a juiced-up housing market. But when the music stopped, and the crisis hit, millions of families were stripped of whatever cushion they had left."

The U.S. economy is "profoundly unequal" and has been "since 1979, when I graduated from high school."

"The idea that a child may never be able to escape that poverty because she lacks a decent education or health care or a community that views her future as their own, that should offend all of us." A data point: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, spending per student in all U.S. public and elementary schools since 1992 has doubled to more than $10,000. The schools have her trapped for other reasons.

He notes the trend toward inequality is global, but it "is most pronounced in our own country."

"A child born in the top 20% has about a 2-in-3 chance of staying at or near the top. A child born into the bottom 20% has a less than 1-in-20 shot at making it to the top."

How bad is it in the U.S. today? You can't begin to guess. "Statistics show that our levels of income inequality rank near countries like Jamaica and Argentina."

And it's getting worse! A new study shows "disparities in education, mental health, obesity, absent fathers, isolation from church, isolation from community groups."

For Barack Obama, 21st-century Americans live with a wolf at every door: "One study shows that more than half of Americans will experience poverty at some point during their adult lives. Think about that." ...

The inequality speech reflects Mr. Obama's habit of burying everyone in listening distance beneath some vast, vague and unanswerable guilt. Yes, it's done out of political calculation and to distract from ObamaCare. But it's also belief. This president has a dark, reductionist view of the U.S. system in place for nearly 200 years before he graduated high school in 1979.

Nor did it all come to him in a dream. The many "studies" the speech cites have been outputted by a generation of academia's army of left-wing sociologists, economists and law students. If you want to learn why America the beautiful is really America as hell, drop by a college classroom.

 

Obama's vision of America

If this is your vision of America, what fresh hell will you create to "fundamentally change" it?  What constitutional barriers would you trample to change it?  What laws would you violate and what groups would you destroy?   Radical reformers throughout time have seen the present through distorted lenses: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Castro and have murdered millions in their drive to "fix" "inequality" and "injustice."  I pray that Obama's rule via speeches is his limit.  That the Republic is not fatally damaged.

Parent Arrested from Common Core Meeting in Baltimore County

Free speech is on the endangered list in Obama's tranformed america.

Images of Free Speech in America, pre and post Obama.

In 2013, in Obama’s “fundamentally transformed” America, we’re rapidly approaching the point at which more people may think of this image, captured from a video of a Maryland town hall meeting concerning the imposition of national Common Core standards on public schools (with many private schools following suit):

If the American media were doing its job, this image would be on the cover of every newspaper and “news magazine” in the country.

From the comments:   

According to the Baltimore Sun he was taken to the Towson precinct and detained. Small was charged with second-degree assault of a police officer, which carries a fine of $2,500 and up to 10 years in prison, and disturbing a school operation, which carries a fine of $2,500 and up to six months.

Free At Last!

Arab autumn?

Some thoughts on the military take-over in Egypt. David Warren

At last, good news from the Middle East. Democracy has been overthrown in Egypt. The generals taking over promise new elections in a few months, but with any luck they are lying....

In a democracy

You win by bamboozling the public; by shamelessly vulgar boasting & display; by making promises that can never be fulfilled; by colouring low motives with high-sounding phrases; by offering pay-offs in not-too-subtle ways. You win by mastering the methods of Hollywood and the entertainment media; by employing the tricks of mass advertising to “create demand” & “shape the marketplace.”

On the other hand, rule by generals ...

Generals, in the main, are men of little imagination, & simple tastes. They love order, to be sure, but in the balance of public vices, a little order is seldom a bad thing. They are not easily infected by ideology, or any other form of intellectual ambition; even those who acquire some may lose it after a while. They don’t much care what one is doing, so long as it will not threaten the peace, or otherwise interfere with their breakfast. Should the general be smart enough to fully understand his need to avoid free elections, he will become unobtrusive. He won’t go out of his way to antagonize anyone. He may line his own pockets, & those of his friends — for as Valéry said, “Power without abuse loses its charm.” But the odd billion into a Swiss bank account is a small price to pay for freedom.

It is the officer who may not be lining his own pockets whom we need to fear; the one possessed by revolutionary zeal, associated from the start with Party. Those, let me admit, give Generalissimos a bad name. No, it is only the career general I’m proposing to push forward: the sort already used to giving orders & having them obeyed; who will not feel the need to redesign his own uniform. Real generals, a little on the plump side, & entirely without charisma: that’s where to turn in a pinch. Not to hothead colonels.

 

We are seeing what Franklin meant when he answered the woman who asked him what kind of government they had created.   I had hope that the republic would have lasted a little longer.

"HENDRIK HERTZBERG of the New Yorker is untroubled" ... and that's a problem.

W.W. In The Economist is troubled by the fact that Hendrik Hertzberg is untroubled.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG of the New Yorker is untroubled by the NSA's promiscuous data-gathering operations. In response to a left-leaning friend's despairing note about the complacency of a press corps faced with the spectre of "the encroaching police state", Mr Hertzberg shrugs:

“I still don’t know of a single instance where the N.S.A. data program has encroached on or repressed any particular person’s or group’s freedom of expression or association in a tangible way. Nor have I come across a clear explanation of exactly how the program could be put to such a purpose.

But even if the program could be misused in that way, for it to happen you would have to have a malevolent government—or, at least, a government with a malevolent, out-of-control component or powerful official or officials.”

W.W. faults Hertzberg for failing to understand that the NSA surveillance program seriously threatens Americans’ constitutional rights. He’s concerned about what a powerful government may do with all the data that it is Hoovering from its citizens. He’s concerned what that government has already begun to do.

But Hertzberg is untroubled. And the reason for his lack of concern has nothing to do with principle and everything to do with the fact that he trusts THIS government. And that’s what partisan ideology does. He’s a true believer, and true believers hold on to their faith despite evidence to the contrary.

For the rest of this essay I’m here to say: To Hell with “Godwin’s Law.”

I’m going to remind people about the Nazis. I’m going to remind people that Hitler ran a popular police state. That's really not so rare, in fact it's quite common.  Popular doesn’t mean that he was universally loved. Popular means that he had a huge following and millions adored him, especially the women. He was popular because he addressed a lot of the issues that troubled Germany in the 1930s. I’m confident that if a poll had been held after he took over a large number of the German people would have told the pollster that Adolf Hitler was the kind of person who “cares about people like me.” As an example, when Hitler came to power cars in Germany were for the wealthy.  The average German rode a bicycle or motor scooter.  He decided that the average German should have a car that they could afford, just like Americans.  So he had the Nazi trade unions create the "People's Car:" "Volkswagen" in German. Unlike Solydra, Volkswagen is still a going concern.

The average German did not become Nazi party members, but they loved him. They loved his speeches, his stagecraft, his policies and even his wars because in the beginning he brought them victory. The problem was that he didn’t know when to stop. He was a narcissist and believed his own bullshit.   In that respect he was  not that different from other leaders. 

Do you know what’s terribly misleading about the movies of Hitler’s speeches?  First, most people don’t speak German so we see edited versions of a man ranting; that’s a mistake, he wasn't ranting in an unintelligible language, he was connecting with his audience. Hitler’s speeches were carefully crafted to appeal to his people. The second thing that’s misleading is that the camera usually dwells on the stage. What people should be looking at is the audience; an audience composed of thousands of little Hendrik Herzbergs. On that stage they don’t see a fanatic standing in front of banners and symbols of party power. They don’t a see a (to use Herzberg's phrase) “malevolent government—or, at least, a government with a malevolent, out-of-control component or powerful official or officials.” They see someone who cares about them and who has a vision for a Germany that rejects its past mistakes and is re-born; led by the ones they have been waiting for.

 Conservatives view this country as unique among nations in its founding as a constitutional representative republic dedicated individual freedom. It is that ideal, an ideal (that this country has fallen short of like all ideals) that makes America a “Shining city on a hill.”  When they are not rejecting the very idea of American Exceptionalism, they are believers in a certain kind of American Exceptionalism.  I believe that there resides in the innermost belief system of many Liberals the belief that America can never fall into the despotism that has been the fate of all other countries. Deep down inside they believe that the American people really are a race apart; somehow better than those benighted English or Germans or Italians or Japanese or Russians or Zulus all of whom entertained despotic rulers.   It's reflected in their wish to do away with the Second Amendment because to them it's absurd that Americans should ever have to actually use guns to physically confront the government.  Why they think that is a puzzle since America is largely made up of people from nations that are or were despotic. But when logic and ideology collide, ideology always triumphs. 

That’s why Hendrik Herzberg is dangerous; he is a perfect, rapt, enthusiastic member of the dictator’s audience, as long as it's HIS dictator.

Egypt needs good government, not democracy.

Walter Russell Meade on Obama: Still Wrong About Egypt—and Wrong About the World Commenting on Obama's vaporing about Egypt's transition to Democracy:

It is not at all clear that Egypt is in the midst of a transition to democracy. It is in the midst of a crisis of authority and has been wallowing for some time in a damaging crisis of governance, but is Egypt really in a transition to democracy? And is democracy really what “ordinary” Egyptians want?

Right now one suspects that most Egyptians fear that the country could be in a transition to anarchy, and that what ordinary Egyptians (who are extremely poor by US standards and earn their bread by the sweat of their brow with very little cushion against illness or a bad day at the market) want most of all right now is security. They aren’t fretting so much about when they will have a government more like Norway’s as they are terrified that their country is sliding in the direction of Libya, Syria or Iraq.

As is often the case, Washington policymakers seem to be paying too much attention to the glibbest of political scientists and the vaporings of the Davoisie. Egypt has none of the signs that would lead historians to think democracy is just around the corner. Mubarak was not Franco, and Egypt is not Spain. What’s happening in Egypt isn’t the robust flowering of a civil society so dynamic and so democratic that it can no longer be held back by dictatorial power.

Want America to look stupid and be hated?

If American policy toward Egypt is based on the assumption that Egypt is having a “messy transition” to democracy and that we must shepherd the poor dears to the broad sunny uplands, encouraging when they do well, chiding when they misstep, Washington will keep looking foolish and our influence will continue to fade. If that is the approach our foolishness compels us to take, look for more cases in which American good intentions just make us more hated—not because we are wicked, but because we are clueless.

Makes you nostalgic for the realism of George Bush.