WHY DEMOCRATS DON'T CARE ABOUT $9.7 TRILLION DEBT

Being a very young single mother during the mid-60s and 70s, my liberal upbringing took a beating and got a breath of reality. As I struggled on my own (without depending on anyone or any government) to keep a roof over my little boy's head, food on the table, and clothes on his back, I watched young people collecting welfare, food stamps, free clinics, free eye-glasses, asking me for "some change", while marching themselves in protest of the government that gave them these freebies. College campuses were another great stage for more protests, and let us never forget the likes of Hanoi Hannah, Jane Fonda.

These hypocrites (hippies for short) are now running our government, and are very close to their lifelong goal of redistributing wealth by destroying our economy. But in the process, they have underestimated the American spirit, inbred for many generations, now fighting back to preserve the American Dream and our Founding Father's vision.

Dennis Prager writes an excellent piece, while on holiday in Morocco, where he is witnessing first hand the destruction of our dollar.


Why Democrats Don't Care about $9.7 Trillion Debt
by Dennis Prager, March 9, 2010

As reported by The Washington Post, "President Obama's proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, congressional budget analysts said Friday."

CNN adds, "Of that amount, an estimated $5.6 trillion will be in interest alone."

The Post continues: "The CBO (Congressional Budget Office) and the White House (are) ... both predicting a deficit of about $1.5 trillion this year -- a post-World War II record at 10.3 percent of the overall economy. But the CBO is considerably less optimistic about future years, predicting that deficits would never fall below 4 percent of the economy under Obama's policies and would begin to grow rapidly after 2015.

"Deficits of that magnitude would force the Treasury to continue borrowing at prodigious rates, sending the national debt soaring to 90 percent of the economy by 2020, the CBO said."

CNN adds that "By 2020 the (CBO) estimates debt held by the public would reach $20.3 trillion, or 90 percent of GDP. That's up from 53 percent of GDP in 2009."

I suspect that most Americans, if asked whether these numbers trouble the Democratic leadership and President Obama, would answer in the affirmative.

They would be wrong.

They would be wrong not because the Democratic Party or the president are economically illiterate or bad individuals, but because the Democratic Party and the president are leftists. And most Americans, including most Democrats, do not understand the left. They may understand liberalism; but President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and most Democratic representatives and senators are not liberals; they are leftists. And most Americans do not understand the difference between liberal and left. They do not realize, for example, that there is no major difference between the American Democratic Party and the leftist social democratic parties of Western Europe. They do not know that from Karl Marx to Obama, the left (as opposed to liberals) has never created wealth because it has never been interested in creating wealth; it is interested in redistributing wealth.

Therefore, unprecedented and unsustainable debt, a debt that will negatively affect most Americans' quality of life, renders the dollar increasingly undesirable, and undermines America's prestige and power in the world -- these developments do not particularly disturb the left. They may trouble the president, the Democratic Party, and others on the left on some political level, but that pales in comparison to what the left really wants: a huge government overseeing a giant welfare state and a country with far fewer rich Americans.

Achieving those goals is far more important than preventing a decline in the American quality of life. The further left one goes, the more contempt one has for the present quality of American life in any event. The left regularly mocks many of the symbols of that life -- from the three-bedroom suburban house surrounded by a white picket fence to owning an SUV (or almost any car) because Americans should be traveling on public buses, trains and bicycles.

As for the dollar, I can bear personal testimony to the decline of the dollar's prestige. I am writing this column in Morocco. In Casablanca, my wife and I and another couple hired a Moroccan driver for the day. And when it came time to pay, the man refused to accept dollars; he wanted to be paid in either Euros or Moroccan dirhams. Yes, dirhams rather than dollars. But the demise of the dollar as the world's currency disturbs the left as much as does America's not getting a gold medal in curling at the Winter Olympics.

And as for America wielding less power in the world, that is a positive development for the American left. It is the world community as embodied in the United Nations that should wield power throughout the world, not an "overstretched," "imperialist" and "militarist" United States.

I used to believe that left and right have similar goals for America, that they just differed in the means they wanted used to get there. I was mistaken. The left has a very different vision of America than those who hold the founding values of America, most especially individualism and small government. And if the price of a once in a lifetime possibility of getting to a giant welfare state dominated by the left is America's steep financial decline, that is a price fully worth paying.


Read other recent columns by Dennis Prager here.

OBAMA'S RADICAL ROGUES GALLERY?

One after another, each of the Obama appointee's far left idiologies are revealed. This past week, we've seen startling actions of this administration such as bringing the 9-11 terrorists to New York City for trial, halting the investigation into the terrorist attack at Fort Hood, and this president's 'treasonous' bow to Japanese emporer, just to name a few.

Each day brings another assault on our country. In an excellent recap of the nightmare appointments since Obama's inauguration, the ever brilliant, lovely Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum writes:


Obama's Radical Rogues Gallery?
by Phyllis Schlafly, November 20, 2009

Another kooky Barack Obama appointee became publicly known this month and quickly was thrown or voluntarily threw herself under the bus. Anita Dunn, the White House communications director (who led Obama's war on Fox News), said that Mao Tse-tung was one of her two favorite "political philosophers" whom "I turn to most" for answers to important questions.

History identifies Mao as a ruthless savage, not as a philosopher. He probably holds the record for ordering the mass murder of more people (50 to 100 million) than anyone else in history.

Dunn tried to claim that her statement was a joke, but anyone can look at her actual statement on YouTube and see that she spoke in deadly earnest. Dunn was part of Obama's inner circle and a senior media adviser during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Dunn's husband, Bob Bauer, an expert on campaign financing, fundraising, and voter mobilization, is Obama's personal lawyer. He has just been appointed White House Counsel where he will be in charge of vetting Obama's appointees.

Obama's Green Jobs Czar, Van Jones, had to exit in disgrace after he admitted that "I was a Communist." We can thank Glenn Beck for exposing him.

Obama's Regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein, wrote a book in 2008 in which he declared that the government "owns the rights to body parts of people who are dead or in certain hopeless conditions, and it can remove their organs without asking anyone's permission." So, after the death consultants authorized in Nancy Pelosi's health care bill convince you to reject life-saving procedures, the organ-transplant team can remove your body's organs immediately.

Czar Sunstein also argues that animals are entitled to have lawyers to sue humans in court. Bow, wow; more business for trial lawyers. His wife, Samantha Power, is now on Obama's National Security Council. She is famous for writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about genocide, which she defined so narrowly that it excluded Stalin and Mao.

Obama's nominee for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Chai R. Feldblum, signed a 2006 manifesto endorsing polygamous households. This lengthy document, called "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage," argues that traditional marriage should not be "privileged above all others."

Obama's education appointments, who came out of the Chicago political machine right along with Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, will have nearly $100 billion in new money to indoctrinate America's youth. Obama's Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is notorious for trying to start a gay high school in Chicago.

Obama's Safe Schools Czar, Kevin Jennings, founded the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a homosexual activist group that now has thousands of chapters at high schools across the nation.

GLSEN chapters and materials have promoted sex between young teens and adults and sponsored "field trips" to gay pride parades. Jennings was the keynote speaker at a notorious GLSEN conference at Tufts University in 2000 at which HIV/AIDS coordinators discussed in detail, before an audience including area high school students, how to perform various homosexual acts.

Obama's Science Czar wrote in a college textbook that compulsory "green abortions" are an acceptable way to control population growth. We assume that what makes an abortion green is when the motive for the killing is population control to serve environmentalist dogma.

Affirmative action is in vogue in Obama's administration: his Diversity Czar has spoken publicly of getting white media executives to "step down" in favor of minorities. Obama's first appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court is a woman who said repeatedly that a "Latina woman" would make better judicial decisions than "a white male."

Obama's top lawyer at the State Department, Harold Hongju Koh, calls himself a transnationalist. That means wanting U.S. courts to "domesticate" foreign and international law, i.e., integrate it into U.S. domestic law binding on U.S. citizens.

Koh is eager to put us under a global legal system that would diminish our "distinctive rights culture" such as due process, trial by jury, and our First Amendment "protections for speech and religion" that give "far greater emphasis and judicial protection in America than in Europe or Asia." Under global governance, the United States will be forbidden to allow more freedom and constitutional rights than other countries.

When Obama's appointee for the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, David Hamilton, was a District Court judge, he prohibited the Indiana State Legislature from giving an invocation that mentioned Jesus, while mention of Allah was allowed. Hamilton worked for ACORN and the ACLU, and even the liberal American Bar Association rated him "not qualified."

And we thought the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was an embarrassment to Barack Obama when he was running for President! We never dreamed Obama would actually appoint such a collection of weirdos.


Further reading:

• Obama Makes Polygamy a 21st Century Issue, 11-06-09
• If Obama Had Told Us Before His Election, 10-16-09
• Un-American and Unlawful White House Projects, 9-04-09
• Obama Is Remaking America Into Socialism, 6-05-09

A MAOIST IN THE WHITE HOUSE

When that little boy was coached to ask Obama "why do people hate you?", maybe a more accurate question would have been "Why do you hate America?". When you keep spending more money than you make, most intelligent people know it will lead to financial ruin.

So, bring down the country you hate, and "transform" it into the banana republic you vision it should be. In order to do that, you will need to apologize to the world for our short comings, kiss up to all dictators, insult our allies, and fill the White House with Mao Tse-Tung admirers. PajamasMedia writes:


A Maoist in the White House

The greatest mass murderer in history. How much more of this can we take?

by Roger Kimball, October 16, 2009

Jeremiah Wright. William Ayers. Van Jones. Where does the rogues’ gallery of Barack Obama’s radical friends end? These people are not liberals. They are not “progressives.” They are radicals who hate America and in many cases have advocated or even perpetrated violence in an effort to destroy it.

Thanks to Glenn Beck, the American public has now been introduced to yet another radical member of Obama’s inner circle: Anita Dunn, Interim White House Communications Director, former top advisor to Obama’s political campaign, and wife of Obama’s personal lawyer, Robert Bauer.

In a speech before high school students last June, Dunn spoke passionately about her two favorite political philosophers, “the two people I turn to most” for answers to important questions like “how to do things that have never been done before.” Who are these paragons? One was Mother Teresa. Dunn didn’t have much to say about her. Most of her enthusiasm was lavished upon her other favorite fount of political wisdom: Mao Tse-Tung.

Mao Tse-Tung. That would be the deviant monster who, quite apart from his disgusting personal life, engineered the mass murder of anywhere from 50 to over 100 million people. Estimates vary so widely because murder on that wholesale scale is difficult to tabulate, especially in a country as backwards as China was under Mao’s long reign. But there is little doubt that Mao has the grisly distinction of being the greatest mass murderer in history.

Yet this is the man that one of Obama’s closest advisors commends to an audience with warmth and enthusiasm. In 1947, she tells her audience, Chiang Kai-Shek seemed to hold all the cards: he had the army, the airforce, and yet Mao went on to victory, telling people, as Anita Dunn told her listeners, “You fight your war and I’ll fight mine.” Don’t believe me? Listen:

N.B.: Anita Dunn is not just an Obama hanger-on. She is part of his inner circle, one of his top aides, along with David Axelrod, Rahm Emmanuel, and Robert Gibbs. What does it mean that someone in that position proffers one of the greatest monsters the world has ever seen for emulation?

Anita Dunn calls Mao a “political philosopher.” In fact, as a real philosopher, the late, great Leszek Kolakowski, understood, Mao’s real achievement was as “one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, manipulator of large masses of human beings in the twentieth century.” His violent peasant revolution mouthed Marxist slogans, but at its core was less Marxist than a particularly rebarbative form of anarchic and anti-intellectual tyranny. “The obfuscation of Western admirers of Chinese Communism,” Kolakowski observes toward the end of his magnum opus, Main Currents of Marxism, “is scarcely believable.” I wish he were still here for Anita Dunn.

In the 1960s and 1970s, many American universities, along with some other Western redoubts of privilege and irresponsibility, harbored a few deluded characters who declared themselves Maoists and were fond of toting around his pathetic compendium of absurdity, “The Little Red Book.” These creatures were the sorriest detritus of our own cultural revolution. Some destroyed themselves. Others grew up, in whole or part, and were absorbed by a rich and forgiving society into the tissues of American life. Only now is it clear that some of the most radical and benighted have subsisted long enough in the outer corridors of power to find themselves suddenly translated into its inner sanctum, the White House and other top agencies of the United States government. It is an eventuality that would be risible were it not repulsive and, indeed, frightening.

So, we have a self-professed admirer of Mao Tse-Tung in a top job at the White House. Where does it end? Where?

Follow up:

The Maoist Explains Herself: Egg, Face, at the White House
White House Communications Director Anita Dunn tries her best to spin her way out of her praise of Chairman Mao.
by Roger Kimball, October 18, 2009

Damage control time!

–She didn’t mean it.
–She was only quoting a Republican operative.
–Fox News is mean to Democrats.
–Glenn Beck is an extremist.
–The President is trying to clean up a big mess left by George Bush.
–Can’t we just change the subject?

When Glenn Beck aired a video of White House Communications Director Anita Dunn praising Chairman Mao — one of her “two favorite political philosophers” — in front of an audience of high school students, the conservative blogosphere lit up like a non-denominational sustainably harvested Kwanza tree. I wrote about it [above]. Andrew McCarthy added some historical background here. Peter Wehner had this to say. Et, I need hardly say, cetera.

There’s one part of the left-wing reaction to the obloquy heaped upon Anita Dunn that should not be allowed to go unchallenged. It might go like this: “George Bush quoted Mao [or Stalin, or Hitler, or some other bad guy]: does that make him a Maoist [or Stalinist, a Nazi, or whatever]?”

As Fausta Wertz points out, Anita Dunn offered a variant of this exculpatory strategy when she claimed, in reaction to the tsunami of criticism her remarks occasioned, that she was only quoting Lee Atwater.

Let’s say that Mr. Atwater had quoted the bit from Mao that Anita Dunn quoted — you fight your war and I’ll fight mine, etc., etc. So what? Lee Atwater did not identify Mao as one of his two favorite political philosophers. He did not stand before a room full of high school students and praise the revolutionary tactics of the greatest mass murderer in history.

Bottom line: it is one thing to quote a tyrant. It is another to endorse his view of the world.

Probably, Anita Dunn would be as horrified as the next person by Mao’s savage wholesale butchery. The same could be said of most of those college students who carried around Mao’s Little Red Book and proclaimed themselves on the side of Revolution. Sure, many exhibited a creepy fascination with violence. But these privileged American kids would have run screaming from the room had they had to confront the merciless slaughter perpetrated by Mao and his merry band of utopians.

That’s neither here nor there. What the left-wing excuse factory wants is for the American people to overlook the radicalism of the people populating Obama’s inner circle, of which Anita Dunn is a prominent member. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, let me once again remind readers of what Obama promised in his campaign. I don’t mean the long string of broken promises about helping the middle class, pulling out troops from Iraq, prosecuting the war in Afghanistan with vigor, etc. Those were just campaign promises, i.e., vote-getting expedients that events have led Obama to renege on.

No, I mean the one big promise that he has every intention of fulfilling: the promise to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” That is what Obama and his lieutenants are about. They are egalitarians — not, perhaps, quite so radical as Chairman Mao, but (as the case of Anita Dunn shows) they have plenty of admiration for Mao’s goals. Obama himself has criticized the U.S. Constitution for being merely a “charter of negative liberties” that fails to promote “redistributive change.”

This is the point: last November, the American people thought they were electing a “post-partisan,” “post-racial” President who would work to restore unity and self-confidence to the country. They woke up on November 5, however, to find that they had elected someone who was deeply ambivalent about America, who distrusted its founding principles of limited government, individual liberty, and local responsibility. Like his radical friends — Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Van Jones, Anita Dunn — Barack Obama wishes to transform the United States according to a model whose basic shape was supplied by the utopian schemes of the 1960s. That’s why Anita Dunn said that Mao was one of the thinkers she most often turned to for wisdom about big-think political problems. It’s not that she admires his penchant for industrial strength homicide: rather, she admires his success at fomenting an egalitarian revolution. It’s not what we bargained for when we elected Barack Obama. But that’s what we’ve got. The question is how much worse will things have to get before the penny drops, before the scales fall from the collective eyes of the electorate? When will voters begin that long countermarch through the institutions in order to take back the country? If not now, when?


Read more articles by Roger Kimball here

Traditional History Courses Are in Decline

One of the obvious reasons we are living in this 'entitlement' age is the lack of education in history. Since the 60s, we are looking at the long progression in dumbing down our children by the radical left of the 60s.

"A university is not a political party, and an education is not an indoctrination." David Horowitz, reformed 60s radical.

We must take back our schools and universities, and home-school (full or part-time) in the meantime.

From Eagle Forum's Education Reporter:


Traditional History Courses Are in Decline
September, 2009

The teaching of history has changed significantly since the 1960s, with modern history departments deemphasizing great people and events and instead calling students' attention to social and cultural history and trends.


"The boomer generation made a decision in the 1960s that history was starting over," Naval War College history professor David Kaiser explained to the New York Times. As a result, today the teaching of history "is no longer focused on government, politics, or institutions" — in other words, on the field of diplomatic history. This change in focus recently became even more evident when the executive editor of the journal Diplomatic History, the sole publication devoted to the subject, proposed changing the journal's name.

Since the 1970s, the number of history professors at four-year institutions has more than doubled, but the growth has primarily occurred in newer specialties such as women's or gender history. Four out of five history departments now boast at least one faculty member who focuses on women's history. Just half of departments employ a diplomatic historian, and 31.7% employ an economic historian. In 1975, three-quarters of history departments had at least one diplomatic historian, and 54.7% had an economic historian. Intellectual and constitutional history have also shrunk as specialties, while cultural history has grown.

Brett Lintott, a Ph.D. student in international relations at the University of Toronto, said that "being a young historian in this field is thus a rather lonely and sobering experience." Some historians in more trendy fields, according to Lintott, feel and express "genuine derision" toward the study of international relations in history. (New York Times, 6-11-09)


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