“Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but Democrats believe every day is April 15th”

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

“An almost unbroken 50 years of deficit spending has finally brought us to a time of reckoning. We have come to a turning point, a moment for hard decisions. I have asked the Cabinet and my staff a quetion, and now I put the same question to all of you: If not us, who? And if not now, when? It must be done by all of us going forward with a program aimed at reaching a balanced budget. We can then begin reducing the national debt.”

–Second Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985.,

Ronald Reagan , President, 1981-1989

Alan Caruba’s commentaries are posted daily at “Warning Signs” his popular blog and thereafter on dozens of other websites and blogs. If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews.

 

WesternFront America

American medicine is the best because it is private and it must stay that way.

~ Ronald Reagan

The shameless tactics of Chicago thug politics were demonstrated on March 21 where President Obama and the Democrats used every Machiavellian tactic to pass his government-controlled health-care bill by a vote of 219 to 212. The real intent of Democrats was articulated by Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., who was impeached and removed from the bench as a federal judge before being elected to the House. Before the bill was signed, Hastings said, There ain’t no rules here, we’re trying to accomplish something. … When the deal goes down, all this talk about rules … we make ‘em up as we go along.

Rep. Hastings’ sentiments are the deserved legacy the GOP has bequeathed to America, a legacy whose latest manifestation is Obama’s $940 billion socialist health-care bill. That’s why I will not join the chorus of Republicans, conservative commentators and radio talk-show hosts in blaming this all on President Obama and the Democrats. That’s too easy and fails to get to the heart of the matter.

How did America devolve into making entitlements a constitutional right protected by the Supreme Court? It didn’t suddenly happen on March 23, 2010, when Obama signed the health-care bill into law. Obama was unwittingly closer to the actual date that America began her tragic love affair with socialism when he said at a rally last week at George Mason University: “We have waited long enough, and in just a few days a century-long struggle will culminate in a historic vote.”

What he meant by that phrase (“century-long struggle”) is that socialist health care for all was envisioned as early as Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09), a Republican who left the GOP in 1912 and ran under the Bull Moose-Progressive Party, where he got 27 percent of the vote and opened the door for America’s first fascist president, Woodrow Wilson (1913-21) to get elected.

Here’s a brief synopsis of how the GOP (and America) lost her way from Reagan conservatism.

In 1980, for crass political expediency, Reagan (1981-89) chooses his arch political opponent as his VP – George H.W. Bush, a liberal Republican who would become the next man in line to become president after Reagan left office. Bush 41 was from a well-connected, politically prominent Connecticut family who made millions in oil. His father, Prescott Bush, was a noted senator and confidant to President Eisenhower, a northeastern, liberal-Rockefeller Republican who voted to denounce Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.

After Bush 41 came Bill Clinton (1993-2001), an unremarkable FDR/LBJ big-government liberal who falsely ran as a moderate and tried to govern as a socialist. Remember Bill and Hillary’s disgraceful attempt at socialized medicine in 1994? Clinton’s socialist tendencies were held in check by Speaker Newt Gingrich, his brilliant “Contract for America” and GOP majorities in both houses of Congress.

In a previous article, “Obama: A sudden catastrophe,” I cited the 20-year political history since the Reagan Revolution that drove this once-great country into the pitiless arms of Marxism:

When Bush 43 speechwriter Matt Latimer got the assignment to write Bush’s speech for a CPAC conference, Bush was decidedly unenthusiastic.

“What is this movement you keep talking about in the speech?” the president asked Latimer.

Latimer explained that he meant the conservative movement – the movement that gave rise to groups like CPAC.

“Let me tell you something,” the president said. “I whupped Gary Bauer’s a– in 2000. So take out all this movement stuff. There is no [conservative] movement.”

How did we get Obama? We got this catastrophe because the GOP nominated an empty suit who denigrated the 20-year Reagan Revolution, that’s why. We have sown the wind of political hacks unworthy of the presidency for 20 years since Reagan left office, electing Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43 and Obama – and now America is tragically reaping the whirlwind with economic, cultural and societal collapse as the world mocks us at every opportunity.

Bush 43, like his father before him, did not believe in the “conservative movement” – both men did everything they could to abort the Reagan Revolution. Gerald Ford, Bob Dole, Bush 41, Bush 43, John McCain – it seems like the GOP has a penchant for running candidates that are without rhetorical skills or able to hold a solid grasp of fundamental conservative ideas, including constitutionalism, low taxes, smaller government and free-market capitalism.

When Obama signed that socialist health-care bill March 23, the U.S. effectively became a socialist country and provided hundreds of millions of Americans the ability to steal money from a shrinking number of wealthier Americas to fulfill their medical needs. But John Adams once said: “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”

Indeed, we are living in tyrannical times, and that’s why I blame Bush 43 for faking like he was a Ronald Reagan conservative in 2001, all but ignoring conservatives for his first nine months in office, until 9/11, bankrupting America during his two terms as president, two ill-advised wars, demoralizing the voters with a $7 trillion prescription-drug bill, a Kennedy education bill (“No Child Left Behind”), TARP and bailing out corrupt Wall Street investment banks.

These socialist policies allowed the Marxist Barack Obama to ascend to power; a man who utterly hates America to the core and is hell-bent on seeing this country pay for all her sins by systematically deconstructing America from a republic and transforming her into a servile, socialist state.

I call universal health care “Stalincare” because every country that has socialized medicine ultimately devolves into reduced medical services, long lines, rationing, and European-level taxation and death panels. America, we always get bad policy like this when we elect incompetent leadership that despises America, liberty and the Constitution.

© Ellis Washington

Ellis Washington, authorized biographer for the conservative intellectual Dr. Michael Savage (see www.MichaelSavage.com), is former editor of the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute. He hosts a radio program Thursdays at 11 a.m. Eastern on 1620 AM in Atlanta. It can be heard online at the Radio Sandy Springs website. Washington is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including “The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law” (2002). Washington’s latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust.”

 

WesternFront America

Thank goodness for YouTube.  There is a lot of archived material there; like these comments from President Reagan…

Many of us have been talking about these very ideas.  I think Reagan’s observations and suggestions are just as wise now as they were then.

However, have we held up our end of the bargain?  Reagan speaks of “informed patriotism.”  Have we worked at spreading that?  I think yes, but only more recently have we begun in the volume needed to make any changes.  I fear that we have not come even remotely close to achieving “informed patriotism” among the people.

Through the “Reagan Revolution” in the 80’s, and the “Republican Revolution” in the 90’s, Conservatives  took political power, but did not engage the culture sufficiently to achieve a long lasting change.  Conservatives could regain the White House again, as well as both houses of Congress.  However, the left still owns the culture (as evidenced by it’s continued decline).  They control most of the media, most of entertainment, and almost all of the public educational establishment.  We can gain position, but without making inroads into the popular culture and institutions, we will still have powerful forces aligned against liberty, freedom, and the America we love.

While the situation seems grim, there are signs of change.  Real change-the kind that results in a major switch in public opinion.  We see Fox News drawing more viewers than every other cable news network combined.  Talk radio ratings are also up.  Print is dying, and in particular, the major liberal leaning newspapers.  People are becoming disenchanted with the media (formerly known as mainstream), and they are turning to more right leaning source of information.  And, when they do, they find out what the mainstream media has been refusing to report, or has been distorting.  If these trends continue, we may be able to see real change.

I sometimes get the sense that Conservatives take the fact that the media, culture, and the  educational establishment are against us, and always will be.  I think that this is a mistaken concept.  It is certainly true right now, but we are seeing the country move to the right.  As the left continues to wreck the country, that trend will continue.  Conservative voices in entertainment are speaking out, and Conservative groups like Campus Reform are trying to spread the word.  If we support them, and others find their voices, we can start to see the actual retaking of these institutions.  It might take a long time, even decades, but the end result will be well worth the wait.

What is to be done?  I think many things need doing.  For those of you that read my Cultural Marxism post, you know that the left began what they called the “long march through the institutions”  decades ago.  Their goal-to infiltrate and eventually take control of our major institutions.  Then, turn those institutions against our cultural.   They have been incredibly successful in that regard.  Think back to Reagan’s words for confirmation.  He discusses that children would learn about patriotism at home, in the community, in school, and in the popular culture.  How many people get a sense of patriotism from the last two sources now?

I believe that Conservatives need to retake those institutions, by having interested people gaining access, opening the doors to others, and changing the system from within.  The left will resist.  But if we all help, their resistance will fail.

In the end, we can win all the elections we want, but as long as the left still controls much of the culture, all victories will be temporary.  We have to stop thinking about delaying and impeding the left, and start working towards re-taking the country.  We can’t think of doing big government in a “conservative way.”  That is antithetical to our beliefs, and it will be just as illogical and dysfunctional as any government bureaucracy invariably becomes.  We need to tear out the liberal power structure, as any concentration of power WILL eventually be corrupted and abused.   The concentration should not  just  be about  stopping the left from implementing more destructive policies, but undoing and abolishing earlier ones.

So, as usual, one of my posts touches on expansive issues.  There is now way to cover all of this in one post.  Please consider this an open thread.

© Matt Ross

Originally posted at Conservative Hideout 2.0

The Liberty Pen

 

WesternFront America

Not so long ago, in our part of Europe we lived in a political system that permitted no alternatives and therefore also no parliamentary opposition. We learned the bitter lesson that with no opposition, there is no freedom.

~ Vaclav Klaus, address before the European Parliament, Feb. 19

Although my memory of Czech leader Vaclav Klaus (president since 2003, re-elected 2008) goes back to his days as prime minister (1992-1997), and to the time of Czechoslovakia’s first president, the famous playwright and philosopher Vaclav Havel (1989-1992), I really didn’t start actively following the career of this free-market iconoclast until radio host Michael Savage would have him on his show from time to time. This made me think to myself – as much as Savage hates Marxism, liberalism and European-style socialism, for him to have President Klaus on his program for an extended interview meant that Klaus had to be a man of stalwart principles and transcendent intellect. Indeed he is.

On Jan. 1, Klaus was appointed president of the European Union. Although this position is largely ceremonial, the EU is a very important economic cooperative represented by 27 nations and over 470 million people. Since President Klaus has a well-known aversion to European-style socialism and statist controls over the free market, he is set on a collision course with the leaders of the socialist welfare states of Europe now under his authority.

Journalist Dan Bilefsky in a recent article on President Klaus wrote:

An economist by training and a free marketeer by ideology, Klaus has criticized the course set by the union’s departing leader, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. The ambitious Sarkozy has used France’s European Union presidency to push an agenda that includes broader and more coordinated regulation by the largest economies to tame the worst of the market’s excesses.

Last Thursday in Brussels, at a major address before the European Parliament, Klaus told the assembly, “The European Union has turned into an undemocratic and elitist project comparable to the Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe that forbade alternative thinking.” Wow! Why don’t we hear that kind of passion and clarity of thought here in America? If Klaus were an American politician, he would definitely be considered a Ronald Reagan conservative. As a matter of fact, Klaus’ European mentor is Lady Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister of Great Britain, a great conservative and unfailing ally with President Reagan in their battles against the tyranny of Marxism and Soviet communism, which eventually lead to the end of the 40-year Cold War as well as the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989-90. (Aides even admit that Klaus has a photo of the former British prime minister in his office near his desk.)

President Vaclav Klaus is a man after my own heart and makes me and other conservatives here in America yearn for a politician to rise up and become a real statesman in the tradition of Burke, Churchill, Thatcher and Reagan. For example, although he’s president of the EU, a conspicuous socialist economic entity, Klaus refuses to sell out his principles and is a tireless advocate of laissez faire free-market capitalism in the tradition of his intellectual mentors, the Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek and the American economist and public philosopher Milton Friedman, whose free-market capitalist ideas Reagan used to build 20 years of sustained economic growth here in America.

Don’t miss President Vaclav Klaus’ book defending the free market against environmental extremism, “Blue Planet in Green Shackles”

The “Reagan Revolution” was seen to cause a political realignment both within and beyond the U.S. in furtherance of his political philosophy of American conservatism, lower taxes, smaller government and free markets. However, Klaus, unlike Reagan, has no Thatcher by his side and is literally waging a one-man crusade to continue the free-market economic and political reforms Reagan and Thatcher championed in the 1980s and 1990s.

Klaus once said, “If you lived under communism [and socialism], then you are very sensitive to forces that try to control or limit human liberty.” This is a sober warning to all of the Quislings, the Neville Chamberlains and Vichy governments amongst the leaders in Europe (and America) who foolishly think that you can fight a 40 year Cold War with one of the most brutal and merciless regimes like the Soviet Union only to repackage and champion their failed economic and political theories years later as something “new.”

There is nothing new about liberalism, egalitarianism, Marxism, communism or European-style socialism. All of those philosophies and economic theories were failures then and are failures now. Sir Winston Churchill understood the perils of socialism and once remarked about this diabolical political theory: “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” Unfortunately Churchill’s successors, like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, don’t seem to understand or appreciate their own recent economic and political history regarding the dangers of embracing Marxism and socialism.

Other European leaders also are not guiltless – Sarkozy of France, Merkel of Germany, Berlusconi of Italy, Balkenende of Holland, Reinfeldt of Sweden, Putin of Russia and every other country in Europe have seemingly failed to take heed to Churchill’s prescient words. These leaders are without excuse, for today we have history as the final judge of our deeds and she has spoken with clarity: Every society that’s tried socialism or state control of all aspects of government, business, education, private property, private industry and the means of production has lead to utter political, intellectual and economic catastrophe. The equitable “redistribution” of resources sought by these naïve utopians and petit bureaucrat has only led, in the words of Churchill, to “the equal sharing of misery.”

Czech President Vaclav Klaus is the only man I see in Europe today that has learned from recent history not to model his country after European-style Marxism. I admire him for his courageous stand against all of the Quislings and Neville Chamberlains he is forced to debate in the marketplace of ideas. His reward? Klaus’ numerous critics sputter and fret in mocking cacophony, calling him a “cynical populist,” a “hardheaded pragmatist,” a “rejected genius,” “a provocateur.” He is none of these epithets.

In my opinion, Klaus is a visionary leader and a statesman amongst small-minded little European socialists who have no memory of totalitarian leaders like Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Mao, Hirohito and Hitler. Therefore, in the words of the philosopher Santayana, these European leaders (and their citizens) will be condemned to repeat history and suffer yet again under these tyrannical political systems.

Thank God President Klaus refuses to compromise his established and moral principles; he refuses to be numbered with the legions of FDRs, LBJs, Jimmy Carters, Barack Obamas and those whom Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin called the ground troops of the socialist and communist revolution … “useful idiots.”

Godspeed, President Vaclav Klaus!

 

WesternFront America