Better trained profilers than us are watching The Lord Protector for clues of all sorts, but the recent Wanda Sykes comments at the White House Correspondents' Dinner about wishing Rush Limbaugh dead (she really is pretty stupid, in a fact-gathering sort of a way, wouldn't you say?) tell us two things about OB-1:
    First, he is most comfortable when among his own, laid back and self-contented, sort of like a Moose Lodge President for Life. Of course, all of us are in some degree or another, but we get the sense he is really uncomfortable when not.
    Second, and this is revealing, Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck really get under his skin. Big time. He really does want to see bad things happen to them, hence the agreeable laugh at Syke's swipe.
    We look at this strategically, recalling the early 30's when the common refrain was "We hate the Nazis but don't want to say anything bad about Hitler. He's very popular," we think it best that the real Obama be exposed as early as possible. There is a lot of bad vibes hidden behind that smirking grin.
    Limbaugh and Beck (and others) are of course private sector, and hurling insults (as the Left sees them) is their business line. They have institutionalized insulting the Left, but, in a way that is outside the realm of officialdom. When Limbaugh calls Obama a liar he only pricks the skin, and really can stab no deeper, which, as I mentioned, is very revealing about Obama's pain threshold.
    But if "official" Washington (the GOP), or the states, (Mr Chumm mentioned Gov Schwarzenegger yesterday), or even official "Business" were to come out as hard on Obama as Limbaugh has been...especially in a mocking or defiant tone, we think Obama becomes unraveled. Those arrows go much deeper. We already knows he's a bit of whiner, and relies on thuggery (by others) to get a lot of things done. (Does anyone recall the sniveling Prince John when Richard was still king?) He seems to be the kind of fellow you don't turn your back on. (No wonder M'Cain respects him.)
    It would be helpful the more we know of these things now, versus later.
St George
   

   The following is a post we wrote Jan 15, 2008, and has not been changed. It has the same relevance now as it did then.
VB

    Like alcoholism, there are both legal and cultural definitions of "torture". The cultural definition is the older and more ingrained in popular understandings, but also the least understood, since it reflects a worldview that lawyers, politicians and polemicists would just as soon ignore. With alcoholism, there's even a good reason for this, since, as you can imagine, a southern Baptist community may find one of its members who takes a daily nip to be an alcoholic, while in Boston the Southies may consider that same fellow a tea-totaller. Legally, the Constitution took care of these regional contradictions with the Tenth Amendment, and left the cultural distinctions alone.
    The first problem with "torture" is it belongs to federal jurisdiction, although I'd wager a state trooper engaging in it would still have to answer to his state courts first. The second problem is that under federal law, there are ever-changing goal-posts, often with a view to steering the more time-tested cultural understandings in a different direction. (Depending on the issue, the record of this is at best mixed, compare Brown v Board of Education with Roe v Wade.)
     The United Nations Convention Against Torture (1984) appears to be the final "first" word on the subject, and is the law of the land in the United States (under USC 18, Part I, Chap 113C, Sec 2043). I say "first" word since each ratifying nation appears to claim its own jurisdiction as to just what "severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental" means. This is typical "lawyer bail-out language" to appease disparate nationalities and their sense of sovereignty. You can see how China might define "torture" entirely different from how US federal courts might define it...taking us straight back to the Baptists vs Boston on the comparative sins of a daily swig of Jamesons.
    How the UN treaty language was designed says much about the stupidity of the argument about what is and is not torture under US law. What conduct falls within the "pain, suffering, physical and mental" criteria is a big issue, but specific conduct, such as water-boarding, can only be proscribed on a case-by-case...and nation-by-nation basis. It can't be inferred, then applied retroactively, which so many lawyers would like to do. Even The Hague is looking down the barrel of a political rather than legal issue, for as much as it may wish to drag Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld before its bar, it can't without having to say nakedly why Clinton and Hu, just to name two, aren't also there. If you had been  following the impeachment-on-war-crimes travails of G W Bush in 2006-2007, you can see how insane the sideshow has become, as many (most?) law faculties have claimed their own private jurisdictions in defining torture, without the help of ordinary legal process, such as the courts. That's how Abu Ghraib became a showplace for "American torture", when in fact it was cruel and stupid abuse (also a criminal offense) falling well short of the more offensive crime of torture.

     So much for preface. How does American culture sees all this torture stuff? Thanks to Jack Bauer we've seen, and been able to decide that there is a cultural component, even context, to deciding this issue which, I am certain, the women of the law faculties (my apologies to real women, I say this as a Mohawk might use it against an Algonquin) both don't understand, or agree with.
     Jack Bauer's torture, in the early years of "24", would qualify as torture under any legal definition, at least where he actually inflicted harm. I won't argue that. He even said last week in a new episode he was ready to pay for those crimes, as a way to showcase the issue. But he often only threatened it, and there the crime becomes more problematic, at least in the eyes of culture. In one case, he made an Arab think he had harmed his family (an illusion) when he in fact hadn't. The deception worked, and there was a furthering of the story, and what Aristotle would have said, "...a Good End was had by all." Lawyers may make hay with this sort of conduct, but the people ain't buying it. They approve.
    Illegal? Hell, yes. Approved by the American people anyway? Hell yes. Why? Jack Bauer provided a cultural real-time context for approving genuine torture that made the pretend-wannabe-torture of water-boarding all the more sensible, especially since it caused the tough-guy mastermind behind 9-11 to cry like a baby, sing like a bird, and rat out everyone he could recall having to do with past, present and future plans to harm America...thus saving hundreds if not thousands of lives. And they only scared him.
    Get it? They scared him. America gets it, even if the law-gals back at Cal-Berkeley don't. And that's probably the rub.
    For what's important now, today (so get ready) is that like rendition, a Clinton/CIA "crime of pragmatism" (I disapprove of this practice generally) that became an albatross around Bush's neck, all these imagined high crimes of torture will disappear very soon once that the tools and rules for their use are back in the hands of other people, er, socialists, with altogether different purposes. They will disappear from Page One for the same reason torture in China...against Falun Gong...will never be a cause celebre in the US.

    This means it's time to inquire a little deeper into that cultural component of torture, set against the back drop of this eternal struggle between men who would free and men who would rather they not.
    Moses Sands loved the old Texas Rangers, which he saw as the model for democratic law enforcement in the developing world. I don't know if he every read Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove or saw the television series, but I had, so when he mentioned them in his piece on democracy in Iraq (his finest sermon) back in Ought Four, I understood what he was talking about.
     He asked if I'd ever considered the difference between the uneducated, tough, even mean men who went out into the wilderness and the men they tracked down and captured? Depending on whether they were heading out to the Staked Plains or heading back to Austin, or the availability of water or provisions, they often as not would just hang those bandits on the spot, with no trial, no due process. Just a "May God have mercy on you soul...Amen", and slap the pony.
     "What made these barbaric men different from the low-down scum they was hanging?", Moses asked.
     Then he answered himself. For one, at the end of the day, they could hang up their guns. The bad guys wouldn't. And two, they would hang their guns up because they were invested in something the bad buys weren't, something good, something bigger, and something that would outlive them. (Moses always believed in the ability of the inarticulate to show the nobility of their souls in other ways. He looked for it.)
     I recalled the hanging of Jake Spoon in Lonesome Dove and knew immediately what he was talking about. That scene was powerful, not so much because of the terrible weight carried by Gus and Woodrow for having to hang their old pard, but in Jake's understanding that he had crossed a line which he could never retreat from. At least in this lifetime. It was a poignant testament to even the harshest of understandings of the differences between right and wrong.

     Like Tom Sawyer's affectionate name for Jim in Huckleberry Finn, I fully expect to see films and books to be withdrawn from library shelves in the next few years that portray such barbaric lawlessness as honorable and noble...or worse, justified. In fact, the committees are already getting organized. Look for it.
     What won't disappear will be the threats or inflicting of "severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental" to get information, and get it right away, when needed. All that will change will be the political or cultural end being pursued. That's the cultural component.
     All that will have changed will be the justifiers...
     ...who will not hang up their guns at the end of the day.
Vassar Bushmills

      The battle of class inside the GOP is a microcosm of what once was the battle between the two parties, but is no more. The lordships seem to have won that fight it seems. It also may be the final battle in a war that began approximately 235 years ago.

      It doesn't matter to me if you'd prefer to notch one up for Darwin, and allow that America is a product of natural selection, or the opposite, that America is from the hand of Providence.
      I go with the latter, but even the former explanation would make modern Darwinists very uncomfortable by its implications. For either approach would have to agree that America is indeed a novel social and political arrangement compared to all the rest of the world's history, and both would agree that this strangeness arises from the fact that America arose from the loins of ordinary men and women...made free. Vassals no more. We like to call them "C-students" here.
     I submit that this is the source of all hatred for America in certain quaters around the world and in teh US...just as it is the source of respect, and admiration from yet other sector of the world's populations.
     Whatever her faults, scars, and scabs, America represents an ideal of freedom and liberty that is universal, and so powerful an impact has this strange new design had on the world that from her benchmarks all the other 'isms have been built, by way of competition and comparison. Even the communists had to call themselves "democracies".
     One can rail against American power, economic and otherwise, her coarse manners, or arrogance (of late) but even the most pious socialist and wannabe aristocrat has to pay lip service to the foundations of human liberty established here. They couldn't draw a single onlooker around their wagon to pitch their patent medicine otherwise. Even Karl Marx had to pretend he was out for the little guy. He even made the common man seem cool on campus, where there has always been a smoldering resentment (in America especially) against the achievements of C-students...but only as an object of pity and exploitation.
     In Man's political history, America has been the game changer. And yes, I think God had a hand in it, for it is clear to me that He does not like the exercise of ruthless power by one man over another, and likes this even less when that one man substitutes himself for Himself.
     The North American continent simply provided a secure petrie dish for this great experiment (making the Providential case even stronger), so that the culture could begin splitting cells for newer generations without any great interruptions. This went on for about three generations, marked by intermittent drowsiness over the true meaning of the experiment's nature, as set out in the original lab manual (the Constitution). So, this period was followed by that one inevitable blood letting (over slavery) the Founders knew would one day come, followed by an infusion of still more new cells from around the world, and an industrial expansion the likes the world had never seen.
     It goes without saying that mutating cells cannot grow and mature and multiple without being attacked from the outside, as well as being vulnerable to genetic weaknesses in their own structure. America's petrie dish had its hands full, especially after the Civil War. Over the next three generations we suffered a new viral threat (industrial oligopoly), alongside the re-awakened dark visage of the natural enemy of the "liberty embryo", the ancient feudal overlord, who had "managed" the lives of these cells elsewhere in the world since the beginning of time, and by this time referred to as "the state".
     This industrial enemy our cells managed quite well, thank you, (after some fits and starts), thanks to free markets and the rise of a small business middle class which ripped Marx's entire vision to shreds. But the other, more ancient Enemy was never fully eradicated by our Revolution and had laid dormant for years, just itching to get back into the game. This Enemy has gone by different names for millenia, but we call it "statism" here, although it has been known as "elitism" in its most narcissistic state, "socialism" in it most academic, "fascism" in its most thuggish, and "progressivism" in it most fashionable. No matter, they can all be identified by one single thesis, which is easily noticed in the most commonplace speech of the day in America, as when one says that someone else ought to be made to do this or that because it is good for still someone else. In the end, that beneficiary is always the speaker, and that poor soul who must do the doing is one the speaker looks down upon with some disdain. That thesis, whether dressed up by the French, who attempted to turn it into a noble birthright (royalty and aristocracy) or the English who tried to gentrify it by acquired merit, or Marx, who tried to paint it with the lipstick of the social engineer, was always "If God had not intended them to be managed he would not have made them a herd."
    How low have we sunk? That sentiment is now shared by the average 19-30 year old, still living in Mom's basement, playing his xBox in his bathrobe, waiting for a phone call for a job interview.
    Oh well. Our maturing culture faced yet another blood letting as the darker side of statism reared its head in the 1940s, but despatched, we once again fell off into our previous state of drowsiness, allowing statism to reemerge from its hole to beckon our herd with its sometimes wagging and nagging, and sometimes seducing, come-hither finger of dependence.
    So pervasive has been this pull from this lethargy the past forty years that it does appear to be the fly in the buttermilk of the Founder's design...so much so that many are beginning to say this is the fatal flaw in our constitutional design. Or, as they say in France, "Whew! Finally."
    Recalling the ups and downs of the refugee children of Israel in their trek from Egypt, alternately begging Yahweh for protection, feasting at the table He set, then erecting new gods to replace Him, like children in need of constant attention and reward...they were eventually denied admission into the Promised Land. Only their children and children's childen could go. We could make an analogy in the way the American people keep turning their backs to the original intent of the Founders, the Constitution, to the gratitude of their forebears and to the honor of Liberty itself. Maybe God is just getting a little fed up, and considering making us wander around in this  wilderness of our own creation for a generation, before allowing our children to once again taste the sweet nectar of Liberty. I'm not sure just yet. Time will tell. Or maybe this Darwinian mutation called America truly has finally run its course.
     What I do know is that the original design was not flawed...just as I also know the failures of our culture has not been due to the natural (genetic) negligence and incompetence of the common man and women; the herd. In that I am heartened.
    The fault, dear Brutus, lies in our betters.
   
    That's a helluva lead-up to a discussion of class warfare inside the GOP, and is certainly not designed to improve my standing with party leaders or for that matter, the conservative movement.
    Interestingly it is the GOP, and not the Democrats or the extreme Left who actually magnify this idea of "class" as being more ancient than all the statist 'isms of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and therefore, more cultural and less political. There is a clear, apolitical, nay, unpolitical line running straight from the feudal nobility of the Merovingians to the modern Me-ists of Middlebury. It is based on nothing more than a self-appointed class awareness.
     We've written about this much on this site. The Founders understood the nature of this natural Enemy to liberty long before Marx, but not only in the royal or aristocratic sense, but in the sense of the inner need of the wealthy, powerful, educated and better bred, people of station, to simply need to be able to lord it over their lessers. They knew there would always be men (and women) who would simply wish to gain power over others...but not just because they could, but because they thought it right that they should. The obverse of the statist thesis, above: "If God had not intended me to manage the herd, he would have placed me outside, and above, it."
In modern college parlance, "What's the benefit of being smarter than Bubba if I can't somehow show it?" (You can fill in the blanks of just what "somehow" translates to be these days."
      The Founders understood this inclination among some men, and designed into law a way for lesser men, who were also far more numerous, to be able to resist the unwanted advances of these men, but not so as to keep them separate, but to bring them together reciprocally. Here, we've often called that the "handshake", so that common men and women would then be able to select/elect among their "betters" who would be entitled to lead them, forsaking the self-appointed.
      It's simple when you stop to think about. And it's simple because it was written for the common people..."Suffer the little children..."

      The Constitution was not conceived and written so as to provide a basis to debate this notion, for this sentiment exists as a matter of nature within people. Always has, always will. The Constitution was designed to give the people, the masses, the C-Students the absolute power to defeat it. Period. To wrap it up and gag it. To send it to its room without supper. To swat it over the nose with a rolled up newspaper.
     We have written much about the failure of the "protectors" of the Constitution, both the elected and un-elected variety. That failure has manifest itself in that handshake between the upper realms of society and those down at the base being withdrawn. Part of that handshake is in education, or as Rush Limbaugh calls it, "teaching", so as to pull those folks up. We agree with his analysis. Good leadership carries with it an element of education, sometimes in the mere watching, since most everyone wants to emulate a good leader in one characteristic or another.
     The Democrats have answered the dilemma of leadership and the handshake in another way, but also quite easily. Having no use for the Constitution anyway, they've just gone around it and bribed everyone. They have their own plantation (actually several) where they keep these constituents, and a large part of their political agenda is to keep them fed...lest they all get angry and someday cross the tracks. This is how Democrats manage their C-students...with crumbs...and a fence.
     No libel ever accused the GOP of harboring "socialist" ideology, so whatever their social disdain for their lessers, it is not inspired by Marx. GOP class orientation being more ancient, in some ways makes their disdain for their lessers even more craven. It is more French than German.
     What I can't understand about class snobbery in the party that sent 600,000 men to die liberating illiterate black people that most had never even seen before, is why are they even here...in this party?
     Yes I know, the party of Curtis and Lincoln turned into the party or Pierpont Morgan and John D in a short forty years, but still...
     ...do the math. Republicans, let alone Republican elitists, can't do what Democrat elitists can do now...even if they wanted to....which begs a whole new line of questions. JP would have figured that out in a heartbeat. For one, the Republican base won't go where the Democrat base has gone. They won't be driven or prodded like cattle, they won't be teased, or fooled (more than once) and they have never developed a taste for crumbs. They haven't been spoon fed and bribed the past forty years. You can cut them loose, but you cannot drag them along, toward a new plantation, er, promised land with a snell hook in their belly.
     So, honestly, I can't figure out the thinking of this wing of the GOP, especially from the East, who believe the party can only grow by first chucking this very, very large base.
     The M'Cain embarrassment of '08 has already proved the simplemindedness of this notion. There's no telling how many Republicans voted for Obama rather than M'Cain, but we know enough stayed home to possibly have swung the election, at least in some key districts and states. And Obama cleaned house with the "moderate" vote in general. What would these urbane Republicans have us do to increase our draw that wasn't done in '08?
      And sadly, for their case, Arlen Specter let the cat out of the bag when he more or less acknowledged that the only reason a moderate candidate becomes a Republican in the first place is because that is the only way he/she can realize a personal political ambition (i, e., the Democrat field was too crowded.). There is nothing, I repeat, nothing, intrinsically wonderful about the Republican Party...its founding roots, its constitutional grounding, its economic platform, its looking out for the little guy...unless maybe as his keeper...that would cause any moderate to choose to become a Republican out of conscience. Even Big Money has gravitated leftward. (There's cultural reasons for that as well.)
      But GOP moderates tip their other hand as well by articulating two reasons why the conservatives, especially social conservatives have to go. One is immigration, about which they may have the better argument...but one for negotiation, not dismissal. I simple haven't seen anyone rolling up his sleeves and extending the hand of reciprocity to acquaint the social conservatives with his side of the argument.
     The other great issue is abortion, or to be more succinct, the pro-life position. The GOP moderate position vis a vis conservatives here is an absolute mystery to me, inasmuch as their position is in the minority, by a wide margin, within the party, but possibly even so in the broader culture. Pro-life was never that far behind in polling, even in its hey-day of killing tens of thousands in the 70s-80s, and has been trending back toward life ever since. Even in the Democrat Party pro-life sentiment is very strong, especially among blacks and Latinos, who alas, are being dragged along politically anyway with that snell hook in their bellies.
     The decline of the number of abortions in the past several years (it may once again grow as the Administration intends to end the Welfare Reform Act and get those mommies back on welfare) has proven that the underlying "rights" issue (which was about the worst legally-reasoned case ever handed down by the Supreme Court, anyway) was based more on class than rights, and affluent class more than  poverty class. With a large number of abortions today, it seems to be more of a convenience and cosmetic issue than economic one.
     We believe there has always been a negotiation basis, inasmuch as the proper venue for establishing abortion "rights" was always the states. That was what was so horribly wrong with Roe. Get rid of Roe and the right to an abortion doesn't end, it just goes back to the states. One could get a legal abortion in the US before Roe. (Then it will be state supreme courts telling legislatures they can't outlaw it. Pyrrhic victory? We think not.)
     In the end, I can't understand how GOP moderates hope to grow, by first cutting off a large part of their party (OK, a small part in Connecticut and Maine, but say, 70% in the South) with no plan as to how to entice them in the party one their key issues have been trumped.
     My only common sense conclusion is that perhaps GOP moderates are in fact Democrats in drag, sleeper Dem's who actually want to reduce the size of the party to a permanent state of dependence on the Democrat majority...but where they could be put in a safe and secure (and hereditary) position in government as the Minority Party in Perpetuity. (Can anyone come up with a fitting name from the acronym MICHEL?)
     Conspiracy? No, class.

     We've already said our piece about the GOP needing a banner....and that banner has to be the Constitution. But the reasons for Constitution were those Vassals-No-More. If the GOP cannot embrace them as the Founders did then that part of the GOP who cannot should go. If there is no party that stands for the Vassals-No-More, and no party that stands against the notion of overlordship, no matter how benign then we vassals-no-more need to find a new home...quickly. The clock is ticking. We are not looking for kinder, gentler drovers.
     What is so remarkable to me is that it would be infinitely more easy to go onto the plantations of the Democrats, places even Rush Limbaugh can't get to, and their vassals over to the Vassals-No-More camp than it ever would be find that one little niche issue in a Democrat moderate that might make them to want to switch sides. With a full 20% of the American population living in abject servitude, but also with the right to vote, it is a no-brainer to as to where the stress of my campaigns the next few season would be. There is Principle, Policy and Process, in that order, and in '10 and '12 we should see a rising menu of Principle and Policy directed at the Democrats' greatest mistake...they still let those folks vote.
     If the GOP is telling us that they cannot find a single selling point from the Constitution, the heroism of the Founders, the spirit of liberty, the bones of the half million who died freeing slaves, and the quarter million who died freeing the rest of the world, that might appeal to a other-side-of -the-track Democrat "client", perhaps in New Orleans, who is still looking for that ladder out of the warm, snug hole the Democrats keep her in...for her childrens' sake...or a Yankee, who started it all 235 years ago, or a wealthy Oregonian who has forgotten the shoulders he stands on, ...then I would say the GOP leadership has the vision that is just about as deep as a warm pool of p**s.
Vassar Bushmills
    
    

    We've been watching for little clues from this administration since the run-up days. Their audaciousness is either contrived, or based on a sense of not just invincibility but immortality. AG Holder, whose credentials as a crooked lawyer were established even before Obama tapped him out, has committed some out and out illegal acts lately, the latest this idea of turning the Bush "torture" lawyers over to their state bar associations...with the implied threat that they had better do something about it.
    This is Nazi thuggery, as we've already pointed out on other occasions. But moreover, it's an impeachable offense...should the GOP ever gets power.
    That's our point here. The brazenness of these acts, so early, indicates that the whole kit n'k-boodle of them never intends to be tossed out of office...legally.
    With them, it's not a hope, but a plan.
Bernard Chumm

        We've often based our analyses on what we call immutable laws. Because most folks work inside their own little wheel, they rarely step outside it to see the larger wheel(s) of which their own little wheel is but a single cog.
        For years dreamers and philosophers have screamed at American to look outside our wheel, and while many are dead wrong, they are worth the looksee anyway, if only to pause and take in the grandeur of the bigger picture. E.g, just going to the trouble of disproving a popular doomsday theme (man-made global warming or climate change comes to mind) can be very illuminating. Mill wrote something along those lines, when he talked about error bumping into truth, making the truth all the stronger because, from time to time, it had to resist an opposite line. (Falsity is not a point of view, by the way. Sorry.)
        For instance, throughout the post-election period there have been all sorts of calls for the people to rise up and take back the Republic at the polling booth. But here, we've sounded the cautionary note that it probably can't be done. Do the math, we've said.
        Even as we know the coalition to hand the nation over to the forces of socialism (however defined) was helped with cheating, most of that cheating was "legal", and their numbers right now are superior to ours. We know this coalition and the type of government it is establishing, must, as a matter of natural law, fall within 40-60 years.  But that is not tomorrow. That is not before infinite damage is done the ideas upon which the Nation was founded.
        Those forces that created that new majority (we like to call them The Enemy here) are as much cultural as political, with a well established and logical (un-pretty) end, if allowed to persist for no more than 10-12 years. This isn't politics anymore. It is inevitability, once certain things are allowed to become cemented. Once cemented, immutable laws take over.
        The Enemy's demographic is still one of growth (e.g., children raised only by their mothers) while ours is a demographic of decline. Liberty isn't cool any longer. Neither is morality. Of course, we argue that these things are reversible...but we must attend to the things that reverse them, such as jumping in headfirst to resist the Pop Culture rather than run away from it. We can't win while shying away from the Enemy face-to-face...on his turf. The Pop Culture is the national street now, and not the little back alley we hide away in. The Pop Culture defines how we raise our children, and worse, how public schools plan to raise our children on our behalf. The Pop Culture is defined by that same fatherless family (almost 50%), and no, I'm not speaking of poor people of color. Selfish little boys raised by helicopter mothers, never allowed to cross the street alone until about age 12, and never, never out of Mom's sight without first, a beeper, then later a cell phone, yet raised in no particular moral tradition, are more than apt to just walk away from a marriage after a kid has been born, in many cases just for the sheer boredom and inconvenience of it all (inconvenience was after all, what drove the anti-war movement during Vietnam), but also because of the inhibiting aspect of parenthood on one's pursuance of the pleasures of play and toys they found just behind Mom's apron's strings those first 22 years. Girls are little better, but alas, they get stuck with the habitat issues, having to raise L'il Dick's Li'l Dick...or maybe Li'l Scarlett.
        This is the demographic that drives politics in America today, and is very close to being irreversible. In constitutional politics it is a game changer, for clearly, the Founders never imagined that the national religion would ever turn out to be craven Me-ism.
       While you chew on that; here's another immutable law about to be invoked:
       : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-3X5hIFXYU

       These numbers are nearly irrefutable.
       It may explain a lot of things that have been going on inside G8 countries for several years. It may explain GW Bush's policy on immigration at our southern border, finding it better to repopulate the US with olive-skinned Roman Catholics than Muslims, who, history shows, have not been proven to be munificent managers of non-Muslims once the shoe is on the other foot. If Europe falls to Islam, it will not be the Lebanese or Moroccan (we've always been pro-Umayyad, sort of) or the Malaysian strain that will assume power there.
       But unlike the doomsdayers, we do not think these warnings are immutable or irreversible...yet.
       How Europe will handle it will be in keeping with their tradition, which will be 1) to submit quietly, with only a whimper, the rich and powerful setting up "sovereign nations of one" in Fiji or New Zealand or Trinidad. (Many like-minded beta Americans will do likewise)....or 2) one day, in the not too distant future, we will wake to find that there had been a Kristallnacht in some remote Europe city, possibly the Netherlands, or Austria, or maybe Sweden. Once that cat is out of the bag, it will be difficult for inside-the-box Euro bureaucrats to put it back, and shortly Europe with revert to type. The continental pogrom will have begun...again.
       Thankfully, America is a few decades behind (ahead?) of the Euros, so either of these scenarios will play out before our eyes. It explains why Islamo-fascism is so intent on bringing America the Satan up to pace with the Euros, who they consider already "in the bag".
       If indeed this sort of information was part of GW's thinking in framing his immigration policy, then he should be damned to hell for yet one more crime of compassion...but not because he was wrong, but because, in the end, he felt we couldn't handle the truth, and withheld it from us.
       Yes, we can.
Vassar Bushmills

     The title about says it all.
     The lab rats have all acted predictably. Ding, ding.
Blakely

         In 1998 I set out on this journey with Moses Sands, to write a book, "his way", about the blueprint of the American House and the US Constitution. Moses was a remarkably uncomplicated man for someone who could see things so profoundly. He saw and understood the Constitution as a Yankee farmer or Boston shop clerk might have in 1790, as well as the Framers. But he also saw it and understood it as an Indonesian rice farmer might have, who couldn't read at all, never heard of America, and only had instincts and dreams for the liberties it laid out.
         He concluded, rightfully in my view, that the Constitution was written for the little guy, (the "C-Student") and not so much for the A-students who could navigate through almost any sort of political regime, no matter how tyrannical. What connected the A- and the C-students was a kind of handshake, inasmuch as the Constitution assumed the A-student would be ever mindful that he was standing on the shoulders of a lot of C-students himself, all of whom had led him to whatever lofty place he now stood. Gratitude.
         Moses believed that you could not look over the span of human history without realizing that the kind of human liberty we have known here in America indeed does encapsulate the hopes of dreams of all men throughout history. He reduced it to the simple formula of being able to build and own your own House, and pass it on, to be built on even more, and, in order to protect that process, create reciprocal relationships with your neighbor so that neither of you would be spending too much time trying to take from the other, as history shows some men are wont to do.
         John Adams wrote that our Constitution could only work in a religious society. That now seems to be where the war, or contest, or struggle today, clearly lies. Adams didn't say "Christian" although he probably inferred it. But what he referred to was a society that moved together with fixed stars in their heaven to guide them. Politics is indeed remarkably uncomplicated when you believe, really believe as a C-student is more apt to believe than a Borgia, that there is a final consequence to the acts we make in this lifetime. Men do not believe they can repeal or amend the immutable in such a society, which is why the Bill of Rights was drafted as it was, as coming from an immutable Source. This too is a line of demarcation between ourselves and our enemies. They wish to replace God...with themselves.

        In some of our travels across the West, many hours in the car, Moses would suddenly pipe up with some new revelation he'd just had about yet another parallel between what he called "transcendent religion" and American exceptionalism. He believed that God looked down and seeing the carnage the royal systems were still bringing to the world, said "this has got to stop", so arranged for his own petrie dish, protected by two oceans where this little experiment in human freedom could grow.
        The only seed He wanted from the building stock was common sense, the ability to know how to build and take care of one's House. With the Constitution he simply added the Plan that would enable his stock to multiply and pass those Houses on.
        I imagine at some point He looked down and was very pleased.
        We've written much of what Moses Sands said on the subject, especially about the natural enemies to the process, (modern royals or elitists and statists). Moses called me one evening in 1998 and suddenly cried out that Americans no longer knew the blueprint of the House, and had no knowledge of the relationship between their House and the Constitution (and those immutable Laws).
        He wanted to prevent what has just happened, but he crossed over in 2006.

        But while we have been writing for a long time about more active things that citizens need to do in order to restore the Republic, we think it would a pyrrhic victory indeed, if after running the scalawags out of office, and putting a few in jail, then we simply went back to how it was in 2005. Our House was in jeopardy first. It was this weaknesses that allowed all the other things to happen. The entire Constitutional "formula" began to disintegrate when average Americans began to lose light of the blueprints of their House. Oh, it was intentional, mind you. A conspiracy even. But the others in the "formula", the Protectors, no longer wanted to get their hands dirty, and the politicians were too be-sotted from their dalliances with that giant whore, Government, to do anything about it. Not one in ten elected officials in either party can even tell you what the purpose of this wonderful expriment even was. Not one in five conservatives can either.    
       You've been on your own for a long time now, and quite frankly, your grandpa would be ashamed. Just look at the myriad of people you've invited in for a chat, but who never left and now lounge around our dinner table like lords...advertisers, government officials passing our free candy, purveyors of filth selling their wares to your children...and a decreasing ability by you to say "no" to your children, for a thousand reasons. Putting Barny Frank in jail will certainly make me feel better, but it will not fix our national House. It takes more.

       We need to go back to see how our House was built and maintained in 1940, not 2000. That was when getting an education and a job, and marrying a decent girl who's never shown her belly button to anyone...anyone!...was the ultimate of cool. There was a time when being able to drink twelve beers in 45 minutes was lame, not cool, for only rich kids at the better universities could do that and not be roundly punished in society, with lost wages, or diminished social standing.
      
       We have just had a socialist takeover in our country. How severe it will be is anyone's guess. No one knows how long it will last. But we need to take advantage of every opportunity. Now it is even more crucial that we get back in touch with the blueprint of our House, for it may well be that we cannot rely on the normal forces of the social structure we used to know to help us pass it along for a few generations. We may have to revisit the blueprints our House as if it were a sacred plan, to be passed from father to son, but kept out of sight, and mentioned only in whispered tones. We may have top do the same with the Constitution for it may soon be a document that is completely thrown down or disfigured beyond all recognition in a few short years. Keep them safe.
      If time ever allows, and we can find a publisher, I'll still get out that book Moses wanted to write, but in the meantime you can go back to an earlier post we did here in 2007, which was the only thin Moses Sands ever wrote that I know about.
Vassar Bushmills

   He becomes a Democrat!
   Thanks, Arlen, one the truly few honest things you've ever done.
Bernard Chumm

      Following the Old Bast**d Himself, V I Lenin, for whom I still bear a grudging respect, and who in 1902 started with "What Is To Be Done"...

     First and foremost, we have to raise an army of full time soldiers. If we don't raise such an army, none of the other "What Is to Be Undone's" that follow really matter.

     Background: The Left has had a full time army in the United States since the 1960s. (Some say much earlier, and they may be right). And by "full time", I mean men and women whose job, whose paying job, is to get out of bed each day and go do battle with the forces of Good (or Evil, as they think perceive us to be.) These are committed soldiers of the Left, filled with a vitriol and hatred for us (we've written about before) that transcends anything they may just coincidentally be for. (This is important.) For them, this has always been a fight to death...to submit our will to theirs.
                            Since the 2000 election their army has grown exponentially, using every tool available to them, from forming internet cells, to forging alliances with local politicians, educators and media. They are active, very loud and as of November, 2008, very successful. Once dismissed as petulant, whiny, childlike, and feckless, they have now become clever in the ways of the turf...which they are increasingly beginning to own.
                           They are well funded from private donors, but the bulk of this army is paid by us, the American taxpayer. Did you ever wonder why, since the 1970's, that American universities have grown in degree programs for which there are no private sector job opportunities? Where do you go to find work with a degree in feminist literature? Answer: To another university that it just so happens is starting up its own Department of Feminism. (We delve into this in another "What Is to be Done"s segment.) The long and short of it is that fully 20% of most public university budgets is to provide a base of operations for these anti-American soldiers. They are the American Taliban, and the public university is their Waziristan.

                           To combat this massive army our side has talk radio and a few committed think tanks, but of late talk radio still spends a lot of time on comedy tours or at the golf course. The rest are ordinary citizens, working full time jobs. 
                           For generations our majority constitutional formula allowed vigilant citizens to be politically active only part of the time, by applying the knowledge and skills of building and owning their own House to 1) keeping their elected representatives in tow, and 2) with the guidance of a small army of "protectors" who kept the enemies of the Constitution at bay. But about fifty years ago, someone on the Left figured this formula out and they have been picking away at the edges ever since. Our Protectors lost sight of the prize, our elected representatives were seduced and the popular culture has over-taken our House, so that now, after three generations since the veterans came back from the world war, there's scarcely anyone who can even recall what that formula was supposed to look like.

So, to be blunt, the idea that a lot of pissed-off citizens can suddenly get up and give up a Saturday here and two hours on Thursday night there by attending a public protest or meeting isn't really enough to beat back the efforts of this giant army.

I hope I'm wrong, but if you are putting all your eggs into the November 2010 basket, based on that formula, you can't afford to be wrong.

Even if you can regain even one of the Houses, their army will be in place, with all the time in the world (they are younger than we are..do the math) to just wait us out until we fall back asleep.
                  
Here is what has to be done:
       For some weeks now we've been pushing a project that will put at least three-five full time soldiers in each congressional district to do battle with the Left in a variety of ways. They will have several invisible ("That damned elusive Pimpernel") functions:
       1. Morale: Rebuild morale among the base, Re-invigorate the base by letting them very publicly see someone fighting back;
       2. Nation re-building: Combat the Pop Culture by using street sense (and some money) begin the generation-long project to make morality, integrity and the values of liberty seem cool, while making the opposite arts of the pop culture seem lame;
       3. Intelligence: Monitor the Left more closely, Provide "clients" with on-going intelligence of the Left's moves and design counter activities so as to better predict their moves so as to get out in front of them;
       4. AGITPROP/PsyOps: Provide a constant drumbeat of noise and action against the Left, "brush fires" in the words of Sam Adams, which started with the first Tea Party; using every for of media;
      5.  Provide A Reckoning,  by allowing no lie no outrage to go unpunished, using many of the same tools the Left has used;
      6.  Enlistment: Build an even larger army of volunteers, especially from the midst of the Left's own territories.

       These functions are all outside the bounds of normal political activities, by parties or other groups. We have already designed plans with the in mind and offered them to political operatives as well as private citizen groups.
       For a decent sized city or congressional district, expect to be able to set and operate such a company of soldiers for no less than $150,000 year, for ten years. And yes, once the news is out that such groups exist, contributions will roll in.

       If interested, contact us thru thesandsinstitute.org, where we will go through a little vetting process.

 

    It's a simple enough question, which almost any GOP congressman or senator instinctively knows, yet can't find the 'hones to ask:
    Madam Secretary, just what book have you read...not just last month, or last year, but in your life...that would cause this body to believe that you have even the remotest idea what is, or has been going on in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Cuba, North Korea, China, Russia, or for that matter, Arkansas or New York?
    Can you name the head of state of Russia? How about the Governor of New York?
    Seriously.
    Blakely

     In case you didn't know, the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, was designed in the West to coincide with the largest celebration in the rest of the world, which was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's 100th birthday celebration.
     Bolshevik!
     No really.
     It was in all the papers. Just like the Devil, no one speaks unfavorably about Lenin any longer. If you are looking for a pivot point in the popular culture, that's a big one.
     April 22, 1970 was the day Lenin became a demi-god, and ironically it was the first day of the end of the Soviet Union...for you see, by making Lenin a god so close to the original Orthodox Easter, those who could still remember, did.
     It wasn't Lenin's fault that he was born so close to Easter, but the Soviet leadership made the most of it, turning an April Easter-time celebration into a week long spring vacation, ending with May Day. They produced "li'l baby Lenin" pins, created a "garden of Gethsemene" pilgrimage to the tent camp he stayed before re-entering Russia in 1917, and even threw in Easter lilies.
     In 1902 V I Lenin wrote "What Is to Be Done", which I read in 1968. Hence the title.

     So, what is to be done?

     If you pay much attention to talking heads (just look at the more popular blogs on Town Hall) you will note a great deal of redundancy.
     This is because everything than can be said positively about the Constitution, American exceptionalism, the American way of life, "conservatism" has already been said. Theer is nothing new. Everything that can be said about the enemies of these gems of liberty also has been said. We all try to find new and different ways to say these things, in the same way Coca Cola keeps looking for another perfect "I'd like to Teach the World to Sing" jingle, but we're all pretty much repeating ourselves.
     So thank God for breaking news each day, for those who do this for a living are indeed grateful that they can find a new backdrtop to whatveer point they've been driving home. Even more than expanding or changing their templates, news provides fodder for restating them...in more and more interesting and new ways.
     Still, other than the events of the day, there is that same message.
  
      This is not a bad thing, as we have written here before about the value of repitition (redundancy). After all, that is how the Left has beaten their lies into the pop culture's head for years now. It is our job now to try to make our truths just as cool as their lies, and apply the same 2/4 drum beat. It's our job to make Liberty cool and Statism lame.
      For you see, there are some things that simply have to be done or it will all be lost, no matter how much we know.The Information phase is almost dead. The Intelligence phase is about to begin, followed by Plans and Actions.
      And there are only a couple of open roads by which these things can be done. If we cannot build a constitutional fire in the hearts of the Republican Party then we will have simply take that fire elsewhere and run the GOP out of our lives...forever. Good riddance. So much for road #1. The GOP has less than a year to decide whether they will try to be easier on the eyes to socialism, or become true standard bearers of the Constitution.
      If they chose the former, this will make our job as citizens much harder, and require another generation to reach our goal, which means, much like Washington in 1778, instead of preparing to take back our institutions, we will be fighting rearguard actions while we retrain and re-arm ourselves toward that day when the next generation (or the next) will finally be ready to reclam those things that have been stolen.
      But we have to make all these decision very quickly, for those who linger on, hoping against hope that a true man of integrity will rise in the GOP, may be swallowed up. The first date of decision will be November 2010, a mere 18 months away.
      Only They know we are coming and will do their best to see that our hopes are dashed. And they have the keys to the state legislatures, secretaries of state, county registrars and billions now to spend on resurrecting dead people who can show up almost anyplace where needed during the election. So don't put all your eggs into the 2010 basket.
      We have to have plans ready for the day after 2010, and we have to make those plans now.
VB
     

       Thanks to Miss Garofalo, I've gone back to finish a piece I started before the election in 2008...about the phony intellectualism of the Hollywood/Entertainment class. Luminaries such as Bill Maher, Clooney, Matt Damon, Sean Penn, and of course, the nitwits of "The View".
They actually do make Katie Couric appear engaged.
       Collectively, I began calling them "Cliffs Notes Intellectuals" about 15 years ago, when another brood claimed the spotlight.
       There is a reason (pathology) as to why they are the way they are. Like most journalists, intellectual laziness is only a part of it.
       Our favorite riposte: "Dixit insipiens" (L: Thus spake the fool). We like it because after listening to a CNI tell you how smart he is, you drop the DI bomb then, walking away, watch them scratch their head as to what you had just said. Works every time.
        We collect one-liners, and suggest you do the same. They work much better than long, glib comments.
VB

      If you don't already know, Walter Duranty was a New York Times reporter stationed in Moscow during the Stalin show trials and the Ukrainian (state-made) famine. He got a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.
      And he lied through his teeth.
      At our GreatAmericanZeroes.com gallery of liars, we named our Media Gallery after Duranty even though he was British. But no one knows why Duranty lied, i.e, was he simpatico to Stalin's communism (he reported favorably about it) or was he simply lazy and easily manipulated? Or both?...for laziness and inconvenience (and the fear of the unknown when going out into the boondocks) spawns a kind of sympathetic behavior toward anyone who can make your job less unpleasant, by allowing you do it in the comfort of your hotel, somewhat like the Stockholm Syndrome. In fact, we call it the "Duranty Rash" to the Stockholm Syndrome. For you see, Duranty did prefer the relative comfort of Moscow versus the tribulations of life outside the city, so relied very much on reports passed out by Soviet press agents, rather than following good journalism out to the hinterland.
      At the Stalin show trials Duranty's cynicism in reporting was finally outed by fellow Brit, Malcom Muggeridge, who became a passionate Christian later in life (as Harry Reid will no doubt do also) and who apparently was smitten by integrity even before he was saved. It eventually led to Duranty's recall in 1934, although the Pulitzer was never recalled. (In fairness, The Times did recommend to the Prize Committee they do so.)
      We noticed the same sort of lazy-cowardly-simpatico journalism in the Newsweek stories on the "Haditha Massacres" that weren't massacres at all, the "crime" hatched by journalists who were afraid to leave the Green Zone in Baghdad in order to find out any truth at all about reports of civilian deaths in Anbar province.

       Through the years the Duranty Rash has shown up from time to time in American journalism, and usually has been quickly covered with calamine, or whatever salve they use over there to stop its spread.
       But suddenly, as in most viral infections, America has come under assault from a more virulent strain, which has grown and taken on pandemic dimensions. Entire news networks now cynically look and see, then look away and report another thing altogether, all in seeming concert with one another. Every day you can find a word or phrase in a single report, then pick it up again in 10-15 other published reports, as if all were getting the same reports from the same Politburo operative, and not even bothering to spice up the report by trying to make it appear original. Unabashed lemmings. Worse, all these people are assumed to be credible journalists. Still, clearly they have been smitten by this new viral strain of the Duranty Rash.
       I note this even as these journalists are safely inside the Beltway or other east coast sanctuaries, but still behave as if their were in the field, up to their knees in muck, gunfire all around, fearing having to drink bad water outside Baghdad (or Saigon), or a lack of shower facilities, or having to wear the same underwear two days in a row, not to mention being shot at (although wanted posters are beginning to pop up in some states...but still with small bounties). Is this laziness gone mad, or simpatico grown incestuous? Whatever, this new rash has almost consumed the entire industry.
       For instance, using only one case, NBC is owned by General Electric, who has bet their entire store on a product line which in a free market couldn't possibly be put on shelves and sold profitably. So why not get the government to make them buy our stuff? they ask. That is the logical question many corporations might ask today. With government mandates for light fixtures no one wants GE's future becomes secure.  So GE.com meets US.gov in a cheap hotel in Fairfax and consummates a deal. Suddenly NBC has become as green as Irish sod and even dedicats one of it tributaries, MSNBC, over to un-apologetic Leftist simpaticos, lock stock and barrel, where, so far, journalistic laziness has been so out-performed by stupidity the former's absence is hardly noticed. While lazy simpatico is merely a curiosity, stupid simpatico is just plain ugly...talk about putting lipstick on a pig...which might explain Jenine Garofalo's high profile there. They actually appear to work hard at being insipid at MSNBC.

       I bring up the Green issue here, because 1) today is Earth Day and Lenin's birthday so, appropriately 2) Global warming is probably the greatest "1984" type lie still working. A complete and utter boondoggle. The notion that Barack Obama can walk on water is mere conjecture compared to this lie.
       So where's Malcolm Muggeridge? And what would be the fall-out if he were to suddenly show up?
       Seriously. Think about it. What would happen if FoxNews (most likely) but even more interestingly, CBS or ABC News publicly announced (the research is already there) that the whole global warming-climate change argument, especially as regards man's causing it, is a hoax, and from this day forward, "we will have no more of it."
       Whatta scoop! What a journalistic line in the sand! Whatta turnaround!
       Wow! Zowie! Zounds! Gadzooks! Yikes! Holy crap!
       Brit Hume will come out of retirement. David Brinkley will rise from the grave. Edward R Murrow will posthumously quit smoking. Katie Couric will start. Keith Olbermann will take a job writing menu ads at Taco Bell...
       ...for fully 55% of all television news watchers in America, within a week, will go over to that new spot on their TV remotes. To hell with fair and balanced. They will seek the sort of facts that begin with "Gore lied, people died."
       What a concept!
St George

      ...in yesterday's 4/19 press conference"

        "I feel very strongly that when we are at our best, the United States represents a set of universal values and ideals -- the idea of democratic practices, the idea of freedom of speech and religion, the idea of a civil society where people are free to pursue their dreams and not be imposed upon constantly by their government."

      Are these values and ideals we've adopted only since January 22, or are these values and ideals we've always had?
      If they are values and ideals we've always had, since the founding, then why did he run against them, and why has he in the past spoken out against reflections on this values, such as the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, as written...or...
      ...did wife Michelle misspeak during the campaign when she said she was "finally proud to be an American.?"

      Coming from Obama, I'd just as soon hear an extemporaneous expression from Mr Obama as to just what those values and ideals are.
      Bernard Chumm

      Only yesterday I warned against getting over-wrought about this Napolitano/Homeland Security report about the "threat to national security" conservatism can become.
      Imagine being told you have cancer. In the company of only yourself, you sit down, gather your thoughts, maybe say a prayer, and then, with the cold steel of resolve, you stand up, with a clear mind and heavy heart...and you go fight this menace.
      Now that you know you are dealing with mad dogs here you don't get angry. You simply go and do what has to be done.
      This is not the time for the loud bellowing of protest, but rather speaking through gritted teeth so low it is barely audible, displaying the kind of resolve to the Other Side that you now understand the stakes as they have always understood them to be: a fight to the death.
      My will versus your will.
      Laisser les bons temps rouller!

      As I wrote yesterday, the Obamailis have just tipped us off. But this may also be their tipping point, that bridge too far that can stiffen men and women's necks, forging an army that suddenly steps forward, arms firmly locked, and marches irresolutely forward. They created a report that cannot be recalled, so now we have an army that cannot either.
      As I have reported several times, a left-wing lawyer in the 1960s told me straight up, "Once we get power, we will make sure no one can use the same tactics to take it away from us." The First Amendment be damned.
      There is much history for this, going back to our own Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. But we doubt, at this early stage, there will be any need for legislation. Within 120 days of the Nazis taking power in 1933, while Hitler was still chancellor, using intimidation rather than new laws, (the laws came later) none of the political tactics used freely by political parties before 1933 were used again. People were threatened with job loss, their houses searched (being "watched" as the Napolitano Report lays out) and publicly stigmatized...in the press, on the job and in neighborhood whisper-campaigns...simply for keeping the company of enemies of the state (right wing extremists with bumper stickers and other people who carry Bibles or editions of the Constitution in their pocket...as I do).
      When communism came to eastern Europe in 1945, all the Communists had to do was say that anyone seen going to church, or making any other overt expressions of religion would result in job loss or demotion. No laws. No billboards. Just a whisper in the ear by a party official or superior.
      And it worked. And why not? Imagine walking into your wife and saying that your job has been threatened because of the Sarah Palin bumper sticker on your car. Wanna bet how quickly she'll tell you to get that damned thing off there?
     You bet it works.
    All they want is for you to put those things away. Then their will has overcome yours. That is their victory.    
    So gird yourself now.
    Just don't get mad.
VB