Know Nothing Party

How things have changed in two short years.*

In November 2008 we were told conservatism was dead and the Republican Party was on its way to Whig status. Ragin' Cajun James Carville boastfully predicted 40 years of Democratic governance.

Maybe not.

Now conservatism is in an ascendancy. The Republicans are back and have learned that the reason they were fired in the first place was because of all that spending. Now that Republicans are back in the House, they can get to work on repealing Obamacare, privatizing Social Security, and ending the welfare state.

Maybe not.

For all the chatter, there isn't anything even broadly revolutionary about this election. There might be a few upsets and a few unapproved candidates might survive running the gauntlet, but this Republican Congress will likely resemble the ones that disappointed from 1994-2006.

The mistake made by rose-spectacled Republicans comes in thinking that a change of majority parties makes much of a difference beyond the name plates and seating arrangements.

Time magazine just put "Party Crashers" Rand Paul, Christine O'Donnell, Marco Rubio, and Meg Whitman on its election issue cover. That Bush Republican Marco Rubio and former eBay CEO and billionaire Meg Whitman are somehow considered "a new breed of Republicans" tells us enough about what is considered "Tea Party" these days.

Too much buzzkill?

The first reason for skepticism is that there has not been a serious philosophical shift, nay even a debate within the GOP.

One might argue that support for the bank bailouts or President Obama's stimulus became a litmus test since it resulted in the scalp of Bob Bennett and the defection of Arlen Specter. But that anyone can support the promotion to Speaker of the House for bailout leader John Boehner suggests that the party leadership won't have to pay for their sins.

The one issue that got Republicans kicked out in the first place, foreign policy and the disastrous experiments in Middle Eastern nation-building, has been a non-issue in this election cycle.

Republicans have convinced themselves and probably convinced a lot of voters that the real reason they got booted was because they spent too much. The party's recent emphasis on economic issues would be a step in the right direction if it was rooted in anything besides partisanship. Like the kid who got spanked for sticking his hand in the cookie jar, these Republicans are only sorry they got caught.

Secondly, there is nothing in this election to suggest confidence in Republicans -- only that Democrats failed and voters had nowhere else to turn.

Republican victories this year are also consistent with historical precedent. In America's duopoly, the ruling party traditionally loses big in the first midterm. One party fails and the other one gets their chance to do . . . something.

In 1954, during Dwight Eisenhower's first term as president and the first such Republican in 20 years, the GOP lost 18 seats in the House. Reagan's Republicans got routed in 1982 while the economy was still sour. Bill Clinton had large majorities in Congress in 1994 before losing a whopping 54 seats. With the memory of 9/11 still fresh, George W. Bush's GOP temporarily broke the trend by adding 8 seats at midterm.

Since the Republicans have gone into exile, there has been no urgency to address issues. Republican identity for the past two years has been wrapped up in opposition to the Democratic president. It's not because he's black. It's because he's a Democrat.

The new Republican ascendance has nothing to do with a re-birth of conservatism or faith in the GOP and everything to do with a Democratic ruling majority that didn't delivery what it promised despite overwhelming majorities.

The Republicans' position as the majority party in Congress doesn't preclude them from relinquishing their title as the Party of No. They can still oppose President Obama at every turn for the next two years but that won't mean they stand for anything.

The Republican Party doesn't need to be restored to power. It needs some fresh ideas and new leaders.

And if Barack Obama can defy conventional wisdom and make a Clintonian move to the Center, who will he and the rest of us have to thank for providing no genuine alternative?

Americans Learn to Love Government

Democrats hail this as a major breakthrough in their goal of finally getting every American insured. Republicans are denouncing the action as unprecedented big government tyranny that they will continue to fight, sure to draw cheers from the base.

But Republicans like John “Bailout” Boehner can jeer all they want about how Congress failed to listen to the will of the people, how this was shoved down the throats of the American people and how Democrats like Bart Stupak will pay at the ballot box in November.

The GOP, certain to make gains this November, will undoubtedly bludgeon the Democrats this fall with their health care bill, which was achieved through any number of shady means, although any significant resistance will likely end there.

One of the biggest reasons is that there are two Republican Parties. There is the party that is out of power and/or campaigning for reelection which purports to adhere to the Constitution and restraining government. This is the party that excites the Tea Partiers. The other party is the one that returns to power, retains the apparatuses Democrats instituted and introduces some of their own. This is the party that deserves to be run out of town and the one that brings the Democrats and this vicious cycle back.

But the screaming masses on the Right need to know one thing: Republicans have had numerous opportunities to roll back the welfare state. The Social Security Act of 1935 passed with bipartisan support. The New Deal remained firmly in place after eight years of Eisenhower.

Republicans have won seven of the eleven presidential elections since Medicare passed, yet Republicans not only preserved that single-payer program but expanded it in 2003 under a Republican president and a Republican congress. This means that Republicans are either

A). Fine with keeping the welfare state in place so they too can control Americans’ lives, or

B). They are too weak-willed to address the politically suicidal task of cutting entitlements. (Hint: Either answer is acceptable)

Even if there is no public option right now, universal health care is still in our future. Since the time of FDR, America has never taken a step away from government health care, only steps towards it.

And if there is nothing as permanent as a temporary government program, what can we say about something as transformational as this legislation?

The other big reason there won’t likely be any longstanding resistance is that Americans have already gotten comfortable with the idea of government health care.

Though often hesitant at first, Americans have shown that they do grow to love their entitlements.

Social Security and Medicare were measures that were denounced at the time as socialist but Americans have largely accepted these entitlements as American birthrights on a par with freedom of religion.

In today’s debate over the Democrats’ plan, Republicans demonstrated this by wailing about the cuts to Medicare as a way to fund the new program, not whether Medicare is constitutional in the first place.

The debate over private vs. public health care was lost long before Sunday’s vote.

Over seventy years ago, journalist Peter Edward “Garet” Garrett wrote about the New Deal in "The Revolution Was":

"There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom. . . .

And:

“A government that has been supported by the people and so controlled by the people became one that supported the people and so controlled them. Much of it is irreversible. That is true because habits of dependence are much easier to form than to break.”

Those dependencies Americans have acquired, Social Security and Medicare, are running a hole in the budget. The biggest parts of the federal budget are the entitlements and all defense spending. The debt is currently $13 trillion. The Democrats propose that they can insure all Americans by just cutting from Medicare. At best, this is a solution that simply rearranges the debt. Republicans seem to be proposing that they can keep entitlement spending where it is, military spending where it is, cut taxes, and everything will be fine.

Cuts in the entitlement programs just won’t happen. Republicans won’t touch them because Democrats already campaign that Republicans will take away Social Security from seniors. Democrats won’t take a butter knife to the defense budget because Republicans already assail them for being weak. And nobody will raise taxes during a recession or during an election season.

The American government has weaned the American people into dependency. Everybody wants to cut something but nobody wants to give up their own share of the federal goodies.

In 2003 regarding the Iraq war, General David Petraeus said, “Tell me how this ends.”

We should be asking ourselves that same question today.

100 Days In

Before handing out awards to congratulate President Obama for being the first black president to host an Easter Egg Roll or the first black president to struggle with his teleprompter, let us look at his real accomplishments thus far, good (yes, some) and bad (plenty).

President Barack Obama has endured a mountain of criticism for his cabinet nominees and members. A number (Geithner, Daschle, Sebelius) have been rightly deemed tax cheats and have embarrassed the president and the ones in charge of vetting candidates. Americans generally have a low tolerance for politicians who get away with something that would land normal folks in heap big trouble. The president’s claim of a "new era of responsibility" gets questioned when an unusual number of his nominees have tax troubles, especially when many Americans themselves are struggling, as well as when the president promises “change” by digging up Clinton-era partisan hacks. However, a compliant media has done much to keep the new president rather unscathed.

Upon the assumption of his office, Barack Obama was faced with an economic crisis not of his doing, but of which he took complete ownership. His method of alleviation was ramming through an economic stimulus bill in the same manner and through the same rhetoric of his much-detested predecessor: this emergency is too catastrophic to wait any longer; if we wait any longer, we will be doomed. The bill is too important to read. Pass it or we will all die. Sound anything like the Patriot Act?

After campaigning against 8 years of Republican corruption and proliferate spending, the president embarked on the aforementioned stimulus bill and the pork-laden omnibus bill, bringing the Obama budget soaring somewhere around $4,000,000,000,000 for fiscal year 2010. While the spending done by the Republicans during George W. Bush’s reign was beyond reprehensible and also worth protesting, the monumental debt already created under President Obama sends the message that Bush-era spending was only the beginning.

In the whole financial debacle, the president insisted that spending would get us out of the recession. That assertion assumes that since a lot of spending and bailouts got us into this mess, lots more spending and bailouts will get us out. It is an assertion that many Republicans share when they are in power that no matter how much short-term success it might generate, the value of the dollar continues to plummet and making the another recession inevitable. It is the same old solution only wrapped in a much bigger box.

One of the most defining aspects of the Bush administration was its "Global War on Terrorism," designed to quash tyranny abroad so that liberty in American can be preserved. Actions such as the Patriot Act and the excesses permitted to agencies like the TSA and others have certainly undermined American liberty at home. An incident at Lambert Airport in St. Louis, MO has already been chronicled here before, but another incident in the Southwest suggests that unarmed and unsuspicious Americans are still harassed by their government, even under the supposed civil liberty-minded President Obama (begin video at 8:01, then here, and here).

On the foreign policy front, President Obama promised change but so far has not delivered much. He quickly announced that American troops would be leaving Iraq by August of next year, that is, excepting the 50,000 "residual" forces that are scheduled to remain until at least 2011. However, as news trickles in that Sunni insurgents don’t play nice when the bribe money starts to dry up and civil war resumes, there will be added pressure on the president to keep troops there to pacify the latest uprising and make John McCain’s suggestion that troops stay there for 100 years sound like it came out of Barack Obama’s mouth.

Farther east, as the president promised, Obama has already escalated matters in the increasingly lawless Afghanistan. With poor supply lines, a disintegrating Pakistan quickly succumbing to the Taliban and more Afghans looking to the Taliban for help, American troops will be either relegated to being person bodyguards for President Karzai in Kabul or left to wander in the desert until they get picked off.

Why? There is nothing to be won in Afghanistan. Bin Laden is nowhere to be found. The Taliban is taking over again and the Afghans, notoriously xenophobic, are not resisting local thugs in favor of foreign armies. So the question must be asked again, why does the president want to wander in this graveyard of empires?

The recent and much-publicized Latin American trip drew a lot of attention, particularly from the president's critics on his right. He was called weak for merely sitting and listening to Nicaraguan Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega delivery an anti-American screed. President Obama was denounced for shaking the hand of Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez at the same summit. Rather than turning tables over in disgust over the president’s inclination to grin and bear it, perhaps he was acting like a new head of state should act: quietly. None of these Latin American clowns, who have wrecked their countries almost without exception, pose any threat to the United States. Are we supposed to shoot down any foreign head of state that has the audacity to question the God-given right of the American government to do whatever it wants around the world? The American Conservative columnist Daniel Larison rightly points out that there is nothing to fear from these goons: they thrive (or even survive) based on anti-American rhetoric. The president was right to either let them do their schtick or outright ignore them. It was an episode of calm disposition, something sorely lacking under President Bush.

The president’s dealings with the Somali pirates and hostage situation were swift and effective. The situation was rather quickly defused as the abducted captain was rescued and all of his captors were killed or surrendered. He dealt with stateless warriors in the only way that was manageable and despite calls from all corners to confront the stateless Somalia, (bombing them) he has rightfully deflected all pleas thusfar to enter into another tribal fiasco.

It has only been 100 days, but it looks like things are remaining very much the same. The new regime has only repackaged the same old disasters and called it "change." Some things have been good, as those that have been covered here, but the future is not very bright. Debt soars higher than sky-high and the foreign wars look here to stay, even under a Democratic president. As the old saying goes, people get the government they deserve.

The Fed Did It

Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse, by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Last fall the bank bailouts, Wall Street bailouts, and home foreclosure crisis all hit at virtually the same time creating a fiscal disaster for millions and a political disaster for the incumbent party, its president, and his potential successor. People panicked when John McCain, who had been picking up steam, validated his Republican primary assertion that he didn’t understand much about the economy, and anxious voters sitting on the fence flocked to the freshman senator from Illinois.

Talking heads filled the TV screens with each party hack pointing to their adversary, claiming that it was their party’s policies that set up the financial Armageddon. Democrats pointed to the Bush tax cuts and Republican deregulation policies while the GOP said it was the affirmative action-backed Community Reinvestment Act begun under Jimmy Carter and rejuvenated by Bill Clinton that was the real reason for the economic tsunami.

The Democrats claimed that it was all the banks’ fault for the housing crisis. It was because of President Bush’s deregulation of the market that caused banks to loan out money to people who could not pay it back. They used the crisis as the justification for economic regulation because laissez-faire economics, like everything else he touched, had obviously failed under George W. Bush. In fact, George W. Bush did true free marketeers no favors when he made his prime-time television address pleading for the bank bailout and readily conceded that he had to "chuck" his free market principles.

The speech was played perfectly by the Democrats who could point out that even President Bush could concede that his deregulation contributed to the problem. That, however, operates on the assumption that just because George W. Bush said something means it is true.

An alternative reading of recent history is made by historian and best-selling author Tom Woods of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the prominent libertarian think tank. In his concise, highly readable, but quickly assembled book, Dr. Woods points to an altogether different culprit, one that is neither the Republicans’ supposed deregulation nor the Democrats’ affirmative action feel-good policies.

The author asks, why would so many institutions, in different areas of the business world, suddenly collapse and look like total buffoons all at the same time? Perhaps the variable is something outside of them. Woods’ thesis is that the source of all our money problems is the Federal Reserve.

One of the most neglected components of American life, Woods argues that the actions of the Fed preclude us from having a genuinely free market. The Fed was brought into life to succeed the First and Second Banks of the United States by a legislative act in 1913. For nearly 100 years, the Fed has been a part of American life that has received virtually no scrutiny. Woods believes it is time to scrutinize.

The Federal Reserve, he says, keeps interest rates artificially low by continually injecting dollars into the money supply, creating the illusion that more saving has been done which can thus be used in long-term projects such as home construction. Woods (along with economists Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, and F. A. Hayek) concludes that these conditions, manipulated by the Fed in an earlier epoch, also caused the Great Depression.

Woods address both sides of the political aisle and indicts both for their hand in the crisis. Woods digs into the history of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA), a piece of legislation supported by President Jimmy Carter designed to pressure banks into making home loans to people of all segments of society, regardless of their credit history. The act resurfaced during Bill Clinton’s administration and the spirit of the act was invoked by George W. Bush in his push for an "ownership society."

The CRA resulted with banks receiving threats of lawsuits which ultimately led to the lowering of their lending standards, and a symptom of the crisis becomes evident. A condemnatory passage of the Democrats, Woods relates the story of Clinton HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo patting himself on the back for winning a "discrimination" settlement against AccuBanc Mortgage that ended with the bank being forced to issue loans on an affirmative action basis, which the secretary knew full well would end in a higher number of defaults (20-21).

Far from a real laissez-faire capitalist, George W. Bush threw in his lot with the "home-owning for minorities" scheme that his Democratic predecessors conjured up. He regularly supported regulations, even if not in word, certainly in deed.

Woods unequivocally rejects regulation as the solution for this and any financial crisis. Similar to security restrictions after a terrorist attack, the regulations and restrictions imposed are designed to protect people from yesterday’s catastrophe. Regulations are, in short, counterproductive and miss the current and potentially future crisis.

The answer, Woods insists, is not regulation because it has already been tried and failed.

He points out that regulators are government employees, not business savvy men. Shortly before Enron imploded in 2001, the SEC checked them out and found things A-OK. As we know from the Enron debacle, it was insiders who really knew what was going on and figured it out, which, while certainly late in the game, was still faster than the government discovered it.

Another example of government regulation of the economy is the presence of insured commercial bank deposits. He writes, "Any 'deregulation' of the banking system that permits the banks to take greater risks while maintaining government (that is, tax payer) insurance of their deposits is not genuine deregulation from a free-market point of view," (46).

But all of these examples are really symptoms of the problem. While affirmative action legislation is bad and regulations are unfruitful and government pressure on banks is also bad, they would all go away if only the Federal Reserve was abolished. The Fed is the instrument that powers all of these poor economic activities. The Fed is the lender responsible for the money banks lend out to unqualified borrowers. The Fed is run by unelected men and truly accountable to no one. It prints paper money which, by virtue of no metal backing, can never be exchanged, and is literally, only paper.

A secondary aspect of Woods’ solution is to return to a gold standard monetary system. Since 1971 and the Bretton-Woods accord, the United States has been on fiat money, that is, money that is not backed by any metal, be it gold, silver, or anything else. Since the government never has to worry about people coming in and demanding gold or silver in exchange for their reserve notes, the people are stuck with them. And since there is nothing to restrain the government by way of the people regarding money, they are free to continue printing as much paper money as they want. This, Woods concludes, is what makes bailouts possible.

This, in fact, is one of Woods’ most compelling arguments. If money can truly be printed at will, and there is nothing people can do that would force government to spend responsibly, that makes bailouts not only possible, but likely. A currency that is based on an exchangeable metal is actually a restraint on government. If politicians have to worry about people coming in and demanding gold or silver for their paper money, they will think twice before spending beyond their means. Also, the very existence of a central bank feeds into the bailout mentality as the "lender of last resort," usually means it will ultimately get to fulfill that duty.

All of this supports the famed Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, a theory which won F. A Hayek the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. The theory states that whenever a central bank creates circumstances which create a false prosperity through the printing of money, which lowers interest rates, a bust will inevitably end the boom. This is precisely what happened in America. People who would have otherwise been considered unqualified for loans received loans. Woods says it is similar to a basketball team expanding the roster by two spots. Even though two more people get to be on the team, they would not have otherwise been considered qualified for the team.

The point is that reality eventually caught up with the housing bubble and caused the collapse. It was a predictable but inevitable event. The central bank can try to delay the bust but doing so only makes the bust worse, since there would be more time to manipulate the false sense of prosperity. According to this argument and logic, the Federal Reserve is the institution that made the housing bubble and bust possible.

The only downside of Meltdown is a common one among free market uber alles advocates. Woods writes about the free market as if all problems would instantly vanish without regulations and the central bank. While I cannot help but agree that the country’s financial situation would improve if we really enacted a laissez-faire economic where the government actually kept its hands off the economic system, the reader cannot help but notice the faith rhetoric that is inherent to the free market system.

Take a passage from page 65: "The market gradually weeds out business owners who do a poor job as stewards of capital and forecasters of consumer demand by punishing them with losses and, if their inefficiency persists, driving them out of business altogether. So why should businessmen, even those well established and who have passed the market test year after year, suddenly all make the same error?" Now simply replace "market" with "God" and the reader can get the sense that the free market is supposed to be infallible. If only the market was really free, then all the financial problems of this country would be resolved. One can almost see the biting satire of Stephen Colbert and his claims of Republican "Moneytheism." Yet, that is really the only shortcoming in Meltdown, one of interpretation and the fear of parody.

Now that the recession is in full swing, and by virtue of this book, we have an opportunity to confront the problem. Shall we continue to blame everyone on the other side and point to policies that have made themselves obsolete while an institution, the Fed, remains untouched? If Woods (and his polemical predecessor Murray Rothbard) is correct and the Fed is the main reason for not only the current crisis but the Great Depression, isn’t it time that there was finally at least a debate on the American central bank? Isn’t it time that we at least begin to discuss whether an unaccountable government institution might be the source of our problems instead of some inane bickering about regulations or the CRA?

Distractions All Around

*Much to my chagrin, I provided some inaccurate information. This post originally reported that the AIG bailout was $85 billion. The cost to date is approximately $192 billion. $85 billion was the original bailout last September. I have also been habitually reporting that the stimulus bill was for $787 billion and it was actually $789 billion. I did not mean to charge President Obama with $2 billion less in wastefulness than he really got. I have corrected my errors and apologize for them.



First it was the earmarks in the famed $410 billion omnibus bill and then it was the bonuses the government-owned AIG executives paid to each other. Both are relatively small issues placed under the microscope and both are issues which require little courage to oppose.

Let’s begin with earmarks. Earmarks are simply money that’s provided in the budget, for projects in the home districts of congressmen. Most sound sensible enough: clean up water supplies, revitalizing a public park, or money for foster programs but we usually only hear about the most absurd of them. Money for experiments on the mating patterns of whales, research on pine trees, or the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.”

It does not take much for a politician to grandstand about the perceived wastefulness of earmarks. Earmarks, which account for less than 1% of the federal budget, are easy for politicians to use to delude the public into believing that it’s all the other politicians who are wasting their money. They can pick out an absurd earmark like the bridge to nowhere and convince enough people that they are fiscally responsible bureaucrats.

Take Missouri Democratic senator Claire McCaskill. Ms. McCaskill, who voted for President Obama’s $789 billion stimulus, railed about the earmarks that showed up in the recent omnibus bill, and carved for herself an image of a fiscal conservative in the Democratic Party. She’s okay with $789 billion that’s either coming from China or being printed out of thin air, but $24,000 for an abstinence program in Pennsylvania is unacceptable? It’s the same reason John McCain can convince people he’s fiscally dependable by opposing earmarks, while being the biggest supporter of the biggest chunk of the federal budget: defense spending.

The president and his cronies lectured to the nation that the $789 billion stimulus had to be rushed through before the earth opened and swallowed us all whole. Then the omnibus comes up and suddenly $20,000 here and $40,000 there are scandals that rival the treason of Benedict Arnold. There is a problem in there somewhere.

How about scrutinizing stimulus and omnibus bills with the fervor the paltry earmarks receive?

Now for the other orchestrated crisis: those damnable AIG bonuses. This is yet another example of the lack of courage required to make a grand political stand.

Last fall, the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-fallible federal government, determining that AIG, the insurance giant, was “too big to fail,” became its 80% owner via a $192 billion bailout. Then, as if out of nowhere, this week it was revealed that AIG was issuing $165 million in bonuses to its executives, an agreement decided upon in 2008, and presumably known by then-New York Federal Reserve president and current Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Like earmarks, anger over executive bonuses is easy to orchestrate. When the American public learns that the executives of a failing company award themselves with $165 million, they’re tempted to grab the nearest pitchfork.

But compared to the government’s purchase of the failing institution, the bonuses are but table scraps. Both the bailout and the bonuses are odious moves, but bonuses stir more rage than the bailout. Nobody can truly comprehend $192 billion or $165 million, but most can comprehend bonuses fairly well and they know that failures don’t deserve them. So, AIG executives become the new object of all ire, earmarks being soooo last week.

Like earmarks, it does not take much courage for politicians to criticize the bonuses (that they implicitly condoned when they bailed them out last year), suggesting odious new legislation that would tax the bonuses at 90%, or propose that the government forcibly take it all away.

When Old Right essayist Frank Chodorov opined that taxation was robbery, he probably did not have insurance execs in mind, but his sentiments are not far off when the government commandeers money they technically okay-ed last year.

As repulsive as these bonuses and earmarks are, what they really amount to is a big plate of nothing.

In a world of billion dollar stimuli and billion dollar wars, earmarks and executive bonuses are nothing more than distractions from the disasters the government is creating by bailing out (socializing, nationalizing) every company or trying to police every corner of the world.

The federal government has taken on far too much for either realistic or constitutional expectations.

Instead of confronting the realities of the bloated government, the solution seems to be to spend more, rather than cutting back, reducing all around, and saving. And instead of doing that, they repeatedly point to others and blame the problems on those who have remarkably little to do with the current situation: earmarks and disastrous executives.

As more money filters in from China, further indebting us to the Orient, and as the Federal Reserve leviathan prints increasingly worthless paper, is the problem really a park in Kansas or an executive getting another $300,000, only to be taxed away?

What, pray tell, will happen if the economy further tanks after the bonuses are taxed away? To adapt from Richard Nixon, you won’t have AIG execs to kick around anymore.

And when the dollar becomes as worthless as a Weimar Mark, shall we hang executives who accepted hand-outs most of us would accept for ourselves, or shall we hang the criminals who gave us the fiat dollar, instigated by egregiously wasteful spending that is giving us the socialistic paradise that is modern America?

There is more at stake than an earmark.

The Fascism of Rush Limbaugh

Fascism is such an ugly word. I even hesitate to use it because it is so misunderstood. Fascism is used as an epithet so frequently, one might be justified in thinking that the proper definition of “fascism” is “describing someone with whom I disagree.”

Many thought National Review Online editor and smear artist in residence, Jonah Goldberg was going to educate people about fascism in his 2008 book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

In fact, Mr. Goldberg merely found heroes of 21st century liberals who had sympathies in the early 20th century with nascent fascist movements in the U.S. and Europe. He faintly connected the two as if to say, “Well, even though liberals always demonize conservatives as fascists, it’s actually liberals who have more a more fascistic intellectual heritage.“ In the end, Mr. Goldberg’s book never defined “fascism,” but he proceeded to use the word as a club against people to his right. “Fascism” was once again being used to define someone with whom, in this case, Jonah Goldberg, disagrees. Another dud in the great fascism-defining-game.

At its most basic level, “fascism” merely means the ultimate subordination of everything in the lives of citizens to an authoritarian state.

Nazi Germany was not fascistic because we fought a war against them. It was fascistic because the needs of the people were secondary to the needs of the regime. The government did not give people jobs in order to save them from starving or to help pull up a people devastated by economic depression and national humiliation. They gave people jobs to serve the infrastructure of the centralized state, as Hitler’s well-known public works campaign accomplished.

So there is an actual definition of fascism after all. Unfortunately, there are times when “fascism” is the correct word to use to describe an opponent. Even more saddening is that, despite all of my frustration at liberals who wield the word as a political club, today there are mainstream conservatives who deserve the epithet.

On February 11 of this year, Rush Limbaugh began his program by decrying those dirty Democrats for their horrible stimulus bill, their ballooning of the government, and their terrible foreign policy. I don’t know if Mr. Limbaugh is aware of this, but everything he moaned about was also committed by his Republican heroes.

Reading the transcript from the day in question, Mr. Limbaugh, in not so many words, announces that he is actually okay with a big, intrusive government that tramples on liberties and personal freedom, as long as Republicans get to use most of its power.

He said he wanted to take the mechanisms of the huge government the Democrats are building up so that when Republicans return to power they could turn it against them. Talk about your endorsements for big government!

That is what fascists do. They use the mechanisms of the government to prosecute political enemies. Hitler did it. Mussolini did it. The Communists do it. Conservatives who concern themselves with issues of liberty, do not do it.

Take another example, during some of the most contentious days of the Bush administration, Rush Limbaugh had the audacity to insinuate that the Democrats hate this government. They certainly hated the now-departed occupant of the White House, but what rational person believes that Democrats, the official big government party, actually hates government? What they hated most about the Bush years was that they were in the minority for most of them.

What Rush Limbaugh actually hated was that Democrats were speaking ill of the president. I cannot say if el Rushbo actually wanted to see the reintroduction of the Sedition Act of 1798 that made it a crime to criticize the president, but he did speak of the Democrats with such vigor that the entire party in question must have been guilty of treason.

Mr. Limbaugh simply babbled on and on about how the liberals just hate the country, all the while he continues to defend the record of George W. Bush.

One would actually think that if Rush Limbaugh looked critically at the Bush presidency, he could only conclude that a liberal had just departed office.

George W. Bush presided over the largest increase of the federal government to date. Liberals traditionally increase the government. He had an open borders immigration policy that, for a number of reasons, has only hurt Republicans. He signed the massive prescription drug plan that came directly out of LBJ’s Great Society playbook. He adopted an aggressive and reckless foreign policy, whose origin can be traced to Woodrow Wilson, the man who decided it was okay to sacrifice young Americans not for legitimate external threats, but to “make the world safe for democracy.”

There was practically nothing conservative in the past eight years. It looks to continue.

The era of George W. Bush and his orgiastic growth of the federal government led his conservative followers to worship it and consider the government to be beyond question. No one could question the actions of the Bush-led regime without being assaulted as unpatriotic or treasonous. To conservatives from 2001 to 2009, the Republican-led government was the meaning of their existence. While people like Rush Limbaugh did not craft this disastrous agenda, they did give it support for the crucial party base.

Under George W. Bush’s watch, the government became more intrusive in all of our lives. The Patriot Act validated the belief of those who were called “kooks” and “whackos” that we do indeed live in a surveillance state. Records became public, privacy became nonexistent, and liberties were curtailed. American conservatives were supposed to believe in fundamental freedom, but for eight years, they defined “freedom” as whatever the government does.

There is your fascism.

All of this spells out exactly what is wrong with the “conservative movement” in this leaderless era of the Republican Party. Whereas conservatism once stood for the supremacy of the individual, the only coherent point conservatives can really make today is that they are against the Democrats. Big government is evil when it is orchestrated by the Democrats but it is used for noble purposes by the Republican Party, they imply.

Considering these examples, one might conclude that Rush Limbaugh is not a genuine American conservative, but a fascist. He does not believe government is the answer to problems, of course unless Republicans get to be at the helm.

February 11, 2009 was a date of utter betrayal. It was a day when the unofficial conservative spokesman let the whole world know that he is perfectly comfortable with big government. His only problem centers around who pulls its strings.

Stop the charade, Rush. You are no conservative.

Stop It!

One of my favorite Mad TV sketches features Bob Newhart, as a therapist whose only advice to any patient was contained in two words: Stop it! When a woman who suffers from an irrational fear of being buried alive in a box comes in, his advice is the same: "Stop it!" No matter what inner difficulties the woman brought up, the therapist’s answer was always “Stop it!” I heartily recommend that our lawmakers see Bob Newhart’s most recent rendition of therapy.

One of President Barack Obama’s first initiatives as the chief executive is to implement an economic stimulus package that he repeatedly tells his countrymen is designed to save the American economy from the catastrophes of tax cuts and capitalism.

It should not be too surprising that Democrats wish to pass a package that would be the more invasive than any government measure into the economy since the New Deal, at a time when the current hardships are still nowhere near those endured during the Great Depression, which was only exacerbated because of those interventions. In short, the stimulus package is not so much meant to stimulate the economy, but an initiative to create more political capital for the new president. One portion that has since been excluded from the package, perhaps due to its sheer odiousness, was bailout money for Planned Parenthood (I don’t know about any of you, but I don’t believe the killing industry has any shortage of business).

The more President Obama says some version of "We have to do something because to do nothing would be worse," more people will get scared, remain scared, and eventually begin to believe it. Think of it as a Patriot Act for Democrats.

The Democratic president disparages the Bush tax cuts, one of his predecessor’s finest measures, because the national debt skyrocketed and our nation’s financial institutions crumbled during the final months of the lame duck administration. In other words, the new president is trying to tell us that the economy is teetering toward collapse because Americans were allowed to have more money in their paycheck, and nothing to do with the ridiculous spending spree President Bush and the Republicans went on. President Obama’s prescription for economic recovery seems to be, don’t cut taxes, but go on a ridiculous spending spree. President Bush’s problem was not that he cut taxes, but that he cut taxes, and then did not begin reducing the size of the government to compensate for the lost revenue. President Obama wants to leave taxes where they are, for the time-being it would seem, and then increase the size of the federal government.

Now that the Democratic-bashing portion of the blog is through, let us move on to the Democrats’ henchmen.

What should be more surprising, but that I fear is not, is that the Republicans are willing co-participants in this mad spending scheme as well.

How? you might say, didn’t every House Republican vote against the stimulus bill as it appeared in the House of Representatives? Yes, but every House Republican voted against a massive spending bill that could have caused revolts among their constituents had they voted for it, and every House Republican voted against a massive spending bill that did not need any of their votes.

The Democrats have such a strong majority in the House that they got the bill passed without any Republicans. By voting against the bill out of pure political expediency, they avoided the heat from their home districts. While many Republican cheerleaders on talk radio praised the Republicans and suggested that they might be returning to their fiscal principles, their votes meant nothing because the bill still passed.

By having nothing to lose by doing so, they voted against it. We still need time to see if the Republicans have made a prodigal journey back to fiscal sanity.

But what really made me reach for the Tums is what the party’s senators began attempting once the package reached their chamber.

When Democrats first suggested a $300 billion stimulus package, the Republicans gave the nod to them and then some: they said $445 billion would be just fine.

Republican senators want to give tax credits to homeowners since the housing market bubble has utterly popped. A tax credit, which sounds like it might be good, is really just another manifestation of welfare. Whereas a tax cut in the form of George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, allows the taxpayer to keep more of their income in their paycheck, a tax credit is a check from the federal government, with money that was printed from out of nowhere.

We can honestly say that we have a bipartisan government.

President Obama, during his never-ending campaign, said that he would bring Americans together and help heal our partisan wounds. Well, all that has happened since he took office is bring Republicans and Democrats together in a massive feast of pork. The parties are fighting over how much money should be in these stimulus packages and that should sound off alarms to conscientious citizens.

The only debate occurring over the spending bills are regarding how much should be spent and on what. There is no debate regarding whether so much money should be spent in the first place.

People seem to have forgotten that one short year ago, President Bush introduced a stimulus package to help boost a slumping economy. The stimulus did nothing to stop the collapse and nationalization of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Lehman Brothers. President Bush’s massive spending bill did nothing to stop the impending economic disaster. President Obama’s massive spending bill is even more massive and will only exacerbate the problem and ultimately cause more suffering for reasons already illuminated.

My prescription for the economy is to actually do very little. The current system cannot fix the disaster. It has been the invasive bipartisan federal government of this country that has caused this disaster.

Another appealing solution is to simply eliminate the Federal Reserve, that corrupt printer of bad money, which is the topic of Thomas E. Woods’ forthcoming book, Meltdown, A Free Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts will Make Things Worse.

Let this prescription for the horrific levels of spending and bad money be quick and to the point: Stop It!

No Scandals Here

Sirens were literally blowing when on December 9, Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was arrested on charges of soliciting bribes. The bribes he was interested in, as is now well-known, were for Barack Obama’s (seemingly always) vacant senate seat. “I’m not going to give it away for -bleeping- nothing,” the Chicago politician screamed. Pay-to-play indeed.

Much is being made about President-elect Obama and his connection to the Illinois governor and all-around sleazebag and not just because Mr. Blagojevich is another in a long line of, let’s call them shady, characters that have coalesced in some capacity around the Mulatto Messiah. First we had black nationalist and hate peddler Jeremiah Wright. Then there was Tony Rezko, who gave the Messiah money and has who has already been convicted of bribery. Then, as the McCain campaign became desperate in the closing weeks of the election, they invoked domestic terrorist-turned tenured professor Bill Ayers, ad nauseum. And when Barack Obama became a candidate for the U.S. senate, one of his biggest and loudest supporters was Illinois governor Blagojevich who knew the Messiah during the latter's minor league days in the Illinois state senate. All these acquaintances and past allies makes one wonder, Does this guy have any non-embarrassing friends?

But not 24 hours after his old boss had been led out of his home in cuffs, did the president-elect issue a statement that neither he nor anyone on his staff had consulted the governor and he believed the governor should resign.

Well, not quite.

It’s been revealed that Mr. Obama’s chief-of-staff and fellow Chicago politician, Rahm Emanuel, actually has spoken with the governor’s office.

Uh oh. Scandal a-ho!

Again, not quite.

Even though the president-elect has been caught lying, in front of all of the cameras, let it be known that none of these allegations will amount to anything.

First of all, Barack Obama does not currently hold office. He has resigned his senate seat and has not yet been sworn in as president, despite what he might want the masses to think with his vacuous “Office of the President-elect” seal. The man cannot be charged with lying under oath when he is not currently under any oath.

Second, even with the president-elect caught in a lie, either he or his many benefactors can easily triangulate their way out of it. Note Mr. Obama’s exact words: “I had no contact with the governor or his office and so we were not, I was not aware of what was happening.” Despite such good documentation of his words, this sentence can be easily reduced to, “We did not have any knowledge of money changing hands or any attempts to do so.” Lie averted.

Third, Mr. Obama’s never ending honeymoon with the media is still not over. He played on their white guilt perfectly by incessantly summoning America’s past racial sins and he is regularly throwing them bones by giving them all of the Clinton officials to fawn over again. The media are such political partners with Barack Obama that even if the new president murdered a man on live television they would look the other way or rationalize that the deceased was but a racist who deserved to die anyway.

Finally, Barack Obama has already been protected from any worse of a scandal, in this instance by the criminal justice system in general, and prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in particular. The most startling part of the Blagojevich arrest was not that he was attempting to sell off the senate seat or that he knew that he was being wire-tapped or that he still refuses to resign. No, the most startling part of the case is that the feds sprung the trap they set and arrested the crooked governor before he actually committed any crime.

It was like eavesdropping on someone’s cellphone conversation where he discloses that he is going to rob the liquor store tomorrow night and you call the police to get him arrested tomorrow afternoon. On what charges can they be locked up? Thinking about committing robbery? You and I both know that that is not a crime. Governor Blagojevich repeatedly tells the papers that he is innocent and has done nothing wrong. What’s depressing for people who yearn to see a corrupt politician thrown into jail is that they know he is right. He is innocent because he was stopped before he could accept a bribe. He will go free.

What this might mean is that Barack Obama and his people are likely more complicit in this matter than anyone is letting on. Why else would they spring the trap on a corrupt politician who is as much a man without a party as the president is, he has been so abandoned. This scandal will effectively be the end of Blagojevich’s political career. He may still avoid impeachment, conviction, and may well finish his term as governor of Illinois, but this is clearly the last office he will hold.

However, this scandal did have the potential to derail Mr. Obama. If they did indeed have contact about who would fill the seat, if any money was involved, and if it was documented on tape, he would be as politically doomed as his former Illinois colleague.

This is purely speculation but why spare Blago unless he could have brought “Barry” down with him?

So, as much as this writer would be pleased to see this president-elect impeached before he takes office, if that was even possible, the chances are slim-to-none that Mr. Obama will do anything but deflect this controversy like all the others. If he is going to be brought down, it will have to be better than connection to bribery.