CAIR Man Asks Allen West, Republican from Florida, Where in the Koran are Muslims Directed to Kill Americans

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

CAIR Tries to Blow Sunshine up Allen West’s Butt

I’m glad I didn’t give up completely on LTC (ret.) Allen West, because he handled this taqiyya artist from CAIR magnificently.

The audio in the clip below is not always clear, so I’ll include the account of the event from Canada Free Press:

At a townhall meeting hosted by Congressman Allen West on Monday evening in Pompano Beach, the Q&A segment of the meeting featured a Koran wielding Nezar Hamze, Executive Director of the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Hamze confronted Congressman West and asked him to point out where in the Koran does it give marching orders to Muslims “to carry out attacks against Americans and innocent people”. West quickly pointed out that the Koran was written long before America even existed and that it does indeed tell believers to kill infidels, and then proceeded to chronicle a lengthy list of historical Muslim acts of aggression. Congressman West closed his retort by referencing the Fort Hood shootings and 9-11 attacks, saying that his first hand experiences on the battlefield has given him insight into the tactics that Islamists use before telling Hamze not to “try to blow sunshine up my butt” with his criticism of him. West took offense to Hamze’s amateurish criticism of his stance on radical Islam and concluded by telling Mr. Hamze to “put the microphone down and go home.”

Comment:  I refered to the Colonel yesterday in a blog.   I liked the way the folks at Gates of Vienna approached this mosquito at the Pampano Beach event.   All attending must have learned more about the controversial text driving its  Jihadis to do so much killing in the world.

And Now a Word on Wisconsin Unions from Our Sponsor, N.Y. Times Boss, A. G. Sulzberger!

 

Union Bonds in Wisconsin Begin to Fray

By A. G. SULZBERGER and MONICA DAVEY

Published: February 21, 2011

“JANESVILLE, Wis. — Rich Hahan worked at the General Motors plant here until it closed about two years ago. He moved to Detroit to take another G.M. job while his wife and children stayed here, but then the automaker cut more jobs. So Mr. Hahan, 50, found himself back in Janesville, collecting unemployment for a time, and watching as the city’s industrial base seemed to crumble away.

Among the top five employers here are the county, the schools and the city. And that was enough to make Mr. Hahan, a union man from a union town, a supporter of Gov. Scott Walker’s sweeping proposal to cut the benefits and collective-bargaining rights of public workers in Wisconsin, a plan that has set off a firestorm of debate and protests at the state Capitol. He says he still believes in unions, but thinks those in the public sector lead to wasteful spending because of what he sees as lavish benefits and endless negotiations.

“Something needs to be done,” he said, “and quickly.”

Across Wisconsin, residents like Mr. Hahan have fumed in recent years as tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs have vanished, and as some of the state’s best-known corporations have pressured workers to accept benefit cuts.

Wisconsin’s financial problems are not as dire as those of many other states. But a simmering resentment over those lost jobs and lost benefits in private industry — combined with the state’s history of highly polarized politics — may explain why Wisconsin, once a pioneer in supporting organized labor, has set off a debate that is spreading to other states over public workers, unions and budget woes.

There are deeply divided opinions and shifting allegiances over whether unions are helping or hurting people who have been caught in the recent economic squeeze. And workers themselves, being pitted against one another, are finding it hard to feel sympathy or offer solidarity, with their own jobs lost and their benefits and pensions cut back or cut off.

“Everyone else needs to pinch pennies and give more money to health insurance companies and pay for their own retirement,” said Cindy Kuehn as she left Jim and Judy’s Food Market in Palmyra. “It’s about time the buck stops.”

In Madison, the capital, which has become the focus of protests, many state workers and students at the University of Wisconsin predictably oppose the proposed cuts.

But away from Madison, many people said that public workers needed to share in the sacrifice that their own families have been forced to make.

The effort to weaken bargaining rights for public-sector unions has been particularly divisive, with some people questioning the need to tackle such a fundamental issue to solve the state’s budget problems.

But more often the conversation has turned to the proposals to increase public workers’ contributions to their pensions and health care, and on these issues people said they were less sympathetic, and often grew flushed and emotional telling stories of their own pay cuts and financial worries.

Here in Janesville, a city of about 60,000 an hour southeast of Madison, Crystal Watkins, a preschool teacher at a Lutheran church, said she was paid less than public school teachers and got fewer benefits. “I don’t have any of that,” she said. “But I’m there every day because I love the kids.”

In Palmyra, a small village bounded by farmland and forests, MaryKay Horter remembered how her husband’s Chevy dealership had teetered on the brink of closing after General Motors declared bankruptcy, for which she blamed unions.

Ms. Horter said she was forced to work more hours as an occupational therapist, but had not seen a raise or any retirement contributions from her employer for the last two years. All told, her family’s income has dropped by about a third.

“I don’t get to bargain in my job, either,” she said.

And in nearby Whitewater, a scenic working-class city of 15,000 that is home to a public university, Dave Bergman, the owner of a bar, was tending it himself on Sunday. He has been forced to cut staff and work seven days a week.

“There are a lot of people out of work right now that would take a job without a union,” Mr. Bergman said.

By some measures, Wisconsin, a state of 5.6 million people, has not suffered as much as other Midwestern states in the recession, according to Abdur Chowdhury, an economist at Marquette University.

Its unemployment rate, 7.5 percent in December, is lower than the nation’s. But a significant percentage of jobs lost in Wisconsin during the recession were in manufacturing, and this is a state where the proportion of the work force in manufacturing is among the nation’s highest.

Meanwhile, some of the state’s well-known companies — Harley-Davidson, Kohler, Mercury Marine — have recently sought concessions from their workers.

The battle over public workers has changed the tone in a state that prides itself on Midwestern civility. A growing number of homemade bumper stickers are popping up with messages like “Fire Them — Democrats Too.”

Among the state’s political leaders, the partisan gulf seems to have widened further. Traditionally, the state is nearly evenly split between Republicans and Democrats (along with a third group of independents) — making it a perennial battleground in presidential elections, with margins of victory that have sometimes come down to a matter of a few tenths of 1 percent. Wisconsin is the state that gave birth to government unions in the 1950s, but also to Joseph McCarthy, who railed against people he accused of being Communists.

“The Republicans are really Republicans here, and the Democrats are really Democrats, so the candidates who come out of primaries reflect that,” said Ken Goldstein, a political scientist from the University of Wisconsin.

Two years after the state elected President Obama by a wide margin, it elected conservative Republicans — some of them supported by Tea Party groups — to the state legislature, the Senate and the governor’s office.

The flip has emboldened Mr. Walker, the new Republican governor who has proposed the cuts to benefits and bargaining rights, arguing that he desperately needs to bridge a deficit expected to reach $3.6 billion for the coming two-year budget.

Union leaders have said they would accept the financial terms of Mr. Walker’s proposal. The more controversial provisions, though, would strip public employees of collective-bargaining rights.

In Whitewater, Ben Penwell, a lawyer whose wife is a public employee, said he saw no reason to strip away workers’ bargaining rights if they had agreed to benefit cuts.

“They’re willing to do what’s necessary fiscally without giving up rights in the future,” he said.

And Pat Wellnitz, working in his accounting office on Sunday, wondered why such bargaining provisions were needed if the real problem was simply saving money.

“That’s pretty drastic even for a staunch Republican,” he said.

But others suggested that unions had perhaps had outlived their usefulness. Carrie Fox, who works at a billboard advertising company, said she hoped that the battle would encourage other governors to rein in public- and private-sector unions.

“I know there was a point for unions back in the day because people were being abused,” she said. “But now there’s workers’ rights; there’s laws that protect us.”

A. G. Sulzberger reported from Janesville, and Monica Davey from Madison, Wis.

Columbia University’s Anti-Americanism Starts with Its Presidents and Professors

Scott W. Johnson at PowerLine provides the following  article which is but a drop of rain in the cloudbursts of America hate preached and enacted  from today’s American university:

“When Columbia students like James Simon Kunen acted up in 1968, Columbia President Grayson Kirk commented: “Whether students vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on an issue is like telling me they like strawberries.” Kunen played off Kirk’s comment in the title of his book on the events of 1968, but Kirk’s comment made a good deal of sense then on the issues in question. Indeed, it still makes sense now on the issue of whether ROTC should be welcomed back on campus.

So far as I can tell, however, Columbia President Lee Bollinger has been conspicuous by his silence in connection with the current controversy. Bob McManus notes Bollinger’s silence today in the New York Post.

Bollinger has not heretofore been so reticent. His previous statements on ROTC — one in 2005, one in 2008 — have both been maintained online at the Columbia Web site as though they are the wisdom of the ages.

In fact, they are full of hot air. Bill Kristol summed up Bollinger’s position perfectly in the 2007 editorial “Columbia University: Ahmadinejad yes, ROTC no.” This time around Columbia students may — may — put their elders to shame. Here’s hoping.

UPDATE: Rachel Abrams is also thinking about Bollinger.

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American Islamist Mole Harasses Representative Allen West…….Colonel West Replies

Islamists and Marxists are today’s  FifthColumnists   attempting to topple America’s democratic institutions; one army to create a religion based on atheism blended with a powerful, autocratic govenment to manage citizen lives, and the other to create another autocracy, militant Islam and its inhuman sharia laws based on 7th Century Islamic  fanaticism.  

Over the past couple generations Americans have failed to teach, yes train their young to understand what it means to be American and understand what their responsibilities must be to maintain  our freedoms, our way of life which has been a beacon for all peoples.   We were peoples from a Judeo-Christian tradition, the tradition sabotaged by Marxists and others psychologically distrubed by the human struggle for liberty and civilized behavior.

Among today’s Americans no one better understands todays battle for our contry’s future, than Colonel Allen West, Republican Representative from Florida.   Please become acquainted with the Colonel as he is confronted by a Islamist fifth columnist, a fellow American:             Click on here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MZx38i6iYs

Israel Silent as Iranian Warships Transit Suez Canal

 

By ISABEL KERSHNER at the New York Times

JERUSALEM — Reports that two Iranian Navy ships were passing through the Suez Canal early Tuesday, heading for the Mediterranean, were initially greeted with a tense silence in Israel where officials have described the move as a provocation.

The ships were expected to transit the canal without incident.

Although there was no immediate official response to the reports, an aide to Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, said by telephone that Israel was obviously not happy at the development. But he reiterated Mr. Barak’s view, expressed in an interview with Fox News last week, that while the move was unwelcome, it should not be blown out of proportion.

Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, was the first to draw attention to Iranian plans to send warships through the canal for the first time in decades, telling an audience in Jerusalem last Wednesday that the ships were due to cross that night and warning that “the international community must understand that Israel cannot ignore these provocations forever.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel viewed the Iranian move “with utmost gravity.”

Referring to the turmoil that is sweeping the region, and that brought down the Mubarak regime in Egypt, Israel’s crucial ally over the past 30 years, Mr. Netanyahu said that Iran was trying “to exploit the situation that has been created in order to expand its influence by passing warships through the Suez Canal.”

This, like other developments, he added, underscored his argument that “Israel’s security needs will grow and the defense budget must grow accordingly.”

Israeli analysts said that the Iranians wanted to show a presence beyond their normal reach, making a point both to Israel and to the United States whose forces are stationed in the Gulf.

Israel has been careful not to point a finger publicly at the Egyptian authorities now in charge in Cairo, although the Egyptians had to give permission for the Iranian ships — a frigate and a supply vessel — to pass through the canal.

Citing a possible purpose for the ships’ movement, Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency reported on Jan. 26 that Iranian Navy cadets had been sent on a yearlong training mission to defend cargo ships and oil tankers against Somali pirates, Reuters reported. The Fars report said they would travel via the Gulf of Aden into the Red Sea and on through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean.

Israel has long accused Iran and Syria of providing weapons to Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite organization with which Israel fought a war in 2006. Israeli military officials said recently that Hezbollah has around 45,000 rockets and missiles buried underground that could be fired at Israel.

As ObamaLefties Dream of Taxing the People for High-Speed Rail, Let’s Wake up to REALITY!

High Speed Rail Is Risk for Local Taxpayers

In an announcing his decision to reject federal funding for the Tampa to Orlando high-speed rail line, Florida Governor Rick Scott cited the substantial risks to Florida taxpayers from cost overruns, the ongoing obligation under the federal grant to subsidize operations and the fact that under certain circumstances Florida might even have to repay the $2.4 billion in federal grants.  Any local government accepting the federal money would expose itself to the financial risks from which Florida taxpayers have been exempted by Governor Scott’s action, says Wendell Cox.

Capital Cost Overruns.

• The eventual construction cost overruns for the Tampa to Orlando high-speed rail line could easily run to $3 billion, more than doubling the price of the project.
• Any local federal grant recipient (city, county or transit district) would be responsible for these cost overruns.

Ongoing Operating Subsidies.

• The ridership projections for the Tampa to Orlando high-speed rail line are exceedingly optimistic.
• This could well lead to a situation in which substantial subsidies are necessary to operate the trains, which would be the responsibility of any city, county or transit district that becomes a grant recipient.

Federal Pay-Back.

• If, for any reason, the eventual high-speed rail service levels are not sufficiently high because of lower than projected ridership or if service is canceled, any city, county or transit district could be required to return the $2.4 billion in federal grants.
• Florida is already paying millions annually for a similar “transgression.”
• In 2009, service reductions on the Tri-Rail Commuter Rail System in the Miami area led the Obama administration’s Department of Transportation to demand repayment of one quarter billion dollars in grants.
• Tri-Rail was saved from this obligation only by a multimillion dollar Tallahassee bailout.

Source: Wendell Cox, “Tampa to Orlando High Speed Rail: The Risk to Local Taxpayers,” New Geography, February 18, 2011.

For text:

http://www.newgeography.com/content/002062-tampa-orlando-high-speed-rail-the-risk-local-taxpayers

The above article was published at the National Center for Policy Analysis.

The Islamic Assault on the West, Yesterday and Today

Fjordman: Medieval Myths

Medieval Myths
by Fjordman
 (This item was published at Jihad Watch and at Gates of Vienna:)

I should thank the pro-Israeli, Islam-critical blog Document for bringing this to my attention. The two Norwegian essays cited here were written by Ole Jørgen Benedictow, a professor emeritus at the University of Oslo specializing in the history of the Middle Ages. The translations were made by me, and the shorter excerpts should capture the spirit of the texts.

Benedictow, as an expert in the field, has tried to influence the public debate on issues related to Islam vs. Europe in the Middle Ages, but has repeatedly experienced being rebuffed in favor of young Marxists with little knowledge of the period. He is annoyed by the fact that people who know very little about this era and its complexities have easy access to the mass media and can spread falsehoods virtually unchallenged. “Revolutionary Socialists” — that is, Communists — have no problem promoting their propaganda in major newspapers despite representing a totalitarian ideology that caused the deaths of tens of millions of people — 100 million if you believe The Black Book of Communism — during the twentieth century alone.

For some reason, allegedly “anti-imperialist” Marxists in the Western world just love brutal, aggressive and oppressive imperialism — as long as it comes in an Islamic shape. There is no hint of an understanding of why the Spanish and Portuguese fought so many centuries for their liberation, nor of the plight of the Balkan Christians or those who suffered under Muslim rule elsewhere in the world, for example following the extremely bloody Islamic conquest of India. Islamic advances must be celebrated; the West demonized and ridiculed. European medieval peoples are invariable portrayed as barbarians with no culture of their own.

Yet the Middle Ages represented a creative growth period where we find the seeds of a new civilization — the European one — which replaced that of Greco-Roman Antiquity but also carried with it a number of Classical elements, albeit often in a somewhat altered form.

The French professor of medieval history Sylvain Gouguenheim has published a book titled Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel: Les Racines Grecques de l’Europe (Aristotle at Mont Saint-Michel: The Greek Roots of Europe), triggered by a recommendation from the European Union that schoolbooks should give a positive rendering of Islam’s part in the European heritage. Europe, he says, “became aware of the Greek texts because it went hunting for them, not because they were brought to them.” He attacks the thesis advanced by historians such as Edward Said of an enlightened, refined and spiritual Islam against a brutal and ethnocentric West. Apart from a tiny handful of freethinkers, the scholars of the Islamic Middle East retained from the ancient Greeks only what they considered to be compatible with the Koran.

The Western Church and its monks contributed to the preservation of many Classical texts. In addition to this, professional scribes could sometimes be found outside of the monasteries, catering to kings and nobles. A hallmark of the Western peoples was respect, even admiration, for different cultures and a willingness to seek out creative impulses from other civilizations. Muslims have historically exhibited little creativity in important forms of artistic expression such as painting or sculpture. In Benedictow’s view, “no cultural sphere with more than a billion people contributes so little to the development of science or the arts in our time.”

The Ottomans used a centralized power structure to extract a large proportion of the resources of the empire to use for military aggression, but they were successfully rebuffed by European states. The problem with an overly centralized power structure with high tax rates is that over time it will lead to economic and technological stagnation. Successful innovation requires some degree of decentralization, which could be found in regions of Western Europe with many free cities, from northern Italy via the Netherlands and Flanders in the Low Countries to England and northern Germany. This is where we encounter the development of capitalism.

Respected scholar Joseph Schacht states in An Introduction to Islamic Law that “The concept of corporation does not exist in Islamic law.” In addition to this, “There is also no freedom of association.” This legal defect had serious implications for Islamic societies, not least in the sphere of economic development, as Timor Kuran has made clear. The economic growth and social developments of modern Europe partly had medieval roots, as Avner Greif and others have shown. By contrast, Islamic culture was based on a very different mental outlook.

As the ex-Muslim Wafa Sultan says in her excellent book A God Who Hates, the raids Muhammad and his companions carried out, which amounted to at least twenty-seven if you believe Islamic sources, occupy a major part of his biography. They were intended to acquire booty and to inflict harm upon rival tribes in order to deprive them of their ability to resist Islam. A philosophy of raiding “has rooted itself firmly in the Muslim mind. Bedouins feared raiding on the one hand, and relied on it as a means of livelihood on the other. Then Islam came along and canonized it. Muslims in the twenty-first century still fear they may be raided by others and live every second of their lives preparing to raid someone else. The philosophy of raiding rules their lives, the way they behave, their relationships, and their decisions.”

According to Benedictow, “Like other great conquering peoples, from Romans to Mongols, the Arab-Muslim conquerors took over landed property and political control and established a tax regime that benefitted the small, but superior warrior elite. For many centuries this was the essence of the Arab-Muslim presence, the imperialist exploitation model. But since Muslims didn’t pay taxes there was also no great urge to do Muslim missionary activity. This is among Western, pro-Islamic left-wing political ideologues, social anthropologists and historians of religion characterized as tolerance. As long as this remained the case, however, the culture of Antiquity could continue to exist, now as a strong undercurrent that allowed for continued work on the Classical texts, translations and commentaries included. The ability of Classical civilization to nourish human ingenuity lived on. Many of those who contributed were Christians and Jews or converts to Islam; rather few were Arabs. As the Muslim religious oppression increased and permeated society and intolerance grew, these Classical civilizational elements withered away. What is actually the case is that the Arab-Muslim conquest of Eastern Roman lands led to the destruction of the civilization of Classical Antiquity. Claiming that the Arab-Muslim conquest saved it is backwards to say the least.”

Comment:  This article was found at Gates of Vienna.  It is not clear who posted it.  Baron Bodissey will be give credit here until further notice.

George Will in Wisconsin: “Wisconsin at Ground Zero….Governor Serene amid Storm.”

The following article by George Will was printed  at the Milwaukee Journal:

“Madison – Hitherto, when this university town and seat of state government applauded itself as “the Athens of the Midwest,” the sobriquet suggested kinship with the cultural glories of ancient Greece. Now, however, Madison resembles contemporary Athens.

This capital has been convulsed by government employees sowing disorder in order to repeal an election. A minority of the minority of Wisconsin residents who work for government (300,000 of them) are resisting changes to benefits that most of Wisconsin’s 5.6 million residents resent financing.

Serene at the center of this storm sits Republican Scott Walker, 43, in the governor’s mansion library, beneath a portrait of Ronald Reagan. Walker has seen this movie before.

As Milwaukee County executive, he had similar dustups with government workers unions, and when the dust settled, he was resoundingly re-elected, twice. If his desire to limit collective bargaining by such unions to salary issues makes him the “Midwest Mussolini” – some protesters did not get the memo about the new civility – other supposed offenses include wanting state employees to contribute 5.8% of their pay to their pension plans (most pay less than 1%), which would still be less than the average in the private sector. He also wants them to pay 12.6% of the cost of their health care premiums – up from about 6% but still much less than the private-sector average.

He campaigned on this. Union fliers distributed during the campaign attacked his “5 and 12” plan. He says his brother, a hotel banquet manager, and his sister-in-law, who works at Sears, “would love to have” what he is offering the unions. For some of Madison’s graying baby boomers, these protests are a jolly stroll down memory lane. Tune up the guitars! “This is,” Walker says, “very much a ’60s mentality.”

He does, however, think there is sincerity unleavened by information: Many protesters do not realize that most worker protections – merit hiring; just cause for discipline and termination – are the result not of collective bargaining but of Wisconsin’s uniquely strong and century-old civil service law.

“I am convinced,” he says, “this is about money – but not the employees’ money.” It concerns union dues, which he wants the state to stop collecting for the unions, just as he wants annual votes by state employees on recertifying the unions. He says many employees pay $500 to $600 annually in union dues – teachers pay up to $1,000. Given a choice, many might prefer to apply this money to health care premiums or retirement plans. And he thinks “eventually,” most will say about the dues collectors: “What do we need this for?”

Such unions are government organized as an interest group to lobby itself to do what it always wants to do anyway: grow. These unions use dues extracted from members to elect their members’ employers. And governments, not disciplined by the need to make a profit, extract government employees’ salaries from taxpayers. Government sits on both sides of the table in cozy “negotiations” with unions.

A few days after President Barack Obama submitted a budget that would increase the federal deficit, he tried to sabotage Wisconsin’s progress toward solvency. The Washington Post: “The president’s political machine worked in close coordination . . . with state and national union officials to mobilize thousands of protesters to gather in Madison and to plan similar demonstrations in other state capitals.” Walker notes that in the 1990s, Wisconsin was a trend-setter regarding school choice and welfare reform. Obama, he thinks, may be worried that Wisconsin might again be a harbinger.

He also thinks Obama’s intervention demonstrates why presidents should serve apprenticeships as governors. He says that Obama, in the Illinois Legislature and the U.S. Senate, “was a liberal among liberals,” and liberals are his base, and his staff comes from it. Governors, Walker says, get used to considering the interests of broad constituencies.

Walker’s calm comportment in this crisis is reminiscent of President Ronald Reagan’s during his 1981 stand against the illegal strike by air traffic controllers, and Margaret Thatcher’s in the1984 showdown with the miners’ union over whether unions or Parliament would govern Britain. Walker, by a fiscal seriousness contrasting with Obama’s lack thereof, and Obama, by inciting defenders of the indefensible, have made three things clear:

First, the Democratic Party is the party of government, not only because of its extravagant sense of government’s competence and proper scope but also because the party’s base is government employees. Second, government employees have an increasingly adversarial relationship with the governed. Third, Obama’s “move to the center” is fictitious.”

George Will is a columnist for The Washington Post.

Comment:  Governor Walker is that kind of an American one might call traditional…..one who believes in what Americans became American for…….to live in a Judeo-Christian God-fearing style society based on citizen rights to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.   As Dennis Prager emphaisizes, there are three pillars grounding this lofty dream which makes America exceptional:  

They are Liberty, E Pluribus Unum, and In God We Trust.  

Mr. Obama is a different kind of an American.  He is persuaded by Marxism and Government Rule over the citizen.

Obama the Deceitful Tries to “Capture” Ronald Reagan for Himself

If Americans would spend a bit more time listening carefully to the constant Obamaperformances on television, they would recognize his preposterous lies and claims as Marxist propoganda.   Americans must think and listen beyond the president’s snappy uniforms and speech and train themselves sufficiently to listen.

Mr. Obama has no core.    He was trained to believe in Marxism.  That is his political being, his past, present, and likely his future.    Marxism is a religion connected with a system of government rule……Or, if doubter prefer, a system of government rule connected to atheism….in its ideal…..in its practice.

The problem for American democrats, both Democrat and Republican, that is Americans who still believe in democratic institutions;  a people’s government, Marxists use Truth or Deceit  when most needed to con a democratic population to believe a life under Marxism, that is a government managing citizen life, is ‘heaven’ on Earth.

Obama is exceptionally gifted in the art of deceit.

In this  Obamalie the president and many Leftwing Democrat leaders are milking  Ronald Reagan’s  sincere and profoundly religious belief and romance of the greatness of the Anmerican dream for their political purposes.   They have little but Marxist government to sell to the American people.   Deceit is their last hurrah.

Ralph Peters offers this article to clarify Obama’s insult to truth that he, the president, is the Gipper of our day.  The title for his article at Family Security Matters, is “Obama is the Anti-Reagan”.

“In one of the most bizarre political gambits in our history, President Obama and his dwindling band of cheerleaders-nervously eyeing the big game in 2012-have been trying to cast an over-inflated community organizer as the reincarnation of the Gipper.

It ain’t working.

No matter how often Obama drops President Reagan’s name or how shamelessly his flaks attempt to link this shrinking, spineless president to the bold, visionary giant who turned a broken nation around, nobody’s buying this preposterous propaganda.

Comparing Barack Obama to Ronald Reagan is like comparing Bernie Madoff to Warren Buffett: Hustling your clients isn’t heroism, and fraud’s not a formula for enduring success.

At a press conference last Tuesday, Obama couldn’t restrain himself from invoking Reagan’s name yet again, associating him with Tip O’Neill (another disgraceful linkage). But you only had to listen to that presser or read the transcript to grasp the immense distance between Obama/Hamlet, forever wringing his hands and wondering, “To be, or not to be?” and Reagan/Henry V embracing a battle the Washington court heralds insisted he could not win.

Asked about the tumult in the Middle East, Obama responded with gutless generalities.

Asked about the freedom demonstrations in Iran, he offered cautious, lawyerly support in terms that seemed chosen to avoid a law-suit.

Asked about Saudi Arabia, he stone-walled completely.

Asked about the potential threat to oil supplies, he ducked that question, too.

And when, late in the news conference, he finally uttered that terrible word “democracy,” he spoke it as if handling a poisonous snake.

Compare that to Reagan’s magnificent call: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Obama couldn’t even tear down Guantanamo, despite his blustering promises to do so. His response to the Cold War would have been unilateral disarmament.

Reagan took on destructive unions, international Marxists, secret police, murderous regimes and the consistently hostile watercress-sandwich salon culture of an in-bred domestic elite (“He’s simply not our kind, darling…”).

Obama took on Fox News. And lost.

Obama isn’t another Ronald Reagan. He’s Jimmy Carter Lite, a deer in the headlights of history, overwhelmed by international crises he doesn’t understand and that don’t make any sense in the politically correct world-view he brought to the Oval Office. This is a president who can’t even stand up to Pakistan, let alone lead the free world through the present Valley of the Shadow.

In that same embarrassing press conference, Obama offered budget cuts that amounted to eliminating one latte per hedge-fund manager per year to reduce our national debt. He lacked the courage to take on a single entitlement program, to offer a single bold proposal, or to simply tell the truth about our cancerous financial situation. And he still blames George W. Bush for everything from excessive spending to the Black Death.

Reagan inherited a nation morally and financially gutted during the Carter years and turned it back into not just a shining city on a hill, but a gleaming country atop the summit of history. He rebuilt our economy, our military and our morale.

Obama is crippling our economy, misusing our military, and telling us we’re bad people who appreciate neither the glories of Islam, the virtues of squandering trillions, or the boo-hoo-hoo, oh-so-awful difficulties of being president (“Mommy…it’s too hard!”).

Nonetheless, get ready for Obama on horseback, wearing a ten-gallon hat and popping jelly beans.

It’s “Mourning In America.”

Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer, and the author of 26 books. His latest novel, just-released, is “The Officers’ Club,” an explicit depiction of the post-Vietnam Army.

This piece first appeared at Family Security Matters.

“What is a Community Organizer? Victor Davis Hanson Explains….

“During the Republican convention of 2008, Rudy Giuliani rhetorically asked: what is a community organizer? I think we always knew the answer without even referencing the guidebook of Saul Alinsky.

President Obama need not worry about budget deficits in the manner of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Unlike state officials, he can print money, and raise fees and taxes. The nation’s more affluent, unlike blue-state refugees seeking red-state low tax sanctuaries, cannot flee anywhere. That makes it easy for President Obama to weigh in on the Wisconsin unrest by suggesting an insolvent state government was more interested in destroying the public unions than meeting a $3 billion budget shortfall.

That characteristic eagerness to grandstand on extraneous issues, while ignoring federal crises, is characteristic of this administration. It will not make meaningful progress in addressing its own massive trillion-dollar debts, reexamine the looming disaster of ObamaCare, gear up to produce more gas and oil in the face of skyrocketing energy costs, or seriously explore ways to get unemployment down below 9%.

Yet in the last twenty-four months, we have learned that the president will indeed declare that: the governor of Wisconsin is using his state budget disaster largely to punish public servants; the police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, act “stupidly” and racially stereotype minorities (“typically”) as do most police departments; the state of Arizona harasses Hispanic children when they go out to eat ice cream, and thus Mexico’s efforts to sue the state should be joined by the U.S. government; much of our ills are due to “fat cat” bankers who junket to Las Vegas and the Super Bowl and cannot seem to grasp that at some point they have made enough money; the pro-democracy protestors in the streets of Tehran are not to be encouraged by our “meddling” (because of our past sins of involvement in Iran), but their counterparts in Cairo are to be encouraged by our meddling (despite our past sins of involvement in Egypt).

In addition, why would the president call for “sacrifice” in lean times, advising Americans to cut out going to dinner and to “put off” a vacation — while favoring Martha’s Vineyard for vacation, as the first lady (of erstwhile “downright mean country” repute) seems especially fond of Vail ski escapes in winter and Costa del Sol Mediterranean jaunts in summer? Is not symbolism important in these hard times?

Why, why, why all this? In a word, because that is what community organizers are supposed to do, even — or rather, especially — when they become the establishment. Cannot we answer Giuliani’s question? As a general rule, the “organizer” is not indigenous to the community, but as a sort of roaming utopian he travels widely to detect supposed foci of injustice (think an Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson), even to the point of worrying about professors being locked out of their homes or the tranquility of ice cream parlors in Arizona.

Almost immediately there is an artificial divide constructed between an oppressive “them” and a victimized “us,” usually on rigid class, gender, and racial lines. Some such university study is cited to “prove” injustice based on the absence of parity in income, health care, or education. Then the community organizer rallies the “community” to “get in their face” and agitate, which can encompass anything from suing in court, holding mass rallies, conducting voter registration drives with accordant intimidation, visiting the private homes of supposedly culpable officials, bankers, and the wealthy, and threatening strikes, slow-downs and disruptions. These metaphorical “hostage takers” must be “punished” as “enemies,” relegated to a proverbial backseat, and in such a fight have their knives rhetorically trumped by our guns.

Indeed, the supposed exploiters are deemed “fat cats” who often favor “Wall Street,” enjoy privileges that accord them Super Bowl or Las Vegas junkets, continually “raise the bar” on the rest of us folks, and can’t seem to figure out that at some point they have surely made enough money from others.

The remedy is always adolescent — the perceived government program and entitlement are demanded without any worry about who is to fund them or how. The community’s perceived “needs” are the sole point of contention, not society’s ability to meet them. The assumption of the community organizer is that there is an amorphous “they” (so often white, male, heterosexual, upper-middle class, Christian) who have done something wrong, or whose ancestors have done something wrong, that both results in their own present privilege and requires appropriate redress, in the moral sense.

The logic is circular — more public money to deserving constituents ensures political support and in turn requires higher taxes from others to pay for it, a two-pronged redistribution plan of taking from the undeserving to allot to the more worthy. Absent from the community organizer’s ideology is any sense that the individual might in some cases bear some responsibility for the ensuing inequality — encounters with the criminal justice system, poor family planning, reckless use of easy credit, involvement with dangerous and addictive drugs, no interest in formal education, or adoption of a popular culture that promotes anti-intellectualism, misogyny, illegitimacy, and defiance of accepted norms. Again, some sort of deliberate prejudice is more likely, and thus state money is justified as a sort of reparation for the collective sins of society, as well as a wise investment to prevent social disequilibrium, if not outright public unrest.

Note the flip side: those who are better off enjoy such benefaction largely as a result of birth, privilege based on the exploitation of others, bias against someone who does look like them, random chance, accident, illegality, or immorality — rarely is success to do harder work, careful planning, more education and training, deferred gratification, or wiser personal decisions. The point is not how someone got more than others, but the suspect system that allowed them to get that more — and how to correct it.

There is never any followup (think audit of the second stimulus, or reexamination of ObamaCare) about the cost effectiveness of the new grant or program. The key is getting the money, not ensuring that it is well used. The organizer — often far better educated than his constituents — then moves on, either to other crisis spots or into politics on his way up his planned cursus honorum. Moreover, the organizer feels a certain sense of entitlement, given his good works — an exemption as it were to live a particular and much deserved lifestyle not always that different from (and indeed at times far better than) the supposed purveyors of social injustice. That the creation of huge entitlements creates social dependency, disrupts traditional local and family networks of mutual help and reliance, emphasizes poverty entirely in a political rather than a spiritual framework, or enables rather than addresses destructive behavior is of less interest to the careerist organizer — either because he sees problems only in classical material terms, or because he is long gone after the money is allotted, or because unanticipated disasters are not his purview, or because dependency, not alleviation of pathology, is the more important goal.

So we should cease being surprised that the president editorializes about extraneous issues while ignoring critical ones, or that the administration is now addressing breast pumps, or that Obama has ignored the findings of his own debt commission, or that he has added 200,000 new federal workers at a time of fiscal insolvency, and on and on.

You see, that is what community organizers do, now and in the past.”

This article was printed at Pajamas Media under the title:  “But that’s what  Community Organizers do!”