Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Obama, Character, and Exceptionalism

Obama, Character, and American Exceptionalism

"This past week, Sarah Palin and the McCain campaign began doing what the [New York] Times failed to do: investigate the years-long association between Barack Obama and domestic terrorist, Bill Ayers. [ ] Instead of investigating, the Times’ writer hurls invective at the McCain campaign for having the nerve to bring up the unpleasant matter. Just minutes after the [2nd] debate ended [Tuesday] night, the New York Times projectile-vomited a load of anti-McCain-Palin vitriol disguised as an unsigned editorial. No wonder its author wished to remain anonymous: the editorial hurled unsubstantiated charges at the McCain-Palin campaign while purposely ignoring or covering up information that it finds unhelpful to its viewpoint." from DBKP http://deathby1000papercuts.com/2008/10/barack-obama-bill-ayers-ny-times-continues-to-whitewash-obama-ayers-connection/>
The idea of Barak Obama as President bothers me. If he wins, the entire world will have to wait-and-see whether his socialistic proposals go as far--or further--than anyone imagines, and whether Congress and the Courts will let him get away with what he attempts to do.

Being a Constitutional lawyer and law professor as he is, he will probably get away with as much as he wants to, in the Courts. This is because the Courts won't hear any cases based on Obama's socialist programs until they have been signed into law and libertarians and others bring suits. And Obama knows what the Supreme Court Justices would think of the various ideas he may try to implement.

Not that more socialism is going to matter. Socialism is now unstoppable. The conservatives are merely conserving that which has been a fact since the New Deal, conserving the idea that government can do some things that are socialistic for the public good, but for the time being it is not to the public good to do more; "Wait a while," they seem to imply, "then we'll see how much more we can go along with."
The obvious and very large recent departure from the conservatism of the Republicans came when they helped craft and then pass in both Houses the bank and mortgage bail out bill.

Socialism is a fact of politics in almost the entire world, and some nations have less socialism than America, the land of the free. It's coming, and it may be only a short matter of time, now, before John Galt begins to shrug. But he isn't shrugging yet, because everyone believes there may be a way back from the brink of European-type entitlements. But it is this very lack of our socialism not being on par with most of the rest of the world, that contributes to the new definitions of "American Exceptionalism." Alexis de Tocqueville defined it as our greatness. To many in this new century it means our apartness from the rest of the world; we are not "in tune" with it.

But what worries me deeply is Obama's apparent bad judgment about the company he keeps, and the company he once said he would make. His connection with Bill Ayer's may be severed now, but no self-respecting libertarian (with a small "l", which is most of America) would have had anything more to do with Ayers than accidentally winding up on one board or commission with him. That Obama served with Ayers, had to have been friendly with Ayers since they lived in the same neighborhood, and allowed Ayers, in his own living room, to throw him an election send-off event at the start of his Illinois Senate run, is not what I would have done. What would I have done? Keep reading.
"William Ayers, in the age of terrorism, will be Barack Obama's Willie Horton," said former counterterrorism official Larry C. Johnson. The Huffington Post Feb. 16, 2008.

So far that has not happened, and I will admit that maybe there is less to Obama's connection with the former member of the radical Weather Underground Organization that claimed responsibility for a dozen bombings between 1970 and 1974, and who said to the New York Times in September 2001, "I don't regret setting bombs...I feel we didn't do enough."

"President" Obama would not be the first President to have connections, tenuous but palpable, with members of the Weather Underground. President Clinton " commuted the sentences of a couple of convicted Weather Underground members, Susan Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans, shortly before leaving office in January 2001." Washingtonpost.com http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/02/obamas_weatherman_connection.html

But Ayers is Not the Only Questionable Connection Obama Has
There is, besides Ayers, Obama's "intimate and long-term association with the 'Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now,'" (Acorn.) [see "Inside Obama's Acorn" http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/09/god-belieforiginal-intent.html "Obama's ties to Acorn - arguably the most politically radical large-scale activist group in the country - are wide, deep, and longstanding. If Acorn is adept at creating a non-partisan, inside-game veneer for what is in fact an intensely radical, leftist, and politically partisan reality, so is Obama himself. This is hardly a coincidence: Obama helped train Acorn's leaders in how to play this game." Stanley Kurtz; nationalreviewonline http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDZiMjkwMDczZWI5ODdjOWYxZTIzZGIyNzEyMjE0ODI=

Acorn is the successor to the 1960’s agenda of anti-capitalism, writes Kurtz. Acorn, he says, quoting Sol Stern’s 2003 City Journal article, “ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities," grew out of “'one of the New Left’s silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization.' In the 1960’s, NWRO launched a campaign of sit-ins and disruptions at welfare offices. The goal was to remove eligibility restrictions, and thus effectively flood welfare rolls with so many clients that the system would burst. The theory, explains Stern, was that an impossibly overburdened welfare system would force “a radical reconstruction of America’s unjust capitalist economy.” Instead of a socialist utopia, however, we got the culture of dependency and family breakdown that ate away at America’s inner cities — until welfare reform began to turn the tide."
"Acorn" is, as of today, under investigation in ten states for voter fraud.

In my lifetime we have gone from the 1950's industrial/military-complex mentality, through the scarriest decade in Amerian history, the 1960's, wherein all factions of our society were fighting each other, sometimes literally, and then wound up where we are. There were racial riots that burned Los Angeles and Detroit, along with other racial events, 26 of which are chronicled in the PBS series Eyes on the Prize.

"The Watts riot of 1965 will become the best-remembered urban black uprising of the Sixties, but summer 1967 brings an explosion of tensions around the country. For five days in July, Detroit, Michigan descends into chaos. [In the] economic boom...and urban renewal...blacks have been left behind. [ ] The 95% white police force, notorious for brutal and arbitrary treatment of black citizens, raids an illegal after hours club and draws an angry, frustrated crowd that quickly turns hostile.
"...Governor George Romney calls in the Michigan National Guard..." Nearly 7000 people will be arrested by the third day, mostly are young and black. "Police and guardsmen shoot at will...Romney asks President Lyndon Johnson for federal help and by Monday afternoon 4700 U.S. Army paratroopers have arrived, under orders not to use live ammunition. A combined 17,000 law enforcement troops suppress the riot. After five days of anarchy, more than 40 people are dead, hundreds are injured, and damage estimates hit $50 million."

I grew up 153 miles away from Detroit and was as familiar with it as a twelve year old could be who had most of his relatives living there--on the right side of 8 Mile Road, as my grandmother would later tell me. I also grew up 154 miles away from Chicago, another hotbed of racial unrest. I remember seeing our soldiers in the VietNam war and we were not accustomed, as are the youngest of children today, to seeing violence on TV. The war was frightening because it caused groups like the Weather Underground, caused riots during anti-war demonstrations, and caused the killing of four innocent students on the campus of Kent State by National Guardsmen. [Watch this chilling video with the lyrics to "Ohio" by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVi-DXOfnAM]
It was the most freightening period of my life. I would like to say that period ended with the only resignation by a President in our history, Nixon, but even that was not an ending. Since no President had ever resigned before, America was nervous about what was to come. And that was not the end of the left-wing agenda. The war had gotten it started; now other things needed to be addressed. Today, one of those is American Exceptionalism.

I grew up in the decade with domestic terrorists who bombed federal buildings. I met one in high school before the war ended; he was politely invited to speak to our class by a leftist who was one of my friends, he was barely older than we were, and the teacher did not condemn him. I was outraged, at both the idea that he could be so freely invited to my school and my class; and that he had (allegedly) commited the crimes he said he had. He had not been caught, so he had not been convicted. But the tone of my voice made it clear that I, for one, did not approve of his actions in spite of the left-liberal atmosphere of the times. Today I would report him for his actions. Then, I was fearful of pissing off the left-wingers, and about one third of all my friends, including my first girlfriend, were leftists.

It was the very-left-leaning-liberal educators of the day who were setting the agenda, because by 1971 it was evident that the military had lied many times to us, that Nixon had lied, that Johnson had lied, and that the anti-war protesters might actually have right on their side. But 99 44/100% of protesters did not bomb government buildings, incite riots, or kill innocent people.

American Exceptionalism

All of this eventually led to a mentality that would allow politics to swing so far to the left that a man like Obama, declared the most left-wing sitting Senator, could now be our next President. He may turn out to be a boogie-man candidate and actually become a fine President. He may rid our nation of some of the "American exceptionalism" (AE) that we often demonstrate to the world, "exceptionalism" that is taken by others in the world as an elitist attitude.

"[A]t bottom, AE refers to the apparent departure of the United States from certain assumed historical norms or laws of development, but AE definitely is a double-edged sword. [O]n the one hand, the 'good' side of the double edged sword promotes, 'Egalitarianism,' ie, equality of opportunity, the idea that in America, anyone can become president. [O]n the other hand, the 'dark' side of the double edged sword promotes, violence, brutality, hatred, cruelty. [S]ince the 1930s, what had once been a debating point for left-wing intellectuals has entered the mainstream of academic controversy." [italics added] from american exceptionalism

But one of the left-wing debating points about any elitism as seen by the rest of the world, that sets America apart from the rest of the world, is this, according to "american exceptionalism": "For one reason or another, so the notion goes, the United States has failed to produce eversharper antagonisms between capital and labor (as measured, most commonly, by the rise of a viable socialist movement). Hence, it appears that America is an exceptional historical case, quite different from other capitalist nations." [italics added]

In other words because it is true that we have "failed" to produce "antogonisms between labor and capital," we are exceptional where "exceptionalism" is taken to mean that we hold ourselves apart from other nations, striving not to be fractional so as not to have to produce antagonisms between labor and capital. Any such antagonisms America has had were those caused by interests who could be served by such antagonism. That is certainly not the labor class nor the management class. In America, both sides know they need each other. Those who have an interest in "eversharper antagonisms," must then be the socialists who desire it and see our scorn of it as elitist.

But exceptionalism also refers to the egalitarian, justice-oriented America. "In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville discussed American exceptionalism in 'Democracy in America', and he is still correct. There was then and there continues to be now in this country a remarkable commitment to liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, and laissez-faire values."

These are not the values of the Muslim world, whose men treasure Sharia law; nor are they the values of the murderous Islamic radicals who are no different than our own domestic murderous radicals: they want to change the world through the initiation of force, changing it into something they would rather see and live with than what they do see and must live with.
But when they have achieved their goal, there will be only another tyranny of power mongers who will do to them who won what the winners did to the losers. The next tyranny will tyrannize them who won against the elitism and exceptionalism they thought they saw, who won what was not theirs to win if it had to be by force and coercion. It will be never ending if allowed to continue.

Barak Obama may be a President with a greatness unequalled in modern history. He may be able to bring opposing forces together if he really can "cross the isle," if he really can work with dictators to make them step down from their posturing and their aggressive behavior. I would truly like to see that, and I don't know that John McCain can do that.
"At least one of Senator Obama's leading foreign policy advisers, Samantha Power, wants to recapture that interventionist spirit.

"'It's going to take a generation or so,' she told Newsweek senior editor Michael Hirsh in an article for the Washington Monthly, 'to reclaim American exceptionalism.' Power lamented that Americans were 'neither the shining example, nor even competent meddlers' in the world's problems.

"Is that what Barack Obama offers the electorate — to be a more competent meddler?" Globalist; Christopher Preble; http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8380
I rather think that the world will be so much more accepting
of "President Obama" than anyone else who has/had a chance at it, including
Senator Clinton, that he either will be a "more competent meddler," or a
"shining example" of how to give away American pride--by offering to the world
America's humility, it's "we-are-the-same-as-you" egalitarianism--and he will
either on the one hand be thought of a great President when it comes to foreign
policy, or a fool.
We have become so accepting of the anti-individualism rampant in much of the world that our next President may be the one who stamps out our American individualism, our American identity, for an identity that is closer to the prevailing world-view of capitalism as a tool for government, rather than as something to be protected by government. That would be Obama, not McCain, and that would make Obama the fool. But like the left-wing activists of the 60's who were followed by another generation of activists, of whom Obama is one, his legacy whether he becomes President or not will be to inspire yet another generation of left-wing policy wonks and activists.
But Obama will not be thought of as a rescuing Knight in shining armor on the economic front, because of what socialism is: capitalism turned into the tool of governments that wish to entitle everyone with costly "rights" as the "responsibility" of government. Just ask Obama, who, not to mention all the other "capital investments" into the American financial infrastructure, wants to push $100,000,000,000 in ten years into our economy to make it fully self-sufficient for energy.
How long at being entirely energy self-sufficient will it take to see a return on that one-hundred billion dollars?
Curtis Edward Clark

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