Posted on 06/01/2009 11:15:22 AM PDT by mojito
Driving north out of New York the other day, I heard a caller to Mark Levin’s show discuss his excellent book Liberty and Tyranny. The word she kept using was “inevitable”: The republic felt exhausted, and there was an “inevitability” to what was happening. A quarter-millennium of liberty seemed to be about the best you could expect, and its waning was—again—“inevitable.” As she spoke, the rich farmland of Columbia County rolled past my window. To many of its residents, the caller would have sounded slightly kooky. Were any of the county’s first families suddenly to rematerialize from their centuries of slumber, they would recognize the general landscape, the settlements, the principal roads, and indeed many of the weathered farmhouses. And they would be struck by the comfort and prosperity of their successors in this land. So what’s all this talk about decay and decline?
Ah, but I wonder if those early settlers would recognize the people, and their assumptions about the role of government. Mr. Levin’s listener was trying to articulate something profound but elusive. It’s not something you can sell the film rights for —there are no aliens vaporizing the White House, as in Independence Day; no Godzilla rampaging down Fifth Avenue and hurling the Empire State Building into the East River. No bangs, just the whimper of the same old same old civilizational ennui, as it gradually dawns that Admiral Yamamoto’s sleeping giant may be merely a supersized version of Monty Python’s dead parrot.
(Excerpt) Read more at newcriterion.com ...
Same here, though I wouldn’t say 5 months is a gradual slide, it’ more like a record pace.
I cannot foresee the left relinquishing power and going quietly into hibernation. I think they will attempt to impose a hard tyranny before they relinquish power. I think they will involve us in a very serious foreign war. I think Obama will not go quietly. Nothing in his biography suggests that he will lightly relinquish the power which is the object of desire for his entire life.
When our ship of state turns turtle, Obama will present himself as the man on horseback.
Alexis de Toqueville
Setting aside his brilliance for a moment but how come Mark Steyn’s accent sounds so cool and Arianna Huffington’s sounds so much like a banshee dying a thousand deaths in the center of a star burning with hatred or something like that?
No, I suspect that King Barry of Kenya will instead offer himself as the “man in a Prius.”
A slow slide? Why am I breathless as we plunge into servitude?
Again today bobble head moved his lips and thete went more of our freedoms!
I view him more as the man in a Trojan Horse...that's about all I can post with out getting banned
Heck of a quote from Tocqueville, BTW
To bad more here in America can't see what is happening in front of their eyes what he saw over a hundred years ago
Yes. Extremely depressing. But also, absolutely outstanding. It couldn’t be put more clearly. Outstanding even for Steyn.
Is Barak Obama a Manchurian Marxist or merely a narcissist on the make?
Every patriotic American should hope that the essential Barack Obama is, as the author suggests, a narcissistic redo of Bill Clinton because the alternative means that we have a leftist ideologue in the most powerful position in the world whose motives border on treason. There is a third possibility, namely the Barak Obama is merely what he shows the world that he is, a left of center liberal with conventional notions that big government is needed to solve big problems.
Here is where this business gets Kafka-like. If Barak Obama truly is narcissistic, it is pointless to look at anything he says because he is by definition a consummate liar and a deft manipulator. Certainly no one would dispute the truth of that as it applies to Bill Clinton; not even leftist Joe Klein who figured it out early on when he wrote, anonymously, Primary Colors which is a paen of grudging admiration for the master manipulator, even as he manipulated the author. A narcissist who denies his narcissism is merely playing out his neurosis.
The law has a presumption which might be of use here. When a party makes an admission against his own interest that admission is thought to be reliable. So if Barak Obama tells us that he is not a socialist, the denial is not worth much and would not be worth much even if he were not a narcissist. But when Barak Obama tells Joe the Plummer in an unguarded moment that the nation's wealth should be redistributed, that is an admission against his interest in appearing to be centrist and it is highly credible. Likewise his admission that higher taxes do not increase revenues but are nevertheless desirable because they redistribute wealth, should be regarded as very revealing.
Of course the safest method of analysis is to ignore what the candidates say on their own behalf and look at what the hell they do. Obama's biography betrays at every turn that he is a Manchurian Marxist. His profound associations have been with communists from his mentor Frank Marshall Davis to William Ayres. He made another admission against interest in his biography when he admitted that he associated with Marxists on campus. His associations include long and intimate attachment to the Black Liberation Theology preacher, Rev. Wright. This is simply a black face on Marxism.
His record in the Illinois Senate and in the United States Senate as an extreme leftist confirms his biography. Since entering the Oval Office I know of nothing that I can think of domestically that President Barak Obama has done which is not consistent with the thesis that he is a Marxist. His record on foreign affairs is more mixed and less conclusive but I think that if one regards his apparent moves to the right in, for example, Afghanistan as moves to protect his own existing power rather than ideological shifts to the right, the Marxist model still fits. In other words, American impotence abroad is one thing if one is a leftist seeking power and quite another thing if one is a leftist already in power.
I think the real question is how committed a Marxist is Barak Obama? Is he so rabid an acolyte of the Saul Alinsky School that he will actively contrive a crisis to seize ultimate power? Or will he will he merely govern on the left but seize an opportunity only if circumstances serendipitously offer?
In other words, so long as we continue as we are I think our representative democracy will survive Obama. My fear is that we will have a profound financial crash with huge unemployment numbers; or we will experience a wave of the Weimar Republic like inflation which destroys virtually every institution; or we sustain a severe or series of severe terrorist strikes; or there is an atomic attack somewhere in the world; or the Iranians or some other crazies, possibly possessed of the bomb, possibly in league with Russia and/or Venezuela, manage to shut off the world supply of oil; or there are assassinations in America.
An event like one of these could be the occasion for Obama to seize ultimate power. I believe he is psychologically prepared to do so but I cannot be sure. If he were to do so, the grab would be rationalized as a move to save the country and an opportunity to finally put the country right. I believe he is psychologically ready to do so because he is a leftist and a God player an acolyte of Saul Alinsky. This is what the Frankfurt school and the Alinsky school have been striving for without respite for decades.
It is hard to believe that if Obama is offered the ultimate prize that he would walk away like Cincinnatus or Washington.
Do we really want to wear “iron collars.” We could see idiot models walking down the runway with a thrall’s collar on their necks, and the elites could sport theirs as well. The peaceniks could paint little emblems on them, and make the look so cool.
That was before her Gay husband was outed and lost his bid for the Senate. She never quite got over that, or maybe she was always just a lying slut opportunist.
Great article, as usual. (Depressed and angry probably sums up a lot of us right now, btw.)
Anyone remember Reagan and optimism, the fated success of liberty as the only thing that actually works?
Thanks for re-posting, although that is a terribly depressing article.
I really think that King Obama will pull out all the stops in his quest to make the US into the latest model of an Alinsky Paradise. Obama is an absolute narcissicist with roots firmly based in Chicago thuggery and black victimhood. The salivating, obsequious mainstream American liberal media will remain firmly in his camp forever, which will only assist him on his merry march to marxism.
It is interesting to note that he is not fooling some of the foreign press; for whatever reason they are not as willing as the American media to be led around by the nose...
Took the words right out of my mouth. I keep vowing to block all media whatsoever. Just constantly depresses me...
That said...
Our nation’s downfall was inevitable. It was only a matter of time before the electorate became apathetic, ignorant, greedy and immoral.
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
“Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.”
My vote for last sigh breathed will be in the independent Cantons of Switzerland.
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