POINT OF NO RETURN ... Mark Steyn

Twelve months ago, the advance of Senator Obama to President Obama was starting to look inevitable, thanks in part to some characteristically Beltwaycentric bungling from John McCain, for whom the economic crisis of mid-September provided the perfect opportunity for the peculiar combination of narcissism and self-destruction he appears to favor. But beyond that more and more influential "moderate Republicans" were beginning to hail the Obama ascendancy. I declined to join them, for reasons that, I think, stand up pretty well:

Across the electric wires, the hum is ceaseless: Give it up, loser. Don’t go down with the ship when it’s swept away by the Obama tsunami. According to newspaper reports, polls show that most people believe newspaper reports claiming that most people believe polls showing that most people have read newspaper reports agreeing that polls show he’s going to win.

In the words of Publishers’ Clearing House, he may already have won! The battleground states have all turned blue, the reddest of red states are rapidly purpling. Don’t you know, little fool? You never can win. Use your mentality, wake up to reality. Why be the last right-wing pundit to sign up with Small-Government Conservatives For The Liberal Supermajority? We still need pages for the coronation, and there’s a pair of velvet knickerbockers with your name on it.

Yes, technically, this is still a two-party state, but one of the parties is like Elton John’s post-Oscar bash and the other is a church social in Wasilla. As David Sedaris put it in The New Yorker:

“I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. ‘Can I interest you in the chicken?’ she asks. ‘Or would you prefer the platter of s—t with bits of broken glass in it?’

“To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.”

McCain vs Obama is not the choice many of us would have liked in an ideal world. But then it’s not an “ideal world”, and the belief that it can be made so is one of the things that separates those who think Obama will “heal the planet” and those of us who support McCain faute de mieux. I agree with Thomas Sowell that an Obama-Pelosi supermajority will mark what he calls “a point of no return”. It would not be, as some naysayers scoff, “Jimmy Carter’s second term”, but something far more transformative. The new president would front the fourth great wave of liberal annexation — the first being FDR’s New Deal, the second LBJ’s Great Society, and the third the incremental but remorseless cultural advance when Reagan conservatives began winning victories at the ballot box and liberals turned their attention to the other levers of the society, from grade school up. The terrorist educator William Ayers, Obama’s patron in Chicago, is an exemplar of the last model: forty years ago, he was in favor of blowing up public buildings; then he figured out it was easier to get inside and undermine them from within.

All three liberal waves have transformed American expectations of the state. The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it. Why can’t the government sort out my health care? Why can’t they pick up my mortgage?

In his first inaugural address, Calvin Coolidge said: “I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people.” That’s true in a more profound sense than he could have foreseen. In Europe, lavish social-democratic government has transformed citizens into eternal wards of the nanny state: the bureaucracy’s assumption of every adult responsibility has severed Continentals from the most basic survival impulse, to the point where unaffordable entitlements on shriveled birth rates have put a question mark over some of the oldest nation states on earth. A vote for an Obama-Pelosi-Barney Frank-ACORN supermajority is a vote for a Europeanized domestic policy that is, as the eco-types like to say, “unsustainable”.

More to the point, the only reason why Belgium has gotten away with being Belgium and Sweden Sweden and Germany Germany this long is because America’s America. The soft comfortable cocoon in which western Europe has dozed this last half-century is girded by cold hard American power. What happens when the last serious western nation votes for the same soothing beguiling siren song as its enervated allies?

“People of the world,” declared Senator Obama sonorously at his self-worship service in Germany, “look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”

No, sorry. History proved no such thing. In the Cold War, the world did not stand as one. One half of Europe was a prison, and in the other half far too many people — the Barack Obamas of the day — were happy to go along with that division in perpetuity. And the wall came down not because “the world stood as one” but because a few courageous people stood against the conventional wisdom of the day. Had Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan been like Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterand and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter, the Soviet empire (notwithstanding its own incompetence) would have survived and the wall would still be standing. Senator Obama’s feeble passivity will get you a big round of applause precisely because it’s the easy option: Do nothing but hold hands and sing the easy listening anthems of one-worldism, and the planet will heal.

To govern is to choose. And sometimes the choices are tough ones. When has Barack Obama chosen to take a stand? When he got along to get along with the Chicago machine? When he sat for 20 years in the pews of an ugly neo-segregationist race-baiting grievance-monger? When he voted to deny the surviving “fetuses” of botched abortions medical treatment? When in his short time in national politics he racked up the most liberal – ie, the most doctrinaire, the most orthodox, the most reflex — voting record in the Senate? Or when, on those many occasions the questions got complex and required a choice, he dodged it and voted merely “present”?

The world rarely stands as one. You can, as Reagan and Thatcher did, stand up. Or, like Obama voting “present”, you can stand down.

Nobody denies that, in promoting himself from “community organizer” to the world’s President-designate in nothing flat, he has shown an amazing and impressively ruthless single-mindedness. But the path of personal glory has been, in terms of policy and philosophy, the path of least resistance.

Peggy Noonan thinks a President Obama will be like the dog who chases the car and finally catches it: Now what? I think Obama will be content to be King Barack the Benign, Spreader of Wealth and Healer of Planets. His rise is, in many ways, testament to the persistence of the monarchical urge even in a two-century old republic. So the “Now what?” questions will be answered by others, beginning with the liberal supermajority in Congress. And as he has done all his life he will take the path of least resistance. An Obama Administration will pitch America toward EU domestic policy and UN foreign policy. Thomas Sowell is right: It would be a “point of no return”, the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America. For a vigilant republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens, it would be a Declaration of Dependence.

If a majority of Americans want that, we holdouts must respect their choice. But, if you don’t want it, vote accordingly.

“People get the government they deserve” Joseph D’Maistre

Gang, we HAD a shot at cleaning these places out this last election and, to borrow a phrase from the klintoon White House, WE BLEW IT!!!

While I, like many of you, am saddened that McCain and Palin couldn’t keep the Marxist Obamessiah out of the White House, let’s try to keep things in some kind of rational perspective: ACORN elected a president and vice-president, NOT a monarch.

For years, I’ve been amazed at this idiotic quadrennial fascination with the beauty contest known as the (cue the trumpet fanfare) “PRESIDENTIAL RACE.” Our inattention and/or apparent desire for a king or a strong man dictatorship has allowed our system to morph to the present quasi-monarchy from its original foundations as a representative REPUBLIC.

People, the most important thing we can remember about all of this is that the Founders constructed the system to put – AND KEEP — the KEYS TO THE FEDERAL CASH REGISTER IN CONGRESS and the current Gang of 535 could bring this out-of-control government spending and the steady usurpation of our freedoms to a screeching halt tomorrow at noon — IF THEY WANTED TO. Attila the Hun could occupy the White House and without the dough to hire the bureaucrats, buy the desks and computers, etc., etc. ad nauseum, Mr. Hun would be hamstrung. (See Article 1, Section 7 of the now largely moribund Constitution for details.)

But they DON’T — for a number of reasons: (And I cite the tax situation as but one example of the problem. Don’t get me started on the ENERGY and Algore’s gloBULL warming scam!)

1. They understand the need to vacuum the excess FRAUDS (Federal Reserve Accounting Unit Denominators) — there are no “dollars” circulating now! — out of circulation BEFORE the bulk of the dumb masses (say it really fast for maximum effect) catch on to the resultant inflation. If you question that statement, ask yourself why else would a criminal enterprise (the federal government) having the power to “create” “money” with the stroke of a pen NEED YOURS every April 15th?

2. The current Gang of 535 understands the need for the massive tax code (so-called because it is written in code by gnomes chained to posts in the cellars of K Street lobbying firms and understood only by their keepers) to reward their friends, punish their enemies and keep the rest of us under their thumbs with threats of draconian punishments should we run afoul of it. It is impossible to NOT run afoul of it.

3. While the dumb masses rant about the abusive practices of this top criminal enterprise’s subsidiary criminal enterprise (the IRS), members of the Gang can pose and posture for the cameras from time to time and declare that “something MUST be done to reign in the abuses of the IRS,” NOTHING WILL BE DONE until we clean house on Capitol Hill and get back to the HONEST, CONSTITUTIONAL MONEY called for at Art.1, Sect. 10. They’ve been playing a rigged game of 3 card-Monte with us for so long – and getting away with it – that, as Herman Cain’s book title declares – “They Think You’re STUPID.” And, hell, for MOST of the dumb masses, they’re right.

And THAT process starts in YOUR STATE and CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT by finding and supporting decent candidates — at ALL levels — who will go to YOUR state capitol and Malfunction Junction and do that house cleaning. Not marching on Washington (unless MILLIONS of pitchfork wielding folk crowd the Mall, the elites are amused by these things and the only folks who benefit from the finite patriot resources devoted to them are the airlines, hotels and restaurants in D.C.)...not sending “money” to the RNC (LOL!)...not writing poison pen letters to these current jerks...but THROWING OUT THE CURRENT JERKS you have identified as NOT having the country’s interests at heart and doing it as many times as necessary to get it done. And then watching the NEW GUYS like a hawk to make certain THEY don’t go bad from imbibing too much of that power Kool-Aid so popular in Disneyland on The Potomac.

A good news in the viability of this approach is that the controlled so-called national mainstream media have far less impact on these widely separated congressional races making it easier to get some good guys elected.

The bad news is that I can speak from personal experience about how the national PARTIES will survey all the contested congressional races and if they DO find a candidate they do not or think they cannot control running on their side, they’ll offer a “consultant” from headquarters to come in and ASSIST the campaign. In at least 4 cases with which I am familiar, the Republican National Committee TORPEDOED those campaigns so a good guy who might be more inclined to cling to the Constitution before toeing the party line didn’t make it to D.C.

And for you who, like a sad number of the dumb masses, THINK YOUR GUY IS OK, go to GRADEGOV at

http://www.gradegov.com/

for your guy’s voting record on taxes, spending or your personal hot button issues. You might be in for an unpleasant surprise.

I often get the strong sense that the American people have some sick and sophomoric yearning for a new ROYAL FAMILY or BENEVOLENT KING to make their lives what they themselves feel incapable of making them without some nanny-state sovereign. Throughout history, with few exceptions conspicuous because of their rarity, those systems nearly always become malignant and freedom founders and eventually fails. With the exception of America – the IDEA, not the place – most men who have walked the earth have lived as slaves.

As opportunities afford themselves (and this is one), I simply attempt to remind my fellow citizens of that history and what lies ahead if they continue in their ignorance of that history.

I could go on for volumes but you get the idea.

One final thought: With the exception of the guys who CLEARLY pass muster at GRADEGOV, RE-ELECT NOBODY!!!!!

Standing by for a record breaking flaming by the fanatics.

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