Posted on 05/24/2010 7:20:45 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Bill Bennett and Seth Leibsohn don’t mince words on NRO: “Allowing the running down of a part of the United States by the head of a foreign government, at the White House, standing next to the president — who not only didn’t challenge him, but encouraged him — is a foreign- and domestic-policy catastrophe.” I couldn’t agree more with them, or with Mona Charen and Michelle Malkin, who’ve written forcefully about the absurdity of entertaining commentary on our immigration enforcement (or lack of same) from Mexico. That would be the same Mexico that enforces its immigration laws with the very “intolerance, hate, discrimination and abuse” of which its president, Felipe Calderón, falsely accuses Arizona.
It is sadly noteworthy, though, that Bill and Seth wrote their essay before Calderón’s appearance Thursday before a joint session of Congress. It was at that latter event, with Vice President Biden and Speaker Pelosi presiding, and with President Obama’s cabinet front and center, that the most breathtaking display took place. I refer not to the tongue-lashing from Calderón, but to the standing ovation from nearly two-thirds of the People’s representatives and from the assembled administration officials. The ovation was for a brazen attack on the People.
Make no mistake: In the Congress of the United States on Thursday, it was a hostile Mexico against a besieged Arizona. Mexico won in a rout.
I was talking to a friend the other day, trying to explain my melancholy over the country. Conversations like that tend to get a bit self-absorbed, but indulge me for a second. I said I couldn’t think of a better example than myself for relating the problem no one wants to face up to. A number of years ago, at some risk to myself and my family, I prosecuted savage jihadists who had made themselves enemies of the United States. I was lauded for doing so by the Clinton administration. Though I disagreed with that administration philosophically, and particularly with its conception of international terrorism as a crime problem, I praised the much-needed overhaul by which it put teeth in our counterterrorism laws. Our disagreement was over the best way to protect the country, not over the imperative that the country be protected. Our debate was the traditional Right-Left debate.
Moreover, as a New York lawyer who made no secret of having conservative views, I was a decided minority, even among my fellow prosecutors. But that only mattered in the occasional, friendly joust over a beer. Day to day, our politics had nothing to do with how we went about our jobs. At the office, I had friends across the ideological spectrum. Most of them were from the political left, but we liked and respected one another. The bond we shared, the sense that we were doing something good for the nation we all loved, was stronger than any ideological divisions.
Why does that matter now? Because, for the first time in our history, we have a president who would be much more comfortable sitting in a room with Bill Ayers than sitting in a room with me. We have a governing class that is too often comfortable with anti-American radicals, with rogue and dysfunctional governments that blame America for their problems, and with Muslim Brotherhood ideologues who abhor individual liberty, capitalism, freedom of conscience, and, in general, Western enlightenment. To this president and his government, I am the problem. Americans who champion life, liberty, and limited government are not just the loyal opposition; they are deemed potential terrorists, and are derided with considerably more intensity than the actual terrorists. Arizona — for criminalizing criminal activity, for defending its sovereignty and protecting its citizens’ lives and property — is slandered as a human-rights violator.
And here is the excruciating part: As the Calderón spectacle demonstrates, these sentiments are not fringe sentiments.
To be sure, they are not held by the majority. To be elected, candidate Obama had to run as a post-partisan moderate, a pragmatic centrist who would not be constrained by ideology. Two camps well knew that this was nonsense: those few of us on the right who bothered to study Obama’s record, and those on the Alinskyite left who understood the campaign to be merely a charade necessary to grab the reins of power.
It was the second camp we saw standing and cheering for Calderón in Congress on Thursday. They used him as a vehicle to condemn Arizona.
This second camp, Obama’s transformative Left, had the numbers to give a thunderous ovation in the People’s House because a lot of people agree with them. If I had to guess — after its two generations of marching through our institutions, controlling the academy, and scripting the legacy media — I’d put it at one in five, or maybe even four, Americans. That’s enough to form a country the size of France or Germany.
Whatever that country may be, it is not America as we know it. Quite the opposite: Its purpose is to remake America, to render it unrecognizable to those who love America as she is, or has been. To that frightening new country, the rest of us are Arizona. We are here to be jeered and loathed. We are necessary only to pay for the unsustainable Change.
That, however, is not supposed to be the social contract, not for most of us. We don’t aspire to be citizens of the world. America suits us just fine. Arizona suits us just fine. And while the Alinskyites know they need us to underwrite their utopia, we will eventually figure out that we don’t need them to govern — and bankrupt — us.
A nation is a big, bumptious thing. It needn’t agree on everything. It can even bitterly disagree on major things. But to be a nation, a People, it has to agree that it has a shared destiny: that its unique culture, core principles, and independence are worth preserving, protecting, and defending.
I didn’t see a shared destiny during those moments in the People’s House Thursday. I saw Democrats cheering for Mexico’s attack on Arizona. It was a catastrophe.
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, published by Encounter Books
I see no way out except war.
I can’t say what I’m thinking because it would violate FR’s posting guidelines and besides who wants the Secret Se4rvice knocking on their door?
The left does hate the founding principles of this country,
and attempts to deny or destroy them at every turn.
Of course, this is simply a proxy war in the big picture.
They work for their “father below” against Christ.
America found special favor for being founded on Christian principles, and it will lose that favor if we allow those principles to be purged from our society.
And that’s exactly their goal.
Bump! Mind if I steal that to post on FB?
The GOAL of leftism is the Destruction of Western Civilization.
It has occurred to me for some time now that the nation is headed for a split. The world views of the left and right are irreconcilable. The question is when will this occur and will it be done through violence or will the two sides be willing to say adios and go their own way.
The right’s ideology is more “live and let live” than the left’s.
If they were to get a “liberal” state to secede, we’d say “adios and good luck”.
They’d call in the military.
How long can THE PEOPLE remain THE PEOPLE when every law and tax passed by Congress differentiates THE PEOPLE.
Has the United States ever had a President that was convicted of Treason? Or members of Congress and if so, what were the reasons?
Speaking for my brothers and sisters in MA -- we have a desperate need to control all aspects of your life. We will not let you go. If you want your freedom, you will have to fight us.
That scene of the dems giving a standing ovation to a foreign leader blasting one of OUR states should be played countless times by their opponents between now and November. That spectacle is the greatest piece of evidence those lib vermin despise America.
Denying him is the one (perhaps the only) lie with which Lucifer has a BIG problem. If we think Obama is a narcissist...wait til we get a load of his REAL father figure.
Probably until that leader is out of office.
I like Andrew McCarthy, but wasn’t his observation kind of obvious after years of watching democrats openly cheer the death of our soldiers in Iraq? They knew perfectly well losing in Iraq would be a huge victory for Al Qaida and they not only cheered for it, they tried to legislate it.
I’d recommend that every believer read “What in the world is going on” by David Jeremaiah.
Understand that Satan doesn’t “know the day or the hour” either.
He has to keep an anti-Christ on deck. Some brooding charismatic young man who has a grudge against humanity in general.
I'll check it out.
Y’know, I agree with the theme and spirit of these posts.
But I am equally disgusted that not a man or woman on the other side walked out in protest.
Shocked by those who stood to applaud the bashing of America and Arizona; saddened by those who stayed in the room.
Good article. Thanks for posting.
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