Posted on 08/13/2009 7:12:20 AM PDT by Kaslin
If Americans had any doubt how the liberal elite (Democrats in Congress, the press, the entertainment industry) felt about them before this month’s congressional recess, surely they must understand it now.
Hard-working taxpaying Americans have been relatively complacent until recently, understandably occupied by their jobs, their finances, their families, and their personal responsibilities. Americans have had a largely unspoken but abiding faith in the enduring principles of American government, the fidelity of their elected representatives to those principles, and the vigilance of the press in defending both.
Oops. The past few months have been eye-openers, haven’t they?
As awareness of Obama’s true intentions have grown, so have Americans’ concerns. Disgusted with the profligate spending of the Bush administration and an earlier Republican-controlled Congress, many Americans believed Obama and the Democrats when they promised fiscal accountability. (This was, to steal Samuel Johnson’s line, the triumph of hope over experience, but that’s another matter.) Skyrocketing deficits, double-digit unemployment, and nationalized private industry were not what most Americans signed up for.
Slowly but surely, Americans have begun to make their feelings known. And as they have, they have discovered what the Left really means when it waxes rhapsodic about freedom of speech, dissent as patriotism, and civil liberties: only for those who agree with us; not for you¸you dimwitted, knuckle-dragging, greedy, gun-toting, child-bearing, God-fearing idiots.
When Congress passed a $787 billion “stealfromus” package without reading it, when buyer’s remorse began to set in, and when the “tea parties” sprung up, the tenor of the Left’s accusations changed. Now, taking a page from Obama’s intellectual “mentor” Saul Alinsky, the press, the entertainment industry, and Democrats in Congress stepped up their tactics and attempted to marginalize and ignore public sentiment, mocking the protestors repeatedly as “teabaggers,” (a vulgar slang term for a particular type of vulgar activity), laughing at them during prime-time newscasts, and giving airtime to inflammatory personalities like Keith Olbermann and Janeane Garofalo, who called Americans “racist rednecks” and “bigots.”
As if this were not bad enough, the Department of Homeland Security leaked a memo in which Americans having served in the military, favoring limited government, opposed to abortion, supporting restrictions on illegal immigration, or Second Amendment rights were characterized as potential “home grown terrorists.”
All of this was supposed to shut Americans up. But it didn’t. When Obama announced his call for nationalized health care, he unwittingly has persuaded people of the ominous threat his power grab represents. April’s dainty tea parties have morphed into August’s contentious town halls. Support for Obama’s policies has plummeted, and Americans across the country have confronted their congressional representatives with their objections to Obamacare and its inevitable faceless bureaucracy, deficit spending, rationing, and declining quality of care.
And how have the liberal elites responded to their countrymen’s concerns, their exercise of their First Amendment rights of free speech, assembly, and petitioning the government? By calling them Nazis, accusing them of bringing swastikas to town halls, characterizing American taxpayers as “angry mobs,” dismissing their grassroots protests as fake “Astroturf,” drummed up and funded by multinational corporations; by cancelling town halls, and insulting constituents who want to know why Congress passes laws without reading them. Uh-huh, sure. When ACORN and other Lefty activist groups pay and bus in homeless people, union members, and others to disrupt and intimidate, that’s “democracy.” When taxpayers, parents, and senior citizens show up on their own and protest how the government plans to spend their money, they’re a threat.
Hey there, average American - NOW do you understand how much they hate you and everything you stand for? The lengths they will go to to discredit and marginalize you, and take from you everything you have worked a lifetime to secure for yourself and your family? They want you to shut up. They want you to go away. They want to humiliate you into backing down while they take over your country, dismantle your constitutional protections, seize your assets, tax you into submission, and insert themselves and their appointed bureaucrats between you and your doctor.
Are you going to lay down and let them get away with it?
Barack Obama himself should be relatively harmless - a well-educated, nice-looking man with a flair for delivering telepromptered speeches and a handful of ideas. Bad ideas, true. Antiquated, regressive, disproven and discredited ideas, certainly. Ideas whose fatal flaws stack up like the countless millions of human corpses sacrificed in their pursuit over 100-plus years of contemporary history, definitely. But all explicable in a man still searching for approval from the African Marxist father who abandoned him; a man whose mother shipped him off to be raised by his grandparents while she pursued social justice ideals in a far-flung third world nation; a man who spent his boyhood being indoctrinated by Marxist societal rejects, and his adult life sitting in a church whose pastor preached racial hatred.
By all rights, Obama should be an obscure ideologue in a tweed jacket with elbow patches, preaching to a small handful of starry-eyed co-eds on a picturesque liberal arts campus somewhere in an upscale mountain town. Instead, Obama is sitting in the eye of a perfect storm of oppressive power: he occupies the office of the presidency, assisted by a Democrat-dominated Congress with complete disdain for their constituents’ values and ideals, and fawned upon by a slavishly adoring press which views its role as that of canonizing America’s first half-black President with photoshopped halos, hailing his every word as social, political and economic gospel, sanctifying his destructive policies, lying and covering up for him, and demonizing those who oppose Obamanomics as idiots, terrorists, bigots, racists and – worst of all – heretics.
At certain times in history, events seem to inexplicably conspire to bring about disaster. Watching Obama’s administration unfold is like watching a documentary about the Titanic, World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917, Hitler’s rise to power, or the Great Depression. Knowing already what is to come, the viewer is nevertheless transported into retrospective incredulity: How could all these things happen at the same time? How could no one see what was coming? Where were the voices of warning? Did no one know any history? Couldn’t this have been averted? Why did the people allow themselves to be led like sheep to the slaughter?
What we have been hearing during Congress’ August recess (and well before) are the voices of our would-be overlords, attempting to herd and reign in and lash Americans into the chutes they have designed for us. But this is not inevitable. The only weapons they have now are humiliation, insults, and opprobrium. We the People, however, have far more powerful weapons in our arsenal: voices expressed in dissent, our own financial resources, and our votes. If the media will not serve as an outlet for our legitimate protests, then we will squeeze them financially as we could any other corporation, by refusing to support them or the companies that advertise on their networks. If Congress will not listen to us, then we vote them out next year. And if Obama insists upon foisting his Marxist transformation of this country over the will of the American public, then we must marginalize him by saddling him with a new Congress that obstructs his every collectivist move, until he himself can be replaced in 2012.
The self-appointed societal elites think they can shut us up by ignoring or insulting us. But the American public, in keeping with the history of our nation, must refuse to be cowed by those who would mock us into submission. If we cannot withstand name-calling, insults, and false accusations, we will find ourselves shackled by far worse.
It appears at least for now more people are discovering what we already knew.
The problem was there was no one to endorse in 2008
Excellent!
BUMP!
Excellent post.
Bump again.
I agree with this article in every detail, but the author should have given equal time to the so-called ‘conservative’ elites (politicians and pundits) that advocate ‘calm and reasoned debate’... (Translated: Shut up and let your ‘betters’ handle things...)
These ‘friends’ are doing just as much to marginalize and discredit our movement as the whiny liberals.....
Actually most everyone on our side was better then the one we got. The problem is that the state run media pushed McCain down our throat
Maybe my cynicism is too far gone, but anyone who think "our votes" will change things -- will be allowed to change things -- is naive. What we'll see in 2010, and certainly in 2012, will make any prior fraud seem like child's play. Then the media -- who will be active participants in the fraud as opposed to just the disinterested bystanders they've been so far -- will trumpet the humiliating and demonizing even louder ("See? See? The election "results" prove that it's only you stupid, racist, redneck, backward-thinking idiots who don't want to "move forward"). It's then that we'll really see how cowed the "average American" will allow himself to be.
Thanks to Laura Hollis the author, and thanks for posting this Kaslin.
Excellent.
Correct.
Americans have two choices. Fight or die.
There might be a similar problem if the same group runs again
Have to agree with your assessment.
The problem in 2008 was that the state-run media was complicit in selecting our candidates for us. McCain? Who thought that was a good idea? There were conservative Republicans out there like Duncan Hunter who were simply ignored, and they never had a chance. Instead, it was engineered that we get “Hope and Change.”
All of us here on FR knew all along what the American public was getting. The mass of Americans did not know or care. They were either never trained to use their critical thinking skills or have been deluded into turning them off. Now SOME Americans have started to wake up. But far too many remain complacent, trusting, and apathetic.
The policies we have before us in Congress really are the turning point for our country. It’s not just socialization of health care. That would be a disaster in and of itself, but my fear is that all of the public’s energy and attention in opposition to the rulers will be exhausted in that fight. Nobody at the town halls are screaming at the rulers for cap and tax, and they should be. Cap and Tax will then slip silently through the Senate during the 0bamacare debate, and be signed into law. Cap and tax is just as harmful to our country. It will destroy our economy, and result in a fascist-state controlled economic system. Under that system, you will probably eventually wind up with 0bamacare anyway. The government will just regulate health care with phony carbon taxes.
My other fear is that if the political class takes the risk and passes 0bamacare and Cap & Tax over opposition, and then still keep their offices, it’s over. The Republic is dead. The political classs will know that they will never lose office on the issues, only on personal scandal. The personal scandal can be controlled by the state-run media. The rulers are in for life, will never fear the masses, and can do as they please.
I have found the perfect description for the left wingers controlling congress.
IVORY TOWER ANARCHISTS.
The government at war with its own people.
In other words, it makes civil war more likely to happen.
Excellent piece of writing!
The elections of 2010 will indeed offer new hope ... or seal our fate. We must not allow the election to be stolen and that work begins NOW! Each state holds its own elections and pressure must be brought on officials in every state NOW to make sure the game is played on a level field next year.
One measure I heard discussed recently was a proposal to allow states to compare voter lists with neighboring states, to weed out duplications. Good start!
Please see post number 17.
Let’s roll....
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