The fact that receiving Hamas support does not appear to disturb Obama should worry us even more than the fact that terrorists see something in him that they really like.
May 15, 2008 - by Steve Gill
Pajamas Media
The 2008 Presidential campaign has already seen a number of outlandish, and patently false, attacks. The idea that Islamic terrorists are picking a side in selection of an American president might seem to be yet another for the list…if it didn’t have its basis in truth.
A few weeks ago, Ahmed Yousef, a top political adviser for terrorist group Hamas, said in an interview on WABC radio in New York that the group supports Obama. “We like Mr. Obama. We hope he will (win) the election and I do believe he is like John Kennedy, great man with great principle, and he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community but not with domination and arrogance,” Yousef explained. Hamas, which seized control of the Palestinian Gaza last June, has long been designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department.
The Obama campaign has claimed to be “flattered” by the fact that the Hamas endorsement compared their candidate to Kennedy. Obama himself told the Atlantic magazine that he understands why Hamas would support him. “It’s conceivable that there are those in the Arab world who say to themselves, ‘This is a guy who spent some time in the Muslim world, has a middle name of Hussein and appears more worldly and has called for talks with people, and so he’s not going to be engaging in the same sort of cowboy diplomacy as George Bush.’” Obama concluded that the perception is “legitimate” as long as they understand he will be “unyielding” in his support for Israel.
So what have Barack’s Hamas friends been up to lately? Well, on the very day President Bush arrived in Israel to mark the nation’s 60th anniversary and to renew his push for a Palestinian state as part of elusive Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Barack’s buddies fired a rocket into an Israeli shopping mall. The mall was devastated, and 14 innocent civilians were seriously injured.
The Hamas endorsement of Obama is even more interesting when viewed against the backdrop of the group’s aggressive promotion of violence among young Palestinians in Gaza and in the context of a recent Al-Jazeera story about how young Palestinians in Gaza have banded together to call American voters at random asking them to vote for Obama. Rockets by night, Obama phone banks by day?
“It all started at the time of the US primaries,” says the pro-Obama Palestinian organizer, 23 year old Ibrahim Abu Jayyab. “After studying Obama’s electronic campaign manifesto I thought this is a man that’s capable of change inside of America. As for potential change in the Middle East, he can also do that if he can bring peace to the area. At least this is what we hope.” The full Al-Jazeera television report can be viewed here.
Obama’s campaign may argue that there is no apparent direct link between the young Palestinian men and the Hamas terrorist organization. But the young phone-bankers have also received coverage from Ramattan, the Palestinian news agency, in what reads like a Hamas-generated anti-Israel press release.
Can anyone seriously believe that young Palestinian men are allowed free and easy access to operate an internet phone bank in the impoverished and violent Gaza Strip — and bring that effort to the attention of the international media — without Hamas’ knowledge and approval? The support that Barack Obama is receiving from avowed terrorist enemies of America should bother him. The fact that it does not bother him should bother us even more than the fact that terrorists see something in him that they really like.
“Mommy, mommy I went wee-wee and added water to the ocean! The fishies should be happy now!”
Ah yes. The screams of joyous Congresscritters and refined Senators as they have solved America’s energy crisis by stopping the flow of oil purchases for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It’s tantamount to the little four year old boy proudly proclaiming he stopped the ‘fishies’ from dying as the tide went out because he went “wee-wee” into the ocean for the first time in his life. These arrogant fools who have set this nation on a course for total economic disaster by first ignoring the threats warned about during the first energy crisis in the 1970’s are at it again. President Appeasement, er, Carter, basically had his EPA shut down the modernization and expansion of refinery capacity along with finding any and all reasons to stifle clean coal development, oil exploration off of our coastlines, and of course allowing free market innovations to re-engineer the auto industry instead of forced mandates. Anyone with two working brain cells would realize that free market innovation always works better and the proof is in the Toyota Prius and the fact that it did not require a government regulation, mandate or law to require it’s manufacture.
Thus with thunderous self-congratulatory applause and numerous arm fractures from patting themselves on the back, the U.S. legislative bodies have now mandated that we are going to dump about 19,000 barrels(per day) of oil on to the markets to help “ease” the energy crisis. That would be all fine and dandy if we could build new refineries to process this oil, so at first glance everyone should contact their local nimrod and ask them if the oil tanker can park off the coast of their district (ok, so that’s sort of hard for a Kansas or Iowa nimrod; but you get my drift) and wait to be unloaded just so these freaking idiots can go home and say proudly to their constituents “see we did something; your gas price went from $3.89 per gallon for unleaded down to $3.88 for unleaded! Now send us some campaign contributions so we can return to screwing you over in the fall!”
Needless to say this development is about as relevant as my proclaiming that I’ve had a conversation with the mosquitoes hanging around my porch and they promise to tell their relatives not to bite me this summer. While we are whistling past the graveyard the rest of the “second world” has been busily moving assets and resources into their nation’s realms by doing what we did in our past:
What is in the best interest of their population and not caring about the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, our politicians feel there is a new “one world” obligation and could care less about people who can not afford this sudden concern for the speckled hump back farting green flea indigenous to only the fourth drill bit of any oil rig located in the Gulf of Mexico. And those people, the seventy plus million baby boomers and those already retired, along with those who are younger than twenty years old are about to enter a world of financial hardship unseen since the 1830’s. The Chinese communists could not give a rats you know what about fleas, grubs, grouses or penguins as they buy more oil than ever to fill their new strategic reserve yet we’re all supposed to sing John Lennon songs around the campfire while watching the Olympics from Beijing on our solar powered television sets. In reality the market can and will be more than happy worldwide to absorb the stupidity of our leaders once again and the oil we’re leaving on the table.
So as the innocent child proudly proclaims he saved some fish by urinating in the ocean our government repeats the same act on a grander scale. Just like the “rebate” checks which will offer temporary stimulus because they are counting on us acting like ignorant sheep spending the money on booze, lotto or amusement parks instead of saving the money or investing it in things we might actually need in the near future; like precious metals, ammunition, food, seeds or tangible goods, this recent vote indicates a willful ignorance of the new reality and the dangerous world we live in.
Prepare accordingly.
****
Ahhh John, to add insult to injury from these morons in Congress and their EcoMarxist pals - what they will mandate on you and I in terms of misery and dependence, they exempt themselves from.
While they will demand that we little people ride bicycles and revert to the 1800’s in lifestyle - to save the earth and the children, they will continue to jet around the planet in their private Gulfstreams and Hummers, nary conserving a single carbon footprint fart that they demand the rest of us will need to live within. But then again these are Liberal Socialists and Marxist we are talking about and this is really all about control and power to subjugate and run our lives as they see fit.
Along with the fact that President Bush’s ranch in Crawford is far more environment-friendly than Al Gore’s mansion, Congress wants to limit the kind of cars we can drive - yet refuse to set an example themselves.
Spurred by radical greens, Congress is determined to drag America kicking and screaming back to the Middle Ages. It won’t permit drilling in a tiny corner of that vast, frozen wasteland known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge because increasing the nation’s oil supply might drive gasoline prices down, though not as far as most consumers think. And the taste of cheaper gasoline might increase Americans’ appetite for further reductions through domestic exploration and development.
Despite widespread economic and personal hardships at home and growing starvation in the Third World related to their energy policies, especially the ethanol boondoggle, members of Congress still refuse to budge. And they won’t relent until all Americans are driving costly, pint-sized, fuel-efficient, low-emissions, dangerous vehicles they don’t like or want.
But if one were to peek into congressional garages, one would find mostly Cadillacs, Expeditions, Tahoes, Suburbans, Lincoln Town Cars and other gasoline-guzzling, greenhouse-gas-spewing cars, many of them leased, fueled, kept up and repaired with taxpayer dollars.
Enter Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II, D-Mo. He’s not exactly the Green Hornet, but he stung his colleagues with his little-noticed amendment to the 2007 energy bill requiring those who lease vehicles through the government to drive cars that emit low levels of greenhouse gases — hybrids, mostly.
The rule has many on Capitol Hill all revved up. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., wants to keep his taxpayer-financed Infiniti M45 because he likes a luxury car with “some giddy up.” Others say hybrids are too small, unsafe, unreliable or unsuited for them or their districts; most say they simply prefer the spaciousness, style and prestige that comes with bigger, more luxurious cars. Of course, they never gave one thought to ordinary Americans’ needs and personal preferences when enacting energy polices that steered them to motorized tin cans.
OK, so Rep. Cleaver suffers from the same moonbattery of the radical greens — his taxpayer-leased ride is a recycled airport shuttle that runs on cooking grease. But give him credit for his willingness to walk the moonbat walk.
Who would have thought Al Gore a Svengali? Insane as it sounds, the High Priest of the Global Warming Cult has actually swindled enough gullible Americans to believe his unprovable climate change tripe as the greatest threat to the planet, frightening school kids who are forced to watch his film under watchful eyes at public re-education camps and creating a neo-panic of suburbanites scrambling to join the local Prius club. The moronic hysteria prompting politicians and global bodies to craft drastic plans that require America to surrender her sovereignty, economic might and revert to a primitive lifestyle more in line with the third world than with an industrial superpower. A diabolical plan conceived to strip the nation of our common sense, wealth and redistribute it to the world in the name of an unprovable hoax designed to achieve power for those who wield it as a weapon, and enrich the Elites to wealth unimaginable.
I cannot recall if it was Stalin or Lenin that suggested that if you told a lie big enough and bold enough, and repeated it ad nauseum, it would be known as the truth without question. Such practices can rewrite history, and even create science out of nothing more than a desired impression to scare the masses with.
So easily are the simple-minded and emoting classes swayed into hysteria by such grand hoaxes designed to enslave them. So sinister and absolute the insistence from the political classes to the media that even the GOP has fallen under the spell of impending ecological doom that requires we trash the Free Market and penalize ourselves for our damnable modern lifestyles.
Today, Maverick Presumptive Nominee John McCainiac has once again showboated his love for the Liberal/Socialist agenda by adopting for his own, the Climate Change Hoax. Taking an approach that even the World Workers Party and Al Gore himself would blush in it’s bold and contrived plans to empower the government to regulate every aspect of business and life in America, McCain has declared himself a Global Warming Cardinal to Al Gore’s Priesthood.
“For all of the last century, the profit motive basically led in one direction - toward machines, methods and industries that used oil and gas,” said McCain. “Enormous good came from that industrial growth, and we are all the beneficiaries of the national prosperity it built. But there were costs we weren’t counting, and often hardly noticed. And these terrible costs have added up now, in the atmosphere, in the oceans and all across the natural world.”
He also took a swipe at President Bush, who balked at the beginning of its term at signing the Kyoto global warming protocols. McCain said he would return to the negotiating table.
“I will not shirk the mantle of leadership that the United States bears. I will not permit eight long years to pass without serious action on serious challenges. I will not accept the same dead-end of failed diplomacy that claimed Kyoto. The United States will lead and will lead with a different approach - an approach that speaks to the interests and obligations of every nation,” he said.
A rational, free-market-based approach to environmentalism requires a commitment to scientific truth, accuracy, and honest cost-benefit analyses.
For the last several years, McCain has been committed to none of those.
It is not Earth’s ecosystem that hangs in the balance, but America’s future. Those whose vision isn’t blurred by green-colored glasses and the temptation to win accolades from the leftist-dominated culture can see that the global push to “save the planet” is more about destroying capitalism, private property and Western culture than sound, science-based environmental stewardship. Never mind the staggering contradiction that free market economies produce cleaner environs.
Indeed, I hate to break it to some of my fellow evangelical Christians who are falling into the trap along with McCain, but the global warming proselytes don’t share your worldview. Do you realize you are jumping in bed with those who are promoting a pantheistic deification of the environment and a diminution of the dignity of human beings created in God’s image?
Contrary to the mandated script from the warming zealots, there is plenty of credible dissent in the scientific community about global warming, particularly man’s role in it. Much of this dissent comes from scientists in fields related to weather studies. Imagine that.
The fact that the enviro-church fathers have “outlawed” dissenting opinion and slander those offering it tells us something fishy is afoot.
Fishy indeed.
Apart from the Communist Manifesto that details many tools that can be used to bring about the destruction of the West, I recall a book called “The Creature From Jekyll Island” by G Edward Griffin that details what he saw as the greatest threat to American Liberty in the Federal Reserve system.
What caught my attention was not so much on the insanity of our banking and financial institutions (we are seeing the fallout from that greed and shell-game right now) but his prescient prediction that the Elites in power would foster the imaginary threat of impending ecological doom to encourage Americans to surrender their wealth and liberty without a shot needing to be fired.
Indeed, even a review from The New American Magazinefrom September 1994 points out with almost eerie prophetic aplomb, the use of ecological doom to achieve subjugation and tyranny by the Political Elite:
Griffin’s review (with extensive quotes) of this truly diabolical Insider study is masterful; he takes it apart and shows us its consummate evil. The study’s premise is that historically the only means by which a government has ever been able to “secure the subordination of citizens to the state” is war. Only war has been able to provide the external threat without which no government can accumulate power. War is used to make the masses put up with all kinds of privation, taxation, and controls without complaint. No amount of sacrifice in the name of victory is rejected. Resistance is viewed as treason.
But, says Griffin, Report From Iron Mountain explains that the war system may have to be replaced because “it may now be possible to create a world government in which all nations will be disarmed and disciplined by a world army, a condition which we will call peace.” In this case, what could be a substitute for war?
Here, explains Griffin, is the origin of the stratagem to promote ecological doom as the new enemy that threatens the entire world. The threat need not be real, provided the masses can be convinced it is real. Credibility is the key, not reality. Griffin writes that Report From Iron Mountain explains the avalanche of phony scientific claims that are uncritically publicized by the Insider-controlled media, as well as the funding of environmental “crazies” by corporations and businesses that would appear to have the most to lose. He sees the plan as being brilliantly successful.
This is 1994 remember. Even then, some saw the emerging threat that the Elites and political class use as a tool to pry our liberties and wealth from us.
The barrage of propaganda has had a phenomenal result. Politicians are now being elected on nothing but “concern for the environment and a promise to clamp down on nasty industries,” with no one caring about the damage done to the economy or our freedoms. Just as no sacrifice is too great in time of war, what happens to the economy or our freedom is of no consequence “when the very planet on which we live is sick and dying.”
Griffin introduces us to multi-millionaire Maurice Strong, the powerful UN environmental czar, who gives us the whole line: “The U.S. is committing environmental aggression against the rest of the world. Current lifestyles of the affluent middle class — high meat intake, frozen and convenience foods, electric household appliances, cars, air conditioning, suburban housing — all this has to go. The world’s ecosystems can be preserved only by lowering our standard of living by rationing, taxation, and political domination by world government”.
Of course facts do not matter when it comes to the fact that Climate Change/Global Warming is a bogus hoax, and neither McCain or Obama will shrink from their dual desire to shackle and shove this country into Green ruin.
The fact is that this hysteria is an insidious plot that may well prove to be the most dangerous and imminent threat to our liberty and way of life than anything else arrayed against us right now. It’s pitiful that the GOP and it’s candidate, have become dimwitted pawns promoting the same insidious plot of our coming serfdom.
If articles and essays I have been reading in the past year indicate a pattern, then Bible-believing Christians in America need to wake up to the fact that they are soon to become a targeted minority by the very culture and political structure that they surrendered to the Left over the last few decades.
It is no surprise to me, understanding the intentions of our Founders, the role that Christianity was to play in keeping our liberties and this republic from falling into the same ruin every republic that preceded us fell into. As Evangelical and Bible-believing Christians shrink from active roles in both the cultural and political landscape - the neo-religious and secular Left is filling the void left behind with every abomination to both religion and liberty.
Socialism is replacing individual liberty and faith in God in this country. Government is now being seen as our Lord and Master in every way imaginable. Politicians are being heralded as messiahs and promoting ‘change’, that the worshipping masses praise, whereupon close inspection beyond the rhetoric reveals the worst possible kind of change for a former free republic; a politburo elite ruling over a starving mass of serfs made slaves to serve an all-powerful and all-seeing government. Christ will no longer be Lord in such a society as we are devolving into - as history demonstrates time and again that human nature in governmental power will suffer no rivals of allegiance.
The rails are already being greased for the masses to accept the denunciation and persecution of Biblical Christians, with all kinds of works from the Left that depict fundamental Conservative Christianity as the largest threat to mankind and the nation in matters of tolerance, race, fairness and even belief itself.
We of course did not arrive here overnight, and our cultural decay and political circus of today is being made possible by the failings of the American Christian church to remain active, vigilant, steadfast and resolute in the face of the attacks by the political and cultural Left. Instead the church has either ignored these assaults on liberty, or compromised with the promotion of sin and vice as a legitimate choice that one should never judge.
This political season is just a testament to the fact that Christians in America have surrendered their God-given liberties and abandoned the battlefield of principles and ideas to a ravenous Socialist juggernaut.
Of course, even among the ‘Moderate Left” - they too have now picked up on the retreating Evangelical Christian as a political force and culture guardian.
Ah, spring. Fresh flowers, fresh leaves, fresh leases on life…and, in step with a tradition dating back to around 2004–the year when Christian “values voters” reportedly seized our fragile nation’s helm–there’s also a fresh crop of new books unabashedly bashing evangelicals.
Leading the pack is “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,” which is yet another entry in the behind-the-scenes, just-like-Skull-and-Bones Christian conspiracy genre. Luckily for yawning readers, there’s also a newer, cuter, echoes-of-Jon-Stewart form of Christian-bashing on the 2008 market, which involves shelving the drama, loading up on the irony, going undercover and making merciless fun of the poor religious saps. In early May, self-affirmed tolerant and open person Matt Taibbi (who, in a recent Rolling Stone article, ridicules “nerdy” evangelicals wearing “the gayest” shirts as “a slow-moving hulk of confused, shipwrecked masculinity, flailing for an Answer”) comes out with “The Great Derangement,” his own book on the topic. Daniel Radosh, meanwhile, offers a kinder, gentler evangelical skewering–but a skewering nonetheless–in his new book on Christian popular culture, “Rapture Ready.”
The funny thing about all of this is, of course, that it’s not 2004 anymore. And as any barely alert political observer can tell you, evangelicals are certainly not running the show. They’re…well…where are they, anyway?
Seriously, where’d all those hard-right, Republican evangelicals go?
The supposed storyline is a familiar one: Religious fundamentalists, a.k.a. “values voters,” catapulted Bush into office. (John Kerry’s “I voted for it before I voted against it,” in this questionable-at-best narrative, had nothing to do with it.) In the wake of the Kerry disaster, Democrats scrambled to appear more religious. As Austin Dacey recently pointed out in USA Today, “The Democratic Party concluded that because values voters are religious, the way to Washington must lie on the road to Damascus. Since then, it has been closing the God gap that is thought to stand between it and the White House.”
As it turns out, Christians, including evangelicals, aren’t as monolithic as everybody thought. The rising religious left has enthusiastically agitated for the environment, a more “fair” budget, and for other “social justice” issues. More importantly, the religious right, made up largely of those dastardly evangelicals, just isn’t playing that large of a role in Road to the White House 2008.
Sure, we see all three presidential candidates offering lip service to faith. But that’s an occasional outlier among the greater themes–the economy, health care, Iraq–of the 2008 White House race. And sure, there was that feverish spurt of support for Mike Huckabee. But we all know how that worked out. John McCain, the ostensible GOP (or, as the latest crop of books would likely have it, “God’s Old Party”) nominee, is famed for being tight-lipped about his religious beliefs, and he frequently annoys evangelical leaders by being notoriously tight-lipped on other issues as well. This week, the LA Times reported that Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, said that the nation’s values voters “are posing a very different question than they did four years ago: What are we going to do in November? ‘The question this time four years ago,’ Perkins said, ‘was: ‘What are we going to do to help Bush win?’”
Smell that shift in the zeitgeist? If anything, it’s towards the material rather than the ethereal. On April 20, Slate writer Mickey Kaus offered a fascinating and honest dissertation on the philosophical roots of Obama’s “yokels clinging to their religion” remarks, along with their larger implications for modern politics. “But of course it was a Marxist thing to say,” Kaus wrote, “wasn’t it? If Democrats had delivered on the economy, Obama suggests, all those GOP cultural “wedge” issues would lose traction. This idea–that the economy trumps culture–isn’t new. It’s ‘materialism.’”
And it may be on the rise. While evangelicals loom large in the popular imagination, they’ve shrunk on the map of reality, particularly in context of the current campaign. Our presidential candidates, particularly Obama and Clinton, whisk past pressing cultural problems like disintegrating families, unwed mothers, and abortion with startlingly sanitized economic arguments. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial page, long lambasted by liberals for its “bias,” has picked up one of America’s more prominent modern materialists as a regular columnist: Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Frank, interestingly, also offers a glowing blurb for the most conspiracy-minded of the latest batch of Christian-bashing books: “Of all the important studies of the American right, ‘The Family’ is undoubtedly the most eloquent. It is also quite possibly the most terrifying.”
Terrifying? For all of the hullabaloo about radical right-wing evangelical power, they’re certainly acting fairly scattered, and they’re certainly not making a very big impact on the domestic front as of late. 40% of births in America are out of wedlock. Gay marriage thrives in Massachusetts. Evolution is still taught in schools, and, yes, “Gossip Girl” is still on the air. Secular America seems to be safe, sound, and thriving.
What, then, is so scary about evangelicals? Why the fixation, particularly when the real shift in the political debate seems to be toward secular materialism?
The most common complaint about born-again Christians, often heard from left-wing quarters, is that the God-boggled can’t “learn to be rational” when it comes to serious policy debates. Science and fact, they argue, are all left behind once one enters the hard-core Christian realm. Meaningful policy debate is impossible. Irrationality, prejudice, and apocalyptic fatalism rule the day.
This is all highly ironic, of course, given that materialism, in its essence, often misses obvious facts–particularly when it comes to connections between cultural realities and economic, material results. Perhaps even more to the point, many modern secular crusades find followers scoffing at facts and, yes, disengaging from science. Two prominent examples include abortion (an article on fetal pain in the New York Times, for instance, caused an uproar in certain circles, as have current pending laws requiring ultrasounds before abortions) and the environment.
Are there nutty fundamentalists out there? Sure. Are hard-core evangelical events and culture sometimes goofy and cringe-worthy? Certainly. Are there some wacky political ideas that can grow out of religious fundamentalism? You bet.
But “clinging” can happen on both sides of the aisle. In both the sacred and secular realms, zealots can come across information they don’t want to hear–and on both sides, there’s the capacity to ignore that information in favor of a certain belief system. And in this election, contrary to the tired old narrative, that capacity might be more likely to come from the fans of Marx and Engels than the fans of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
While I am convinced the Marxist/Socialist Left in this country HATE Christianity and religion with a passion, it is amazing to see the blatant hypocrisy of their support and excuse-making for so-called Christian Pastors like Jeremiah Wright if the gospel preached is one based on America-hatred and Socialism.
I will go on record to state in my opinion, Obama’s “christianity” is as fake and theatrical as his political speeches. Everything is about political expediency to achieve power for this America-hating Socialist - as it is for his former pastor and mentor of the last twenty years.
In the fallout after the new media trumpeted Wright’s Hate America antics in his sermons - all-of-a-sudden, the Left has found religion, and witness the scramble and call to protect the free exercise of religion if the liturgy is America-hating Socialism.
Traditional Christianity can still go to hell as far as the Left is concerned however.
Open the pages of a liberal magazine or peruse the liberal blogosphere, and you’re bound to come across denunciations of the religious right, if not religion itself. The “reality-based community,” as self-satisfied liberal bloggers call themselves, was a term created in direct response to the “faith-based community,” what the Bush administration called recipients of money from its Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Given the religious right’s use of “faith” to justify hoaxes such as “intelligent design” and the ruinous attempt to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals, the left had good reason to criticize, and sometimes mock, the absurdities that are the inevitable result of religion mixing with politics.
Yet the left, with its healthy skepticism toward religion, has shown itself to be cynically flexible over the past few weeks in response to the utter insanities emitted from the big mouth of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor, mentor and friend of 20 years. Suddenly, some liberals have discovered a newfound love for extremists who hide behind the cloth to justify their radical views.
The lunatic remarks made by Wright in videotaped sermons released in March — which, lest there be any doubt that these pearls of wisdom were taken “out of context,” Wright reaffirmed at the National Press Club last week — are indefensible, and it is beyond pedantry to quibble over whether a spirited defense of Louis Farrakhan is more or less offensive than blaming abortion doctors and gays for Sept. 11, 2001, as Jerry Falwell infamously did two days after the terrorist attacks.
But in the warped minds of some on the left, uttering such inanities is not only “understandable,” it’s laudable. That is, of course, if the person alleging that the government created AIDS to kill African-Americans is an aggrieved black man lashing out at the rapacious, capitalist and irredeemably racist United States. Wright, you see, is actually a “patriot” for speaking uncomfortable “truths” about his country.
John Nichols is the Washington correspondent for The Nation. Like most of his comrades, he tends to be a vociferous critic of the religious right, regularly denouncing them for all manner of bad deeds. But to Nichols, Wright is not a divisive figure spreading dangerous lies. He is, in fact, “in possession of the balm that has frequently proven to be the cure for what ails America,” that is, “an eyes-wide-open faith in the prospect that this country can and will put aside the sins of the past and forge a future that is as just as it is righteous.” Nichols ended his ode to Wright by comparing the preacher to none other than Thomas Jefferson, a comparison that Wright would likely find insulting, given that he’s accused the author of the Declaration of Independence of pedophilia.
Indeed, many on the left are trying to outdo one another comparing great historical figures to Wright, whose most proximate antecedent would be a black, religious Lyndon LaRouche. Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell called Wright “Our Jeremiah,” in that he is akin to the “biblical truth tellers who regularly warned the government that divine destruction was imminent if the nation continued to oppress the powerless.” She then decided to insult the very notion of historical memory by comparing Wright to Frederick Douglass. Don Wycliff, former public editor of the Chicago Tribune, was perplexed as to what all the fuss over Wright was about. “I’m trying to figure out what it was that got everybody’s shorts into a twist,” he wrote in Commonweal magazine. (Wycliff’s bewilderment over the reaction to Wright’s lies and hyperbole does not speak well to his skills as an ombudsman.) The double standard some liberals have employed in response to Wright makes one seriously consider their oft-stated preference for
rationality, reason and secularism over superstition and prejudice.
Wright attacks capitalism throughout his sermons, an odd ideological target for a man who reportedly drives a Porsche and whose grateful congregants are building him a $1 million, four-garage home in a predominantly white suburb of Chicago (so much for being “unapologetically black”). He has also praised Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Libya’s Muammar al-Qadhafi. So it’s really no wonder that a huckster such as Wright has emerged as some sort of “reality-based community” folk hero. The political left finds common cause with the religious left and is apparently willing to overlook exactly the sort of racist sectarianism that it would be so quick to condemn were its perpetrator a white conservative.
Last Monday, Wright claimed that criticism directed toward him represents “an attack on the black church.” With this shot across the bow, Wright perpetrated a solipsistic conflation of the mainstream African-American religious tradition (which, despite the protestations of his apologists, he does not represent) with his own bigoted paranoias: anti-Zionism, anti-white racism and the lie (especially dangerous in the black community, where HIV infection is skyrocketing) that the government created the virus to kill African-Americans.
As much as Obama may now try to separate himself from his former preacher, he unwittingly justified Wright’s barnstorming performance with his initial justification that “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.” Unfortunately, some in the reality-based community seem to agree.
“Everything is proceeding as I have forseen” - Emperor Palpatine, Return of the Jedi
Ever wonder what it would be like to be in the midst of a Socialist Revolution? An upheaval that results in the people becoming canon fodder and slaves to an all-powerful Central Planning State? Well, look around - listen to the politicians - you’re in the very midst of one!
Americans are well acquainted with presidential candidate Barack Obama’s legendary pledges to bring “change” to America’s political and social landscape. (For example, see here and here and here.) Indeed, “Change We Can Believe In” is the slogan that adorns the homepage of his campaign website and so many of the placards displayed by the supporters who attend his speaking engagements. His Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, is also well practiced at issuing calls for change. Her “Change and Experience” ad campaign was but an outgrowth of her 1993 declaration, as First Lady, that “remolding society is one of the great challenges facing all of us in the West.” Most Americans are unaware, however, that when Obama and Clinton speak of “change,” they mean change in the sense that a profoundly significant, though not widely known, individual — Saul Alinsky — outlined in his writings two generations ago.
Alinsky helped to establish the confrontational political tactics, which he termed “organizing,” that characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States. Both Obama and Clinton are committed disciples of Alinsky’s very specific strategies for “social change.”
Obama never met Alinsky personally; the latter died when Obama was a young boy. But Obama was trained by the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in Chicago and worked for an affiliate of theGamaliel Foundation, whose modus operandi for the creation of “a more just and democratic society” is rooted firmly in the Alinsky method. As The Nation magazine puts it, “Obama worked in the organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky, who made Chicago the birthplace of modern community organizing.…” In fact, for several years Obama himself taught workshops on the Alinsky method. Obama and his fellow agitators made demands for many things in the Eighties, including taxpayer-funded employment-training services, playground construction, after-school programs, and asbestos removal from neighborhood apartments. Journalist and bestselling author Richard Poe writes: “In 1985 [Obama] began a four-year stint as a community organizer in Chicago, working for an Alinskyite group called the Developing Communities Project. Later, he worked with ACORN and its offshoot Project Vote, both creations of the Alinsky network.” (In recent years, Poe notes, both of those organizations have run nationwide voter-mobilization drives marred by allegations of fraudulent voter registration, vote-rigging, voter intimidation, and vote-for-pay scams.)The Nationreports, “Today Obama continues his organizing work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons on the south side.”
Hillary, for her part, actually got to know Alinsky personally. She was so impressed with Alinsky’s theories and tactics vis a vis social change, that during her senior year at Wellesley College she interviewed him and subsequently penned a 92-page thesis on his ideas. In the conclusion of that thesis, she wrote:
If the ideals Alinsky espouses were actualized, [t]he result would be social revolution. Ironically, this is not a disjunctive projection if considered in the tradition of Western democratic theory. In the first chapter it was pointed out that Alinsky is regarded by many as the proponent of a dangerous socio/political philosophy. As such, he has been feared — just as Eugene Debs or Walt Whitman or Martin Luther King has been feared, because each embraced the most radical of political faiths — democracy.
During her senior year, Hillary was offered a job by Alinsky but chose instead to enroll at Yale Law School. Alinsky’s teachings, however, would remain close to her heart throughout her adult life. According to aWashington Post report, “As first lady, Clinton occasionally lent her name to projects endorsed by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the Alinsky group that had offered her a job in 1968. She raised money and attended two events organized by the Washington Interfaith Network, an IAF affiliate.”
Given the huge intellectual debt that both Democrat presidential candidates owe to Saul Alinsky, it is vital for all American voters to understand precisely who he was and what he taught. As you read this, you will hear in his words the echo of many familiar, outspoken leftist agitators for “change.”
Though Alinsky is generally viewed as a member of the political Left, and rightfully so, his legacy is more methodological than ideological. He identified a set of very specific rules that ordinary citizens could follow, and tactics that ordinary citizens could employ, as a means of gaining public power…
…In the Alinsky model, “organizing” is a euphemism for “revolution”—a wholesale revolution whose ultimate objective is the systematic acquisition of power by a purportedly oppressed segment of the population, and the radical transformation of America’s social and economic structure.
The goal is to foment enough public discontent, moral confusion, and outright chaos to spark the social upheaval that Marx, Engels, and Lenin predicted—a revolution whose foot soldiers view the status quo as fatally flawed and wholly unworthy of salvation. Thus, the theory goes, the people will settle for nothing less than that status quo’s complete collapse—to be followed by the erection of an entirely new and different system upon its ruins. Toward that end, they will be apt to follow the lead of charismatic radical organizers who project an aura of confidence and vision, and who profess to clearly understand what types of societal “changes” are needed.
As Alinsky put it: “A reformation means that the masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don’t know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won’t act for change but won’t strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution.”[1]
“[W]e are concerned,” Alinsky elaborated, “with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which men have the chance to live by the values that give meaning to life. We are talking about a mass power organization which will change the world…This means revolution.”[2]
To counter that materialism, Alinsky favored a socialist alternative. He characterized his noble radical (read: “revolutionary”) as a social reformer who “places human rights far above property rights”; who favors “universal, free public education”; who “insists on full employment for economic security” but stipulates also that people’s tasks should “be such as to satisfy the creative desires within all men”; who “will fight conservatives” everywhere; and who “will fight privilege and power, whether it be inherited or acquired,” and “whether it be political or financial or organized creed.”[7] Alinsky maintained that radicals, finding themselves “adrift in the stormy sea of capitalism,”[8] sought “to advance from the jungle of laissez-faire capitalism to a world worthy of the name of human civilization.”[9] “They hope for a future,” he said, “where the means of production will be owned by all of the people instead of just a comparative handful.”[10] In short, they wanted socialism.
Alinsky had no patience for those he called the liberals of his day—people who were content to talk about the changes they wanted, but were unwilling to actively work for those changes. Rather, he favored “radicals” who were prepared to take bold, decisive action designed to transform society, even if that transformation could be achieved only slowly and incrementally. Wrote Alinsky:
Liberals fear power or its application.… They talk glibly of people lifting themselves by their own bootstraps but fail to realize that nothing can be lifted except through power…Radicals precipitate the social crisis by action—by using power…Liberals protest; radicals rebel. Liberals become indignant; radicals become fighting mad and go into action. Liberals do not modify their personal lives[,] and what they give to a cause is a small part of their lives; radicals give themselves to the cause. Liberals give and take oral arguments; radicals give and take the hard, dirty, bitter way of life.[13]
If the purpose of radicalism is to bring about social transmutation, the radical must be prepared to make a persuasive case for why such change is urgently necessary. Alinsky’s conviction that American society needed a dramatic overhaul was founded on his belief that the status quo was intolerably miserable for most people. For one thing, Alinsky saw the United States as a nation rife with economic injustice. “The people of America live as they can,” he wrote. “Many of them are pent up in one-room crumbling shacks and a few live in penthouses…The Haves smell toilet water, the Have-Nots smell just plain toilet.”[14]Lamenting the “wide disparity of wealth, privilege, and opportunity” he saw in America, Alinsky impugned the country’s “materialistic values and standards.”[15] “We know that man must cease worshipping the god of gold and the monster of materialism,” he said.[16]
Having painted a verbal portrait of a thoroughly corrupt and melancholy American society, Alinsky was now prepared to argue that wholesale change of great magnitude was in order. What was needed, he said, was a revolution in whose vanguard would be radicals committed to eliminating the “fundamental causes” of the nation’s problems,[22] and not content to merely deal with those problems’ “current manifestations”[23] or “end products.”[24]The goal of the radical, he explained, must be to bring about “the destruction of the roots of all fears, frustrations, and insecurity of man, whether they be material or spiritual”;[25] to purge the land of “the vast destructive forces which pervade the entire social scene”;[26] and to eliminate “those destructive forces from which issue wars,” forces such as “economic injustice, insecurity, unequal opportunities, prejudice, bigotry, imperialism, … and other nationalistic neuroses.”[27]
The organizer’s function, he added, was “to agitate to the point of conflict”[41] and “to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a ‘dangerous enemy.’”[42] “The word ‘enemy,’” said Alinsky, “is sufficient to put the organizer on the side of the people”;[43] i.e., to convince members of the community that he is so eager to advocate on their behalf, that he has willingly opened himself up to condemnation and derision.
But it is not enough for the organizer to be in solidarity with the people. He must also, said Alinsky, cultivate unity against a clearly identifiable enemy; he must specifically name this foe, and “singl[e] out”[44]precisely who is to blame for the “particular evil” that is the source of the people’s angst.[45] In other words, there must be a face associated with the people’s discontent. That face, Alinsky taught, “must be a personification, not something general and abstract like a corporation or City Hall.”[46] Rather, it should be an individual such as a CEO, a mayor, or a president.
Alinsky summarized it this way: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it…. [T]here is no point to tactics unless one has a target upon which to center the attacks.”[47] He held that the organizer’s task was to cultivate in people’s hearts a negative, visceral emotional response to the face of the enemy. “The organizer who forgets the significance of personal identification,” said Alinsky, “will attempt to answer all objections on the basis of logic and merit. With few exceptions this is a futile procedure.”[48]
Alinsky stressed the need for organizers to convince their followers that the chasm between the enemy and the members of the People’s Organization was vast and unbridgeable. “Before men can act,” he said, “an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels, and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil.”[51] Alinsky advised this course of action even though he well understood that the organizer “knows that when the time comes for negotiations it is really only a 10 percent difference.”[52] But in Alinsky’s brand of social warfare, the ends (in this case, the transfer of power) justify virtually whatever means are required (in this case, lying).[53]
Winning was all that mattered in Alinsky’s strategic calculus: “The morality of a means depends on whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory.”[54] “The man of action … thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action,” Alinsky added. “He asks only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work.”[55]For Alinsky, all morality was relative: “The judgment of the ethics of means is dependent on the political position of those sitting in judgment.”[56]
Given that the enemy was to be portrayed as the very personification of evil, against whom any and all methods were fair game, Alinsky taught that an effective organizer should never give the appearance of being fully satisfied as a result of having resolved any particular conflict via compromise. Any compromise with the “devil” is, after all, by definition morally tainted and thus inadequate. Consequently, while the organizer may acknowledge that he is pleased by the compromise as a small step in the right direction, he must make it absolutely clear that there is still a long way to go, and that many grievances still remain unaddressed. The ultimate goal, said Alinsky, is not to arrive at compromise or peaceful coexistence, but rather to “crush the opposition,” bit by bit.[57] “A People’s Organization is dedicated to eternal war,” said Alinsky. “… A war is not an intellectual debate, and in the war against social evils there are no rules of fair play.… When you have war, it means that neither side can agree on anything…. In our war against the social menaces of mankind there can be no compromise. It is life or death.”[58]
Alinsky warned the organizer to be ever on guard against the possibility that the enemy might unexpectedly offer him “a constructive alternative” aimed at resolving the conflict. Said Alinsky, “You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying, ‘You’re right — we don’t know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us.’”[59] Such capitulation by the enemy would have the effect of diffusing the righteous indignation of the People’s Organization, whose very identity is inextricably woven into the fight for long-denied justice; i.e., whose struggle and identity are synonymous. If the perceived oppressor surrenders or extends a hand of friendship in an effort to end the conflict, the crusade of the People’s Organization is jeopardized. This cannot be permitted. Eternal war, by definition, must never end…
…Though Alinsky died in 1972, his legacy has lived on as a staple of leftist method, a veritable blueprint for revolution — to which both Democratic presidential candidates, who are his disciples and protégés, refer euphemistically as “change.”
Thanks to ChiliPalmer for this excellent opinion summary of the FLDS tragedy.
Trial By Public Opinion
5-1-08
by ChiliPalmer
Only it isn’t really the public’s opinion, now is it? An opinion is something arrived at all by your onesies. The public has been carefully herded through the chutes, their handlers prudently administering frequent inoculations on the way to the end goal. Think what you’re told to think, there is no reasonable alternative. Get along, lil dogie.
Today marks four weeks since a church ranch was raided by heavily-armed police and APCs in Texas. Much has been alleged, nothing proven. But then, it seems the public is satisfied with allegations. We’re content to really, really hate the evil people we’re told to hate, and if no one ever gets arrested and sent to prison for the evil things we’re assured most definitely occurred; well, they are feeling our heavy disapproval and that is surely enough!
Who needs prisons, we can go back to junior high and make others feel uncomfortable. Tough on crime, that’s us.
Crime. Yeah, bit of a problem there. It doesn’t appear there’s actually anything deeply criminal going on. At best the state may have a handful of statutory rape cases. Considering we’re fed a steady diet of “child molestation” and “rape” and “severe beatings” and “waterboarding infants”, the state is going to have a hard time justifying that the best they can do is the decidedly anti-climactic statutory rape of near-majority teens.
Honestly, we’re going to have a hard time whipping up a lot of furor over 17 year old mums with our national teen pregnancy rate. I can see it now. Pitch smoking and crackling on our blazing torches, we wave random gardening implements over head. “Get them! Evil! Satan’s minions, with their teen pregna… Oh, wait, my girl was the same age.” “Yeah, Bob, mine was fifteen. You don’t, y’know, think they’ll arrest me, do you?”
Quite a conundrum for the state. April 3rd is looking more like a lynch mob than officers of the law acting on probable cause. All those big guns and body armor and tanks, for statutory rape. Yeah. That’ll go over well. I readily confess to being more misanthropic than Gregory House, but it is looking more as if the state has nothing to take to court, and so is taking it to the court of public opinion; throwing anything it can find against the wall in the hopes it sticks.
The bean counters lost a woman’s two sons and still haven’t found the baby. Not that he’s lost, mind. They just don’t know where he is. But LOOK! LOOK HERE! Oooh, it’s a shiny new allegation. There’s 53 teenaged girls between 14-17 and 31 are pregnant or mothers. (Lost baby? What lost baby? Focus here, lots of pregnant teens.)
Only, this is 26 more than the state themselves testified to at trial. Ah! Those girls were lying.
Only, each of the twenty-six “little girls” CPS re-classified as teenagers are from the group of women whose ages have been disputed by the state. At least some women have offered certified birth certificates. The state instead lined them up and looked at them. Nope, they all look like teenagers to us. We don’t need no steenkin’ birth certificates! The poor victims and their state-issued birth certificates are liars!
Only, each and every one of those twenty-six women CPS insists on adding to the teenager catagory on the iron-clad “we looked at them” test, also happen to have children. Each and every one of them. Link.
Quote:
[CPS spokesman Patrick] Crimmins said that all 26 females now deemed to be minors have children.
CPS culled through the younger adult women and added females with children as “underaged victims” to get a really incriminating statistic on teen pregnancy rate. Occam’s razor. The alternative is to claim that it is purely accidental that the only women whose ages are in dispute are the younger adult mothers; the young adult women who have no children must just not have that youthful glow.
Lost baby? What lost baby? We don’t recall reading about a lost baby.
So we’re kind of, sort of, beginning to becoming just a little sceptical about this FLDS teen pregnancy rate thing. The media keeps dribbling in more information, and the fact that these women aren’t minors at all rather gets in the way. BUT LOOK! LOOK HERE! OMG, 41 children have broken bones at some point in their lives. That’s bad, right? That clearly proves child abuse, right?
Well, we’re sure invited to think so. In fact, fifty percent of children will break a bone. The FLDS haven’t even reached ten percent. There’s also the pesky fact that a skilled radiologist has a high degree of success at proving a fracture’s cause: falling out of a tree looks different on X-ray than being hit with a frying pan because you misquoted St. Paul.
Show of hands, how many think assault charges will arise from any of these 41 children with broken bones? Anyone? Buehler? *crickets chirp*
CPS got called out on this one and backpedaled like Lance Armstrong showing off in France.
Quote:
Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for the Child Protective Services division, said the state was still investigating and Cockerell’s comments were not meant to be an allegation of abuse.
“This is pretty early in this investigation, particularly given the number of children we’ve been interviewing,” he said. “We are just looking into it.”
Ah. It’s deeply concerning and actively being investigated but you didn’t mean for us to think you called it abuse. Merely that you strongly implied it.
BUT LOOK! CPS says there is new evidence - no, not the arrest warrant type evidence, just the press release type - that FLDS boys have been sexually abused. Ooooh, SHINY! They know this from interviews with the boys. I would dearly love to ask if anyone has heard of social workers from Wenatchee going missing, but that would be crass and obvious.
I will instead simply ask when CPS has decided that the children they have announced from the start to be lying liars who spout untruths every time they open their cute little mouths and have been brainwashed to hate and fear outsiders (like Hitler! If Hitler were Satan’s grandpa!) have suddenly become trusting, truthful little creatures, as honest as the day is long and confiding their inmost souls to strangers they met days ago and who took them from their parents.
Except they still lie when asked their age. Or their name. And when they say who their father is, that’s a lie too. All the victims are liars. The only time the victims aren’t lying are when they tell us something that might justify the massive raid, but anything else they say is a lie. Everyone’s a liar, because that’s what evil child abusers do. They lie. Only CPS tells us the truth. Anyone who doesn’t believe CPS’ truth is a child abuser or protecting child abusers. Either you’re with us, or you’re a child abuser or protect them.
First they came for the Branch Davidians at Waco
and I did not speak out
because I was not an alleged wacko Christian cultist with guns.
Then they came for the FLDS church in San Angelo
and I did not speak out
because I was not an alleged child-abusing polygamist.
Eventually they came for me, and my church
and there was no one left
with any courage or outrage
to speak out for me.
I sit in stunned amazement of so many Americans cheerleading the government of Texas’ actions in the military raid at gunpoint, detention and kidnapping of the women and children at the FLDS compound in San Angelo earlier this month.
Let me state outrightly that I am not Mormon, I do not agree with their religious doctrines and both polygamy and child abuse is wrong and evil in my opinion.
But what was trampled underfoot YET AGAIN in Texas, was not the trampling of the rights of the FLDS members, it is the trampling of due process and the Constitutional rights of ALL AMERICANS.
I’m stunned no one sees or understands the absolute dangerous cliff we are going over with the tyrannical actions made against the FLDS in Texas.
Your right to religious liberty in the First Amendment was trampled.
Your right to be secure in your persons papers and effects, was trampled.
The Constitutional requirement that warrants to search and seize must be obtained by affirmation and oath of more than one witness of probable cause of a crime commited, has now been abolished.
Your children can and will be forcefully taken away from you at gunpoint if the state says you have abused them, even if no evidence of abuse was presented to a Judge to obtain a warrant.
Your individual case to plead is abolished and you are treated in bulk with the whole of those accused.
And all of this, done before any defendants have their day in court.
I cannot relay to you how much my own blood boils at the abject tyranny on display in this case. This is Waco part II, without the bloodshed - but even more damaging to our liberties as Americans than at Mount Carmel.
I had someone argue with me vehemently that the FLDS deserved to have these things happen to them, and that regardless of the violations of due process and the Constitution that the State’s action’s, the seriousness of the charges outweigh their Rights, and by extention - ours.
During the course of the argument they wrote that “Whatever was needed to be done, even if it violated due process as you say and the Constitution, those children’s lives and stopping the abuse is more important than your stupid belief in the Constitution - I’d hate to live in a country of people that think like you do”.
So now a mere allegation or “common knowlege” is more important than our “stupid belief in the Constitution”
I now know and understand how it was possible that an enlightened people in Germany empowered a madman.
If people think for ONE SECOND that ANY of what was done to the FLDS deserves applause, kudos and thanks to the gestapo agents of the state, then will all due respect, they are no different than these enablers of tyrannical bastards:
Suddenly, the stormtrooper goons with submachine guns show up with APCs to bust in and kidnap the women and children without so much as showing a warrant, producing a warrant or providing any hard evidence of a crime to have procurred the warrant.
When asked if they could see the warrant, the stormtroopers told the women they do not get to see any warrant. That exchange was caught on video.
Then the Police and officials of the State lied to the women they took captive:
Worse yet, is after the kidnapping of these women and children, the women are being held in detention without being charged with any crime, and their children have been stripped from them and shipped to foster home that HAVE A HISTORY OF ABUSE, RAPE and even MURDER.
William Grigg notes this in his blog:
Judge Walther has ruled — and wasn’t the suspense terrific? — that the 416 abducted FLDS children will remain in “temporary” state custody.
This, despite the fact (as explained below), that the abuse report that provided the pretext for the raid was contrived. This, despite the admission, under oath, of Bruce Perry of the ChildTrauma Academy — an “expert” witness on behalf of the state — that the foster care system “would be destructive to these kids.”
As what follows will illustrate, Perry isn’t exaggerating one whit.
So … the warrant was based on a lie, the raid was therefore illegal, the children face the prospect of certain harm within the state foster care system — and Judge Walther is OK with this.
The raid was conducted on a false allegation, with no evidence of abuse and now are being put into a system where rape, abuse and worse have plagued the agency.
The children suffer behind an iron curtain of corrupt secrecy. That curtain was lifted a few years ago, long enough to get a brief but terrifying glimpse of what was being done by people who had placed themselves beyond accountability.
Scores of children were killed, poisoned, beaten, and otherwise abused each year. Child rape was terrifyingly common: The largest group of victims were between 12 and 15 years of age, but thirteen percent of the victims were three years old or younger.
An official investigation of this secretive system was undertaken, but soon foundered over obstructions thrown up by those who had the most to lose if the full truth were revealed. But before the portcullis was slammed shut, the investigator learned that a child being raised in that system was four times more likely to die of criminal violence than a child in the general population.
The obvious course of action would be to mount an armed raid to liberate those children, but whatever necessary means, from the abusive system in which they’re being held.
Unfortunately, the entity that would carry out such an operation also presides over the systematic abuse. The findings described above are from an abortive investigation of the Texas Foster Care System conducted by Carole Keeton Strayhorn on behalf of the state Comptroller’s office.
Grigg goes on and his sentiments are noteworthy to consider. This is an affront to liberty and an attack on freedom itself.
They’ve done what they intended: They’ve stolen the children, and they’re not going to give them back unless they’re literally forced to do so.
“I think some people have really focused on that [Sarah] but the reality is that her phone call is the reason we went out there, but it was not the reason for the removals,” claimed DFPS shill Greg Cunningham. “The removals happened based on what we saw out there.”
What, pray tell, did they see “out there”? We won’t find out until a court-appointed “Special Master” has had a chance to review — or, if necessary, contrive — the “evidence.”
Here’s what the public has seen:
We witnessed a military assault, with armor provided by the Department of Homeland Security, against a peaceful, unresisting religious community.
We have seen happy, healthy, well-adjusted children who have been separated at gunpoint from loving mothers.
The children suffer behind an iron curtain of corrupt secrecy. That curtain was lifted a few years ago, long enough to get a brief but terrifying glimpse of what was being done by people who had placed themselves beyond accountability.
Scores of children were killed, poisoned, beaten, and otherwise abused each year. Child rape was terrifyingly common: The largest group of victims were between 12 and 15 years of age, but thirteen percent of the victims were three years old or younger.
An official investigation of this secretive system was undertaken, but soon foundered over obstructions thrown up by those who had the most to lose if the full truth were revealed. But before the portcullis was slammed shut, the investigator learned that a child being raised in that system was four times more likely to die of criminal violence than a child in the general population.
The obvious course of action would be to mount an armed raid to liberate those children, but whatever necessary means, from the abusive system in which they’re being held.
Unfortunately, the entity that would carry out such an operation also presides over the systematic abuse. The findings described above are from an abortive investigation of the Texas Foster Care System conducted by Carole Keeton Strayhorn on behalf of the state Comptroller’s office.
“In April 2004 I said I would give our forgotten children in foster care something they need — a voice,” recalls Strayhorn. “I have been and will continue to be their voice. This Governor’s Health and Human Services Commission continues to stonewall my investigation and this governor continues to hide the truth.
We have seen and heard women who have experienced the single worst thing that can happen to a parent — the loss of a child or children — present themselves with dignity and reserve in the face of arrogant aggression by a corrupt state bureaucracy (as if any other kind existed).
What we have not seen is any evidence that children were being abused in the FLDS community.
But there is ample evidence of systematic abuse of the most heinous kind in the foster care system into which the child-snatchers seek to place the FLDS children.
Perry, or at least the government over which he presides, did eventually act to “save” children — by conducting a potentially lethal military raid against a community where they weren’t being abused, for the purpose of delivering them into a government-run system in which children are routinely killed, molested, and poisoned.
As an ABC News analysis points out, the DFPS legal strategy is to treat the people living in the YFZ enclave as a single household. In this fashion, under what the Texas government is pleased to call the “law,” finding a single case of abuse within the community would be enough to justify keeping all of the children in permanent state custody.
Which means, of course, that they would become the property of a single collectivist “household.” We could envision it as sort of a polygamous union between various foster homes and the state government, in its role as Parens Patriae. And in that collectivist household, abuse is widespread, frequently lethal, and protected by “law.”
As legal proceedings in the FLDS custody battle began today (in — as the bitter ironies continue to accumulate — the Tom Green Courthouse), the presiding judge, Barbara L. Walther, was praised by all and sundry as the very soul of equity.
Judge Walther will give the FLDS “a fair shake,” insisted attorney William Moore of San Angelo, where the case is being heard. Fellow attorney Guy Choate praised Walther for her command of details. And Robert Post, whom Walther defeated in the 1992 election in which she won her seat, insisted that the judge won’t be a “rubber stamp” for the state bureaucracy, but rather will “make them prove it up.”
Judge Walther may be the embodiment of competence; she may be the essence of good intentions made flesh. But either through professional blindness or something more sinister she failed her first, and perhaps most important, test today:
She did not issue an order to the DFPS commanding them to produce “Sarah,” with an inflexible and immediate deadline to do so.
Walther is the judge who issued an extravagantly overbroad warrant on the basis of “Sarah’s” alleged report. Today she admitted into evidence documents seized in that raid without confirming that there was a legal basis for the warrant.
By relieving the DFPS of the responsibility to produce the alleged witness that was the basis of that report, Walther has graduated from commonplace offenses against the Constitution to participation in a criminal conspiracy — assuming, as I think by now we should, that “Sarah” doesn’t exist.
The criminal conspiracy in this case involves the attempted — or, better put, not entirely consummated — theft of children by a state bureaucracy with a financial interest in enlarging the ranks of its foster care system, however miserable or dangerous that system is to its enrollees.
So, who will be next?
The Mormons themselves?
The 7th Day Adventists?
YOUR CHURCH?
If all it takes is an uncorroborated anonymous phone call by someone claiming a crime to bring the entire weight of an armed police state through your doors, the confiscation of your children and property, then America and liberty as we knew her are already gone, and all that is left of us is to wait in fear - waiting for that knock at the door in the middle of the night, before the Gestapo bust down your door and shove a gun in your face while your family is taken away and shipped to who knows where.
In a touch of irony when fiction mimics life, as Padme Amidala noted in the last Star Wars movie ‘Revenge of the Sith” -
“So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.”
Witness liberty dying before your eyes Americans.
To thunderous applause.
UPDATES:
JUSTICE DENIED.
Legal aid group challenges state’s forced relocation of FLDS children to foster homes
The Third Court of Appeals has decided to hear arguments over whether the state of Texas can place children from the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints currently in its custody into foster care without giving each of their families the opportunity to defend themselves in court, according to a press release.
“These families have the right to have their voices heard in the legal process,” said TRLA attorney Robert Doggett. “The idea that these children can be taken away without giving their families the opportunity to address allegations and fight to stay together is absurd.”
Revelations that the March 29 phone call that sparked a raid on a Schleicher County polygamist compound may be a hoax have led prosecutors to doubt the reason for the original search-and-arrest warrant that granted authorities access to the YFZ Ranch.
Arrests still could be made in the case, said First Assistant 51st District Attorney Allison Palmer. The raid, based on the warrant, led to the removal of 437 children from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints ranch, the largest child custody action in Texas history.
“If it were true that the female who identified herself as Sarah is not really Sarah, I do not feel that would be enough to (invalidate) the search warrant,” Palmer said.
Palmer used the phone calls as the probable cause necessary to secure the search-and-arrest warrant granted by District Judge Barbara Walther.
“Some events have shaken our belief and confidence in that probable cause,” Palmer said.
Yup, you read the headline right. But should any of us that understand that the mainstream media despises the pesky 2nd Amendment as much as the Marxists in government do be surprised?
As life gets more difficult here at home with a slumping economy and a spoiled-rotten entitlement mindset among most Americans, the continuous shredding of the Constitution by everyone from politicians and their propaganda arms of the 4th branch of Government in the media is greeted with yawns.
So when the mainstream media goes to the extremes of propagandizing the big lies against our very foundations in blaming the woes and miseries of the third world cesspools on our own foundational documents - they must perceive that doing away with that pesky document altogether within the realm of possibility.
In the very least, they are conditioning the American people to accept the severe regulation or abolishment of the 2nd Amendment. With the SCOTUS opinion on the DC vs Heller case regarding the ability of states to regulate the 2nd Amendment to be handed down anytime, isn’t it convenient that yet another media expose in blaming that pesky Constitutional Amendment again rears it’s head?
ABC News: Mexican Drug Violence U.S. Constitution’s Fault
By Warner Todd Huston
True to the liberal penchant for blaming every ill in the world on the USA, ABC News has produced a “report” claiming that the increasing number of guns and drug cartel violence in Mexico is all the fault of… the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That’s right, it isn’t the drug dealers and killers in Mexico that are at fault, it’s James Madison and the Founding Father’s fault! Now, before you imagine that I am employing hyperbole in my introduction, just look at the title of their piece: “U.S. Guns Arming Mexican Drug Gangs; Second Amendment to Blame?“
ABC wrote that “U.S. gun stores and gun shows are the source of more than 90 percent of the weapons being used by Mexico’s ruthless drug cartels,” but then noted that “It’s virtually impossible to buy a firearm in Mexico as a private citizen.” To anyone really thinking about it, this fact sort of confirms the pro-gun bromide that “if you make owning a gun a crime, only criminals will have guns,” doesn’t it?
Regardless, ABC allows the Mexican attorney general to present Mexican criminality as the fault of the U.S. Constitution.
Mexico’s strict gun laws are being subverted by the easy availability of weapons in the U.S., the Mexican attorney general, Eduardo Medina-Mora Icaza, told ABC News. “The Second Amendment,” said the attorney general, “is certainly not designed to arm and give fire power to organized crime abroad.”
If that same Mexican government wasn’t so rife with corruption, weakness and crime, our laws here wouldn’t be such a problem for them there. Here is the thing, if Mexicans had the same God-given right to self-defense as Americans, all their guns would be purchased right at home. But, Constitutional right or no, the same violence would be happening in Mexico as the violence is not the fault of gun laws. It is the fault of Mexican corruption and drugs.
Further, the Mexican drug cartels are powerful and flush with money. If they really wanted guns and the USA didn’t offer an easy mark to obtain them, they’d merely go elsewhere. Certainly we should try harder to assure that our Constitutional rights don’t interfere with the laws of a neighboring nation, but to assume we are the sole cause of their ills is poppycock.
Naturally the ABC piece bandies around the term “high-powered assault weapons” as if it were a meaningful phrase instead of a kitchy and misleading term as used by anti-gun advocates, but the piece is also misleading with its claim of “cop killer” bullets in the newly popular Belgian-made pistol dubbed by Mexican gangs as the “mata policia.” ABC reports the power of the Belgian FN pistol as if its round was especially powerful and is perhaps a new and rising threat to standard police bullet proof vests. However, this is misleading in the fact that the “mata policia” isn’t any more dangerous than most rifle rounds, including the 7.62×25 round of many handguns made in Eastern Europe and China. In other words, its popularity isn’t because it is more dangerous than any other weapons, but as much out of a sort of fad as anything.
Additionally, the ABC piece also slings around the name “AK47″ quite a lot. Where this is misleading is that the AK47s sold in the USA are not automatic weapons. They are not machine guns. Yet the ABC piece leads the reader into imagining that they might be. If machine guns are being used by Mexican gangs they are certainly not coming from the United States because machine guns such as the proper AK47 are illegal here.
But a telling item came from ABC’s first posting of this story on-line. Here was one of their original paragraphs:
The drug cartels’ weapons of choice include variants of the AK-47, .50-caliber rifles converted to automatic firing capability and a Belgian-made pistol called the “cop killer” or “mata policia” because of its ability to pierce a bulletproof vest.
Yet, hours later the paragraph was altered to read this way:
The drug cartels’ weapons of choice include variants of the AK-47, .50-caliber sniper rifles and a Belgian-made pistol called the “cop killer” or “mata policia” because of its ability to pierce a bulletproof vest.
Notice what’s missing (from my bold in the first version)? You see, you cannot make a civilian style .50 cal. rifle fire in automatic mode.
It should also be noted that the straw-man purchase is already a federal crime. So, if people are buying large lots of guns for someone else, that is already against the law. This is also a matter of our government not enforcing current laws. New laws aren’t needed but we aren’t even enforcing many of the laws we do have on the books already.
But, this whole story also points to a support for something else that doesn’t get mentioned: building the border fence. If we had better border control, we wouldn’t have American guns so easily crossing the boarder to kill the Mexicans that Mexican guns don’t want to kill. Build a fence and we’d certainly make it harder to smuggle guns.
Still, the lawlessness of a neighboring nation is no reason to destroy a Constitutional right here.
His associations, freindships and mentors are a cadre of Middle Eastern sleaze bag financiers, domestic terrorists, an America-hating racist pastor and elite snobs who sneer at middle America, and especially Christians who own guns.
Stanford Law Professor, Larry Lessig, a digital Communist Tech guru with Google, and Advisor to the Obama campaign has a little video he likes to share with others that depict Jesus as a disco-singing flamboyant homosexual in a diaper that gets run over by a bus.
This video is blasphemous and disturbing if you are sensitive to the depiction of your Lord and Savior with such contempt.
Of course if this was Mohammed Lessig was insulting, we could expect mass riots and death threats from Muslims. Interesting that Lessig and his contemptable audience at Google has nothing to fear from Christians as a result of their ridicule of Jesus Christ, but would they dare slander Islam the way they think they can slander Christianity?
Google has a history of being unfreindly to Christians, while it has no problem banning anyone that might insult Islam or question Liberal ideologies like Abortion and so on.
But the story deepens.
This is yet ANOTHER individual Obama has CHOSEN to associate himself with. Lessig himself acknowldeges this freindship, and given that Obama has past alliances and relationships with black nationalists, racists, and domesitc terrorists like William Ayers, it is clear that Obama lacks any judgement of character and that he himself must share all of these anti-American and anti-social views, otherwise he would not be in fellowship with such individuals.
So, what we have here is another close Obama supporter and advisor that seems to hate the things that the average American holds dear. The list of America hating Obama associates is getting longer every day, and now we can add a Christian hating, communist to that list.
It’s really hard to believe that any real American can support a man for president of the United States of America who surrounds himself with people who so hate this country and all it stands for.
