A year ago I predicted that a Republican would win in a landslide on November 4, 2008 because Hillary Clinton would be the Democrat nominee and America would never elect someone that far left as president. Today Barack Obama, who is even farther to the left than Hillary, won a solid victory as president.
I might have been right 20 years ago, but America has changed. It looks as if America has moved to the left.
People make much of Obama being the first black president, and indeed that is a good sign that America is not a racist nation. The ideal that all men are born equal lives in our country. Aside from this, I can find little to celebrate in an Obama victory. He is pro-choice, and the religious right has suffered a temporary setback; these are good things.
The bad far outweighs the good. Obama has promised some trillion dollars in new spending. He will probably appease our foreign enemies. As Biden said, he will be tested by enemies who smell weakness. He wants all Americans to sacrifice for the good of the collective. Reviving the Fairness Doctrine is a threat. Three Supreme Court Justices will retire in the next four years, and they will be replaced by the worst judges imaginable.
And the maddening thing is that we know very little about who Obama really is, so we don't know how bad the next four years will be. Is he your typical Democrat? Or is he a radical leftist with a hidden agenda? There were a lot of troubling little things during the campaign, such as Michelle Obama's ominous statement, "Barack Obama will require you to work." These folks don't seem to understand that in a free country the president does not force people to work.
But then, with large Democrat majorities in the Senate and the House, just being a typical Democrat might be bad enough to seriously expand state power and destroy liberty in America.
Well, congratulations to Barack Obama. And to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. It's their show now. Let us see what Democrat power brings to America.
UPDATE: In my channel surfing last night I heard Jeffrey Toobin on CNN say something about how wonderful it is to see "gender diversity" in the crowd at Obama's rally. Gender diversity. In other words, there were men and women there. As if only men go to Republican rallies, I guess.
New Leftist jargon leads one to sheer blithering idiocy.
8 comments:
Hmmmm. He ain't my boss. And the day he is is the day I will revolt.
Let's hope Obama is an opportunist along the lines of Clinton. That might minimize the damage.
"It's their show now."
Quite true in the practical sense, but now is the time to offer the alternative that Republicans never could. The unknown ideal.
L-C
Harry Binswanger on his HBL list noted how all presidents since JFK have moved to the middle. I'm skeptical that this will be the case with Obama, particularly since he'll face an adoring Democratic Congress and a media that worships him and will want nothing but good for his presidency.
I'm going to leave my comments at that for now. I'm going to let this reality of an anti-American as president sink in for a bit, and then I'm going to reevaluate where this nation is going and prepare to step up my intellectual activism.
I cast the first stone on my Facebook page by writing: "Joseph Kellard advises on Obama’s win to gear up for Jimmy Carter Part II. Best advice: read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and The Virtue of Selfishness.”
I'm not sure America really has moved to the left. When you look at some of horrible things FDR said and did, we survived. I think that people are just incredibly stupid and ignorant (which is worse, in a way).
Here is what I see among non-intellectuals and even people pretending to be intellectual. Bush was so bad that people were simply fed up -- on both the left and the right. McCain yammers on about keeping troops in Iraq for 10,000 more years and talks about how the economy is "fundamentally sound". Of course he was going to lose. People saw this as more of the same.
Hopefully after the economy collapses under Obama and a Democratic Congress, and get over their love affair with the wunderkind, they will rethink their choice in 2012 or thereafter. Hopefully we will actually have a better Republican candidate in 2012. We have some great opportunities here.
One of Arizona's better Congressmen just penned an op-ed for the Washington Post that makes me hopeful. I don't know if it'll take fire but at least someone in Congress is actually saying it.
Good post. Thought you might enjoy this video and post on the same "Meet the New Boss" theme. It was a last ditch appeal for "divided government" votes - dated now - but thought I'd call it to your attention before I consign it to the dustbin of history.
Although this is somewhat long, I would like to post here a letter that I sent to McCain. He may never read it, but I hope others do and learn something. This is titled "Why They Won."
Dear Senator McCain,
Now that the elections are over, perhaps we could take an honest look at the reasons for the disaster that we have created. Yes, Senator, I say “we” because the Republican Party and you are just as responsible as the ignorant majority that fell for the unrealistic and undeliverable promises. Perhaps even more than they. You are supposed to be educated, you are supposed to know better, and you, Senator, were supposed to have been a leader. Instead of upholding the original American ideals, those of capitalism and private ownership of property with the ensuing individual freedom and responsibility, you succumbed to the popularity of socialism. With the mortgage crisis, you had an opportunity to stand up for those ideals. You had an opportunity to tell the nation that the crisis was in fact caused by the government, starting with Carter’s policy of pressuring banks to give out loans to those that were not capable of paying them back; that this policy was exacerbated under Clinton, and that it was Obama and ACORN that made a living by forcing banks to give out un-repayable loans for “social causes” and their political gains. You could also have said that people that were taking out second and third mortgages on their homes, way beyond the worth of those homes, and living a good life for years on borrowed money, are responsible for their excesses. Instead, you blamed Wall Street greed and proposed that people like I, who did not live beyond their means, should pay the excess mortgages of those that did. If that is not socialism, please tell me what is?
You thought that your message will be more appealing if you promised a little redistribution; certainly much less than your opponent. The problem is that once you adapted the path of socialism and started to make promises that you could neither keep nor had a moral right to make, you have lost the moral foundation. How could you expose the evils of socialism and Obama’s lies if you had basically the same platform? Of course, Obama lied more, better, and more convincingly – he does have that talent. But you have morally bankrupted yourself to be able to challenge him.
I could not describe, precisely, what it is that you stood for; nor could anyone else. In the end, people came to your rallies and voted not for John McCain, an American hero and a leader of a great nation, but against Barack Obama, an enemy of America.
And there’s another factor – religion. Just when will the religious fundamentalists realize that most of the country does not see them as god’s apostles and when will they stop doing god’s work for everyone else’s detriment? Let’s face it – if god wants something, he can do it himself without relying on his Christian Taliban soldiers. Be religious, but keep it to yourself, please.
This was truly a historic election because the damage that Obama can, and probably will do to this country may be irreparable. Common sense lost, capitalism lost, freedom lost, the nation lost. An opportunity to make it right was lost.
Alexander Strugatsky
King George, VA 11/05/08
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