Clichés Of Socialism
Rights vs. socialism
The American Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to access healthcare, education, jobs, homes, transportation, travel, public speech, their government, and many other rights.
No other country guarantees to its citizens all of the rights that Americans have.
American government is limited, but its citizens’ rights are not. For Americans, rights are unalienable, and within the bounds of law, practicable.
In other countries where rights are limited, government power is correspondingly greater. There’s an inverse relationship between government power and individual rights. They don’t coexist.
Socialists would have us trade away our unlimited rights for a smaller set of rights limited by government regulation, and a much larger basket of government powers. They would have us exchange freedom for government overseers.
Socialists use all sorts of emotional arguments to justify these trades, but in the end, they all lead to degrees of slavery.
Socialists who give up on the market, who give up the right to practice their rights as they personally see fit, make a very poor bargain for themselves, and for all who come after them.
Do you want the option to buy the healthcare you actually need? Or do you want a government bureaucrat to tell you what healthcare you are allowed?
Do you want the option to educate your kids in a curriculum you choose? Or do you want a government bureaucrat to determine what your child may learn at school?
Do you want to practice your own choices about what is best? Or do you want the government making those choices for you based on unproven dubious theories?
Do you want an economy run by consenting makers, sellers and buyers? Or do you want closed markets resistant to invention and creativity regulated by bureaucrats who have no personal skin in the game?
For reasonable people, these types of questions have obvious answers. Why do Leftists appear to lack the common sense necessary to see them?
The uncivil strategy for offensive Leftism
The Left foreshadowed their ongoing street theatre of harassing leadership and throwing up phoney charges at the opening of the Kavanaugh hearings. Audience members jumped up shouting and wailing in a calculated and prolonged demonstration, made to appear like random testaments, to insert themselves into, and destroy the hearing process – egged on by phoney procedural delay attempts from their Leftist Senators.
It was all planned, and it raised a big middle finger to the American people who tuned in to learn something about their government.
The Left cannot permit reason to control. Under reason, they lose. But the rule of law is no match for the rule of the mob. Civility can’t compete with barbarity. Consent means nothing in the face of force.
The Left moved the bar to shouting, property destruction, procedural disruption, and all things uncivil. Without civility, what remains to check human impulses? How long until they start shooting?
That’s how previous Leftist movements all ended up. The fascists, communists, and socialists always end up imposing violent repression because citizens don’t usually voluntarily give up their freedom. Freedom gets taken surreptitiously. It’s stolen quietly, a bit at a time.
Like now. Our Supreme Court nomination process has been taken from the people and put under the force of Leftist dominion. Our Republican leadership seems oblivious to the theft.
Antifa, BLM, the Indivisibles, the Resist movement, the DSA, all the Soros-funded groups, etc., want their violent escalations to end up in revolution. No way are they moderating themselves.
Plunder by Proxy
Leonard E. Read
Saturday, September 01, 1956
“They who employ force by proxy, are as much responsible for that force as though they employed it themselves.” Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, 1865
The popularity of Robin Hood derives from the fact that he robbed the rich to aid the poor. Let it be acknowledged that he was popular not with the few he robbed but with the poor he aided, they being the more numerous.
Robin would not have been popular even with the poor had he robbed the rich to aid himself. Nor would the poor have been popular had they robbed the rich to aid themselves.
However, the rich were no less robbed by reason of Robin’s doing the robbing. Nor were the recipients of stolen goods any the less thieves because someone else did their stealing.
The issue in this fiction is not robbery, for that has been established. The issue is: Why, when someone else does one’s stealing, is there an absence of a guilty conscience, a sense of absolution? Can anything be done about it?
The analogue to this Robin Hood fiction is the taking-from-some-giving-to-others reality of our own political establishments. The recipients of subsidies, for instance, have no more sense of guilt than did Robin’s “beneficiaries.” Absolution is assumed, and for the same reason: Someone else—in this case, the government—does the plundering and the bestowing.
As long as this blind spot prevails, it will induce a feeling of absolution; and as long as this false feeling persists, political plunder will be increasingly embraced as proper national policy.
What can be done to replace this blind spot with understanding?
A bit of imagination may suffice. Take the recipient of a farm subsidy as an example. Let the government policy of subsidization remain exactly as it is. It is decreed that Farmer Jones (he may be rich or he may be poor) is to receive $1,000 as payment for taking some of his acreage out of production. But instead of the government forcibly collecting this amount in taxes, Farmer Jones is assigned a policeman and authorized by the government to call personally on all American families, rich and poor alike, and forcibly collect from each a specified amount. Disregard, please, the inefficiency of this type of plunder. Think only of Jones personally doing the collecting, with his policeman in tow, of course.
One can readily see what would happen the moment such personal plunder replaces impersonal government plunder. The blind spot would cease to exist. Guilt would stand where absolution had stood. Farmer Jones would no more use force to collect one penny from Widow Doakes or 50 cents from Mr. Gotrocks than he would steal his neighbor’s cow.
It isn’t necessary to adopt this collection plan to be rid of spoliation. It is only necessary to understand that morally there is not an iota of distinction between the collecting and disbursing method now in practice and the one here depicted.
The difference between the impersonal and personal methods is not moral but psychological, an unwholesome gap in thinking. The impersonal evokes a false absolution; the personal, if merely imagined, compels us to see that we would act solely on our own integrity and moral scruples. []
The Field of Personal Responsibility
It must be remembered that 95 per cent of the peace, order, and welfare existing in human society is always produced by the conscientious practice of man-to-man justice and person-to-person charity. When any part of this important domain of personal virtue is transferred to government, that part is automatically released from the restraints of morality and put into the area of conscienceless coercion. The field of personal responsibility is thus reduced at the same time and to the same extent that the boundaries of irresponsibility are enlarged.
Government cannot manage these fields of human welfare with the justice, economy, and effectiveness that are possible when these same fields are the direct responsibility of morally sensitive human beings. This loss of justice, economy, and effectiveness is increased in the proportion that such governmental management is centralized.
Clarence Manion, The Key to Peace
widespread deep state surveillance
Newsmax – Sunday, 19 Mar 2017 01:04 PM
Nunes Must Ask FBI’s Comey About Montgomery Mass Surveillance Case
By: Larry Klayman
The old expression about Washington, D.C., is that if you want a friend, get a dog! In the case of President Donald Trump, this is a lesson he has undoubtedly learned in his thus far short tenure as the commander in chief. Nowhere is this seen more than over the current controversy concerning the president’s claims that he was wiretapped, that is, illegally spied upon, by his predecessor’s administration, former President Barack Obama.
As I have written in this Newsmax blog and elsewhere particularly of late, my client, former NSA and CIA contractor Dennis Montgomery, holds the keys to disproving the false claims of those representatives and senators on the House and Senate intelligence committees, reportedly as well as FBI Director James Comey, that there is no evidence that the president and his men were wiretapped.
Montgomery left the NSA and CIA with 47 hard drives and over 600 million pages of information, much of which is classified, and sought to come forward legally as a whistleblower to appropriate government entities, including congressional intelligence committees, to expose that the spy agencies were engaged for years in systematic illegal surveillance on prominent Americans, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, other justices, 156 judges, prominent businessmen such as Donald Trump, and even yours truly. Working side by side with Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence (DIA), James Clapper, and Obama’s former Director of the CIA, John Brennan, Montgomery witnessed “up close and personal” this “Orwellian Big Brother” intrusion on privacy, likely for potential coercion, blackmail or other nefarious purposes.
But when Montgomery came forward as a whistleblower to congressional intelligence committees and various other congressmen and senators, including Senator Charles Grassley, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who, like Comey, once had a reputation for integrity, he was “blown off?” no one wanted to even hear what he had to say. The reason, I suspect, is that Montgomery’s allegations were either too hot to handle, or the congressional intelligence and judiciary committees already knew that this unconstitutional surveillance was being undertaken. Moreover, given the power of the NSA, CIA, and DNI, for congressional committee heads to take action to legitimately and seriously investigate and if necessary recommend prosecution of officials like Clapper and Brennan could, given the way Washington works, result in the spy agencies disclosing and leaking (as occurred recently with General Michael Flynn), the details of their mass surveillance, ruining the careers if not personal lives of any politician who would take them on.
After Montgomery was turned away as a whistleblower, he came to me at Freedom Watch. With the aid of the Honorable Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who I had come to respect and trust over the years of my public interest advocacy, we brought Montgomery forward to FBI Director James Comey, through his General Counsel James Baker. Under grants of immunity, which I obtained through Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Curtis, Montgomery produced the hard drives and later was interviewed under oath in a secure room at the FBI Field Office in the District of Columbia. There he laid out how persons like then businessman Donald Trump were illegally spied upon by Clapper, Brennan, and the spy agencies of the Obama administration. He even claimed that these spy agencies had manipulated voting in Florida during the 2008 presidential election, which illegal tampering resulted in helping Obama to win the White House.
This interview, conducted and videoed by Special FBI Agents Walter Giardina and William Barnett, occurred almost two years ago, and nothing that I know of has happened since. It would appear that the FBI’s investigation was buried by Comey, perhaps because the FBI itself collaborates with the spy agencies to conduct illegal surveillance. In landmark court cases which I filed after the revelations of Edward Snowden, the Honorable Richard Leon, a colleague of Judge Lamberth, had ruled that this type of surveillance constituted a gross violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. (See www.freedomwatchusa.org for more information.)
A few months ago, given FBI’s seeming inaction in conducting a bona fide timely investigation of the treasure trove of information Montgomery had produced and testified to, I went to Chairman Bob Goodlatte of the House Judiciary Committee, as I had done earlier with Senator Grassley, since Montgomery had revealed that judges had been spied upon, and asked his staff to inquire of Director Comey the status of the investigation. I have heard nothing back from Goodlatte or his staff and they have not responded to recent calls and emails.
So last Thursday, I traveled to Capital Hill to personally meet with Chairman Devin Nunes (RCa.) of the House Intelligence Committee and, when his scheduler claimed that he was “unavailable,” forcefully pushed for a meeting with one of his committee lawyers, Allen R. Souza, and fully briefed him about Montgomery and the FBI’s apparent coverup. I told this staff intel lawyer to inform Chairman Nunes of the facts behind this apparent coverup before the committee holds its hearing on the alleged Trump wiretaps and questions Comey this Monday, March 20, in open session. My expressed purpose: to have Chairman Nunes of the House Intelligence Committee ask Comey, under oath, why he and his FBI have seemingly not moved forward with the Montgomery investigation.
During my meeting with House Intelligence Committee counsel Allen R. Sousa I politely warned him that if Chairman Nunes, who himself had that same day undercut President Trump by also claiming that there is no evidence of surveillance by the Obama administration, I would go public with what would appear to be the House Intelligence Committee’s complicity in keeping the truth from the American people and allowing the FBI to continue its apparent coverup of the Montgomery “investigation.”
And, that is where it stands today. The big question: will House Intelligence Committee Chairman Nunes do his job and hold FBI Director Comey’s feet to the fire about the Montgomery investigation?
Please watch the House Intelligence Committee hearing closely this Monday.
Larry Klayman, founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch, is known for his strong public interest advocacy in furtherance of ethics in government and individual freedoms and liberties.
the Left have no justification
This is why the media and the Left have ramped up anti-Trump mania. He threatens to disembody the soul of socialism by forcing the deep state to justify itself, and deep state actors know they cannot.
Presidential Executive Order on a Comprehensive Plan for Reorganizing the Executive Branch, May 13, 2017
(excerpt)
(d) In developing the proposed plan described in subsection (c) of this section, the Director shall consider, in addition to any other relevant factors:
(i) whether some or all of the functions of an agency, a component, or a program are appropriate for the Federal Government or would be better left to State or local governments or to the private sector through free enterprise;
(ii) whether some or all of the functions of an agency, a component, or a program are redundant, including with those of another agency, component, or program;
(iii) whether certain administrative capabilities necessary for operating an agency, a component, or a program are redundant with those of another agency, component, or program;
(iv) whether the costs of continuing to operate an agency, a component, or a program are justified by the public benefits it provides; and
(v) the costs of shutting down or merging agencies, components, or programs, including the costs of addressing the equities of affected agency staff.
America must choose => socialism or jobs
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Utopia’s Classes
by Daniel Greenfield
The sort of people who set off class wars as a hobby have very particular classless societies in mind. The average left-wing revolutionary is not poor. He is a homicidal dilettante from the upper classes with a burning conviction of his own importance that he is unwilling to realize through disciplined labor. His revolution climaxes with a classless society in which he is at the very top.
Not near the top, not adjacent to the top, as he usually was before, but at the very top.
Utopia has a class system. At the top are the thinkers, the philosopher kings who develop plans based on how things ought to be and then turn them over to lesser men to actually implement. They are the priestly class of an ideological movement whose deity is politics and whose priests are politicians.
In a planned economy, they are the titans of industry and finance, they are the heads of banks and the men who move millions and billions around the board, and they are utterly unfit for the job. But they also make decisions in matters of war and science. And in all things. They measure political heresy in all things and all the activities of man are measured against their dogma and rewarded or punished.
This is the way it was in the Soviet Union or Communist China. But take a closer glance at the White House – and Elbert County* – and see if you don’t spot the occasional similarity.
In the middle of Utopia’s class system is the middle class. This is not the middle class you are familiar with. There are no small business owners here. No one striving to make it up the ladder. Utopia’s middle class is the bureaucracy, the interlinked hive mind of government and non-profits.
At the top of Utopia’s class system are the philosopher-planners who issue the regulations. Or rather they offer objectives. The bureaucracy filters them through successive layers, transforming grandiose ideas into stultifying regulations and each successive layers expands them into further microcosms of unnecessary detail. This expansion of regulations also expands the bureaucracy. One feeds off the other.
Utopia has no lower class. That would be dystopian. Instead it has a client class. The client class is what used to be known as the working class. Utopia however transforms it into the welfare class.
Clienture transforms the working class into the welfare class. The destruction of the conditions under which the working class can exist forces its members either upward into the bureaucracy, a feat that is only possible for the younger generation willing to undergo the educational process, or downward into the welfare class.
The client class justifies the existence of Utopia’s upper and middle class which are, in theory, dedicated to public service, to remedying the ills of an unfair society, which has been made fair by eliminating all free will and individual choice. But the client class exists to be subsidized. And its subsidies justify the subsidizing of the upper and middle classes of the planners and the bureaucrats.
This is Utopia’s crisis.
Its upper class of philosopher kings expect to live like kings. They want to vacation in Aspen and New England. They want Bernie’s summer home and Hillary’s flat broke houses. And that does not come cheap. Utopia’s middle class expects to live the way that our middle class does. And yet none of them actually produce anything. They will, in Obama and Elizabeth Warren’s “You didn’t build that” formula, claim that their public service makes the condition of productivity possible.
There is one problem with that. Their public service actually inhibits production. Whatever the rhetoric, they spend all their days killing the geese that lay the golden eggs. And then they are insulted when the goose doesn’t recognize their contribution to her golden egg-laying.
Utopia has a series of interdependent classes that are subsidized by a productive class that is being starved out of existence. The inevitable outcome of such a system is one in which the lower classes are worked to death to subsidize its betters and the middle class is robbed by the upper class.
The left thus creates the predatory economic system it preaches against as a way of life. Its own abuses are inevitably worse than the system it replaces because it is not only exploitative, but its exploitation actively inhibits production.
*added
Trump could help end socialism in America
Taxing imports – customs import duties – don’t do us any favors [Mr. Trump.] Notwithstanding where ownership of the foreign production resides, import duties raise prices to consumers, and send more money to be burned in the fire of federal spending. If the product is a necessity, the burden of the cost of the import duty will fall on those in need of the product. If the product is not a necessity, it will become less price competitive and possibly disappear from the market altogether.
Mr. Trump, however, is on the right track toward repatriation of American capital by lowering business taxes. But while the negative threat to levy import duties on a firm contemplating moving operations to a more economically favorable location politically appeals to class warriors, it’s really a threat to cutting off one’s nose to spite the face.
American consumers should benefit from least cost manufacturing environments.
And poorer countries know they must bootstrap themselves into the modern world, that there is no charity to bail them out from decades of socialist economic degradation. In the modern era they watched while America manufactured its way to the good life. They want to do it too, and they should.
Lower prices do not harm anyone, including Americans, and higher prices will not bring jobs back to America.
Job makers won’t leave America if the return on investment and regulatory environment remain more favorable to manufacturing in America than somewhere else. And job-making capital will return to America for the same two reasons.
These conditions should not be temporary inducements. They should be fundamental and long term features of the American business landscape. Job-making capital will come back, and will not leave in the first place, if taxes on business and income are removed, and if regulatory red tapes – at all levels of government – are eliminated.
Let’s call a spade a spade. America became socialist in the 20th century. Capital doesn’t like socialism. We can have jobs or we can have socialism. Not both.
Overt socialists like Clinton and Sanders will lament the loss of federal spending that feeds their voting blocks, and feeds their political machines. But their voting blocks would be much better fed by good paying jobs than by government handouts, price controls, subsidies, and legal shelters.
America needs to give up the socialist nightmare. Even China knows that socialism causes poverty and economic decline, though they’re not yet willing to release the communist reins of power.
Power is heroin for socialists. Cold turkey is the way to end an addiction. You don’t gradually ween from a disease. You cure it or you die from it.
We have the medicine. We know what works. We just need to quit listening to the socialists selling snake oil.
A Socialism Spill on Aisle 9
A Socialism Spill on Aisle 9, by Daniel Greenfield
Progressives don’t particularly care about the woman in Aisle 9. They eat up hard luck stories on NPR and CNN the way that their great-grandparents marveled at hunger in Africa because of the way that it makes them feel, not because they understand how those people live or care about them. They use them to feel charitable and to win elections. Each progressive solution makes life worse in Aisle 9, but they never visit Aisle 9. If they did, they would outlaw the other half of the products in it that they haven’t already outlawed through various contrived legalisms.
hyperbolic times
Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh
Polite debate is no longer the accepted norm in our society. The liberal left is not tolerating divergent opinions, they want them eliminated. Outrageous labels, personal threats, and even violence have escalated during what used to be polite discourse and disagreements of opinion. [Read more…]
the fallacy of apparent proof
“It [Socialism] may be called, for want of a better label, a ‘magnificent faith in incredible evidence.’ At its worst, it leads to ready acceptance of generalizations that are supported by nothing more logical than a wish that they were true. At its best, it seems to infect you Socialists with a willingness to adopt and defend any alleged fact or group of facts, however dubious, so long as it seems to prove your case.”
H.L. Mencken, Men Versus The Man, 1910.
ElCo usurping property rights
A right is only as valuable as your ability to protect it. I recently wrote about water rights, and I had no plans to revisit the subject so soon.
At the last BOCC meeting, the Director of Community and Development Services [CDS] announced a meeting to be held this evening at 6:30 p.m. in the commissioners chambers to discuss the draft Oil & Gas Regulations [OGR]. The Director indicated the proposed zoning was nearing completion. I stopped at CDS today to pick up a copy of the current draft prior to tonight’s meeting, which they provided for $.25 a page. 56 pages.
I was also informed that the purpose of tonight’s meeting is to discuss a Memorandum Of Understanding [MOU] to be submitted by CDS to the COGCC. I presume that MOU hinges on having the OGR largely resolved. See Followup here.
I found some major problems with the Draft OGR.
I.
The first one is in Section 26.2 A, a. Suitability. This section forms the corpus of planning review criteria to be used to evaluate all OGR development. It says, “factors will be evaluated in accordance with applicable State, County, and Federal standards.” What standards? It doesn’t say. The applicable ones I guess. Which ones are applicable? Who knows.
Next, Section 26.2, A, c. Site Characteristics. “Factors for consideration include: topography, natural hazards (landslides, flooding, wildfire, etc.), cultural and historical uses of the proposed site, and current resource values (open space corridor and wildlife habitat).” Again, what defines these factors? It doesn’t say.
These two sections are meant to guide CDS, the Planning Commission and the BOCC throughout the implementation of these proposed zoning laws. They are a blank check, without an anchor in any specified written law, in the hands of the government.
Zoning that is not founded on published statutes or objective sources of law is a license for government to do as it pleases. There is no property right protection under such a scheme.
II.
Turning to Section 26.2 B, 1. Minor Oil & Gas Facility Defined. “Land use applications for a proposed Minor Oil & Gas Facility shall be processed administratively by [CDS] without a public hearing before the Elbert County Planning Commission or the Board of County Commissioners.”
However Section 26.2 B, 2. Review Process for Minor Oil & Gas Facilities, specifies adjacent property notice procedures and refers to “appearing at the hearing or by submitting a written waiver to the Director prior to the hearing.”
Now, there’s either a public hearing process for Minor O&G facilities, or there’s not, but the Draft OGR is internally inconsistent on the question.
III.
The largest objection I have to these regulations is in Sections 26.3 G. 5 – 9. Water Supply Plan and Surface Water / Aquifer Protection.
Section 5, “Prior to commencement of any drilling operations, the Operator will contact, by certified mail, all surrounding property owners with active domestic, irrigation or livestock wells … and ask permission to conduct water sampling and analysis pre-drilling, post drilling, post completion, and post production every (3) years for a period of fifteen (15) years.”
“The Director of Community and Development Services may require further water well sampling at any time in response to complaints from water well owners.”
“Additional testing, for cause as determined by CDS, will be done at any interval for any resident within the test area. A request for further testing must be submitted in writing and must include reason for request.”
The section continues and even specifies allowable methane levels in your water before CDS will require an Operator to investigate the source of the gas.
So, to summarize, this zoning law gives away your rights to protect your water quality to Elbert County bureaucrats, who may require an Operator to determine the source of gas in your water, if they agree with your written request, and if the test results meet their standard for water pollution.
Perhaps what most offends my sensibility is that this surrendering of your ability to enforce your own water quality comes in the form of asking permission by a non-governmental entity. A prospective operator asks you permission to test your water. If you give it, Elbert County steps in and becomes the arbiter and enforcer of your water quality. The county owns your water quality thereafter, and with that, they might as well own your water.
What if you don’t like the quality of water that the county finds acceptable for you? What if you think .9 mg/L of methane tastes funny in your water and you want a remedy, but the county doesn’t think your water pollution rises to the level it is willing to defend?
Don’t do it Elbert County citizens. Don’t give up your ability to protect your property interest in your water quality to government planners. Their interest in your property is just not as personal as yours.
These Draft OGR zoning laws undermine your property interest in owned mineral wealth by subjecting that process to an arbitrary set of laws. And they undermine your property interest in protecting your water quality directly.
Fail.
B_Imperial
When Democrats Talk Like Socialists
By SVETLANA KUNIN
Posted 08/22/2012 06:47 PM ET
‘What exactly is the point of this article?” asked a reader of my last (July 25) column titled “President’s Attack On Success Shows U.S. Falling, Not Rising.” “That the U.S. has a robust private sector and a host of freedoms? That people with good ideas can succeed in America? Who is arguing these points?”
Too many people think that freedom, opportunity and a variety of choices are ever-present features of life in the U.S. — that fundamental transformation of America will not affect accustomed standards. [Read more…]
Anita Moncrief at C-PAC
Dreams From My Real Father
This film documents the socialist conquest of America. Whether Obama is the son of Frank Marshall Davis or not, the history of the totalitarian movement they both dedicated their lives to is an on-going American tragedy that must be seen, must become known, by all Americans.
I’m ashamed to be called ‘newsman’
by Joseph Farah
After watching the press reaction and “questions” following Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s breathtaking news conference yesterday, I have to tell you I’m embarrassed to call myself a newsman.
If someone asks me what I do for a living, maybe I’ll identify myself as an Internet entrepreneur.
Or maybe I’ll say I’m a “writer.”
Or maybe a publisher or businessman.
I never thought it would come to this. Being a newsman was all I ever wanted to be as far back as I can remember. It’s really all I’ve ever done through adulthood. It’s all I really know and love.
But I don’t ever want to be associated with that pack of jackals from Phoenix who jumped all over Arpaio and his investigator, Mike Zullo, for courageously presenting overwhelming evidence – I would even use the term “proof” – that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is fraudulent and that the state of Hawaii is not only a willing accomplice in this scandal but perpetrating an even bigger one as a virtual factory for phony documents giving noncitizens instant citizenship with a stroke of the pen.
Some 50,000 people across the globe watched the live presentation on WND TV. If you didn’t get a chance to see it unfold, I urge you to take the time to review on demand, at your convenience.
In another era, with another occupant of the White House – someone like Nixon or Reagan or Bush – such an event would have been carried live by ABC, NBC and CBS. The New York Times would have had a half-dozen reporters on the scene. CNN, FOX and CSPAN would have carried coverage and offer instant analysis and debate over the issues raised.
But that’s no longer the America in which we live.
Today, without the Internet, we live in a 100 percent controlled media environment. There are more sacred cows than edible ones. The watchdogs are now lapdogs. The “reporters” are propagandists for the political establishment and the status quo.
I watch in horror as my chosen profession collectively disgraces itself.
Can our nation even survive without a free and independent and inquisitive, watchdog press?
Thomas Jefferson said, “Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”
Are we “safe” in America today?
On the other hand, Vladimir Lenin said, “When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward – or go back. He who now talks about the ‘freedom of the press’ goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.”
Is that where we’re headed in America today – forward to socialism and tyranny?
I feel sympathy for Arpaio and Zullo for the abuse they have endured. I understand it well, because I’ve experienced it firsthand for the last four years in my own commitment to the pursuit of truth regarding Obama’s life story.
The easiest choice to make is to go along with the conventional wisdom, not ask the hard questions, not relentlessly pursue truth. Kudos to Arpaio and Zullo, who didn’t take the easy way out like those clowns in the local Phoenix media and all those in the national media who just ignored what the only law-enforcement investigation of Obama’s birth certificate found.
I may not want to associate myself with the media anymore out of sheer humiliation. But I promise you one thing: I’m not going to stop being a real journalist. I’m not going to stop doing what I’ve been doing for 35 years. I’m not going to stop supporting intrepid, independent renegades like the WND team who make me believe there’s still hope for redeeming the media.