My proposition is that liberalism — or Statism — is inherently immoral. It is inherently immoral. Any philosophy that has, at its core, the belief that thievery is a virtue — is immoral.
If you steal from a bank, that is, you rob a bank but you intend to use that money to feed the homeless — the act of robbing is still immoral. You’ve taken somebody else’s money. Perhaps taken it from people of modest means to advance a belief that you have.
A liberal may be moral in his or her own life, of course. They may be honorable and ethical in all they do personally, of course.
But then to support a political philosophy that seeks to do that which is immoral when done outside the realm of government — that is, stealing— then what is that?
How can that be moral? To vote to put people in office who campaign on stealing — who campaign on stealing — to oversee such an agenda, which promotes a fundamental power-grab, to confiscate somebody else’s property and to assign to some other use, is that not an immoral act? Whatever that use may be? I’m not done: Liberalism is inherently immoral.
When you run up deficits — and I don’t just mean Democrats, liberal Republicans too — when you run up deficits that are so massive, that you create a crisis and that crisis gets worse and worse and could destabilize our society someday soon… and could destroy the opportunities for our children and our grandchildren one day, is that moral?
No, that’s immoral.
If you keep telling people that pay into Social Security that they’re paying into a non-existent trust fund, and if you keep voting time and time again to use the money that’s supposed to be put aside for Social Security to pay for every-expanding programs and spending for other things… then is not the act of lying — not just lying once, but lying repeatedly, lying as a matter of philosophy, is that not immoral?
Yes, it’s immoral.
Liberalism is inherently immoral. And there’s no getting around it.
You can hear this debate around Obamacare. Look at the statistics that have been knowingly used to promote a lie: that adding 30 million more people to health care, massively increasing the federal government’s role, massively increasing subsidies, will cut the deficit?
That’s a lie. And it’s immoral. And it’s immoral to keep saying it.
In a sane world, watching this guy cravenly avoid straight talk on America’s fiscal crisis in order to talk about salmon and high-speed rail would have lost him 10 points overnight. At the very least, one would think the sheer tedium of his laundry-list approach might have cost him a point or two. Nope.
Among President Obama’s many pie-in-the-sky promises tonight, he delivered this: “Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80% of Americans access to high-speed rail, which could allow you go places in half the time it takes to travel by car. For some trips, it will be faster than flying – without the pat-down. As we speak, routes in California and the Midwest are already underway.”
Like so much of the speech, the high-speed rail folly is recycled claptrap (hetossed it into last year’s speech, too). The remarks will appease Big Labor and eco-radical social planners led by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who’ll have his grubby hands all over the high-speed rail slush fund faster than you can turn off your soon-to-be-banned cell phone. Read the rest of this entry »
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, what can be said of plagiarism? President Obama’s second State of the Union address contained enough recycled ideas and lines lifted from speeches of others to make historians wince. I suppose this is what one does when one not only has nothing new to say, but is required by custom and Constitution to come forth with a report of some kind by a certain time and day.
Had Obama or his writers been considerate enough to have informed listeners of where some of the president’s best lines and offered-up ideas originated, the speech might be remembered for its cutting and pasting of great and not-so-great moments of the past performance of others. After quoting Robert Kennedy early on, Obama tried to have his listeners believe that everything else he said that we might remember were his or his writers’ creations. Had the president submitted the text of his second State of the Union Address in the form of a college term paper, he would have been sent forthwith to the nearest academic dean. Once again, our public affairs are such that we have one standard for presidents and another for undergraduates. Now is as good a time as any to let Obama’s listeners in on what the late Paul Harvey would have termed “the rest of the story.” [Take the poll: Was Obama’s State of the Union speech a success?]
Early in his address, Obama said that he wanted the nation he leads to be a “light to the world.” The last president who set such a mission for the nation he led, and in those exact words, was Woodrow Wilson.
The UK’s Telegraph reports that President Barack Obama will use the State of the Union address to raise the alarm about America’s global decline. As the Telegraph summarizes:
“A briefing paper released by the White House in advance of the address on Tuesday said: ‘The most important contest we face today is not between Democrats and Republicans. It’s America’s contest with competitors across the globe for the jobs and industries of our time.’
With unemployment stuck at 9.4 per cent and the likes of China, India and Brazil surging in the global economy, Mr Obama is also expected to address the insecurity about the future that many Americans feel.
When the applause had died down and the softly glowing screen of the teleprompter faded to black, the echoes of the Leninist cadences of Obama’s State of the Union address, “We must out-educate, out-compete, and out-innovate the rest of the world”, “We have broken the back of the recession” and “We can’t win the future with a government of the past” suggest that we are now living in a land without history.
How else could Obama get up and deliver an address whose rhetoric represents a 180 degree turn, while the substance continues down the same track. The meat of the address was stolen from Clinton’s 1992 campaign stump speeches on the economy. There is the same invocation of personal stories of unemployment combined with promises of replacing the old bad manufacturing jobs with free educations for everyone. But Clinton was better at pretending to be one of the boys, a working class man who only got out thanks to a good education. Obama’s people must have known that dog wouldn’t hunt.
As usual, the slogan du jour comes from the dictionary of the left. “Winning the future” was a common slogan on the left. While it was belatedly used by Newt Gingrich, it was most commonly employed in the 20th century by Communists and the far left. Two time Lenin prize winner, Danilo Dolci used it as the theme of one of his addresses. Jesse Jackson made use of it during his presidential campaign. Max Lerner gave a number of talks on “Winning the Future”. Mandella threw it in there. Most notably it was used by Lenin, “Our hopes must be placed on the young. We must win the youth if we are to win the future.”
The thrust of Obama’s agenda follows Lenin’s. The old jobs are gone. We must prepare for the future by educating our youth. The sturm und drang of the “We Musts” quickly becomes an argument for pandering to the teacher’s unions. Only by empowering the teacher’s union will we be able to compete with China. But China isn’t strong because of its teachers, but because it has no independent unions, no minimum wage, no pollution laws and nothing to get in the way of the terrible machine of its industry. The People’s Republic of China is not beating us in science or math, but in manufacturing cheap products with an undervalued national currency.
