Trouble In Our Day

So weary am I, dear Conservative Patriots, of fellow Americans lacking conviction, resolve and spine that I willingly step into perilous territory, inspired by the challenge of my self-appointed task. I was going to take a pass on courageous Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) until I was reminded of the words of Thomas Paine in 1776.

In the final days of that historic year, the revolutionary Paine said, "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace."

Indeed, there is trouble, and it is of a magnitude rarely seen during these past 233 years. Again, to quote one wiser than myself, I was struck by the words of modern revolutionary Andrew Breitbart in today's Washington Times: "On college campuses, in newsrooms and now in the highest corridors of power, with Barack Obama in the Oval Office, the politically correct left is wielding its weaponry with the confidence that it can take down any group, anyone or anything."

Exhibit A: Perella Weinberg Partners, one of the investment banks carrying Chrysler Corp. debt.

Exhibit B: Rep. Foxx, who dared to call the premise behind a so-called hate crimes bill passed by the House last week precisely what the premise is, a hoax.

Exhibit C: Rep. Judy Biggert (R-IL), who wrote to constituents by email warning of automated calls circulating through her Congressional district (13th) containing falsehoods about her voting record.

In Exhibit A, a bankruptcy lawyer told ABC News that a senior Obama White House official threatened to use the "full force of the White House press corps" to "destroy (the firm's) reputation" if Perella Weinberg refused to support the White House-led Chrysler bankruptcy plan. The Obamatrons could not stomach the idea that the greedy investment bankers at this and other firms refused to forgive Chrysler's debt at 29 cents on the dollar.

By the way, that's 29 cents on a lot of dollars -- 6.8 billion with a B.

More terrifying than the White House's meddling is its absolute confidence that the press would readily comply with and be manipulated by Obama insiders passing out "tidbits" intended to the discredit the firm. But of course information consumers have come to expect no less.

It is sad to watch American media icons collapse under their financial ineptitude (yes, even the New York Times); it is alarming to see them becoming even more ethically bankrupt in their fervor to spread Obama's tentacles everywhere to ensure his "greatness" will be firmly rooted.

Seems it is perfectly OK for Obamatrons to carry a deeply held hatred of Capitalists and their profit making ways. On the other hand, Democrats in the House of Representatives went on record last week that they have zero tolerance for disdain of other varieties.

The Liberal Dems want to redefine what it means to commit a hate crime in America, and to support their mission they re-visited the most extreme example they could find of bad guys doing really bad things to an innocent guy. They went back to the 1998 murder of a Wyoming resident named Matthew Shepard.

Rep. Foxx called upon the Audacity of Truth, in remarks on the floor of the House, in firmly rejecting the claim that Shepard is an authentic poster boy for hate crime legislation. He was murdered by drug-crazed punks coming off a "five-day (methamphetamine) binge," as Breitbart describes them. There is no clear evidence that the meth heads knew Shepard was gay. But the brilliant Left believes it to be the truth, so beware dissenters, beware.

While Foxx said nothing to diminish the awful circumstances of Shepard's death 11 years ago -- he was beaten to death and the guys who did it are in prison for life -- she boldly proclaimed that using this case to prove the necessity for tougher hate crime legislation represents the carrying out of a "hoax" by fellow lawmakers.

She was deriding their disingenuous agenda, and yet (can't you see this coming?) was instantly accused of calling Shepard's death a "hoax" in and of itself, which clearly it was not and never has been suspected to be. Nonetheless, Foxx decided she had to issue an apology and wander into the "what I meant to say" minefield, where only Vice President Joe (Ought to be Hidin') Biden is safe, apparently.

If the rigid hate crime definitions become part of the law of the land -- and this is where Foxx makes a legitimate objection -- you can be sure that any political, social, religious or cause-driven position that opposes gay marriage or supports something as extremist as, say, the observance of the Christmas season, to name two, will be attacked by outraged liberals as "hate speech" and accused of inciting "hate crimes". Where this leads, as Breitbart concludes, is to tortuous, Orwellian political correctness and emboldened thought police squads around every corner.

The Obama thought police apparently are after Rep. Biggert of Illinois, who in her recent email expressed a concern that she is being punished for opposing Obama's runaway spending. She is being punished, in other words, for standing firm on that principle the she will not mortgage the future of her grandchildren -- or yours -- to achieve ideological supremacy in the present.

"This past week a liberal 527 group paid for automated phone calls into my district lying about my record," Biggert wrote. "If one stands up to the D.C. Democrat Machine, then they start rattling their sabers and sending their goons after you. In fact, they are using the web to spread lies that I am retiring. Their games are not about the issues."

On one point, I disagree with Rep. Biggert. These are not games. What we see with more clarity, with every passing day, every hour, is a calculated assault on American values, a jack hammering of our bedrock principles.

If you defend Capitalism, you will be threatened in the remote corners of the corridors of power. If you embrace marriage as a legal union between a man and woman, you are stoking the embers of hatred. If you oppose massive federal spending intended to create an unsustainable Entitlement Class, you will be singled out, targeted, and maligned in your own backyard.

Take heart. We are here 233 years after Paine and his fellow founders welcomed the battles before them because Americans are not timid when staring into the face of freedom's enemies. Indeed, we know we will prevail.

HCSI: America

Get ready for a new tide of "hate crime" victims across America.

(REUTERS) The current law, enacted four decades ago, limits federal jurisdiction over hate crimes to assaults based on race, color, religion or national origin. The (2009) bill would lift a requirement that a victim had to be attacked while engaged in a federally protected activity, like attending school, for it to be a federal hate crime.

If the bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives today actually becomes law (as B. Hussein Obama intends), playground banter between kids at school, for example, could become subject to closer "scrutiny", shall we say. Do not send your child to summer camp without trailing legal counsel.

Or, let's imagine you are a passenger on a commercial flight and become frustrated by the demeanor and attitude of a flight attendant (a scenario requiring no imagination, whatsoever). You let her know about it. Today, they call it air rage. Tomorrow, it's a hate crime, Mister!

Your waiter drops dinner all over your lap and you, the customer, suggest he is an idiot. Hate crime.

You attend a school board meeting and publicly challenge the competence of a board member. Hate crime.

Any hint by an employer that an extremely obese person is incapable of performing his job. Hate crime.

Bloggers, in fact, likely will face accusations of being hate criminals each time a new post appears.

The expanding Victim Class will be lining up around the block to file its claims. Where will it end?

It won't.

Air Force 1, New York 0

In the months and years after Hurricane Katrina, Americans weary of the media’s unrelenting disparagement of President Bush would greet any unsettling news development by forecasting the obvious. “Of course, they’ll blame Bush.”

It all began when the Bush White House was blamed for decades of negligence by Louisiana and New Orleans officials, negligence exposed by the aftermath of the deadly hurricane in 2005. And the chorus never stopped.

Gas prices up? Bush did it.

Drought in the southeastern U.S.? Bush strikes again.

Town square bombing in Baghdad. Blood on Bush’s hands, of course.

American Idol ratings slide. Has to be Bush!

Now, in these heady 100 days under Dear Leader Maobama, or as writer Michelle Malkin rails, the Obamessiah, the list of items to which Obama legitimately could be held to account is spreading faster than germs in Mexico.

Of course, the growing list is dismissed as extreme right wing racist hate speech.

Let’s see: The blown attempt to recite the Oath of Office on January 20. The white tie for the Inaugural balls, when only black tie was appropriate. The Special Olympics quip on The Tonight Show. Naming a tax-evading Treasury Secretary. The DVD gift set for the British Prime Minister. The “Obama’s Greatest Hits” iPod presented to the Queen of England. Bowing to the Saudi King. Backslapping with the openly racist President of Brazil. Appointing a Homeland Security chief who thought the 9/11 terrorists entered the U.S. through Canada.

I mean, ladies and gentlemen, these are just off the top of the head. No research team needed. It’s too easy. All little things, Obamatrons will argue. Just nit-picking by angry, rich, under-taxed white people.

But, I ask you, when do the little things add up to an enormous problem, a building threat to the dignity, perhaps even the security, of these United States?

We saw one example today in the blue skies above New York City. Read the news item to follow and think, for just a moment, what would have been said about George W. Bush had this incident happened, say, on April 27, 2008? Can you imagine the mass media outrage, the certainty that this, once and for all, proved the utter incompetence of the Bush White House?

“A jumbo jetliner that serves as Air Force One, escorted by a military jet, flew over Lower Manhattan Monday morning, frightening office workers and causing evacuations in what turned out to be a publicity operation approved by a unit of the U.S. Air Force.”

Seems the mid-air photo-op involving the “United States of America” 747 and a trailing military fighter jet was approved by one Louis Caldera, director of something called the White House military office.

This startling episode, heralded by one headline as evidence that “New York is Obama’s World, You’re Just Living in It”, is alarming on so many levels. (In a New York Daily News online poll, 89% said it was a big mistake).

I thought liberals were obsessed with this carbon footprint thing? How do you for one instant justify firing up Air Force One for a Manhattan fly-around to capture publicity photos? We’re assuming the jumbo was occupied by a cockpit crew only.

I thought B. Hussein Obama was all about transparency. Yet the Mayor of New York City didn’t know the big bird was coming to town. The White House tipped off the NYPD but ordered the force to keep the planned operation under wraps. After all, why would New Yorkers be rattled by a low-flying jumbo jet streaking across a tranquil morning skyline? Gee, why would a disabled person cringe upon hearing the Leader of the Free World using “Special Olympics” to describe his lack of bowling prowess?

Did it not occur to The Great One, or some of his Lesser Greats (or the Teleprompter), that the scene just might conjure images of 9/11? Does it not threaten to make the U.S. Air Force vulnerable to baseless criticism for seeking to engage in a photo shoot that felt more like a reenactment of a tragic day than a reaffirmation of the majesty of Air Force One in flight?

Or, if the conspiratorial mind is set loose, maybe that’s the whole point. Obama’s unrelenting quest to re-visit post-9/11 interrogation of savage murderers and “apologize” to the world for stopping inevitable future attacks, in a sickening sense, seems to go hand and hand with his indifference toward Americans, at work in office towers on a sunny Manhattan morning, who do not want history to repeat.

Forget about blame. Just think about this: a President of the U.S. who dishonors the sacrifice of citizens who died on 9/11, some 3,000 of them (by insisting we should have taken it easy on the perpetrators), and who now is, apparently, dismissive of the fears of those who lived through that awful day and went to work on Monday morning.

There are days when I am convinced the Obama White House is sinister. There are days when I believe it is destructive. And there are days, like today, when the logical conclusion is that they’re all stuck on stupid. It is one thing to be cast as stupid by a liberal media (W), quite another to demonstrate, with cameras rolling, said intelligence gaps every few days (O).

The New Piracy

Congratulations to the Navy Seals and their skilled snipers for doing what should always be done to dangerous terrorists.

We are incredibly fortunate that the strength and courage of the American military is still a force for good in the world, even at a time when the Obama Administration is hell bent on shrinking America’s global stature.

I can’t imagine the backache Barack Hussein will have after the upcoming Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. By my count, there will be 33 heads of state before whom to bow later this week.

While I applaud Obama’s apparent zero-tolerance policy regarding brazen Somali Pirates, here at home we’re no less under siege. We have entered the age of The New Piracy We Can’t Believe In.

The traditional definition of piracy is an act committed by a non-state actor but the Somalis have made that obsolete, as no one believes they are true pirates, acting alone or without training. Here in the U.S., there are multitudes of state actors littering the looting and pillaging landscape:

Tax pirates on Capitol Hill and inside the White House.

Salary/bonus pirates on Congressional subcommittees.

Free-market pirates, most of them holed up in Larry Summers’ office at the White House.

Education pirates, a.k.a., lawmakers who’d rather stay cozy with teachers’ unions than open doors to educational opportunities in abysmal urban school systems.

First Amendment pirates, led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reed, who still think folks don’t get the twisted irony of something called “The Fairness Doctrine” that targets Conservative talk radio.

Family pirates, judges mostly, popping up in state after state, zealously targeting the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman with bench rulings that legalize gay unions. The pirates are still nursing rum hangovers in Iowa and Vermont.

Peace pirates, empowered by the President, who apparently believes that a little love sent Iran’s way will pay big diplomatic dividends down the road. Where’s the harm in a little unabashed uranium enrichment by Iranian “technicians”?

(Iran’s a small nation, like North Korea, remember? The junior Senator from Illinois said so last year when seeking the Piracy, ah, Presidency. They’re just a bunch of happy-go-lucky Johnny Depps, charming the ladies and dabbling in petty crimes).

Finally, we learned just today about the Freedom Pirates lurking inside the Department of Homeland Security. Seems they’ve issued an “assessment” that warns “rightwing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about several emergent issues.”

The report compares present trends to a climate that spawned the various anti-government military militias of the 1990s (translation: during the last reign by a liberal Democrat President). There is no mention of what if any activities these extremists were suspected of in the past decade, as if there were no hidden factions that loathed George Bush. They existed, but they would mainly fall under the heading, “leftwing extremists”, and would thus have been of little concern to the DHS and beyond the scope, as they say, of this report.

The DHS further advises that, while there are righties who are “hate-oriented” (the militia types), the feds are also keeping an eye on “those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.” Imagine that? A failure to embrace big, smothering government control of … um … well … everything.

Let us not misunderstand the underlying message of this “assessment” (which is being discussed across the land tonight) and the intent of its publication. American citizens who are not pro-Obama are members of society who pose a “threat”. The DHS knows this because of its analysis of “rightwing extremist chatter on the Internet”. (Such as the post you are reading here).

You are not a Conservative if you oppose Obama’s radical vision, his Socialist agenda, or his apologies for America when he stands on foreign soil. You are not a Patriot if you believe in the Constitution as our enduring foundation, or if you would fight to preserve the First and Second Amendments.

What are you? You are a Rightwing Extremist Threat. It says so in the DHS “assessment”. It says “the historic election of an African American president and the prospect of policy changes” are stirring the right. It says our chatter focuses on “the perceived loss of U.S. jobs” (yes, it actually says “perceived”). It says the winds of extremism are blowing because you are “antagonistic toward the new presidential administration and its perceived stance on a range of (social) issues.”

Oh, and this. You are on the DHS radar because your “rightwing extremist views bemoan the decline of U.S. stature.” Shall we assume that a leftwing extremist bemoans the expansion of U.S. stature?

I think we know the answer. We hear it every time the White House teleprompter rolls.

Monday is Patriots’ Day. But at the DHS, every day since Jan. 20, 2009, has been Rightwing Extremist Alert Day. Get used to it.

The Hussein Hilton

Dear Sen. McCain:

I stepped into a voting booth in suburban Chicago on Nov. 4, 2008, and cast my vote for John McCain to be President of the United States. I did so proudly, as a conservative Republican, and without trepidation.

Before casting that vote, I donated thousands of dollars to your Presidential campaign. I encouraged friends and neighbors to do the same. And I distributed McCain/Palin yard signs in my community, proudly wearing a McCain cap as well.

I did this because I believed you were qualified and deserving to be President. I supported you because I embrace the powerful message of "Country First". And when you admonished audiences on the campaign trail to "stand up, stand up, stand up and fight", I stood up.

Today, you stood up once again -- at President B. Hussein Obama's ridiculous Fiscal Responsibility Summit, an event staged only days after Obama signed a Fiscally Reprehensible $787 billion spending bill. I appreciated your searing, dry humor, engaged in a hostile setting to criticize the federal government's audacity in planning to spend obscene amounts of money on a new fleet of Marine One helicopters for the White House.

(The price tag for one new chopper, $400 million, exceeds the cost of the pair of Air Force One Boeing 747s, $363 million, that went into service in 1990. And, it should be added, 28 of these $400 million mega-choppers are on order).

You stood up, Senator, but I fear you ultimately surrendered. If you truly believe in "Country First" you would not have been anywhere near the White House today. You would have remained far removed from this bogus public relations stunt, this orchestrated "Summit".

Obama is making a mockery of the White House. He uses it as a large, elegant television studio for his endless parade of announcements and task forces. You would put your country first by rejecting the dangerous spending bills and bailouts Obama is shoving down the throats of the American people.

The campaign for the Presidency is over. But the the battle to keep our union strong never ends. The war to preserve the Constitution can not afford a truce.

In another lifetime, you endured the humiliation of the Hanoi Hilton in Vietnam. Today, I urge you to stand up and fight. Reject Obama's White House. We have entered a tenuous age when 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the address of the Barack Hussein Hilton. Enter with extreme caution.