Category Archives: Political Commentary

The Obama Fundraising Fraud

If John McCain were doing this, the press would be crying bloody murder:

He may now be running the biggest underground finance operation since Nixon deployed the plumbers as his key operatives in 1972.

And there seem to be a lot of parallels with the voter registration fraud being perped by ACORN. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

And of course, if McCain ends up losing this because he didn’t have enough money, it will be justice, because it was his idiotic assault on the First Amendment that got us here.

Spreading THE Wealth

A vanity poster over at Free Republic makes a good point:

Last year I let a family member move in with me. I’ll call her my niece. My niece was down on her luck and needed a place to stay while she got on her feet.

As it turns out, she was actually down with drugs and needed a place to lie on the couch while she got on the phone. But anyway. I came home one day and was looking for my iron, so I could iron clothes to wear to work.

(“Work is that place you go to,” I explained to her, “and they pay you to do things for them. Yes, like that time you took the baggie to some guy named Raoul in the parking lot of the grocery store nearby. Rather like that, only more regular, and legal.”)

Anyway, my niece said, “Oh, I loaned the iron to my friend Rachel.”

I puzzled over this for a bit. She loaned my iron to some girl I barely knew? She loaned my iron to some girl she barely knew?! Would I loan any of her items to a friend of mine? Let me think. No. I wouldn’t.

So why would she?

The clue lies in the wording. “I loaned the iron…” THE iron. Not YOUR iron, Auntie Beth, THE iron. The local iron. The iron that existed here before I came and is therefore part of the landscape. Like the sun, the trees, and the street. Belonging to nobody, or everybody.

So let’s really parse what Barack Obama says to plumbers and other people who’ve done something with their lives besides lecture like a lawyer turned college professor turned professional pied piper: “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

I think the most important word in that sentence really is “the.” THE wealth. Not your wealth, says Obama, because it’s not yours. And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t intend to spread HIS too thin. I have a feeling his daughters will be taken care of before anyone else’s kids.

Snide comments aside, Obama said THE wealth because that’s how he thinks of it. Community property. Belonging to everyone. Just THERE, like sunlight, a fact of life that we determine how to utilize.

To Obama, it’s not something that belongs to anyone. Not something you created, earned, or own. Just something that you somehow managed to get hold of, maybe by picking it off a tree, and now you need to share what came from that tree.

And don’t worry. That tree will always bear fruit. It always has, right? Well no, it hasn’t, but only the gardener who planted it realizes that. The lawyer who comes along representing the neighbors who’ve been eying that fruit tree doesn’t know, or care, how it got there. It’s there now, isn’t it?

And it isn’t your tree anymore. It’s THE tree.

Yup. Some want to spread THE wealth, and others want to create it.

What Fred Said

Why can’t John McCain make a speech like this?

Obama and the Democrats believe that Americans in a time of crisis will be willing to sacrifice their freedoms, abandon their founding principles and common sense and ease into the mediocrity of the warm embrace of the Washington papa bear who will take care of all of our problems for us.

These are not the ideals of the America that drew brave men and women from all over the world to our shores. In most cases, they were fleeing nations with the heavy hand of government, intolerance and class warfare. They risked everything to experience our Founding Fathers’ notion of a limited government with powers that were delineated, checked and balanced, in a land where they could live and prosper in a free, dynamic, upwardly mobile society – the kind that existed no where else in the world. But Obama and his liberal friends don’t see things that way.

The liberal agenda is based upon the belief that there are elites among us who know more and know better than the rest of us. And that with the application of their intellect and power … and our money … they can impose regulations and establish programs, bureaus and agencies that will solve all the problems of the masses’.

Senator Obama and his supporters essentially see society not as dynamic and changing or full of opportunity. They see one that is divided by economic classes into which every one of us is permanently assigned. In their worldview, those in a lesser economic class are presumably resentful and envious. So it’s the government’s job to level things out … or as Senator Obama would say “spread the wealth around.” It’s about dividing the pie among static classes, not trying to make the pie bigger for everyone or creating opportunity in an upwardly mobile society.

This is the reason why they do not understand Joe the Plumber. Because he doesn’t have a higher income today they assume that he never will and that he believes he never will. They expect him to resent anyone whose doing better than he is, instead of planning to do better himself. They don’t understand the Joes of the world. Never have. Never will.

There’s more. And here’s the video.

A Depressing Comment

Over at Samizdata, Jonathan Pearce wonders if freedom seekers will be heading the other way after the election:

Occasionally, whenever one of us Samizdata scribes writes about events in the UK, such as loss of civil liberties, or the latest financial disasters perpetrated by the government, or crime, or whatnot, there is sometimes a comment from an expatriate writer, or US citizen in particular, suggesting that we moaners should pack our bags, cancel the mail and come on over to America. Like Brian Micklethwait of this parish, I occasionally find such comments a bit annoying; it is not as if the situation in Jefferson’s Republic is particularly great just now, although a lot depends on where you live (Texas is very different from say, Vermont or for that matter, Colorado).

But considering what might happen if Obama wins the White House and the Dems increase or retain their hold on Congress, I also wonder whether we might encounter the example of enterprising Americans coming to Britain, not the other way round. The dollar is rising against the pound, so any assets that are transferred from the US to Britain go further. Taxes are likely to rise quite a bit if The One gets in, although they are likely to rise in the UK too to pay for the enormous increase in public debt, even if the Tories win the next election in 2010.

For a number of reasons stated over there, it seems unlikely, but this comment stood out:

I think the general message here should be that the whole western world is on the same trajectory, and shopping around for liberty is going to be ultimately futile. In a sense, we all need to be “liberty patriots” and do our best in our own countries to reverse the rot, because wherever you flee to, it’s happening there too, if at a different pace or in in slightly different ways. The anti-liberty movement is operating in every nation, and trans and supra-nationally, and everywhere it is winning. There is nowhere to run.

Well, as I’ve long noted on this blog, that’s what space programs are for.

Muggers For Obama

Well, I guess now we know what Senator Obama meant when he told his followers to “get in people’s faces“:

Richard said the robber took $60 from the woman, then became angry when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the victim’s car. The attacker then punched and kicked the victim, before using the knife to scratch the letter “B” into her face, Richard said.

And they accuse McCain and Palin of inciting violence.

Well, it could have been worse (and it may become so if he’s elected, and in control of the Justice Department). She should consider herself lucky.

[Update on Friday afternoon]

It turns out to have been a hoax. What a stupid woman. Normally it’s leftists who stage things like this.