Category Archives: Social Commentary

The Eighteenth Brumaire

of Barack Obama:

…Obama is not a communist, even in the twentieth century meaning of the term. Communism is about state ownership of the means of production. The Obama administration does not seek ownership. In fact, where it acquired ownership through the bailout, the administration now works to divest itself. What Obama is building is a large government bureaucracy whose expanding limbs find their way into every facet of human existence, a government that does not own the means of production but controls them by increased and oppressive regulation and taxation. Obama’s political inspiration is more likely to be Mussolini or Peron, even Hugo Chavez, than Lenin or Stalin.

As I’ve long noted, the difference is pretty much transparent to the serfuser.

Mike Bloomberg

Liberal fascist:

…yer honor, your job is to manage the city government, to make sure the snow gets shoveled and the trash gets picked up, not to lecture the rest of us and use the power of City Hall to impose your particular life-style choices on everybody else. But that’s what happens when conservatives let the Left seize the narrative and promote governmental mission creep. Once government “addresses” a problem by throwing taxpayer money at it, it’s only a short hop to government claiming — as Bloomberg does in the clip — that because government spends money on a “problem,” it now has the right to dictate personal behavior. Sheer genius, really.

By now, the notion that government from the feds on down has the “right” to interfere in every aspect of American life is well-established and nearly unquestioned. Two generations of red-diaper babies have grown up with visions of the Frankfurt School dancing in their heads; they’ve adapted Marxist tactics to the capitalist system in the furtherance of their world-view — George Soros, take a bow — but their goal remains the same: power, disguised as “compassion.”

The collapse of free societies doesn’t start with the Vandals’ assault on the gates of Rome. It starts with “reasonable” restrictions on freedom, “carve-outs” and “exemptions” to constitutional principles, “temporary” taxes and suspensions of civil liberties — all designed to inure the public to the destruction of bedrock guarantees ( i.e. “Congress shall make no law…”) in the name of what’s good for them.

If Jonah does another edition of his book, Bloomberg’s photo could be on the cover instead of the Hitler smiley face.

[Update late morning]

Opposition to Mike Bloomberg on guns has nothing to do with defending our civil rights. No, it’s because we’re anti-Semitic:

According to MSNBC contributors Mike Barnicle and Al Sharpton, opposition to New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun-control push is partly the result of anti-Semitism. “Let’s get down to it, Mike Bloomberg, mayor of New York City, there’s a level of anti-Semitism in this thing directed towards Bloomberg,” Barnicle argued on Morning Joe, “It’s out there.” “No doubt about that,” Sharpton responded.

“If he was not a big-city Jewish man and was from another ethnic group, in some parts, I think it would be different,” Sharpton continued.

Note that that this is the same Al Sharpton who incited riots against Orthodox Jews with anti-Semitic code words. I’ll never understand why any television outlet would give this race-baiting ass-clown a venue for his idiotic opinions.

The Socialist Paradise

…of Venezuela:

Apologists for Chavez mentor Fidel Castro blame Cuba’s sixty years of economic problems on the US embargo. If it weren’t for Uncle Sam, they say, Castro would have built a socialist paradise by now.

Venezuela is the test for this talking point. Not only is there no US embargo in Venezuela, but the country also has huge oil reserves. And what does it have? Food and medicine and foreign currency shortages.

There are very real theoretical reasons, based on fundamental human nature, why socialism doesn’t work, and empirically fails everywhere it’s tried. But it’s also human nature to wish it would work, so those ignorant or in denial of those reasons continue to try it. Or to try to defeat human nature by creating the New Soviet Man, at the point of a gun.

Slaying The Dragons Of Mars

Stewart Money has an interesting essay on progress in understanding the risks of a Mars flight:

This most recent experience brings to mind another observation Zubrin made in The Case for Mars, once it was foreseen that the oceans could be crossed, people of the era did not wait for the advent of iron plated steamships, they raised sail and headed out into the unknown with what they had available ”iron men in wooden ships.”

Why should we do any less?

Why indeed?

[Cross-posted at Safe Is Not An Option]

If You Don’t Support The “Assault Weapons” Ban

…you hate children and want them to die.

Plus, Ted Cruz gets a scolding, not an answer:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California wants us to know that she is “not a sixth-grader.”

Anyone who saw the recent exchange before the Senate Judiciary Committee between Feinstein and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas over guns and the Constitution might speculate that the reason she said this is because she couldn’t pass the entrance exam.

As for Cruz, a friend of mine for a decade, it turns out that the most important of the “Senate rules” is unwritten: Thou shalt not embarrass a fellow senator – even one in the opposing party – by making him or her look unprepared, uneducated or uninformed.

That’s not always an easy thing to avoid. The rulebook doesn’t say what to do when a Senate colleague who wants to ban certain guns dodges a tough question and then goes on the attack – thus embarrassing herself.

Nevertheless, Cruz, 42, is headed to the principal’s office. His infraction was asking the right question. What Cruz wanted to know was this: Why do liberals cherish the First and Fourth Amendments, but trash the one in between – the Second Amendment?

That’s a brainteaser. Why does the left play favorites with different parts of the Bill of Rights?

Experience teaches that the better the question, the less likely you are to get a straight answer.

That’s what happened here. Feinstein went on the offense. Abandoning reason for emotion, she scolded Cruz for daring to “lecture” her. After all, she said, she had seen the bodies of people killed by gunfire.

The illogic of these people defies description. They run on pure, grade-A unadulterated emotion.