Campaign Finance Scandal
by Peter Andrew of ConservativeAmerican.org
[The puppet’s top fundraiser sought money and support from disgraced political fundraiser Norman Hsu.]
Politico reports—Julianna Smoot, National Finance Director of the puppet’s Presidential campaign, originally sought the support of Norman Hsu. Hsu was a fugitive from the law and ran a Ponzi scheme.
Sex for Kindergartners Scandal
by Peter Andrew of ConservativeAmerica.org
The puppet laughs about being criticized for wanting Sex Education taught to kindergartners, but says, “It is the right thing to do.”
Posted in 2007 Articles
Tagged America, American Government, christians, Freedom, Louisiana, politics
Puppet Controversy—Supports Law-Breakers
by Peter Andrew of ConservativeAmerican.org
The puppet marched with illegal aliens waving Mexican flags in Chicago. He backs an easy way to convert 12-million illegals instantly to citizens. Immigrants who want to be here and want to be citizens should wave U.S. Flags.
World Net Daily says listen to the puppet’s promises to La Raza in 2007.
Posted in 2007 Articles
Tagged America, American Government, christians, Freedom, Louisiana, politics
[This is a great read even though I'm critical at times. This is only part of the entire work. I pulled these parts out because this is the most important part that Ms. Wolf was wanting to get across. I think she did it very well. Thanks Naomi for having the guts to do something like this. This is ACTION! **Again—these are Naomi Wolf's words. As usual, mind appear in this color ONLY! PS. Don't get Pissed off right away...read it through first.]
Fascist America, In 10 Easy Steps/The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
by Naomi Wolf, The Guardian
Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (was) published by Chelsea Green in September [Now available at Amazon.com]. Wolf graduated from Yale University and New College, and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. Her essays have appeared in The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Glamour, Ms, Esquire, The Washington Post, The New York Times. She is also a bestselling author of The Beauty Myth and has numerous other long works published.
[She wrote this about President Bush but it seems more fitting to describe what is happening now!]
Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down—the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody. They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy—but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration. Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree—domestically—as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government—the task of being aware of the Constitution has been outsourced from citizens’ ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors—we scarcely recognize the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don’t learn much about European history, the setting up of a Department of Homeland Security—remember who else was keen on the word homeland—didn’t raise the alarm bells it might have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable—as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realize.
[Now, the puppet has what he needs to seal it shut!]
Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the U.S. (The fascist shift does not progress like diagonal line rising steadily across a chart. Rather, it progresses in a buildup of many acts assaulting democracy simultaneously, which then form a critical mass…a “tipping point.”)
There have been other times of crisis in which the U.S. accepted limits on Civil Liberties, such as during the Civil War, when Lincoln declared Martial Law, and the Second World War, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented—all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without National boundaries in space—the globe itself is the battlefield. “This time,” Fein says, “there will be no defined end.”
Creating a terrifying threat—hydra-like, secretive, evil—is an old trick. It can, like Hitler’s invocation of a communist threat to the Nation’s security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reich-stag Fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced Constitutional Law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the global conspiracy of world Jewry, on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain—which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks—than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilization as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-Democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-Democracy uprising. With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantanamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now.
Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA ‘black site’ prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street. Gulags in history tend to metastasize, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalized. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the U.S.-run prisons we are aware of and those we can’t investigate adequately. [This should not have taken place. I agree. This was wrong and against our rights...the American's rights!] But Americans still assume this system and [these] detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don’t generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi Pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner—”First they came for the Jews.” Most Americans don’t understand yet that the destruction of the Rule of Law at Guantanamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24, 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People’s Court, which also bypassed the Judicial System—prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offenses, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the Rule of Law in favor of Nazi ideology when making decisions.
[I agree. By letting them take small steps they gain bigger steps. This country was founded on a People's government. My study of history and how this country has come to this point has led me to one single conclusion...its PEOPLE. The American people have been lazy. They are sleeping and not caring and the politicians know this. The old saying "Give an inch, they'll take a mile." There you go!]
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America’s security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the U.S. Military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time U.S. administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution.
[I was in the military. I think only those who served could actually say they truly understanding why Bush did what he did. If you've never been through the military, you have no clue to what you are talking about.]
Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security [This is a German Nazi term. I think more should be voice about that then the ability to protect American citizens at ALL cost.] hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode—but the administration’s endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in U.S. cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men [Only Republican men. I can walk down the streets of any city and find buses full of angry young any party men and the whole of America labels them as thugs and most of them are just scared!], dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. [Why? Because Florida State is about the only State left with paper ballots. I think we should all go back to paper ballots because I am positive if we had paper ballots for the 2008 election, the puppet would not be President. And, I had a first-hand account shared with me about the 2008 election in Michigan. Blank Panthers dressed all up in their customary threatening voters right outside the doors of the voting halls!] If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for public order on the next Election Day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station to restore public order.
Other harassment is more serious—the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents—a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 ‘suspicious incidents.’
The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) Agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organizations engaged in peaceful political activities—CIFA is supposed to track potential terrorist threats as it watches ordinary U.S. citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as terrorism. So, the definition of terrorist slowly expands to include the opposition.
[So, my American friends...this does explain why the Tea Party movements have been shunned!]
In 2004, America’s Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list—two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela’s Government—after Venezuela’s President had criticized Bush; and thousands of ordinary U.S. citizens. Professor Walter F. Murphy is Emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost Constitutional scholars in the Nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former Marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal.
But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, “Because I was on the Terrorist Watch list.”
“Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that,” asked the airline employee.
“I explained,” said Murphy, “that I had not so marched, but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution.”
“That’ll do it,” the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the Constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of ‘enemy of the people’ tend to expand ever deeper into civil life. James Yee, a U.S. citizen, was the Muslim Chaplain at Guantanamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the U.S. Military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest. Brandon Mayfield, a U.S. citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list. It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can’t get off.
[This is crazy...our freedom of speech sets us up to be a terrorist? Our Government is really screwed up. We really need to straighten this out.]
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not coordinate, in Goebbels’ term, ideologically. Since Civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically coordinate early on—the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7, 1933.
Bush supporters in State legislatures in several States put pressure on regents at State universities to penalize or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for Civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them. Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that “water-boarding is torture” was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job. Most recently, the administration purged eight U.S. attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the Civil Service in April 1933, attorneys were ‘coordinated’ too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
[Okay, because some law enforcement officers were doing their job and investigating the puppet, they were suspended. And...?]
The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of U.S. journalists are at an all-time high—Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened “critical infrastructure” when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration. Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C. Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellow-cake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy—a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the U.S. is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the U.S. Military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organizations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC‘s Kate Adie. In some cases, reporters have been wounded or killed [That's normal in war. If a reporter is going to attempt to report live or on the line, they have to expect death or injury—American soldiers do. I really don't think an American soldier would purposely shot at a journalist. Military law is worst than civil law in any way, shape, or form.], including ITN‘s Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the U.S. Military and taken to violent prisons; the news organizations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. [Exactly what is happening now. Not only what the puppet is doing but all the way to the climate change. Do you realize that the temperature degrees that were reported on the news this winter were off by at least five degrees. That means the weather was colder outside than they were reporting. Facts speak for themselves.] Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the Nation. The yellow-cake charge, too, was based on forged papers. You won’t have a shutdown of news in modern America—it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it’s not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can’t tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution. Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and “beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death,” according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin‘s Soviet Union, dissidents were enemies of the people. National Socialists called those who supported Weimar Democracy November traitors. And here is where the circle closes—most Americans do not realize that since September of last year—when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006—the President has the power to call any U.S. citizen an enemy combatant. He has the power to define what enemy combatant means. The President can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the Executive Branch the right to define enemy combatant any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin’s gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantanamo’s, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantanamo, is all isolation cells.)
[I believe in keeping American secrets secrets. After 9/11 there were things that had to be done that the normal citizen wouldn't do and wouldn't want to know about. But in order to keep blood shed off American soil, these things must be done. Those who have never studied war, who have never studied history in debt, who have never held an M-16, who have never threw a grenade—you don't know the first thing about keeping a country safe and have no place telling those that do how to do their job. If it sickens you, that's find...but in order for you to sleep soundly at night, in order to keep bombs from going off down the street, in order to keep your child's school from being that next target someone has to stand on the wall. If you are not willing to do that, than shut your mouth and move on. The puppet...is a coward. He has never stood on a wall. That is obvious. For a President to release National secrets the way he did...he has never stood on a wall. He has never felt the pain of a soldier dying. To me, it was more like he saw death and enjoyed it. Keeping a country safe is never easy for anyone. For those that stand on that wall and do their job—no matter how nasty it gets—they do it for YOU, to keep YOU safe, if you like it or not! What I don't believe in is letting the enemy get the best of us. We have become too easy. America's doors are too open. We need to close them for a while and regroup. All non-Americans need to go home and we need to step back and take a breath. We are letting too many people take advantage of us. And this paragraph, right here, is the result of an over used, exhausted nation. We have allowed the enemy to drive us into the panic mode. We are better than this. Yes, our legal rights as individual citizens are most important. So, let's close our doors and regain what we've lost. Then, and only then, should we allow visitors in.]
We, U.S. citizens, will get a trial eventually—for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even U.S. citizens fair trials. Enemy combatant is a status offense—it is not even something you have to have done. “We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model—you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we’re going to hold you,” says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder—it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests—usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV, and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn’t real dissent. There just isn’t freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
[Do you hear the noise? I hear it. What is it? I know...shhhh...it's AMERICANS!]
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears’s meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole’s baby, the New York Times editorialized about this shift—A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American Democracy have been passed in the dead of night…Beyond actual insurrection, the President may now use military troops as a Domestic Police Force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any other condition.
[Yes, this is so. Duties of the State Militia other than acts of war against a State are these. This has always been and has never changed. The National Guard belongs to the States and can be used in any way the States see fit. My National Guard unit help with a concert. We were allowed to wear our BDU pants but we had to wear black shirts with the words security on the back. All we did was help the regular security in the Super Dome. Don't become civilian police. States can use THEIR State Guard anyway they see fit. That's why they are their. Right now my son, a National Guardsman, is working the beach building walls to keep the oil out. And Governor Jindal can call on Texas and Mississippi or who ever and ask if we can borrow some units. For the hurricanes, we get units from all over helping out down here. Not just in Louisiana but all along the coast...That's what it means to be an American. So next time you see a guardsman. Don't criticize him or her. Thank them instead. The federal government can also use the federal military for these events. I don't understand the problem with this. I love my military. If there is a natural disaster, disease outbreak or terrorist attack—bring in the ARMY!]
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act—which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for Domestic Law Enforcement. (But the above mention reasons are WAY beyond local law enforcement task. I think I’d rather the Army than the FBI or CIA!) Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a President to declare Federal Martial Law. [Or is this just panic...from where I sit, the puppet doesn't stand a chance with the military. I'll take my chances with my Army.] It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did—having seen citizens bullied by a monarch’s soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias’ power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
[I've never seen a soldier burst into my house and rape my daughter and kill my son and steal my food. Have you? That's what the founders meant. Protecting your people is one thing. Controlling them is another. The Reds were controlling. Our military protect and if you've ever met them, you'd see that. Their hearts are BIG!]
Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini‘s march on Rome or Hitler’s roundup of political prisoners. Our Democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and Judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that. Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in Democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion. It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating Harvest Festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere—while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing—”dogs go on with their doggy life…How everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster.”
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of Democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly—our Democratic traditions, independent Judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are at war in a long war—a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the President—without U.S. citizens realizing it yet—the power over U.S. citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone. That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions—and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the what ifs.
What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack—say, God† forbid, a dirty bomb? The Executive can declare a State of Emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani—because any Executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.
[Okay, let's look at this. It's over a year. The puppet in office. One that's worst. Much worst. We have our next crises. The Gulf oil spill. He does want to shut things down. He's tried and Louisiana is fighting it because we don't give in that easy. The one State that can play dirty with dirty is dear old Louisiana. We've cleaned up but we can pull out the old strings if we need them.]
What if the publisher of a major U.S. newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a right-wing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite. Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us—staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda.
[So, does this mean that because I'm using my free speech rights on this here blog that I'll be put into jail? Like Miss California, shunned for life. I don't think so. There is just too much fear and we have to erase it. We are Americans. We don't crumble under tyranny. Sorry.]
This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody’s help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a U.S. unrestrained by real Democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world. We need to look at history and face the what ifs. For if we keep going down this road, the end of America could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think—that is how it was before—and this is the way it is now.
“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands…is the definition of tyranny,” wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our Nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.
Americans expect to have freedom around us just as we expect to have air to breathe, so we have only limited understanding of the furnaces of repression that the Founders knew intimately….Most of us have only a faint understand of how societies open up or close down, become supportive of freedom or ruled by fear, because this is not the kind of history that we feel, or that our educational system believes is important for us to know. Another reason for our vagueness about how liberty lives or dies is that we have tended lately to subtract out the tasks of the patriot—to let the professionals—lawyers, scholars, activists, politicians—worry about understanding the Constitution and protecting our rights. We think that ‘they’ should manage our rights, the way we hire a professional to do our taxes; ‘they’ should run the Government, create policy, worry about whether democracy is up and running. We’re busy….
In 2002, the Bush administration created and named the Department of Homeland Security...American Presidents have before now referred to the United States as the Nation or the Republic, and to the Nation’s internal policies as domestic. By 1930, Nazi propagandists referred to Germany not as the Nation or the Republic—which it was—but rather as the Heimat—the homeland. Homeland is a word that memoirist Ernestine Bradley, who grew up in Nazi Germany, describes as saturated with nationalist power—“Heimat is a German word which has no satisfactory equivalent in other languages. It denotes the region where one has been born and remains rooted…longing to be in the Heimat causes the incurable disease of Heimweh.”
In 2001, the U.S.A. Patriot Act let the Federal Government compel doctors to give up confidential medical records without a warrant demonstrating probable cause….I am describing the movement of the pendulum—as in the American cliché, “The pendulum always swings back.” We are so familiar with, and so reliant upon, the pendulum. That is why you are so sure that America is different. But the pendulum’s working depends on unrestricted motion. In America, up until now, the basic checks and balances established by the Founders have functioned so well that the pendulum has always managed to swing back. It’s very success has made us lazy. We trust it too much, without looking at what a pendulum requires in order to function—the stable framework that allows movement; space in which to move; that is, Liberty. The pendulum cannot work now as it has before. There are now two major differences between these past examples of the pendulum’s motion and the situation we face today.
…previous wars and emergencies have had endpoints…[and]when prior dark times unfolded in America, we forbade torture, and the Rule of Law was intact.…I believe we honor the memory of the victims of Nazism with our willingness to face the lessons that history—even the most nightmarish history—can offer us about how to defend freedom….I am calling your attention to important lessons from history about how fragile Civil Liberties are and how quickly freedom can be lost.
“Bitter Clingers” Gaffe
post by Peter Andrew of ConservativeAmerican.org
The puppet tells wealthy liberal elites, “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest…and it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Even the H.R. Puff-n-Stuff website called that “a problematic judgment call.”
Posted in 2007 Articles
Tagged America, American Government, christians, Freedom, Louisiana, politics
The puppet’s Family Owned Slaves!
post by Peter Andrew of ConservativeAmerican.org
The puppet tells a crowd in Selma, Alabama that his father “came over to this country. He met this woman whose great great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves [He goes on to give speeches about him being part of this slaving past then he says this!]; but she had a good idea there was some craziness going on because they looked at each other and they decided that we know that the world as it has been it might not be possible for us to get together and have a child.” The child was the puppet, whose great-great-great-great-great grandfather owned slaves! That’s right—the puppet comes from white family that owned slaves!
Playing Dumb
post by Peter Andrew of ConservativeAmerican.org
Time Magazine says the puppet played dumb—“We don’t have the technical capacity to create something like that. It’s pretty extraordinary.”
The puppet, disavowing the possibility that a YouTube video mocking Hillary Clinton was created by his campaign staff. Two days later, the “Apple 1984 ad” spoof was revealed to be the creation of a political operative employed by a firm overseeing technology for the puppet’s campaign. The puppet campaign later fired the creator—probably after thanking him.
Posted in 2007 Articles
Tagged America, American Government, christians, Freedom, Louisiana, politics
Biden—Racist Comments about the Puppet!
post by Peter Andrew of ConservativeAmerica.org
[Another Gaffe for Joe Biden.]
Fox News reports—The day Biden announced his Presidential bid—the Delaware Senator was roundly criticized for calling the puppet “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” [He’s the first half-black man to be articulate? To be bright? To be clean? Good Lord, man! Who let you out of the cave?]
Posted in 2007 Articles
Tagged America, American Government, christians, Freedom, Louisiana, politics
