Category Archives: Politics on the left

Give us more money so we can lie to you more persuasively

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The left have the best cliches and their arguments embody every fantasy and wish anyone who has ever hoped to live in a better world than the one we have has had. The only thing that keeps them from winning every election is that their ideas are so wrong and misguided that after a few years of the nonsense they peddle, conditions are so bad that the electorate become desperate to see the last of them and to get someone to fix up the mess they left behind. That continues until the voting population forgets, as it inevitably does, how rotten the ideas of the left actually are. This is from John Hinderaker at Powerline on why the left wants to stop the right from criticising the left:

[The left] have a problem. Their arguments are terrible, and their theories are contradicted at nearly every turn by the facts. Which means that they can’t withstand criticism. They can’t take competition; they need a monopoly. Which, in turn, means that they must prevent voters from hearing conservative ideas and arguments. They can do that in the schools and in the culture, and they don’t have to worry about newspapers or broadcast television. But there is a loophole of sorts: during election seasons, conservatives can buy time on television and on the radio to broadcast messages that liberals are otherwise able to blockade. This is intolerable! Because when people hear conservative ideas, unfiltered by the liberal press, they tend to find them persuasive.

And then there are the 47% who vote for a living but that’s something else again.

Don’t worry, I won’t let anybody tell me

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It’s not even that she is so stupefyingly ignorant that is so remarkable but that it is apparently a winner for her to say it. This is the story of the video above and the title of the post it comes from exactly restates what the next Democrat to run for president intends to argue: ‘DON’T LET ANYBODY TELL YOU’ THAT ‘BUSINESSES CREATE JOBS’.

There may be some way for an interpretation of the most destructive piece of arithmetic in history – Y=C+I+G – to enter more vacuous territory, but it’s hard to see how. For her, her husband apparently and all too many on her side of the fence, it is government spending, not productive businesses, that causes economies to grow and individuals to be employed. (To understand the reference to arithmetic, you need to go to the video.)

You think the American economy will recover? With people as out of it as she is at the helm, the US economy will never recover, not ever. And if we give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she actually knows better but her supporters do not, what comfort is there in that? Personally though, I think she is saying what she believes. What then for living standards a decade from now?

It’s not easy being non-green

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I went along to hear ex-Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore last night and a very rewarding evening it was. A fellow Canadian and from our west coast so I may even have travelled in the same circles during the dropout stage of my life in the early 70s. I certainly knew whereof he spoke. I encourage you to go along, and also catch up with him on Andrew Bolt tomorrow. He has a roadshow presentation which you can hear for yourself, so I will stick to the Q&A which was as interesting as the rest. And if you are of the opinion you have heard it all before, you may have but I hadn’t so it may be worth your while. He has also not yet been scheduled for an interview by the Trotskyists at the ABC.

First my own question, which is something that worries me a very great deal. Moore presented a long line of statistics and other evidence, some I was familiar with and some I wasn’t, in large part pointing to the fraudulence of the global warming scam but also dealing with other areas of the environmental movement and the massive damage it is causing. So my question was to point out that anyone who has the inclination to follow the evidence and look at the data has already caught on and understands there is nothing to concern us. What, therefore, do you think, I asked, about green policies really being a form of religious observance, not science based, and therefore unreachable by the use of rational argument. To which he replied:

“I have no answer.”

I think that is the same answer I have and it is the essence of the problem. There is always some stray fact or random event that will keep people who desperately want to believe the worst about our way of life from straying from the fold. There are no crucial tests they set themselves. There is no actual standard, such as seeing whether or not temperatures have actually risen, which you would think ought to be fundamental. To a true fundamentalist there is no evidence actually required. The old cartoonist standard of the old man with the “we are doomed” sign is the mainstream. We live in an age of faith and nothing is allowed to disturb that faith.

The other answer to a question I found interesting was about why the environmental movement has been able to maintain such a strong position in spite of the massive harm it does and the absence of any serious factual basis for their claims. This was his answer:

There is a great convergence of our elites, each of which sees advantage to themselves in promoting and going along with the environmentalists:

1) the greens
2) politicians
3) the media
4) the grant-seeking academic community
5) businesses who want to look green as a promotional activity
6) most religions

That is a formidable combination that, quite frankly, I don’t see any prospect of defeating. In more authoritarian regimes green politics is a nullity but here in the West, I can see it is one more reason to believe we are at the end of time. It is only the fantastic cost to individuals that may eventually slow but never stop the damage being done. When your electricity bill is $1000 a quarter, there may be some reconsideration. In the meantime, I might go and get myself one of those “we are doomed” signs for myself.

If you would like to see Patrick, this is where you still can while he is in Australia. Also on Andrew Bolt tomorrow, at 10:00 am. A very good speaker and comes with the authority of someone who has been there and knows where all the bodies are buried.

Where you can still see Patrick Moore in Australia

MELBOURNE
27 Oct. 12 for 12:30 The Australian Club 110 William St 2-course lunch $110 p.p. (dress code)

CANBERRA
30 Oct.

1st Session 2-3pm afternoon tea 3-30 pm,
2nd session 3:30- 4:30 pm

Hughes Community Centre Wisdom Street, Hughes
$20 donation ($10 for students) requested plus $2 for afternoon tea payable at the door

PERTH
1 Nov.
1st meeting 4 – 5pm (GM crops) C3 Church, 94 Waratah Ave. Dalkeith.
2nd meeting 5:30 – 7pm (Climate), C3 Church, 94 Waratah Ave. Dalkeith
a $20 donation ($10 for students) is requested to cover costs – covers both sessions.

HOBART
3 Nov. TO BE ADVISED.
Please register your interest in the Hobart event with Garth Paltridge (paltridge@iinet.net.au)

BRISBANE
Nov. 5th 7 for 7:30, Irish Club 175 Elizabeth St. A $20 donation at the door is requested to cover costs.

NOOSA
Nov. 6th 5 for 5:30, TheJ, 60 Noosa Dr, Noosa Heads
To book for this event, just click on:
http://sa2.seatadvisor.com/sabo/servlets/EventSearch?presenter=AUNOOSHI&event=mse0611

a $20 donation will buy a ticket.

Gough Whitlam – his last dismissal

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gough

I was in my first year in Australia and in transition from left to right at the moment Gough was dismissed by the Governor-General. Not long before I had been astonished at my own lack of enthusiasm for the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese which was something I thought I had cared about and wished to see. Instead, it left me feeling hollow and uncertain. It was also the year that I came upon Hayek’s Road to Serfdom in the College library at Bendigo and G.L.S. Shackle as well. Nevertheless, I thought Bill Hayden’s budget was very good, being still Keynesian in my outlook. And as a Canadian who had been brought up on the principles of the King-Bing affair, which meant governors-general did not dismiss Prime Ministers, I thought Kerr’s decision was fundamentally wrong, and indeed, in the light of history could never happen again. If a PM has control of the House, the PM remains the PM. But he was nevertheless a bad Prime Minister who has left a bad legacy behind, and it is only the blurring of the years that may have created the impression that Rudd and Gillard were worse. This was put up at Catallaxy by Sinclair and it really does tell a story.

Whitlam-Legacy

And the only thing that saved Medibank from becoming as disastrous as the English or Canadian systems is that Malcolm Fraser found he couldn’t get rid of it so he merely legislated so that everyone could use their Medibank levy to buy private insurance instead if they preferred. It is why we have the best system in the world because you can be in the public system and get reasonable care or you can pay your own way and get better care, with the dual form of funding attracting more resources into the health care system in total than either on their own would do.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum. OK. I will therefore say he was not worse than Rudd-Gillard which his friends will think of as all right and my friends will know perfectly well what I mean. The cartoon, by the way, is from The Guardian. It apparently is intended to be respectful so I think I can have it here as well. But “to show us what was possible” as an encomium to Gough is about as clueless a line about a failed politician as you are ever likely to see.

“The Obamas have taken lies, dishonesty, deceit, mendacity, subterfuge, and obfuscation to new depths”

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I have just been sent a copy of a column originally written in February 2012 and then reprinted in January 2013 but which could be reprinted every day before or since and would not grow stale in the retelling. Between the allowing of Ebola to cross so easily into the US while blatantly only pretending to fight a war against the Islamic State, Obama is everything that this column says and more. The one aspect that makes this particular column so untouchable is that the author is a black American and therefore cannot be accused of racism as is the norm for critics of the President. The article was titled, Why I Do Not Like the Obamas but it goes well beyond not liking into the kinds of disgust I feel for him (and his wife) and everything they have done. He also takes note of the singular role the media has played in protecting Obama from any serious oversight. Not surprisingly, this is not an issue often raised in the media, but what is more surprising is now seldom it is mentioned on blogs and in other writings by conservatives.

The author is Mychal Massie and he blogs at The Daily Rant. This is what he wrote:

The other evening on my twitter, a person asked me why I didn’t like the Obamas? Specifically I was asked: “I have to ask, why do you hate the Obamas. It seems personal not policy related. You even dissed their Christmas family pic.” The truth is I do not like the Obamas, what they represent, their ideology, and I certainly do not like his policies and legislation.

I’ve made no secret of my contempt for the Obamas. As I responded to the person who asked me the aforementioned question, I don’t like them because they are committed to the fundamental change of my/our country into what can only be regarded as a Communist state.

I don’t hate them per definition, but I condemn them because they are the worst kind of racialists, they are elitist Leninists with contempt for traditional America. They display disrespect for the sanctity of the office he holds, and for those who are willing to admit same, Michelle Obama’s raw contempt for white America is transpicuous.

I don’t like them because they comport themselves as emperor and empress. I expect, no, I demand respect for the Office of President and a love of our country and her citizenry from the leader entrusted with the governance of same. President and Mrs. Reagan displayed an unparalleled love for the country and her people. The Reagans made Americans feel good about themselves and about what we could accomplish. Could you envision President Reagan instructing his Justice Department to act like jack-booted thugs?

Presidents are politicians, and all politicians are known and pretty much expected to manipulate the truth, if not outright lie; but, even using that low standard, the Obamas have taken lies, dishonesty, deceit, mendacity, subterfuge, and obfuscation to new depths. They are verbally abusive to the citizenry, and they display an animus for civility.

I do not like them because they both display bigotry overtly: as in the case of Harvard Professor Louis Gates when Obama accused the Cambridge Police of acting stupidly, and as in her code speak pursuant to now being able to be proud of America. I view that statement and that mindset as an insult to those who died to provide a country where a Kenyan, his illegal alien relatives, and his alleged progeny, could come and not only live freely; but he could rise to the highest, most powerful position in the world. Michelle Obama is free to hate and disparage whites because Americans of every description paid with their blood to ensure her right to do same.

I have a saying, that “the only reason a person hides things is because they have something to hide.” No president in history has spent over a million dollars to keep his records and his past sealed. And what the two of them have shared has been proved to be lies. He lied about when and how they met; he lied about his mother’s death and problems with insurance; Michelle lied to a crowd pursuant to nearly $500,000 in bank stocks they inherited from his family. He has lied about his father’s military service, about the civil rights movement, ad nauseum.

He lied to the world about the Supreme Court in a State of the Union address. He berated and publicly insulted a sitting Congressman. He has surrounded himself with the most rabidly radical, socialist academicians today. He has fought for abortion procedures and opposed rulings that protected women and children — that even Planned Parenthood did not seek to support. He is openly hostile to business and aggressively hostile to Israel.
His wife treats being the First Lady as her personal American Express Black Card (arguably the most prestigious credit card in the world). I condemn them because as people are suffering, losing their homes, their jobs, their retirements – he and his family are arrogantly showing off their life of entitlement as he goes about creating and fomenting class warfare.

I don’t like them, and I neither apologize nor retreat from my public condemnation of them and of his policies. We should condemn them for the disrespect they show our people, for his willful and unconstitutional actions pursuant to obeying the Constitutional parameters he is bound by, and his willful disregard for Congressional authority.

Dislike for them has nothing to do with the color of their skin; it has everything to do with their behavior, attitudes, and policies. And I have open scorn for their playing the race card.

It is my intention to do all within my ability to ensure their reign is one term. I could go on, but let me conclude with this. I condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the media for refusing to investigate them as they did President Bush and President Clinton and for refusing to label the Obamas for what they truly are. There is no scenario known to man whereby a white president and his wife could ignore laws, flaunt their position, and lord over the people as these two are permitted out of fear for their color.

As I wrote in a syndicated column titled “Nero In The White House” –

“Never in my life, inside or outside of politics, have I witnessed such dishonesty in a political leader. He is the most mendacious political figure I have ever witnessed. Even by the low standards of his presidential predecessors, his narcissistic, contumacious arrogance is unequalled. Using Obama as the bar, Nero would have to be elevated to sainthood…Many in America wanted to be proud when the first person of color was elected president, but instead, they have been witness to a congenital liar, a woman who has been ashamed of America her entire life, failed policies, intimidation, and a commonality hitherto not witnessed in political leaders. He and his wife view their life at our expense as an entitlement – while America’s people go homeless, hungry and unemployed.” (WND.com; 8/8/11)

Oh, and as for it being personal, you tell me how you would feel if a senator from Illinois sent you a personally signed card, intended to intimidate you and your family because you had written a syndicated column titled “Darth Democrat” that was critical of him.

Is this cynicism or just the way it is?

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From Instapundit

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Only American Ground Troops Can Defeat ISIS.

Yeah, but that’s not Obama’s plan. His plan is to look like he’s kinda doing something until November, then let ISIS win.

Or perhaps we could go to one of the comments at Instapundit for some amplification of the same point:

Lets just pretend for a moment that America had elected to the presidency, a closet Muslim who wanted to enable the establishment of a caliphate across the middle east and north africa. How would such a President act, that is different from how this President acts?

Good question. What’s the answer?

It’s the media – Obama is just a low grade leftist with a high grade media defence

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obama cover up team

Obama could not have gotten away with even a quarter of his mis-rule if he were not supported to the hilt by the American media, the academic world and the far left. But it is the unbalance in the media where nothing negative about Obama ever becomes a raging news story that has mattered the most. It is only Obama’s fantastic level of incompetence that has been able to breach the defences that surround the president. The media are stone cold ignorant and live in as much of a fantasy world as Obama, completely unable to understand the nature of the world as it is and what is required to maintain a civilised community.

Another forgotten moment in history

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hitler stalin pact

Totalitarians come in so many different forms and the mutation rate is astounding. This is from Daniel Hannan in an article in The Telegraph in London on The greatest cultural victory of the Left has been to disregard the Nazi-Soviet Pact. There are so many cultural victories of this sort that it is hard to know which is the greatest or whether it is the facts they hide of the half truths they distort. Anyway, this is how Daniel begins:

Seventy-five years ago today [September 26], Red Army troops smashed into Poland. Masters of deception and propaganda, they encouraged locals to believe that they were coming to join the battle against Hitler, who had invaded two weeks’ earlier. But, within a day, the true nature of the Nazi-Soviet collaboration was exposed. . . .

It’s this lop-sidedness in our folk memory that we need to address. While Nazism is well understood as the monstrosity it was, there is often a lingering sense that Communism was well-intentioned, even though it went wrong. The merest connection with fascism bars a politician from office; yet those who actively supported the USSR are allowed to become ministers and European Commissioners. Wearing a Che Guevara tee-shirt is not regarded in the same light as wearing an Adolf Hitler tee-shirt; but it should be.

As the first of the comments noted, “It is a leftist myth that fascism and marxism are opposites. In reality they are both extreme leftist totalitarian rivals, while the opposite of both of them is free market libertarian capitalism.” A good deal of politics on the left revolves around my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Until the Soviet Union was attacked in 1941, the left found tooth and nail against the war. The enemy of the left are our free institutions and bourgeois values. That the carriers of the opposition are totalitarian crackpots is merely a detail that can be easily ignored.

Obama girl – then and now

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This is astonishing. I saw the second video but didn’t appreciate just how amazing it was until I saw the first. People grow up, they learn from the world and they really can change. First the flash hit of 2008.

Now the same woman, six years later. I hope she is a sign of things to come. Alas, all those twelve year olds of 2008 are now about to vote for the first time, feeding a never ending stream of ignorance and stupidity, just perfect for Democrat politicians to exploit.

Shockingly ignorant about the climate facts of life

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For a change, we actually can see the true agenda in the person of Naomi Klein in her new book on global warming:

The thesis of This Changes Everything is that global warming is a war of capitalism against the planet, and that we need a people’s uprising to reclaim true democracy from the venal and corrupt politicians who have been co-opted by Big Oil. If this sounds like the Occupy movement all over again, you’re right. “We need an ideological battle,” Ms. Klein told The Guardian.

The article this is from is actually a fantastic read, in which the writer, Margaret Wente, hews into Klein’s arguments. It’s short but here is a sample where she comments on the ignorance of many of those who write about the climate as if it’s all from first world capitalist economies:

The folks who revere Ms. Klein and gushingly review her books don’t have a clue about this stuff either. I wouldn’t expect Vogue to know. I wouldn’t even expect the Guardian or the Nation to know. The CBC should know, but frequently does not. As for The New York Times – its chief climate drum-banger is currently Mark Bittman, who was formerly the newspaper’s chief recipe-writer. He knows how to make a mean Thai beef salad (you should look it up) but is shockingly ignorant about the climate facts of life. He thinks Ms. Klein walks on water. He, too, says that neoliberalism is the problem and reclaiming democracy is the solution. He thinks we could fix the climate – if only we took on the evil greedy corporations and put our minds to it. As for the rest of the world, he doesn’t seem to know it exists.

There’s not enough of this sort of thing around, but it’s good that there is at least some.