Post Mortem of an Election: We're Toast

I decided to call this an open thread post-mortem. There may be more of them.

For the moment, however, this one serves to allow me to voice my immediate concerns about our country, and to permit our commenters to have their say about what the election means to them. We are facing the coming reign presidency of poseur Barry Hussein Soetoro (that’s his real name, the one his mamma and adoptive father gave him, not his nom de politico, the persona which he so successfully huckstered during the years he was inventing himself). What are the portents?

The subject matter here is seriously mortal, i.e., that my beloved country is about to be taken over by a thugocracy and turned into a mini-me Europe. The U.S. will have all of the crass and none of the class of that continent. It will be ugly.

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Thus, the comments are to be limited to opinions about the ramifications of this momentous and sobering event for the U.S. and for the world. Anyone attempting to hi-jack the thread to Moscow and its environs will be deleted. We have numerous Russian posts where you may speak to your heart’s content on that subject. Go find one if you are so compelled.

Even better, email your own post about Russia and see if it flies with the Baron. We both like guest posters.

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Were our president-elect, Obama, posing as a Republican — perish the thought! not in Chicago! — the press would have long since run this poseur out of town on a rail. But he is a Leftist, so they took him into their hearts and proceeded to sell him harder than a used car dealer pushes the worst clunker on the lot. And of everyone who was put forth as a possible mainstream presidential candidate this election cycle, we bought the clunker.

To the press, Obama’s blackness was only incidentally helpful. Mostly they have used it to bash Jacksonian southerners, whom they loathe as a form of sub-human, racist ignoramus. Jacksonian political philosophers are merely sports that somehow were preserved in amber as a primitive species when every thinking person made the shift to Homo Sophisticated.

Black is insufficient evidence for our MSM; it must be accompanied by the same far-left political opinions they share amongst themselves. A conservative journalist learns to keep his mouth shut or leave the mainstream hives for more congenial offices. (This is true for most conservatives in the US. They are extremely careful in public, or even in their inner circle of friends, about coming out of the conservative closet. To do so without being sure of your audience can be a form of social suicide.)

American journalists are infamous for skewering black conservative candidates who are merely appointed, much less those who have the temerity to run for office. Just ask Clarence Thomas. In fact, if you want leftie views of Justice Thomas’ endless failures during his tenure at the Supreme Court, just google (without the quotes) “Clarence Thomas stupid”. Here we are, eighteen years after his ascendance to the bench, and the Left is still seething about Thomas’ very existence, complaining that he can’t cut his own meat at a meal and that he is unforgivably stupid. To be a conservative is prima facie evidence of stupidity. As a conservative, I have been told this on several occasions by people who didn’t know I was one of “those”. As soon as I came out of the closet, my IQ dropped fifty points, clinkety-clink, right at their feet.

Lefties love affirmative action while sneering that this is the only way Thomas could have attained the Supreme Court. His previous career of service meant nothing. Fortunately, he had the mentoring of John Bolton early on. Bolton warned him of what he faced in Washington and advised him later on, when things got really ugly.

So let’s dismiss the “journalists” as a source of reality-driven information. Motivated as they are by vitriol, partisan (and often ignorant) opinions, not to mention their ability to pander to the lowest common denominator, the various forms of the MSM belong to Barry Soetoro, heart and soul. They deserve one another.

What is of vital importance is the subjugation of our country which has been in the planning by Bill Ayers & Co for all these many years, ever since he was setting off bombs back in the “good old days.” If he hadn’t stumbled upon Obama, he’d’ve had to invent him. But as luck would have it, li’l Barry fell from the heavens, right into his lap. That’s how Messiahs arrive, I guess.

Want to get a good look at Barry’s bestest friend, Bill Ayers? Zombietime has done yeoman’s service in unearthing Prairie Fire, an anthology of writings from Ayers and the communists who made up the core of his inner circle. I doubt one could find a copy of this book, though I do intend to look for one. Should you be fortunate enough to run across a copy, please let me know. There may be samizdat versions making the rounds — but the national police force will be around to collect those eventually, along with the original book. Meanwhile, much of the pertinent material is on Zombie’s page.

Here are a few choice quotes from Ayers in his youth, unearthed by Zombietime from a worn edition of the little red book, Prairie Fire. Zombie follows the quotes with further information:

We are a guerilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years.

To which Zombie adds:

And not some nicey-nice peace-and-love kind of communist. Through his group the Weather Underground, Ayers was planning to “seize power” in a violent communist takeover of the United States:

He continues with another quote from Ayers:

We need a revolutionary communist party in order to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and build the new society.

Zombie goes on to explain what happened to Ayers and his fellow criminals back then:

Ayers and his co-authors freely brag about their bombings and other violent and illegal acts, and even provide a detailed list, most likely typed up by Ayers himself, of the crimes they had committed up to that point. Ayers’ list, scanned directly from Prairie Fire, is shown below. He may have escaped conviction due to a legal technicality (the prosecutors failed to get a warrant during some of their surveillance of the Weather Underground), but this in no way means that Ayers was factually innocent of the crimes. As has been widely reported, after the case against him was dropped, Ayers described himself as “guilty as hell, free as a bird.”

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Just because Ayers tries to appear respectable now doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a violent revolutionary in the past. In fact, as the text of Prairie Fire shows, Ayers was one of the most extreme extremists in American political history. And as the links given as the end of this essay will prove, Ayers is just as politically radical now as he was back then. He has never renounced the political views he professed in the 1960s and 1970s. The only difference is that now he no longer commits violence to achieve his goals. After his stint as the leader of the Weather Underground, he shifted to a different tactic: to spread his ideology under the aegis of academia. But the goal remains the same: to turn America into a communist nation. Ayers’ contemporary writings contain many of the same ideas (and even the same phrases) found in Prairie Fire, just toned down to make them more palatable in polite society.

If you click on Zombie’s post and scroll down, you’ll find the numerous links that demonstrate the long-term connection between Barry and Bill. Call it Barry’s Faustian bargain — and look what he gained!

A soul is a small price to pay for your own servants, chefs, aircrafts, yacht, and mansion, finally enough success to get his wife off his back, plus the chance to jaw-jaw with the rich and famous. Don’t forget his generous pension for life, one not to be affected by that hare-brained scheme to steal liberate our private pensions and let the government make of them the same kind of Ponzi scheme that it has done with Social Freaky “Security”.

One of the things that bothers me most about this man is his grandiose ideas about building an even bigger governmental machine to fix the problems that government “solutions” caused to begin with.

Our governmental blob is so big, so greedily malignant, that it has finally imploded upon itself with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Not to worry. Obama has plans to fix that. It will be a government fix. He’s going to get the money out of you rich people, the ones making $250,000.00 a year.

Of course, someone making that much money is already giving federal, local, and state governments at least forty per cent of that sum. Not to mention the hidden gasoline, alcohol, food, and merchandise taxes that bring the total closer to fifty percent. Next time you’re filling your car’s gas tank, while you’re standing there, calculate how much of the total cost of your fill up in really just confiscation by the Blob.

If you make $250,000.00 a year, you really have (with luck) about $125,000.00 to work with. At the beginning of each year, you must work for free for more than five months before “your” earned income becomes “yours.” And God help you if you’ve got unearned income — that’s when they bring out the scalpels.

The Hill has the tax information, including a version by George Friedman, which is more to the point:

For a more accurate assessment of the total costs of government we calculate Friedman Day, or the day when Americans have earned enough money to pay for everything that federal, state and local government will spend on during the current year. Friedman Day this year was Monday, May 19.

Tax Freedom Day is indeed useful to illustrate the tax burden — and has shown consistently in recent years that Americans (although individual circumstances vary widely) spend more of their time working to pay taxes than they do to pay for food, clothing and housing combined.

But current taxes represent only a portion of government’s cost.

Other costs are being deferred — passed on to future generations through government borrowing and the accumulation of IOUs in nonexistent “trust funds,” such as the Social Security trust fund.

I believe this amount to be underestimated, because it doesn’t mention what you must fork out every time you purchase anything but the absolute necessities. Isn’t it odd how food did not make the cut for “necessities”? Ah, but that worry is over: now we can live on the pearls of wisdom dropping from the mouth of the Messiah. He will make our polluted waters into wine and our squishy white bread into whole grain goodness.


Another feature of Barry’s that concerns me is his threat campaign promise to create a National Police Force. One wants to beseech the heavens, “how, oh, how could people vote for someone who spouts such trash?” And then we remember…ah, there is more than one way to skin a cat. What better way to finally ban legal gun ownership than to create a national “militia” — using that magic Second Amendment word.

Gun ownership has been increasing at phenomenal rates ever since it began to look like Barry Soetoro was headed for the Oval Office. Not that people are afraid of him — their distaste doesn’t run that high. Gun ownership usually rises under Democrat rule, for the simple reason that Dems love government and the more government we have, the more people have to fear government will attempt once again to ban guns. Democrat-run government will do this despite the overwhelming evidence that gun control kills people:

Massive social-science research shows the ineffectiveness of gun control in reducing crime. It is a source of continuous amazement that gun control advocates ignore the results of criminological, historical and econometric studies by reputed scholars like (among others) John Lott, Bill Landes, Gary Kleck, James Wright, Peter Rossi, Taylor Buckner, David Kopel, Don Kates, Gary Mauser, Colin Greenwood, and Joyce Malcolm. Why?

The essay quoted here goes on to relate a telling anecdote, one I do not recall seeing before. Did you?

In January 2002, two armed students of Appalachian Law School, in Virginia, stopped a mass killing in progress at the university by arresting the killer. Why don’t gun-control activists wonder why there have been no mass killings at the University of Utah, where students are allowed to carry guns? Could it be that madmen look for places where they can do more damage without being interrupted?

Well, that kind of incident can’t happen again in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Ain’t no armed student ever going to step in to prevent a crazed slaughter. Our General Assembly made sure of that.

In January, 2006, a committee in Virginia General Assembly refused to allow a bill onto the assembly floor that would have allowed college students and employees the right to carry handguns. The smug satisfaction that followed the abortion of this bill before it ever saw the light of day was pretty well universal in the Politically Correct Ivory Towers, those places where the mandarins believe their own fantasies about the virtues of gun control, even when first hand experience tells them otherwise.

Here’s one heinous example of the attitude prevalent back then:

Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was happy to hear the bill was defeated. “I’m sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.

It shows the remarkable forbearance of the parents of all those dead children and teachers — all thirty three of them — at Virginia Tech that the bumptiously ignorant Larry Hincker is breathing.

I certainly didn’t feel “safe” while visiting Virginia Tech a few weeks ago. And I knew we’d better not let the word “gun” even pass our lips within the confines of the campus. You know why? Because that criminally negligent administration, and the State Assembly to which it answers, did nothing to address the crux of the problem. That is unless you count candlelight vigils as a solution. You may not speak about something that has been swept under the rug. What if your speaking brought it back??

So, yes, I fear The One’s fascist ideas about the need for a national police force. Is it not enough that we have the Federal Bureau of Investigation (already beloved by local law enforcement), the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco — just to name the major players in the law “enforcement” business?

Crime is mostly on the rise in those places with very strict gun control laws — e.g., New York, the O’s very own Chicago, Washington, D.C. (until they repealed the gun ban), and so on.

Here’s a personal, close-up look at Barry’s real deal on gun ownership, a report of a conversation with him on this subject. Or rather, an attempt to have a conversation. I suspect li’l Barry doesn’t play the dialogue game much, at least not when he’s on a level playing field. Here’s his voting record, and here’s the conversation:

In fact, Obama has a long history of supporting city gun bans. The Associated Press described his vote on a gun-control bill in 2004: “He also opposed letting people use a self-defense argument if charged with violating local handgun bans by using weapons in their homes. The bill was a reaction to a Chicago-area man who, after shooting an intruder, was charged with a handgun violation.”

No major-party presidential nominee has ever had as strong and consistent an anti-gun record as Obama. Here is a politician who supported a ban on handguns in 1996, backed a ban on the sale of all semiautomatic guns in 1998 (which would encompass most guns sold in the country), and advocated banning gun sales within five miles of a school or park in 2004 (a virtual ban on all gun stores). He also served on the board of the Joyce Foundation, the largest private funder of anti-gun research in the country.

This evidence should be sufficient, but I have yet another reason to be skeptical. I knew Obama during the mid-1990s, when we were both at the University of Chicago Law School. Indeed, when I introduced myself to him, he said, “Oh, you are the gun guy.”

I responded, “Yes, I guess so.” His response, as I recall it, was, “I don’t believe that people should be able to own guns.”

When I said it might be fun sometime to talk about the question and his support of Chicago’s lawsuit against gun makers, he simply grimaced and turned away, ending the conversation.

Obama obviously thinks the gun issue is important. He and his surrogates constantly repeat the claim that he has always supported an individual right to own guns. But the media should stop uncritically reporting the claim without checking his past statements.

Yeah, the media should stop that. The media should cease and desist from a great deal of the disingenuous “reporting” it flounders around in, but don’t hold your breath. The MSM is your friend just like the government is your friend. They’re both here to help you and the more they do the worse they make the situation.

With friends like Obama and the media, who needs enemies? We are toast, folks…

On the bright side, we have Queen Michelle, she of the budget wardrobe and simple tastes. I can’t wait to watch her performance. It will be the spectacle we’ve been waiting for. I only feel sorry for the poor Secret Service agents assigned to her. Wouldn’t you love to know what code name they use to designate this particular ward? If they haven’t chosen yet, I have a suggestion: “Pigeon” — as in a pouter pigeon. There is no one who can pull a pout like Michelle. She looks like the pluperfect six year old as her lip comes out, her mouth turns down, and the frown lines appear between her narrowed eyes.

Yes indeedy. She can’t do sophistication, but she has spoiled brat down to a science. Much more interesting that way — at least you get the sense you’re seeing the real Michelle.

That’s more than you’ll ever get from her Obie.