The Myth of the “Moderate” Democrat

The original plan for this post was to feature an essay written last week by Robert Tracinski, editor of “The Intellectual Activist”. From there it would have broadened out with a more detailed look at the website itself and the depth of Mr. Tracinski’s experience (which is considerable).

However, in the process of unearthing further information about the subject of Mr. Tracinski’s essay, it became too disheartening to think about much else beyond our thorough betrayal by the Democrats. Thus, the material gathered from and about “The Intellectual Activist” will be put aside for a more propitious time. Instead this post will be limited to what Mr. Tracinski encountered and the subsequent research I did on the subject of his essay.

Ahead of time, though, I admit my failure to perform due diligence in the summer of 2008, while there was still time to make a difference. Like many others in my Congressional district I failed to pay attention. We were sure that the very able conservative Congressman who had served us well would be easily re-elected, despite the machinations of the Democrat Party in Charlottesville. My opinion in that regard didn’t differ much from the experts, for example, here:

“Perriello has a great profile in a very liberal district in Boulder, Colo., but that’s not Virginia’s Fifth,” says David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, who nonetheless has reclassified the race from “solid Republican” to “leaning Republican.” “Voters in this district are hurting and don’t consider Darfur activism to be a qualification for Congress.”

How wrong we were. And what a difference we might have made had we known back then what the man who defeated our Congressman really was, or to whom he was beholden.

In the end, Thomas Perriello sidled by to win by 727 votes — that’s 727 out of the total 316,893 votes cast; a ‘victory’ with a margin of 0.229%.

Since Charlottesville is blue enough to qualify as indigo (or perhaps you could call it cyanotic given the deep hue in Jefferson country), it’s no surprise that the town has a long history of Democrat dominance. In a Congressional district (VA- 5) geographically larger than New Jersey, Charlottesville is one of just a few blue spots in the Red Sea of Central Virginia political life; in contrast to urban, wealthy Charlottesville, the rest of the district tends to be poorer, rural, conservative, and not impressed by the fast lane Mr. Perriello travels.

Given that he rode into Washington on Obama’s coattails, the Honorable Thomas Periello is not likely to make a return trip past 2010. Many of the voters who showed up for Obama in 2008 won’t be there this November for this elitist transnational who sold us down the river.

During his time in office Perriello has been a straight Democrat Party voter; not a scintilla of originality or rebellion has he shown. Perhaps he believed what the money people told him? Perhaps the Democrats were so euphoric to finally have a Representative for District Five unleashed in the halls of power that it didn’t matter how he actually performed or where his campaign chest originated? Whatever. It looks to be shark-jumping time, even this far inland.

Perriello is now considered vulnerable, at least according to the polls. On the other hand, Larry Sabato, burned last time by Perriello’s win, has District Five as a toss-up — i.e., it could go either way.


Okay, now you have some context about this piece and about its subject. If you find the current confusing flux in American politics interesting, then this sample will be worth your while. If not, simply scroll down to the next post.
- - - - - - - -
Mr. Tracinski went to a public forum hosted by the Jefferson Area Tea Party last week, held in Charlottesville, VA. What made this particular meeting of interest is that the featured attraction was an appearance by Tom Perriello.

The essay isn’t written in Mr. Tracinski’s usual coolly analytical style. Not that he doesn’t do justice to the subject; it’s simply that his heart and his head are both evident in this one. His essay demonstrates just how strongly local conservatives feel the betrayal. Perriello didn’t betray their expectations — no one imagined him to be other than what he is: a very liberal activist Democrat. However, back in November 2008 none of us could imagine the gargantuan slabs of meretricious legislation that Perriello and his ilk would ram through the House without a qualm or a by-your-leave. Those thousands of pages of bumf and pork politics are a blot upon the soul of our Political Class. Not that they care. Worse, these laws trail a whiff of future serfdom for many people in the rural, poverty-level areas of our District (and of other places like it).

Thus, upon coming come face-to-face with a person who bears some direct responsibility for our diminished future, a man reacts to the immediate heat of that welling sense of treachery.

Tracinski’s title sums up ahead of time what he found:

Tom Perriello and the Myth of the Moderate Democrat

[note: any emphases or bracketed information below are mine — D]

Thursday night [August 26th] I witnessed an unusual sight: a Democratic incumbent speaking to a local Tea Party group. Tom Perriello, the congressman for Virginia’s Fifth district, spoke to a monthly meeting of our local Charlottesville group, the Jefferson Area Tea Party.

I almost had to give Perriello credit for courage, for having the guts to venture into the lion’s den while other Democratic congressmen are scrambling to evade their constituents. Almost.

Hmm…that was my thought, too, when I heard Periello was going to speak to the JATP. Considering that someone had cut the gas line of the barbecue grill at his brother’s house (mistaking it for his), Perriello had to know he was in a venue where his political views are anathema to those who invited him. Perhaps hope was springing eternal on both sides; maybe Perriello hoped that if he went into their den, it would head off the likelihood of having them publicly demonstrate against him. Or perhaps he knew a refusal to meet would follow him all over the District. Did the JATP hope to inch Perriello a bit toward a more centrist position?

Mr. Tracinski watched the performance and took back any points for courage he’d been willing to allow:

But when I saw Perriello at work, I realized that this wasn’t the courage of a principled leader who is willing to go forthrightly into the enemy’s camp and defend his principles. It’s the brazenness of a practiced card-sharp who is confident he can shuffle the deck fast enough to fool the suckers.

I took the opportunity to ask the congressman one simple question that, in my mind, cuts through to the core issue, reveals the real radicalism of Democrats’ attack on liberty, and exposes the myth of the moderate Democrat.

Ah, that mythological creature, the one-horned Democratus Moderatus, garlands of flowers around his neck. Why, I know him! Exemplars of his type even show up in our comments at Gates of Vienna on occasion. When asked for evidence of their “moderate” creds, they’re as hard put as Perriello was to come up with pertinent examples.

Perriello’s whole method was not to answer our questions or address the ideological differences between us. His method was to evade our questions and defuse any sense of confrontation, to mollify us with soothing sounds while disguising his real intentions. I found myself chuckling part-way through his opening presentation when I realized how crudely, childishly obvious his method is. The formula is to emphasize areas of seeming agreement with his audience-even with a Tea Party audience — but always to keep his answers vague, general, up in the clouds. After all, if he was forced to get down to specifics, the illusion would vanish.

Liberals are always reduced to generalizations. Obama’s “talking points” during the 2008 election were quintessential examples of vague airy-fairy bonbons. Who can forget the vapid Obama signature line, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for”?

Tracinski fisks Periello quite well, pointing out the things about Democrat speeches which render the words nothing more than vacuous sound bites that leave one hungry for real thought or principle:

For example, his opening statement stressed his opposition to the TARP bank bailouts. [These occurred before Perriello arrived in Washington, thus they were an easy target.] He expanded this with some populist Main-Street-versus-Wall-Street rhetoric and then ended with a hint at pseudo-patriotic protectionism, talking about keeping jobs in the US and the need for an economy that was “making things" again.

Later on you’ll see Perriello’s career so far, one that has been devoid of anything so gauche as “making things”.

So we’re going to get that kind of economy from precisely which of Perriello’s legislative initiatives? There are plenty of closed-up buildings in District Five. Which ones is Perriello spending his legislative energy trying to get open again? What businesses are expanding as a result of his vote on that ruinous Cap ’n’ Tax bill he enthused over after voting ‘yea’ on it?

Tracinski says:

Notice how he hit some notes that are calculated to resonate with the Tea Partiers: no corporate handouts, more American jobs, and an appeal to patriotism. But if you ask “what did he say specifically,” he mentioned only one actual policy: “closing a tax loophole for companies that ship jobs overseas.” “Closing a tax loophole” is a code phrase for “raising taxes.” Leave it to a Democrat to look at a struggling economy and the long-term strangulation of American manufacturing, and to fall back on the only solution he can think of: whose taxes can we raise?

But of course, if he had just said “my solution to the economy is to raise taxes,” that would have given the game away. So the rest of his presentation was there as protective camouflage to hide his actual, concrete meaning.

“Closing a tax loophole” is also code for taxing the rich — you know, those “wealthy” business owners who were already regulated past reason or justice before Obama showed up with his knee-jerk dislike of the business world. Perriello never had a real job in his life. He has worked for governmental and quasi-governmental groups, some of them in hellholes far from his upper middle class childhood in Ivy, Virginia.

Tracinski moves in:

Then I got a chance to ask my question. For obvious reasons, I’ve been working for a long time on the art of asking questions to politicians. The main challenge is to keep them from floating off into the safe zone of vague generalities and instead to pin them down to concrete, specific reality. In other words, a good question has to short-circuit Perriello’s whole methodology.

Here was my question. (I’m writing this from memory; the exact wording, as I asked it to Perriello, may have been slightly different.) “You hear us talk a lot at Tea Party events about the Constitution, and the reason is that we view the Constitution as granting limited power to government. But part of what started this movement is that we look at the Democratic Congress, and they don’t seem to think that there are any limits to their power. I could cite recent quotes here from Charlie Rangel or from Pete Stark, but basically their interpretation of the Constitution is that they have the power to do anything they like to us, so long as they say it’s for the ‘general welfare,’ which is no limitation on anything. So my question for you is: what limits does the Constitution place on the power of Congress-and can you name anything that Congress has done, since Democrats have held a majority, that you think goes beyond those limits?

Tracinski knew that his question would require Perriello to get real or to make tracks outta there. No way was he going to reveal the real Perriello to a bunch of conservatives who think his programs are poison for the American commonweal. So he’s got his back to the wall here, as Tracinski well knows:

…If he is allowed to speak in empty generalities, he could tell us that, sure, he thinks there are limits on government. But ask him to name, from his own thinking, real examples of specific legislation, and you’re likely to get a much more revealing answer.

And that’s precisely what we got. As I expected, he confirmed that there are limits on the power of Congress — in theory. But even there, he talked in terms of the authority of federal government versus state governments, and the division of power between the legislative and executive branches. But he made no mention of the essential issue, the one that has the Tea Parties up in arms: the government versus the people. The limits imposed on government by the rights of the people were not even on his radar screen.

…as for the specifics, Perriello paused for a moment and confessed that no, nothing came to mind. He couldn’t think of a single thing — not one piece of legislation — that the Democrats had proposed in the past four years that might go beyond constitutional limits.

That was the answer I expected, and though it might not seem like it, that was the “gotcha” moment I was looking for.

Yes, that is indeed the “gotcha” moment for many socialists like Perriello. As Tracinski reminds us, regarding the “frenzy of legislative activity”:

• Democrats voted overwhelmingly for TARP [this was before Perriello was in Congress], which disbursed massive borrowed funds for no specific use and with virtually no direct control by Congress.
  
• Then there was the giant stimulus bill, with its now-broken promise of low unemployment.
  
• There was the health care bill which imposes massive new controls on health care, dictating whether we buy insurance, what we buy, what it must cover, what it costs.
  
• There is the cap-and-trade takeover of the entire energy industry, dictating what we can drive and how much we will have to pay to heat our homes. [And how, if we ever wish to sell our homes, we must retrofit them to pass an impossible green standard, one for which the technology isn’t currently available.]
  
• There is “card-check” legislation that would eliminate the secret ballot for union elections.
• And there was the DISCLOSE Act, an attempt to impose controls on political speech that specially targeted opponents of the Democratic agenda.

These highlights of a massive move to the Left, a move that most Americans despise in its totality (though the electorate can be depended upon to hold out for their own favorites) are extremely disturbing. It is still hard to believe they managed to destroy so much in so little time. And we know with certain dread that they haven’t finished with that wrecking ball yet. Already they’re planning on how much more they can get done in the few lame duck months left between the election in November and the new Congress in January. These folks are committed ideologues. What their constituents want isn’t relevant to their program.

Tracinski observes:

And those are just the highlights of a genuinely gargantuan, sweeping agenda. But nothing strikes Perriello as having gone over the line. And if that’s the case, then there is no line.

And I don’t think Perriello was trying to evade the question. I don’t think that he realized there was some legislation that was iffy, and he was trying to avoid mentioning it. He really seemed to be trying to come up with an example, and he genuinely drew a blank. But this is not how you would react if you were actually in the habit of thinking about the constitutionality of legislation. If you were in the habit of asking, about every bill that comes up: where is the authority in the Constitution for this bill? — then you would have that knowledge stored away as an important fact about any particular piece of legislation. Even if you didn’t think any proposal violated the Constitution, you would at least be prepared to talk about why it was constitutional.

Perriello’s response is the reaction of someone who clearly doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Constitution. It doesn’t figure in as a consideration in drafting, debating, and voting for legislation.

Hmmm. Just think about Perriello’s training at Yale Law School. How much of his law education was devoted to a consideration of the limits of the Constitution? After all, he had his future set as a social entrepreneur, ready to take government money, NGO funding, leftist foundation gleanings and UN slush funds and use them to build a better world. That world might be in Sierra Leone or Kosovo, but like the other elitists in the Political Class, he already knew what was best for the hoi-polloi below him and he was full of energy to bring that “best” into being.

Tracinski returns to an earlier question from another attendee at that Tea Party Forum:

This fits with his response to an earlier question from a tea partier who asked about the state lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of ObamaCare. He did the usual tap-dance: he was glad, he said, that those suits had been filed, but he was confident they would be rejected in the courts, and this was the way the question should be settled, by arguing it out before the courts. But he just asserted that the law would be found to be constitutional, providing no argument for why that is so. That is the typical method of this Congress. It’s not their job to think about the Constitution. Their job is to charge full steam ahead, grabbing as much power for government as they can, and finding out later how much the Supreme Court will allow them to get away with. It is the policy of leaders for whom the Constitution is not a moral law to be taken seriously, but an annoying roadblock to be overrun.

Tracinski reminds us where this meeting took place and how much times have changed:

Since we’re in Thomas Jefferson country here in Charlottesville, it’s appropriate to contrast this attitude to that of Thomas Jefferson, who rejected the idea that guarding the Constitution was a task to be outsourced to the courts. Instead, he held that each branch of government had the responsibility to enforce constitutional discipline on itself. He took this so seriously that he almost decided against the Louisiana Purchase on the grounds that the Constitution gave him no explicit authority to acquire new lands for the United States. He went ahead with the purchase on the grounds that it was an emergency — he didn’t know how long the French would be willing to sell — and he then asked Congress to pass a constitutional amendment authorizing his action after the fact. Since it was already a moot issue, and because the purchase had overwhelming support, Congress didn’t bother. But has one ever seen such solicitous concern for constitutional limits from our current leaders?

All of this highlights the reason why, for all of his glib political skills, Perriello didn’t win any friends Thursday night. Perriello’s method is intended to make him look like a reasonable “moderate.” But there is a reason he votes with the Democratic leadership on all of the really important pieces of legislation, and that is because he accepts the Democrats’ radicalism on one central issue: their view of the unlimited power of government and their contempt for constitutional restraints.

Tracinski says he thinks people are beginning to catch on to the extreme makeover of our country at the hands of radical Democrats, of which Perriello is a prime example:

The public is learning that the “moderate Democrat” is a myth. It’s a myth because the actual choice is between two radical alternatives: limited government, or unlimited government. If you side with unlimited government, as Perriello does, then the flood gates burst open, and it doesn’t matter whether you support every little bit of the left’s agenda: you have let that agenda loose in the world by denying the constitutional limits that were intended to restrain the government from taking our precious liberty.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
Back at the beginning I mentioned not having paid much attention to Periello during the campaign. Our former Congressman had won time after time because he lived in and knew this District so well. Not just the money people, but everyday folks, too. Like Perriello, Virgil Goode was born here, but unlike Periello, Virgil didn’t leave for college without looking back. He graduated with honors from the University of Virginia and he returned home to begin his professional, and eventually his political career.

I knew how much Charlottesville hated Virgil Goode and how hard they’d tried to unseat him, without success. I’d quit paying attention to his opponents a number of campaigns back. My big mistake was in believing that Tom Perriello, son of a popular local pediatrician and thus a Charlottesville boy, was just one more effort by the Republic of Charlottesville to unseat their nemesis, the hated conservative Virgil Goode. In other words, I fell for the package in which Perriello wrapped himself. Like many others, I never looked inside.

After he won, I still didn’t look inside to see the real person. I figured he’d won by riding on Obama’s coattails, and that’s true as far as it goes. However, the fuller truth is far more threatening than the commonplace misperception about Tom Perriello. He’s a new breed of socialist, so it’s no wonder we didn’t recognize him.

Here’s a look at Perriello from a report in the Christian Science Monitor back in July 2008. Titled “Social activists hunt for congressional seats … in G.O.P. districts“, the article laid everything out for us:

Tom Perriello — a netroots “social entrepreneur” — doesn’t look like a close fit with the rural Virginia district he hopes will send him to Congress.

He’s not donning hunting garb or endorsing a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. His credentials are not in elected office or business, but mainly in creating social-action groups over the Internet, working for reform in places that aren’t exactly top of mind in Virginia’s Fifth Congressional District, such as Sierra Leone, Kosovo, and the Sudan.

“It’s not a traditional profile for a political candidate, but … it is playing very well,” says Fred Hudson, chairman of the Democratic Party Committee in Virginia’s Fifth.

Perriello’s ability to raise a campaign war chest over the Internet drove out all primary contenders, he says. At the end of March, Perriello reported $500,000 cash on hand, compared with $593,000 for six-term incumbent Rep. Virgil Goode (R). Next week Perriello’s campaign will report more than $900,000, much of it raised out of state over the Internet.

Raised out of state? I’ll say! Raised “over the internet”? Not unless getting your goodies from George Soros’ many pockets is “over the internet”.

Look at his résumé, taken from that Monitor article:

Born and raised in the district, Perriello graduated from Yale with a major in humanities, then consulted on youth and environmental campaigns in Washington at the Center for a Sustainable Economy (now part of Redefining Progress). After graduating from Yale Law School, he cofounded Res Publica, a Net-based organization of public-sector professionals; Catholic Alliance for the Common Good; and, most recently, Avaaz.org (avaaz means “voice” in many languages), a global Web movement on issues ranging from human rights to climate change. With 3.4 million on-line members, Avaaz.org is the largest on-line organizing movement in the world, says cofounder and executive director Ricken Patel.

Okay, there you have it. All his ducks (at least the ones we know about) are lined up in a row, or at least most of them. But look at his résumé from Res Publica, which is a bit more revealing:

Before co-founding Res Publica, Tom served as Special Advisor to the Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a United Nations tribunal, and as a Yale Law School/OSI Teaching Fellow in West Africa. He has worked for the US State Department, the International Centre for Transitional Justice and others on human rights and legal reform efforts in Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo, Argentina, Chile, India, and the United States. Prior to law school, he worked as Assistant Director of the Center for a Sustainable Economy (now part of Redefining Progress) and as a consultant on youth and environmental campaigns, elections. Tom is also a founder of the Catholic Alliance for the Common Good. He holds a BA in Humanities from Yale College and a J.D. from Yale Law School and is a member of the New York State Bar.

That’s quite a paper trail. Let’s line up his succession of jobs and see if there are any common denominators here.

• Special Advisor to the Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a United Nations tribunal.
  
• U.S. State Department [no job description there]
  
• International Center for Transitional Justice [notice that this group worked on “human rights and legal reform” in many places, including the United States.]
  
• Yale Law School/OSI Teaching Fellow in West Africa.
  
• Center for a Sustainable Economy/Redefining Progress [Assistant Director]
  
• Admitted to the New York State Bar
  
• Res Publica [co-founder]
  
• Catholic Alliance for the Common Good [founder]
  
• Avaaz [founder]

Notice that he’s a member of the New York State Bar. Doesn’t say anything about Virginia, though. Why would it? He’d never planned to return here at all. It was probably Obama’s selection as the Democrat contender in the presidential primary that propelled Periello to grab the main chance while he could. After all Soros was in on Obama’s dealings from the beginning, and Periello could count on lots of contributions from Soros operatives to fill the coffers:

Soros’ ties to Obama date back to 2004, when the multi-billionaire hosted a fundraiser for Obama during the latter’s 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate. In December of 2006, as Obama contemplated making a run for the presidency in 2008, Soros met in his New York office with the Illinois senator. Then, on January 16, 2007, Obama announced the creation of a presidential exploratory committee. Within hours, Soros sent the senator a contribution of $2,100, the maximum amount allowable under campaign finance laws.

But that was pennies. Through his proxy groups, Soros donated millions to the Democrats, especially activists like Perriello, those “social(ist) entrepreneurs” who descended on Congress in 2009 and left a wide swath of ruin in their wake. So wide, in fact, that people finally noticed how awful they were.

But back to the list:

Res Publica, anyone? You can look at the website for yourself and see if you can figure out what they’re up to. It sounds like Leftist bumf to me:

Res Publica is a community of public sector professionals dedicated to promoting good governance, civic virtue and deliberative democracy.

We work as “public entrepreneurs”, choosing our location and projects based on assessments of threats to the public good and opportunities to maximise our impact. While many public and public-interest bodies restrict themselves to particular roles and means, Res Publica pilots a new model: rapid, flexible, project-specific responses to problems, focused on results and emphasising effectiveness, creativity and innovation.

Res Publica is Latin for “the public thing” and refers to what individuals in a community hold in common or place above their self interest.

Through its work and among its membership, Res Publica tries to heed Gandhi’s call to “be the change you wish to see in the world”. It operates internally and with partners on the basis of fellowship and deliberation.

How’s that for Obama-esque blather? Who isn’t for “good governance, civic virtue and deliberative democracy”? Hmm… the Taliban, maybe?

Take a look at their Advisory Board. The woods are thick with Soros connections over there and the code words for “socialism” abound.

The same goes for their list of references. “Progressive faith” is key on that page of glowing recommendations:

“Res Publica has been extremely helpful in energizing the progressive wing of the faith community. Res Publica’s work reflects clarity of vision, organizational capacity, and great energy and all of us who have been privileged to work with Res Publica are very grateful.”

So says the indebted head of the National Council of Churches, that Castro tool. That’s bumf squared. Stupendously magnificent are the Emperor’s Clothes.

If that weren’t enough, Our Boy was busy helping to found two other Soros fronts. The first is Avaaz. The wiki information on the sources for this one is quite plain:

The name Avaaz…was derived from the Persian word for ‘voice’ or ‘song’. Avaaz.org was co-founded by Res Publica, a global civic advocacy group and non-profit organization, and MoveOn, an American non-profit progressive public policy advocacy group and political action committee. The organization is also supported by Service Employees International Union, a founding partner, and GetUp.org.au. Avaaz’s individual co-founders include Executive Director Ricken Patel, Virginia congressman Tom Perriello, Australian progressive entrepreneur David Madden, Jeremy Heimans, Andrea Woodhouse, Tom Pravda, and MoveOn Executive Director Eli Pariser.

Here’s how they operate:

Avaaz is managed by a team of campaigners working from Switzerland, Brazil, the United States, Argentina, and the United Kingdom. They communicate with members via email, and employ campaigning tactics including online public petitions, videos, and email-your-leader tools.

They forgot to mention candlelight vigils. Perriello’s groups shine on that one.

But social entrepreneurs aren’t against making a profit while they save the world. Meet Purpose, a money-making arm of Avaaz:

Purpose creates 21st century movements. We look for ways that movements can help solve major global problems. To do this, we work with some of the most exciting players in the new green and social economy to help them get to scale faster and some of the world’s biggest brands to mobilize their consumers for significant social impact.

We are also a home for movement entrepreneurship. Our principals co-founded Avaaz.org, the world’s largest online movement with 4 million members operating in 13 languages, and Australia’s GetUp.org, an internationally-recognized political phenomenon with more members than all that country’s political parties put together. Right now, we’re working on launching a ground-breaking transnational gay rights movement and creating a consumer movement to lay the groundwork for the transition to electric cars. We’ve helped to create significant new global efforts to fight cancer and eliminate nuclear weapons.

21st century problems like the climate crisis require both huge global policy change and rapid, large-scale consumer change. Our work is deploying huge numbers of people, online and offline, in scores of countries, to impact the political process. At the same time, we are working with brands to create the consumer demand and behavioral shifts required to bring about the kind of change that politics alone cannot.

I hope our Australian readers can tell us about GetUp.org — obviously it’s got a connection to MoveOn. Clever, these progressives. I’m waiting for the founding of GetOut.org, which will no doubt find a new place on the reservation for corrupt capitalist pigs and their conservative minions.

From wiki again, here’s what Avaaz does:

At the 2007 G8 conference, Avaaz.org protested against the “U.S. administration [for its] ‘wrecking tactics’ and failure to agree to specific, binding global goals” when it came to the mitigation of global warming. At the event, Avaaz.org presented a petition signed by 355,000 people from 193 countries that supported its position.

Give me a break. 355,000 people from 193 countries is… (wait I have to use my toes for this one)… is less than 2,000 citizens per country. Busy work. Potemkin People.

In March 2008, Avaaz launched a global petition to Chinese President Hu Jintao on Tibet, calling “restraint and respect for human rights” and the opening of “meaningful dialogue with the Dalai Lama.” This petition passed 1 million signatures in seven days, and has now reached more than 1.4 million signatures, making it among the largest and fastest-growing online petitions in history. The petition was delivered in protests and events at Chinese consulates and embassies around the world on March 31, 2008.

You can’t get much more 1960s than that. And it made such a difference, didn’t it? 1.4 million signatures is what percentage of the Chinese population? And since when did signatures from nobodies in the outside world make a dent in the thinking of China’s leaders?

The wiki lists Avaaz’ ‘current’ campaigns. Though these were last year they’re still worth looking at:

On 21 September 2009, Avaaz.org staged a ‘global wake-up call’ to press world leaders to take action on climate.

On 12 December 2009, Avaaz.org organized 3241 candle-lit vigils in 139 countries, again to press those attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 to reach a “Real Deal”.

I suppose Soros cornered the candle market for that one.

Predictably, anything run by Soros has its anti-Israel component and this one’s no different. They’ve got a petition going to investigate the Israeli interception of Turkey’s “aid” flotilla, and another to demand an investigation of the situation in Gaza.


So, if you didn’t know before, you are up-to-date with the job description for a “social entrepreneur”. Find someone to fund your existence and then get other organizations to buy your services which include candlelight vigils and petitions. So much for Perriello’s ignorance about “making things” (if you can remember back to that speech to the Tea Party). I’ll bet he can make dandy paper airplanes out of some of the pages of his endless petitions.

I’ve saved the worst for last. That’s his “Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good”. It’s simply another Soros-funded pro-abortion group. Soros hates fetuses more than he hates Jews.

This group was created to push the abortion agenda in that misbegotten ObamaCare bill. Back in March of this year, Gateway Pundit, prior to the disastrous vote on health care, wrote about them:

REMEMBER: DEMOCRATS WILL STOP AT NOTHING… to deceive the American public in order to take control of one-sixth of the US economy with their health care suicide pact.

Today, a far left pro-abortion group that calls itself a “Catholics in Alliance For the Common Good” published a dishonest letter that suggested that a Catholic organization backed the democrat’s pro-abortion takeover of the health care industry. This supposed Catholic group is a who’s who of far left radicals. The group includes non-Catholic leftists and even has non-Catholic pro-abortion democrat Hillary Clinton listed as one of its leaders. [links appear at the original post]

When I went to the Alliance website, the first thing I saw was a baby. Figures. Lots of anti-Catholic bumf on this website, too. And pro-illegal immigration, pro-union — all the usual talking points. Unironically, they call the blog part of their website “Just Words”. A most fitting name for what Tom Perriello represents. Just words.

The man is obviously a member in good standing of the Transnational Elites, lately of the NGO class, now of the Political Class, at least for the moment.

When Perriello rode over our Congressional District in his Soros steamroller, he did a grave injustice to us and to a public servant of great integrity. Even the Monitor called Virgil “[an] incumbent well-known for high-quality constituent service.”

Now it looks like Perriello is finished here. At least I pray so. Like an unthinking spoiled child, he will leave a ruin in his wake and never look back. His vaunted “social entrepreneurship” will continue apace, with petitions and candles and earnest world-changing rhetoric.

I didn’t pay attention to that election in 2008. If I had, if even a few people had done so, Perriello might not have won by 700 votes. A “majority” of 0.0029% is a crime, and I and others like me were guilty of complacency. No wonder the Tea Parties are forming in such numbers. There must be a great many other people who have the same feeling.

Our district has lost Virgil for good. He won’t be running again and I don’t blame him. Washington is an ugly place now and it will be a long time before it gets better. If it ever does.


By the way, recent reports say that Soros is opening up against the Tea Parties. He sees them as a threat, which means they must be having a salutary effect in the efforts to fight back against the Socialism Machine into which he has poured billions:

Soros and the foundation left have launched a website designed to go after the growing Tea Party movement. Teapartytracker.org will post video interviews and blog entries gathered by folks on the false left who never grow weary of demonstrating their outrage over the very idea of a grassroots political effort overthrowing establishment Democrats and Republicans in the district of corporate criminals.

Teapartytracker.org will be sponsored by the NAACP, Think Progress, New Left Media and Media Matters for America. Think Progress is a George Soros operation connected to John Podesta’s Center for American Progress. Podesta is Clinton’s former chief of staff. Media Matters for America is the brainchild of a MoveOn consultant and Podesta’s Center for American Progress…