The “Sell Out America” World Tour

OK, boys and girls. These are examples of what is known as “giving aid and comfort to our enemies.” Can we say “treason?” I knew you could.
–
–
The Apologists
by Patrick J. Buchanan (more by this author)
Posted 04/21/2009 ET

For 50 minutes, Obama sat mute, as a Marxist thug from Nicaragua delivered his diatribe, charging America with a century of terrorist aggression in Central America.

After Daniel Ortega finished spitting in our face, accusing us of inhumanity toward Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Obama was asked his thoughts.

“I thought it was 50 minutes long. That’s what I thought.”

Hillary Clinton was asked to comment: “I thought the cultural performance was fascinating,” she cooed.

Pressed again on Ortega’s vitriol, Hillary replied: “To have those first-class Caribbean entertainers all on one stage and to see how much was done in such a small amount of space. I was overwhelmed.”

Thus the nation that won the Cold War, contained the cancer of Castroism in Cuba, liberated Grenada, blocked communist takeovers of Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, and poured scores of billions in aid into this region was left undefended by its own leaders at the Summit of the Americas.

Nor was this the only unanswered insult. Hugo Chavez, who has called Obama an “ignoramus” and Bush “El Diablo,” walked over to a seated U.S. president and handed him the anti-American tract “Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.”

The book blames Latin America’s failures on white Europeans.

It opens, “Renaissance Europeans ventured across the oceans and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations.”

Civilizations? Before Pizarro and Cortez, the Inca and Aztec empires these conquistadors overthrew were into human sacrifice.

Evo Morales, the Aymaran president of Bolivia, who is using the race card against Bolivians of European descent, implied a U.S. role in an assassination plot against him.

Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner, who allegedly received black-bag money from Chavez, ripped into America for its role in the 1980s. Under Reagan, America aided Britain in the Falklands War, after the Argentine junta invaded the islands, and assisted the Contras in their war of national liberation to oust Ortega’s Sandinistas.

Again, Obama offered no defense of his country.

President Lula da Silva of Brazil, who blames the world financial crisis on “white, blue-eyed bankers,” told Obama that any future Summit of the Americas without the Castro brothers was unacceptable.

Perhaps Obama believes in turn-the-other-cheek diplomacy, though it is hard to find much success in history for such a policy. Perhaps pacifism is in his DNA. Perhaps he shares the indictment of America that is part of the repertoire of every Latin demagogue.

Whatever his motive, in Trinidad, there were not two sides to the story. There were the trashers of America on the Latino left and a U.S. president who wailed plaintively, “I’m thankful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was 3 months old.”

But, the Bay of Pigs, had it succeeded, would have given Cubans 50 years of freedom instead of the brutal dictatorship they have had to endure. And it took place four months before Barack was born.

Obama’s silence — signifying, as it does, assent — in the face of attacks on his country is of a piece with the “contrition tour” of his secretary of state.

“Clinton Scores Points by Admitting Past U.S. Errors,” was the headline over Saturday’s New York Times story by Mark Landler:

“It has become a recurring theme of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s early travels as the chief diplomat of the United States: She says that American policy on a given issue has failed, and her foreign listeners fall all over themselves in gratitude.

“On Friday, Mrs. Clinton said … that the uncompromising policy of the Bush administration toward Cuba had not worked. …

“The contrition tour goes beyond Latin America. In China, Mrs. Clinton told audiences that the United States must accept its responsibility as a leading emitter of greenhouse gases. In Indonesia, she said the American-backed policy of sanctions against Myanmar had not been effective. And in the Middle East, she pointed out that ostracizing the Iranian government had not persuaded it to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions.”

Sandler wrote that Hillary brought to mind Bill Clinton:

“On a single trip to Africa in 1998 … Bill Clinton apologized for American participation in slavery; American support of brutal African dictators; American ‘neglect and ignorance’ of Africa; American failure to intervene sooner in the Rwandan genocide of 1994; American ‘complicity’ in apartheid … .”

Yet, as C.S. Lewis reminds us in “God in the Dock,” “The first and fatal charm of national repentance is … the encouragement it gives us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing — but, first, of denouncing — the conduct of others.”

Bewailing the policies of Bush as failures and standing mute in the face of attacks on his country and predecessors may come back to bite Obama.

For when Jimmy Carter assumed a posture of moral superiority over LBJ and Richard Nixon, by declaring, “We have gotten over our inordinate fear of communism,” it came back to bite him, good and hard.

Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, “The Death of the West,”, “The Great Betrayal,” “A Republic, Not an Empire” and “Where the Right Went Wrong.”

Barack Obama rejects Normandy trip to avoid offending Germany

Didn’t want to offend the GERMANS? This lying, narcissistic pecker head doesn’t want to offend anyone else around the world, but he doesn’t seem to mind offending his SUBJECTS at home. He was overheard being asked by a staffer why he didn’t want to go to Normandy, to which he responded “…there are not live voters there.” He doesn’t care about doing what is best for America. He cares about what is best for the rock-star image of B. Hussein Obama. He’s only going to go where he can draw the biggest crowd.

---

Obama and Liberal War on Christianity Gaining Momentum

Here is an outstanding analysis and exposition on Obama and the liberals war on Christianity. There’s very little to add to the article except this:

Obama says we (Americans) are not and never will be at war with islam. This may prove to be true, but the simple fact is that islam, or at least some percentage of it, IS and HAS BEEN at war with America and western civilization for some time. Sadly, most of our Neville Chamberlain, head-in-the-sand liberals refuse to admit this fact.

---

Obama’s Unholy War Against Christianity, Not Islam

By George Neumayr on 4.8.09 @ 6:08AM

The more illiberal a religion, the more liberals tend to like it. Western liberals who propose no place for God in the public square can usually be counted on to excuse non-western religions that impose a false and dangerous one upon it.

The explanation for this apparent contradiction goes beyond the childish and self-hating affinity of western liberals for all things non-western. The deeper reason is western liberalism’s attachment to irrationality. Having ruptured a once-harmonious relationship between reason and religion in their own culture, western liberals can’t seem to stop themselves from championing similar ruptures in alien ones.

By different routes of irrationality, western liberals and militant Muslims arrive at the same spot. Western liberals reach it by a distorted “reason” without faith, militant Muslims by a distorted “faith” without reason, with each imbalance producing its own culture of death: abortion and euthanasia in the west, jihad in the east.

An old-style liberal like Oriana Fallaci found it amazing that Enlightenment liberals could defend so enthusiastically the gross illiberal tendencies of militant Muslims and puzzled over how two seemingly different groups could turn up on the same side in debates. But it is not surprising if one considers their shared rejection of reason properly understood and the common enemy that rouses them — a lingering Christianity in the west.

But, says the day-to-day watcher of politics, who cares? What does any of this have to do with Barack Obama’s speech in Turkey earlier in the week? A lot, actually. Behind the speech is the above-mentioned phenomenon; it contained a deep sympathy for Islam that Obama would never extend to traditional Christianity.

As Obama gears up to abolish the conscience rights of Christian pro-lifers at American hospitals, as he uses executive orders to force Christians to finance abortions at home and abroad, as he places Christian opponents of gay marriage in the moral category of racists, he tells Turkey that “America is not and never will be at war with Islam” and accepts the moderation of Muslims without question.

Never mind that self-proclaimed moderate Muslims in Turkey, Sufi-Shia Muslims, have been persecuted by the Turkish government; never mind that Turkish Christians have been persecuted too, banned from opening churches or running seminaries and thrown into jail for insulting “Turkishness” after giving open witness to Jesus Christ.

No, none of this is worrisome to Obama. His enemy is not Islam abroad, but Christianity at home. Indeed, if he treated Muslims the way he treats believing Christians in America, Muslims would call it a holy war.

As far as Obama is concerned, the only religion to be “reformed” — which is to say destroyed — is not the west’s historic adversary but its progenitor. Islam is peaceful, he pronounces, while traditional Christianity is bigoted and dangerous. Islam is a friend to America, while traditional Christians are, as Obama supporter Tom Hanks described Proposition 8 supporters, “un-American.”

Obama has in effect declared to Christians in America: either bring your understanding of Christianity into line with my liberalism or don’t bother entering the public square. You want federal money? Well, then perform abortions, distribute condoms, hire homosexual activists, etc., etc. He would never dare talk to Muslims in those terms. He will give back ancestral swords to freed Muslims from Guantanamo Bay and hand forceps to Christian doctors.

If Muslims had to endure patronizing and lying secularist drivel from him like “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values,” they would riot. Cowed and secularized Christians just nod and offer him an honorary degree.

George Neumayr is editor of Catholic World Report and press critic for California Political Review.

The Democrats AIG Bonus Scam

How is it that lying to congress is a federal offense, but congress lying to the American people is no problem at all? At the very least all of these clowns are guilty of impeachable offenses of lying to their employers (that’s US!). Actually, following the Democrat-set precedent of the Scooter Libby trial, they are guilty of criminal offenses that should land them all in jail. The Democrats lead by Obama are destroying truth, real justice, and personal responsibility in America. They, along with the Democrats posing as Republicans, all need to go to jail for their contributions to the destruction of America.

The Dems’ AIG Bonus Scam

by Fred J. Eckert (more by this author)
Posted 03/24/2009 ET
Updated 03/25/2009 ET

The Democratic Congress put on quite a show for us last week (and this week may top last).

In a memorable performance, they feigned surprise and shock that $165 million of taxpayers’ dollars were spent on bonuses for executives of the failed insurance giant AIG.

“If they don’t give the money back, we will put in place a new law that will allow us to tax these bonuses at a very high rate so that it is returned to its rightful owners — the taxpayers,” New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer fumed in a Senate speech. “So, to those of you getting these bonuses, be forewarned: you will not keep them.”

It was a scene reminiscent of the one in the movie Casablanca in which Captain Renault tells Rick he is closing down his saloon down because, “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here” as a casino worker hands Renault a wad of money and says, “Your winnings, sir.”

Schumer knows perfectly well that this $165 million for AIG executive bonuses is something he voted for just a few weeks earlier.

The same is true of each of the other ten Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who have joined Schumer in signing a letter making the same threat he announced in his floor remarks.

It’s a farce — a sham.

What’s going on here is that the news media finally got around to mentioning that this $165 million for bonuses is part of the more than $170 billion of taxpayer money that Congress and President Obama insisted must be awarded in haste to the failed insurance giant American International Group, Inc (AIG). The public, understandably, is really angry.

So the Democrats are terrified that the public might actually start figuring out what an incredibly incompetent job President Obama and the Congressional Democrats are doing.

What if average citizens begin asking themselves the sort of questions that the Democrats can depend on the mainstream media to cover for them by not asking? Questions such as,

• Why was Congress so reckless in writing the bailout legislation that it didn’t include limitations to preclude waste such as those big bonuses?
• Anyone who reads the news knows that the financial markets are truly global. When writing the legislation, Congress had to know that AIG would pass billions of U.S. tax dollars to foreign banks. Why didn’t Congress make that contingent on equal or greater contributions by foreign governments? Why are the French, the Germans and the British having their banks rescued by American taxpayers?
• What other questionable expenditures of taxpayers’ dollars are buried in the barrels of billions the Democrats are rush delivering to seemingly anyone who puts his hand out? Weren’t there better alternatives than simply giving away taxpayers’ billions to anyone and everyone who got into severe trouble by taking reckless risks? Why no public hearings on this?
• Was the main reason for such a great rush to avoid close scrutiny of where the money was going? How many so-called “stimulus” expenditures are really nothing but gigantic rewards to political allies?

What the Democrats decided is that they needed a stunt to divert attention away from their stunning incompetence.

So, last week, the House voted to “take back” those contractually obligated bonuses, and the Democratic leadership has promised that the Senate will do the same this week. This is not a comedy the Democrats are performing for us — it’s a tragedy.

Equally tragic is the blatant disrespect for the Constitution of the United States that is on display throughout these shenanigans. Article 6 of the Constitution requires that the President and Member of Congress swear to support the Constitution. Of course, the Constitution doesn’t require them to understand it or even to read it, but let’s give the driving force behind this sham, Chuck Schumer, the benefit of the doubt and presume he has read it. He is, after all, a graduate of Harvard Law School, a member of the Senate’s Committee on the Judiciary, and was a member of the Judiciary Committee when he served in the House.

Schumer knows better — and so should every member of Congress and the President. Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3 of the Constitution prohibits what they are doing because it specifies that: “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.” And what they are doing constitutes a bill of attainder.

As the Heritage Foundation’s Guide to the Constitution says, “In common law, bills of attainder were legislative acts that, without trial, condemned specifically designated persons or groups to death…,” but the Supreme Court — going back to a case in 1810 — reads the Constitutional bar to prevent legislative confiscation of property.

As James Madison explained in The Federalist Papers No. 44: “Bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, and laws impairing the obligations of contracts, are contrary to the first principle of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation.”

Freedom from bills of attainder and ex post facto laws are the only individual rights which the Framers deemed so important as to insert in the original document protection against both federal and state infringement.

In 1965, in United States vs. Brown, the Supreme Court once again affirmed that the purpose of Article 1, Section 9, Paragraph 3 is to prohibit “legislative punishment, of any form or severity, of specifically designated persons or groups.”

The position of the U.S. Supreme Court over the years has been that this clause of the Constitution is deemed violated if 1) The legislation in question specifies a specific group; 2) It includes some form of punishment; and 3) It does not include a judicial trial.

One, two, three — guilty on each count. Which means that what’s coming next is that the Supreme Court will give thumbs down to their pathetic pretense. And then they will feign surprise and say they tried. Trying to con the American people into believing they have nothing to do with something the public is incensed about — that’s what this big charade is really all about.

This sham is an affront to the Constitution of the United States by the Congress of the United States and the President of the United States. They are violating the solemn oath they took to bear “true faith and allegiance” to the Constitution — and by doing this, they are guilty of neglecting to “well and faithfully discharge” the duties of their offices.

Many of them don’t know what they are doing.

Many of them know but don’t care.

That’s how bad things are in Washington right now.

It’s change, all right — an appalling change from what the Founders of the American Republic had in mind for governing this great country.

Fred J. Eckert is a former conservative Republican Congressman from New York and twice served as a US Ambassador under President Reagan, who called him �a good friend and valuable advisor.�

An Example of Courage for our U.S. Politicians

If only our politicians had this kind of courage and grasp on the reality of our situation. The ship of our nation is taking on water, and rather than bail water overboard, the Obama administration is pouring more buckets of water INTO the ship. For another analogy, the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. Telling him will only get you attacked, and no one has the courage to throw a blanket over him.

I’ll drop the Obama birth certificate thing if Hannan can run in our next presidential election.

U.K. MEP Daniel Hannan: Transcript of His Attack on Gordon Brown

March 25, 2009 08:43 AM ET | James Pethokoukis | Permanent Link | Print

I don’t normally delve into the politics of the European Parliament, but this video of Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan stripping the bark off British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is worth noting. (“The devalued prime minister of a devalued government.”) Many American politicians might be hearing the same criticisms next year if the U.S. economy is still depressed even as the national debt soars. Here is a transcript:

	“Prime Minister, I see you’ve already mastered the essential craft of the European politician, namely the ability to say one thing in this chamber and a very different thing to your home electorate. You’ve spoken here about free trade, and amen to that. Who would have guessed, listening to you just now, that you were the author of the phrase ‘British jobs for British workers’ and that you have subsidised, where you have not nationalised outright, swathes of our economy, including the car industry and many of the banks? Perhaps you would have more moral authority in this house if your actions matched your words? Perhaps you would have more legitimacy in the councils of the world if the United Kingdom were not going into this recession in the worst condition of any G20 country?”
	“The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child. Now, once again today you try to spread the blame around; you spoke about an international recession, international crisis. Well, it is true that we are all sailing together into the squalls. But not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear their rigging; in other words – to pay off debt. But you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further. As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the water line under the accumulated weight of your debt We are now running a deficit that touches 10% of GDP, an almost unbelievable figure. More than Pakistan, more than Hungary; countries where the IMF have already been called in. Now, it’s not that you’re not apologising; like everyone else I have long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things. It’s that you’re carrying on, wilfully worsening our situation, wantonly spending what little we have left. Last year – in the last twelve months – a hundred thousand private sector jobs have been lost and yet you created thirty thousand public sector jobs.”
	“Prime Minister, you cannot carry on for ever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit. You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re ‘well-placed to weather the storm’, I have to tell you that you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense! Everyone knows that Britain is worse off than any other country as we go into these hard times. The IMF has said so; the European Commission has said so; the markets have said so – which is why our currency has devalued by thirty percent. And soon the voters too will get their chance to say so. They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government.”