Tag Archives: Nixon

It’s Not the Leak, It’s the Coverup

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One of the interesting things that has come out about the Snowden leak is the reaction to it. In the Nixon White House critics claimed it wasn’t so much the crime – bad enough of itself – as the coverup. In some ways it is appalling, but not surprising, that our own government is doing this, but it is more appalling that some react to it with indifference or with anger towards the leaker.

I can’t say that Edward Snowden is a hero or a traitor. We don’t know what his true motives are. We don’t know enough about him. More will come out, I hope, and shed some light on him.

I do think that the government monitoring of us is a terrible thing. Sure, most of us aren’t doing anything that would get us in trouble. However, I know, too, that anything you do or say can be taken out of context, twisted and made to look terrible. Giving information about yourself is giving your opponents a tool to use against you.

Some say no one is listening to our phone calls. Evidently that’s not true as it was discovered that the calls of soldiers in Iraq making intimate phone calls home to wives or girlfriends was something people sought out to listen to. Anyone who wants to run for office who made such an innocent call can have that used against him. Remember Barack Obama’s opponent for the Senate seat in Illinois? The sealed records of Jack Ryan’s divorce papers were released and his career went phhffft. Multiply that by millions and you think everyone’s safe?

It’s disturbing who’s not disturbed by this. Speaker John Boehner, for instance. This top Republican should be leading the charge to find out more and stop this surveillance of innocent people. Karl Rove is for it, too. Really? Shame on him. So are Steve Moore, economist and co-founder of the conservative Club for Growth; Senator Rob Johnson of Wisconsin; former NSA director Michael Hayden; analysts Bill Krystal and Brit Hume.

The reaction of young people is particularly stunning. Many just shrug their shoulders and say government’s been doing that a long time, who cares? Some want to appear sophisticated. They know all about web technology. In truth they are exceptionally naive.

Maybe it has something to do with education. Those of us who are older were taught the traditional American values of freedom and the Constitution. Who knows what they’ve been learning the past twenty years? Obviously it was not the same history and beliefs we hold dear. The world has been turned upside down. For once, young people are the complacent while the older population the revolutionary ones.

Thankfully some are standing up for freedom. In the good column are Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz; Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner who helped write the Patriot Act; Glenn Beck and a few others. The co-founder of Home Depot, Ken Langone, said yesterday that “I’d throw a party for Edward Snowden” and praised his courage for outing this info.

Have we become so enamored of our daily personal pleasures that freedom and privacy no longer matter? If so, that is what Obama is counting on. That is how tyranny is ushered in.

Have You No Sense of Decency?

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Joseph Welch asked that famous question to Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1954 hearings on Communism in the U.S. It wasn’t so much a question as a condemnation that resonated throughout the country and doomed McCarthy to the ash heap of history – fairly or unfairly.

But whatever McCarthy did or Nixon did, it’s nothing in comparison to the scandals that are erupting for Barack Obama. In just one of them, the IRS probe, We’re learning that the IRS has been making life difficult for conservatives, Republicans, Tea Party people and Jews as far back as 2010. (I guess Jay Carney would say that was so long ago it is old history now.) Talk about your enemies list!

The IRS somehow spilled the beans on itself. That, alone, is indicative that this goes much deeper and much higher than a few people in Ohio with an over active sense of reprisal. Someone was trying to get in front of the tsunami on the horizon. Curious.

Fox News reports:

The internal IG timeline shows a unit in the agency was looking at Tea Party and “patriot” groups dating back to early 2010. But it shows that list of criteria drastically expanding by the time a June 2011 briefing was held. It then included groups focused on government spending, government debt, taxes, and education on ways to “make America a better place to live.” It even flagged groups whose file included criticism of “how the country is being run.”

By early 2012, the criteria were updated to include organizations involved in “limiting/expanding government,” education on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and social economic reform.

Obama & company have been pretty quiet about this issue. Maybe that “buck stops here” phrase applies to him. Ultimately, it does. I ask, Mr. President, have you no decency? What will you try next; the old racism ploy? Probably.

Fiscal Cliff or Economic Collapse?

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The tug of war over tax hikes and government spending intensifies as we get closer to January 1.

Part of the reason we can’t get traction is that the American public does not understand what is at stake. Purposefully. The media helps that by obfuscating. Most of them are reluctant to show why Republicans hold to their tax cut/spending cut ideas; the Democrats’ mantra that they are for the middle class sounds more appealing but it is hollow. Their ideas don’t tackle the problems at all.

Following the election many of us realize the appalling state of our voters. Obama supporters came out of the woodwork to ensure that they’ll continue to get their goodies. The rest of us realize that there won’t be any goodies for anyone if we are taxed to death and spent to death.

Trace it back to schools where students evidently don’t get much in the math department. They don’t understand the enormity of the money the government takes out nor the even bigger amount it spends. Let’s face it; it’s not a concern for most people. They run up the credit card and payment day keeps getting extended. Meanwhile, they enjoy their purchases. How much this will cost them in the end doesn’t matter for the fun of today.

Selwyn Duke writes “I’ll See Your Economic Collapse and Raise you National Demise” in the americanthinker.com today. He puts numbers in terms maybe even the morons can grasp.

Let’s get real. Federal revenue this year will be approximately $2.5 trillion.

That’s $2,500,000,000,000.

How much, again? Well, updating some examples Rob Bluey provided at The Foundry lends the following perspective:

It is 2,500 billion.
At $45.8 million per year, LeBron James would need to work 54,607.5 years to earn it.
Average life in the U.S. lasts 2.4 billion seconds.
2.5 billion seconds ago = 1933.
2.5 trillion seconds ago = 74,250 BC.

Furthermore, a stack of 2.5 trillion dollar bills would reach a height of 169,665 miles — more than two thirds the way to the moon. This brings us to the second part of the problem.

We’re set to spend this year $3,500,000,000,000.

Stacked up, that many bills reach to the moon. And that’s where we’re headed fiscally.

Perhaps that can make an impact.

As he says, “if the government cannot get by on $2.5 trillion a year, guess what! Pull it up root and branch and start anew.”

Yet some still argue that liberals do care about fiscal restraint and want to tackle the problem. Duke reminds us

Ronald Reagan learned this the hard way in the 1980s when he agreed to a budget deal that included three dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in tax increases. The taxes came first.

The cuts never came at all.

As Reagan later wrote, “[t]he Democrats reneged on their pledge and we never got those cuts.”

So here’s a message for Republicans who think that liberals can be negotiated with on the budget. I’ll be blunt.

Hey, idiots, they’re not going to stop spending. Capisce?

Yes, I screamed that. How do I know they won’t stop? Ooh, maybe because they haven’t stopped for 50 years? Maybe because the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior? It’s also because a liberal is a liberal is a liberal. A scorpion stings, a cuttlefish expels ink, a skunk sprays mercaptan fluid, and a liberal spends. It’s what the species does.

Many conservatives don’t grasp this, however. They make a common mistake: they assume that others think as they do. They’re largely rational, so they expect rational behavior from their fellow man. But as I explained recently, emotion prevails in people’s decision-making far more than you may think. What feels right often trumps what is right, even when the former is downright stupid.

So maybe, bad as it might be, a jump off the fiscal cliff is better than death by drowning in the debt drowning pool.

Year of the Chick Fil-A Voter

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Look at this line from the Bay Area of all places:

Doesn’t this tell you something about this election year?

Some of us remember Nixon’s Silent Majority. He correctly figured out that most Americans didn’t go along with the radical, anti Vietnam War, hate America crowd that was the hippie part of the 60s. They weren’t able to or didn’t want to speak out about it. It wasn’t in their nature. But they did not like what was going on. Nixon appealed to them and won the election.

Maybe we are experiencing something like that again, if the whole Chick-Fil-A incident is any indication.

We’ve previously identified the Soccer Moms, Values Voters and WalMart shoppers as voting blocks. Pollsters discovered them. But the Chick-Fil-A voters came up organically. The same pollsters did not see them coming, but at the first opportunity to express their political feelings people lined up spontaneously to make a statement.

The Chick-Fil-A voter puzzles the Democrats. They’d like to brand them as anti-gay. They aren’t. They are tolerant people who resent any community forcing another to give up free speech rights for political correctness. Democrats don’t believe it, but the whole thing really had nothing to do with like or dislike of gays. It had to do with an out of control government insistent on shaping American mores.

The Chick-Fil-A voters may team up with another recently identified block, the CENGAS. This is pollster John Zogby’s term for “college-educated, not going anywhere” youth. They voted for the hopeandchangey thing last election, but found out they were duped.

This group seeks jobs and hopes to live independent of mom and dad, an impossibility in the Obama administration. Many have already switched to Romney.

These two groups are a significant threat to Obama’s reelection. So far, he hasn’t known what to do about them. He’s attacked them as racist, greedy or stupid. Not a way to woo them.

Let’s hope Romney and Ryan get it and get them.

Will Mitt Get Mad?

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A lot of people are anguishing whether Mitt Romney will begin delivering broadsides against Barack Obama.

Mitt certainly didn’t hold back against his fellow Republicans. In the primaries, he hit them all hard, especially Gingrich and Santorum, until they were out of the way. Last week when Romney was vacationing much of the conservative media began criticizing him for his tepid responses to the ruling on Obamacare, Bain capital attacks and overseas financial accounts. I listened as Fox News, the Wall St. Journal, Bill Cristal, Laura Ingraham, and about every talk radio host lambasted him.

Is Romney being lax? This morning Ace of Spades noted:

In a conference call Monday morning, senior staff said Romney’s surrogates would stop shying away from the word “lie” in responding to Democrats’ attacks on his business record, and plan to go on TV to call Obama a “liar,” the source said.

“They are very fed up with these attacks,” said the source…

“The feeling was that nobody is watching this right now,” said the source. “They had a time frame to respond to the Bain attacks… But today the counterattack with the surrogates is going to begin.”

He continues, reflecting that the Reagan/Carter election polls which showed Carter ahead for a long time, were suspect. Ace also comments:

But what if the country were doing well under Carter, and Reagan turned in the same charming, reassuring debate performance? Would the debate have turned the election then?

This gets to my point about underlying factors being crucial, and nearly determinative, to predicting election outcomes.

Yes, voters may have seized upon Reagan’s debate performance as a reason to vote for him… but due to underlying factors (economy, hostage crisis) they were already looking for a reason to vote for him.

I’m not sure if his debate performance was a game-changer so much as a justification for people to do what they were already inclined to do.

When couples divorce, there’s usually some precipitating event — a singular event — which spurs the actual decision. “The last straw,” as they say. But the last straw was the last straw only because there were so many hundreds of straws before that one.

I believe in the concept of preference cascades and tipping points. I think the country is poised for a preference cascade; I think most undecided voters are looking for a reason to vote against Obama.

Whether it’s a debate, or some Obama gaffe, or a charming Romney appearance on some news show, or a global depression… When you’re looking for an excuse, you’ll eventually find one.

Obama usually gets 46-48% support, in polls. But I consider 5-8% of that support either nominal (I’m saying I support him, but I really don’t) or extraordinarily fragile (I’ll give him one last chance).

It’s an unhappy marriage. The public is very disappointed in Obama, and by the all gods of Hyboria, is Obama disappointed right back at a public too stupid to understand his awesomeness.

Everyone’s looking for an excuse to get out of this unhappy arrangement. Including, I think, in his heart of hearts, Barack Obama.

They’ll find that excuse. I don’t know what it’ll end up being, but they will find it.

And then, in 20 years, the Story of the election will be “Oh right, Romney put the election away when he picked [Insert Candidate Name Here] as Vice President.”

But that won’t be the truth of it. The election was actually all but decided when the third sub-100,000 jobs report came down, way back in early July.

Many times elections hinge on one comment that rubs the public the wrong way. Or an unforeseen event. Sometimes a man gets elected president that no one even particularly likes (think Nixon in 1968). It’s still too early to tell in my opinion.

If Romney were way ahead in the polls right now, it still wouldn’t be much comfort. Leads can collapse and often do. Think of the Kentucky Derby. The favorite rarely wins and the one out front at the start usually finishes way behind the others.

One of the tactics Obama and the media will employ is to discourage us. They will tell us Obama is ahead and make it look desolate for the Republicans. We can’t believe this. It’s not over until election night. Well, hopefully election night.

Thank You, Senator Santorum

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At last Romney’s smear machine has done enough damage to get him the nomination.

His last remaining obstacle, Senator Rick Santorum, announced today that he was suspending his campaign. That’s a euphemism for giving up. Sunday on a news show, Newt Gingrich effectively admitted defeat, too. He doesn’t see a way to get the delegates that would secure the nomination in Tampa this summer. Gingrich has also run out of money. For a while he was asking supporters to buy signs. Now he is in the hole.

Neither Gingrich nor Santorum could match the bucks Romney was willing to use to buy the nomination. He started his negative ad campaigns against Bachmann, Perry, Cain, etc. and went on until they were obliterated. Santorum was always working on a shoestring. It’s amazing he got as far as he did.

At least in Tennessee and Mississippi, Romney’s throwing the kitchen sink at Santorum didn’t work. Too much common sense here for people to believe that Santorum eschews conservatism. In other states, Romney was more lucky. This upholds my view that Southerners are much more savvy than the rest of the country.

While I will not work for Romney, I will vote for him. If Romney is Nixon (and he seems frighteningly as flexible as the man who gave us the EPA and other such liberal fancies), Obama is a monstrous mix of Mao and Stalin. So in that respect, it is an easy decision.

But I am not optimistic about the vote in November. Will Romney take it to Obama the way he took it to Santorum? I doubt it. Our candidates were too squishy to bring up the Mormon business. Obama won’t be. He won’t do it directly, but it will be done for him. I have nothing against Mormons, but they do have some rites that may scare away Americans. Also, the David Plouffe/Axelrod contingent has been set up in Chicago for a year and a half doing opposition research on Romney. If he ever sneezed in a movie theater, they know about it. Does anyone think Romney’s people have been as thorough?

I’m glad Santorum stayed in as long as he did. He, along with Cain, Perry and Bachmann helped push Romney a little more to the right than he might have wanted to go. The Republican establishment has promoted him and wiped away the Tea Party influence. If he loses, it will be on their heads. Rove and company: be careful what you wish for.

Victory

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Our two Republican candidates in yesterday’s city elections both won last night. In fact, they won overwhelmingly.

Because of efforts by Shelby Republicans, they were able to defeat their Democrat rivals. People stuffed envelopes, made phone calls, put up campaign signs and donated for letters to be sent in our neighborhoods. Special thanks go to Ruth Henderson, Cile Brooks, Alex Mahone and Tommy Parker for their donations.

Another factor in victory could have national implications. In such a heavily Democrat city, Conrad and Boyd managed to win even though union money was used against them. It would appear that union influence is waning, and even better, becoming a turn-off to voters.

The Commercial Appeal pointed out the money that unions had put behind candidates and even waged against Mayor Wharton before the election. They evidently thought it was an important factor. However, there is backlash against the tactics of the unions as seen in Wisconsin and the lavish benefits that they award themselves while crying poor.

The Occupy Wall Street protestors could have negative implications for Democrats. Remember 1968? The riots in Chicago hurt Humphrey and thrust Nixon into the role of uniter. We know how that turned out.

University Disgraces Itself

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“Enraged Leftists Force University to Nix Bristol Palin Campus Appearance” read the headline at gatewaypundit.com. Unphazed – the Palins are attacked so often now it’s almost part of the daily routine: get up, eat breakfast, newspaper attacks Sarah Palin; eat lunch, TV pundit laughs at Palin; go to bed, comedian calls Palin stupid. Trigg is not hers, Todd is unfaithful, Bristol rigs her “Dancing With the Stars competition, Sarah causes the Tucson shootings.  So what else is new?

Then it caught my eye. Students at Washington University in St. Louis speak out against Bristol Palin’s appearance as keynote speaker for Sexual Responsibility Week. Skipping over the ridiculousness of a university wasting a week on that topic, I went on to  dismay and disappointment and yes, anger. The University I had liked and attended had once again behaved poorly.

“Following student dissent, Palin and the Student Union mutually decided she wouldn’t attend,” said the St. Louis Post Dispatch. The controversy would “overshadow the topic they hoped to discuss” the panelists  decided.

Really?

When did universities become so close minded? When did they start stifling free speech? When I attended in the 1970s, following the tumultuous 60s, the atmosphere was not as highly charged as it seems  now. Students had  burned down the ROTC building in ’68, but the professors and students seemed to have moved on from that. Even with Watergate in the news and Nixon resigning, I don’t recall students being this mean spirited and radical.

As David Horowitz warns, the Marxist, Leftist leaders of the time did not go away. They just dug in deeper and worked harder to radicalize students. For decades most of us did not realize what was happening.

And they wonder why we don’t have innovations like we used to? When people are not free to discuss different points of view, creativity is depressed. What’s the point of a college education anymore? It’s just delivering more soldiers to the liberal battle against us.