The American Spectator

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Defenses Down

6.19.08 @ 12:01AM

(Page 2 of 4)

If one sees a cockroach in the kitchen, one stomps it dead. The next step is to call in an exterminator and kill the nest. Obama, as a community organizer from Chicago, certainly knows this. But after hearing his rhetoric, the question arises, did he advise the tenants to ignore the infestation, negotiate with the bugs and blame the tenants for leaving food out in the kitchen in the first place? Sometimes giving the enemy the benefit of the doubt is simply giving them time to prepare.

Senator Obama is walking down a well worn Democratic path. He naively believes that terrorism is a legal issue and terrorists are to be treated as respectable citizens (much like the Freedom Five of the Supreme Court). Terrorism is a political act but not one of civil disobedience. It cannot be fought in the courts and through police enforcement. Diplomacy is rendered useless or turned against our interests. The Middle Eastern mindset respects "the strong man" approach. As President Johnson said, "When you've got 'em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow." Senator McCain understands that military force is the only rational response to terrorism.

Mr. Obama, it is not time to "turn the page." It is time to open another book. May I suggest The Art of War by Sun Tzu or Carl von Clausewitz's On War?
-- Ira M. Kessel
Rochester, New York

WHO NEEDS RETIREMENT?
Re: Peter Ferrara's Obama von Bismarck:

Obama is learning a lesson from the Socialists in Chile -- if you lie long enough and well enough you can raise taxes, stymie an economy and undermine freedom of choice and still market yourself as an "idealist" (actually ideologue) working for positive change.
-- Michael Tomlinson
Jacksonville, North Carolina

The reason that Social Security has no savings or investment is that it was never set up to be a pension fund, but was meant to be a retirement insurance program which would pay out a small percentage of claims against a huge pool of insured. This was based on the assumption that most Americans would not live to file claims, as the average life expectancy during the 1930s was less than the 65-years of retirement age. As long as most people didn't file claims, the fund would, theoretically, remain solvent.

That assumption, however, ran up against several trends. First, the Johnson administration saw the opportunity to use the SSI revenues to fill in budget shortfalls. Had a private insurer exhausted the company's assets to cover overspending, the FCC would have had his head on a plate, but since it was the FCC's boss that was doing it, the rules governing oversight of insurance funds were never applied.

The second trend was the idea that people who had never paid into the program could be eligible for benefits. This started with minor dependents or spouses of deceased recipients, which seemed like a logical outgrowth (if you accept that the payments into Social Security were part of the estates of the claimants), but soon this logic was applied to people who had no relation to the program, from recent immigrants to disabled adults. What had started out as an insurance program soon became just another form of welfare.

Finally, people began living longer. That meant that, rather than a small percentage of insured members filing claims, the vast majority filed them, draining the system's assets. Even if the system hadn't been looted, it would have been impossible to maintain the benefit structure without a constant influx of new taxpaying workers to support the retirees, a problem which will reach critical mass as the baby boomers retire. Again, a private company which paid out dividends to the first wave of investors out of the payments of the last wave, without any real investment, would have been shut down as a Ponzi scheme.

The solution to Social Security must begin with the recognition that it was structurally unsound from the beginning, and that the temptation to loot any source of revenue is too great for any government. Those who claim that it cannot be amended because it would somehow violate FDR's "legacy" have elevated symbolism over substance, and will end up saddling FDR with a far more destructive legacy, the bankruptcy of the United States government.
-- Mike Harris
MAJ, US Army

Obama is just the latest empty-suit, full-blooded liberal, albeit the most unique and newest and improved-est of the lot, to come along to sell the "progressive's" "message." Trouble is the progressive agenda neither is new nor has proven progressive. In fact, their recent rebranding of themselves from liberals to progressives is a deliberate throwback to those idyllic times when their ideology held promise and was not yet tainted and bloodstained by its results around the world.

Remember too, it is the Dems who believe the success of the conservative movement in recent decades was due to packaging, presentation and marketing deception. According to this psychological self-comforting, Ronald Reagan was popular not because of his ideas and their results but because he was an artful speaker and reassuring fatherly figure. After all they sneer, he was an actor (and a B actor at that!) but in reality was an amiable dunce napping his way through history who duped the denizens of flyover country. "If only we had a Ronnie Reagan!" they tell themselves, and now they think they do.

But rather than a Reagan who governed the largest state, Obama is more like the Marty McFly of contemporary politics. Just like in the movie Back to the Future, he is a no talent, unaccomplished slacker with a winning personality and gift of gab who, through the help of eccentric friends, finds himself driving a Democratic media time machine back to an earlier day of progressivism when all of their intentions seemed possible. And intentions are all that matter to libs, not the results. When their intentions realized don't resemble their dreams their reaction is to intensify their belief in the intentions but not to ever reassess the underlying ideas. Why did Spielberg, a staunch liberal, send Marty to the '50s? My guess is because it was then liberals were emerging ascendant from the dark ages of the McCarthyite red scare and at the brink of a new era with the just the right combination of modern science, academic brain power, organization, state power and good intentions. A liberalism fully realized seems in the offing. If you listen to Obama carefully he sounds like it's the 50s when all things liberal are possible and the last 50 years of liberalism's results never happened. He thinks we can have a do over.

But the life of our nation is no movie and though Marty McFly makes it home to the '80s okay -- ironically to a day of economic growth, national security and American resurgence, no thanks to liberals -- we know how things went from the 50s on whenever modern liberals were in charge. Liberalism has not had a new idea in 50 years and Obama represents no "change" any attentive grownup can recognize, save his skin color, but instead just the same old tired script of feel-good intentions we know don't work off the set. He does, because of his skin color, represent progress of a sort but not enough to take a trip with him in a back lot Delorean whilst the real dark ages of Islamism encroaches in a pincer movement of energy extortion funding holy war against our very civilization. So, in tribute to the movie Back to the Future I've derived a campaign slogan that captures perfectly the inversion of intentions vs. results that Obama liberalism represents. Instead of Back to the Future, Obama wants to take us Forward to the Past.
-- Mark Shepler
Jupiter, Florida

A HOUSE DIVIDED
Re: John Samples's What Sort of Country?:

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Taxes, John McCain, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Entitlements, Social Security, Sports, Islam, Constitution, Supreme Court, Founding Fathers, Military, NATO, Energy, Oil