The Child in Chief Speaketh

From CNN

Obama also said Wednesday he is "very comfortable" with his decision to ban interrogation techniques like waterboarding, which he called torture.
The president called the practice a recruiting tool for terrorist groups like al Qaeda, citing World War II-era British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who also rejected such "enhanced interrogation" techniques.

"Churchill understood that if you start taking shortcuts, over time that corrodes what's best in a people," Obama said. "It corrodes the character of a country."

- President Barack Obama, 100 Days, April 29, 2009.

Mr. Obama – a point of clarification. Mr. Churchill’s reference to torture was:

a.) in reference to actual torture, not highly productive interrogation techniques which, while scaring the daylights out of prisoners, do them no actual harm

b.) in reference to downed and captured Nazi pilots, most of whom were drafted against their will and who possessed little to no strategic knowledge outside of the parameters of their particular mission, rendering torture or even harsh interrogation pointless

c.) in recognition that captured British soldiers were largely being treated well by their German captors

Detained Islamic terrorists have demonstrated in word and deed their personal and deeply held conviction that their enemies – all non-Islamics – must convert or die. They have stated their unrepentent allegiance to this conviction. They have abused, tortured, beheaded, and blown to pieces countless innocent people in demonstration of this conviction and vowed to continue doing so long before any American or Allied engagement in the matter. They are in possession of strategies and technologies that make a small band or even just one of them as potentially lethal as an entire squadron of Luftwaffe bombers.

Your assessment of the situation and reference to Mr. Churchill in this instance is yet further proof of your adolescent and disastrous miscalculation of past, present, and future.

That the leader of the free world would publicly renounce a proven and legitimate means of defense in the fight against pure evil is a profound step in the direction of total surrender. And the free press applauds. Breathtaking.

Cheers,

Charlie

Update from the UK Times -Best try that again Barry.

100 Daze: What do we have Dr. Obama?

One hundred days into the Obama administration we are reminded of the oft told exchange between Mrs. Powell and Dr. Benjamin Franklin as he exited Philadelphia’s Independence Hall upon completion of the United States Constitution. “Well Doctor what do we have, a republic or a monarchy,” asked Mrs. Powell. “A Republic,” replied Doctor Franklin, “if you can keep it.”

Sentient Americans find themselves asking a similar question today. “Well Doctor Obama, what do we have, a republic, a monarchy, socialism, crony capitalism, corporatism, fascism, communism … what?” No one seems to know.

Newsweek magazine famously (and gleefully) declared, “We are all Socialists Now” citing the massive expansions of government, first under the Bush administration then accelerated exponentially under Mr. Obama.

Others call it fascism, not as a pejorative Hitlerian reference, but according to the definition of fascism as, “a system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.” Arguably all are applicable at present but the belligerent nationalism and racism. Belligerent Leftist political correctness, however, may yet prove an effective substitute.

Conservative political activist and former diplolmat, Alan Keyes, believes Mr. Obama to be a radical communist.

And economist Larry Kudlow, in a recent column about Obama’s economic interventions, muddied the waters still more.

“It’s not socialism because the government won’t actually own the means of production. It’s not fascism because America is a democracy, not a dictatorship, and Obama’s program doesn’t reach way down through all the sectors, but merely seeks to control certain troubled areas. And in the Obama model, it would appear there’s virtually no room for business failure. So the state props up distressed segments of the economy in some sort of 21st-century copy-cat version of Western Europe’s old social-market economy. So call it corporate capitalism or state capitalism or government-directed capitalism. But it still represents a huge change from the American economic tradition.”

Zounds. And all this in just 100 days.

So please tell us, you Hope & Changers, exactly what was it for which you voted? It would appear they haven’t a clue.

In a recent letter to members, Heritage Foundation President, Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D. analyzed the “puzzling ambivalence in the America people.”

“Following President Obama’s speech to Congress on February 24, a national poll sought the public’s overall reaction; 68 percent said they found it ‘very positive’; 88 percent said the policies he proposed will take us in the ‘right direction.’ But now consider some other polls. Rasmussen asked people whether Congress knows what it is doing in addressing our economic problems; 69 percent of voters said they didn’t think so. In another poll, Rasmussen asked whether Ronald Reagan was right when he said, ‘Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.’ Surprisingly, 59 percent of all voters (not just Republicans) agreed with that. President Obama is proposing something on the order of $1 trillion in new taxes; yet 57 percent of voters say tax cuts would help the economy.”

Such analysis leads one to the only logical conclusion which is that the American people are on crack. Not all of them. The sober are either attending Tea Parties desperately trying to resuscitate what remains of Dr. Franklin’s Republic, or quietly delighting in the phenomenal progress their Marxist schemes are making in all sectors of society. The masses in the middle, however, are clearly on crack.

Poor timing this. Iran, Russia, North Korea, Islamists the world over, and, last but by no means least, China are all vying for position to be the first to seriously challenge American resolve in the age of hope and change. In public, the rest of the world applauds Mr. Obama’s conciliatory gestures in face of it all. In private, they crave vigorous and unapologetic American protection; for they know that without it, all is lost.

“The price of greatness is responsibility,” declared Sir Winston Churchill before an audience at Harvard in 1943 regarding America’s role in the world. This is more true now than then. This is not the time for the American people to be smoking crack, or experimenting with Marxist variations of government and economy, or whining for chimeras like risk free loans and free health care.

The United States Constitution and free market principles have served Americans and, consequently, the world quite well. Would that these institutions be shown the respect and attention they deserve.

Cheers,

Charlie

Earth Day: The New Religion’s Holy Day of Obligation

“Only government can provide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe. Only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy.” - President Barack Obama

Mother Gaia has been raped one time too many. Mankind has forfeited any right to liberty he managed to arrogate unto himself. Repent sinners! Judgment is coming. The terrible swift sword of justice shall be leveled upon ye. For mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord, and its name is GOVERNMENT.

GOVERNMENT is all powerful. GOVERNMENT is all knowing. Yet GOVERNMENT is compassionate to those who would truly renounce their sin.

Thus prepare your sacrifice, and with happy heart give freely of your liberty, your wealth, and your way of life, that you may be made worthy in the eyes of GOVERNMENT.

Take ye now the Earth Day Vow of Poverty:

Do you renounce the use of all fossil fuels? (Your answer) I do.

Will you accept all manner of regulations affecting how you work and live?
(Your answer) I will.

Will you accept a global warming tax amounting to nearly $2,000 on every American household annually? (Your answer) I will.

Will you accept a diminishment of disposable income of more than $1,000 per household? (Your answer) I will

Will you accept gross domestic product losses in excess of $600 billion per year? (Your answer) I will.

Will you accept cumulative gross domestic product losses of nearly $7 trillion by 2029? (Your answer) I will.

Will you accept annual job losses exceeding 800,000 for several years? (Your answer) I will.

Then go forth, unburdened by greed and self-interest, of clean spirit into a clean world and sin no more; for thou hast been made worthy in the eyes of GOVERNMENT.

A Blessed Earth Day to all!

Cheers,

Charlie

Sacrifice, the “Common Good”, and Greater Evils

“My Father! If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not My will, but Thine be done" (Mt. 26: 38-39).

Sacrifice. It is core to the extraordinary teaching of Christ. We are compelled to sacrifice by God’s commandment, love thy neighbor as they self, and the revolutionary insight that it is in giving that we receive.

No where in this transaction is there a role for the State.

The salvific quality of sacrifice – great or small – is in the individual creature surrendering his will to the will of the Creator by free choice. To be compelled to give by force of law is no sacrifice at all.

Herein lies the bitter heresy of the so called Christian Social Justice movement that provides “moral authority” to the rape of human liberty currently being arranged in the halls of government throughout the free world. No thinking free man would willingly sacrifice his hard earned wealth to the corrupt cesspits of waste and ruin that comprise the majority of today’s social justice industrial complex. But force him to fund them through taxation and declare that doing so is necessary in order to ensure justice, eradicate poverty, and save the planet, and what choice does he have?

This is extortion not sacrifice, for the element of choice – Liberty – is wholly absent from it. Entities which identify this process as “sacrifice” reveal the perverted state of their minds and souls. They make virtues of envy and materialism and condemn the exercise of liberty as sin. This they do, they say, in the name of the “common good.” But they are blind to the far greater evil they unloose in supplanting human liberty in the name of “righteousness.”

This is the great sin of our time, for those championing it, know of what they do. It could scarcely be made more plain than in the words of Pope Benedict the XVI in his first Papal Encyclical “Deus Caritas Est” of 2006.

“There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such. There will always be suffering which cries out for consolation and help. There will always be loneliness. There will always be situations of material need where help in the form of concrete love of neighbour is indispensable. The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern.

We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need.

The Church is one of those living forces: she is alive with the love enkindled by the Spirit of Christ. This love does not simply offer people material help, but refreshment and care for their souls, something which often is even more necessary than material support.

In the end, the claim that just social structures would make works of charity superfluous masks a materialist conception of man: the mistaken notion that man can live “by bread alone” (Mt 4:4; cf. Dt 8:3)—a conviction that demeans man and ultimately disregards all that is specifically human.”

This Easter we pray that the Logos – the Word made Flesh, the Communion of Faith and Reason - be raised again in the hearts and minds of men, shedding the light of true freedom, and stirring them, as before, to fight all that would threaten their God given gift of Liberty.

Cheers,

Charlie

No thanks Barry. Already got one of these!