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Obama plans and is on track to winning

by Mojambo ( 160 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Elections 2012, Liberal Fascism, Media, Progressives, Republican Party, Socialism, Tea Parties at November 29th, 2011 - 2:00 pm

His contempt for us is a weakness, but it’s also a sign of how fortified his position is.

The Knish points out the obvious – that not only is Obama far from being beaten, but with the incredibly weak front runners we have in the Republican Party (Newt Gingrich aka “Mr. Newt”? Herman Cain who probably could not find the Middle East on a map? The cynical Mitt Romney?) is right now more then likely to win reelection. All the forces are still in play for him – a loyal base, a lapdog media, the popular culture, billions of dollars, and most important of all – he is still Black. The Knish reminds us that Obama tossed away the white working class vote in 2008 and still won.

by Daniel Greenfield

It’s downright strange that at a time when the field of Republican candidates has narrowed down to a few bad choices and the left has finally fielded its own answer to the Tea Party movement, that some pundits on the right are still cheerfully pushing the meme that Obama is all but done.

Sure it would be great if Obama were lying on the floor in a pool of spilled beer while humming songs from Sesame Street, but that is not what’s going on. And adding false self-confidence to the mix is about the worst possible thing to do.

Yes Obama wants to win and worse still he’s on track to win. It doesn’t matter how low his ratings are, so long as his opponent’s ratings are even worse. This is not a campaign that he has to win by being the better man, he just has to sit there and let the press destroy his opponent.

Obama does have one thing in common with some of the pundits predicting his imminent demise, they’re both sure that they can’t lose. But Obama has grounds for thinking that. Far better grounds than the cheerleaders who insist that anyone the Republicans run will win in a landslide in every state.

The lack of a traditional campaign on the D side of the line means nothing. 2008 wasn’t a traditional campaign either. Is Obama tossing away the white working class vote? He won without them in 2008. The unions have no choice and the rest can go to hell. Obama is saying mean things about Americans? He did that in 2008 too and it didn’t slow him down.

[……]

Using leftist occupations of public spaces in major cities as the kickoff to a campaign. How many people saw that coming and how many expected it to work? But it worked well enough to engage the younger voters who helped boost him last time around. And it’s not the end of the show.

It’s tempting to see Obama as another Carter or Dukakis, a malaise ridden liberal, but while he has a good deal in common philosophically with them, his image and his campaign have little in common with theirs. And it’s also worth remembering that Reagan’s defeat of Carter was not nearly as easy as some would make it out to be.

Reagan’s victory might not have been nearly so decisive without the involvement of an independent candidate who drew votes from Carter. And even that victory was not always inevitable. Before the debate, Reagan was polling behind Carter. Had Carter avoided debating Reagan and avoided challenges from the left, it’s not inconceivable that he might have pulled off a second term.

No we aren’t doomed to a second term of O. But as always the election is ours to lose. And the best way to lose a game is to assume that you’re going to win before you even play. It’s possible that we might win this on an “Anyone But Obama” vote by independents, but it’s more likely that we will have to work hard for it.

Out of the starting gate that means we are likely to be saddled with a candidate that much of the party isn’t happy with. Our challenge will be to revive a grass roots campaign even while the grass roots may not be particularly enthusiastic about the ABO candidate. It will be to cope with daily media attacks without getting beaten down or losing our spirit. And the best way to begin is to understand that this will be a tough fight.

So I’ll say it again, yes he wants to win. It may not look like he’s working for it, but that is because he doesn’t have to work for it.

Obama does not have to work hard to win this election. He just has to make his campaign stops, read his speeches off the teleprompter and bask in the glow of the media’s praise. We are the ones who have to work hard because we are the insurgents. No matter how dissatisfied the public is with this term, and no matter how willing they seem to be to vote for a generic Republican, they are not going to be nearly as eager to do so after a month of media attacks.

The media is going to make this a campaign of personalities, contrasting the personalities of their guy and our guy. We are going to have to fight to bring the issues to the forefront and that means renewed activism, not just for the big chair, but for the smaller chairs in the House and the Senate. We are going to have to pick a core economic issue and hammer it home over and over again until it can no longer be ignored.

Whoever the Republican nominee will be is not likely to be another Reagan, and he will likely not be reliable on many core issues, and it will fall to us to take up the fight on those issues. And that will not be an easy fight. The campaign won’t want anyone disrupting the likability of their candidate by touching of any divisive issues, a plan that will work as well as the shiny and likable McCain did.

[……]

Obama has lost the insurgent’s advantage, but he has gained the incumbent’s advantage. If his team manages to make his opponent seem unpalatable enough, then he becomes the default choice. If he’s at 35 percent, then his team’s goal is to push Romney, Gingrich or Perry down to 34 percent. And after what we’ve seen so far, do you think that will be impossibly hard to do?

The goal here is to make voters uncomfortable with voting Republican by portraying him as personally reckless and politically extreme. And it’s a little too easy to see how that will play out. The template for this was already written in election after election and there will be new wrinkles here, unexpected surprises and unprecedented attacks.

The idea that Obama doesn’t want to win ignores the simple fact that this is all he is. What he wants most is attention and being where he is puts him at the center of it. Not only that it’s financially lucrative and gives him powers well beyond those he ever expected to have. And it’s doubtful that he has gotten tired of wielding them.

At times he may appear sullen, not because he doesn’t want to be where he is, but because like a petulant child he doesn’t want to do the work that will take him there. Obama has always gotten by on the externals with other people to do the hard work for him. We can’t count on having anyone to do the hard work for us. Not our candidate, not the party and certainly not public dissatisfaction.

The people around Obama know that the public mood can be turned around in an instant, and that no likes to look foolish. If they can introduce wedges then they can split their opposition and collect the winnings. They also know that overconfidence can quickly lead to despondency and despair. The best way to prepare yourself for a tough job is to know the size of the task you mean to tackle and expect strong opposition and difficult obstacles along the way.

And no amount of irresponsibility, petulance and obnoxious behavior should give us the impression that our opponent doesn’t want to win. His contempt for us is a weakness, but it’s also a sign of how fortified his position is. We are the ones with the uphill battle and we cannot afford to rest at the bottom of the hill before we have taken the high ground.

Read the rest – Yes Obama wants to win

Tags: Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish
Posted in Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Elections 2012, Liberal Fascism, Media, Progressives, Republican Party, Socialism, Tea Parties | 160 Comments »

Rape and the Occupation

by Mojambo ( 59 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Communism, France, Islam, Liberal Fascism, Progressives, Socialism at November 15th, 2011 - 2:00 pm

The Knish reminds us that the end result of collectivization with it s destruction of individual rights only to be replaced by “group rights” is rape. Subsidized equality ultimately means a loss of all individuality, uniqueness and personal responsibility. Redistribution of power and redistribution of wealth are two different things. Capitalism in America has made the former possible.

by Daniel Greenfield

The multiple incidents of sexual assault in the Occupation tent cities are as ugly as they are inevitable. The absence of theft, assault and other forms of attacks is not a natural phenomenon, it is the outcome of a system that protects individual rights. The Occupy tent cities are not concerned with the rights of the individual, but with the grand collective right of the “99 percent” to demand private property on behalf of the government. And collectivist movements are notoriously unconcerned with what happens to the individual.

The collectivist response to the allegations is to urge the victims to remain silent to avoid harming the reputation of the movement. This is a commonplace institutional response to rape allegations. It is not concerned with the individual, but the group. You have to break some omelets to make some eggs and you have to cover up some rapes and assorted bits of ugliness to have a society where everyone’s masters degrees are subsidized by the state.

Rape is a symptom of a larger loss of rights. When rape becomes widespread, as in South Africa, it can mean that the society is now lawless and the weak are preyed upon, it can also mean that a society has been conquered from the outside and the conquerors are looting the conquered, as Muslims are doing in Sudan or Sweden. Either way it means the end of a consensus on enforceable individual rights.

[…]

If OWS thinks the 1 percent is bad in the United States, try the 1 percent in Medieval England, the USSR or Egypt in the present day. The 1 percents over there were and are a good deal worse with much more power and few rights for the commoners that needed respecting. And for all the working groups, the occupiers have not managed to come up with anything that works any better than the system they are denouncing.

While the left has consistently tied the redistribution of power to the redistribution of wealth, the United States Constitution redistributed power as widely as possible and then let the free market take care of the redistribution of wealth. The system has worked well enough that half the world would like to move to the United States, not because it has a wealth of natural resources, plenty of countries have that, but because it actually is the land of opportunity.

[…]

Almost a century after the French Revolution, France was being ruled by the Second Empire and the Napoleonic Dynasty. Around the same time the United States had put an end to slavery and was enjoying nearly eighty years of uninterrupted rule under the world’s second-oldest written Constitution. There’s the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie which managed to roll out a system of government that could be scaled from a portion of one coast to half a continent, survive a civil war and two world wars.

Women’s rights are yet another example of radical activism not translating into freedom. French women were vocally and passionately involved in their liberation movements and despite all the declarations and slogans, not only was France one of the last countries in Europe to give women the right to vote, but it did so only belatedly in 1944. The reason has an obvious overlap with what is going on at OWS.

[…]

It is no coincidence that the growing political power of women correlated not with radical politics, but with their growing economic power. Individual rights have always followed the trajectory of free market rights. Only individuals within a group that achieves wealth can achieve any meaningful equality. That’s the difference between Asian-Americans and African-Americans.

Without the industrial revolution, it is doubtful that women would have had a national right to vote or that there would have ever been a civil rights movements. But the revolution multiplied the value of the individual worker and made occupational flexibility possible. It is only through this that women came to be viewed as more than a subset of the family and workers as more than subsets of the plantation.

[…]

Muslims don’t view rape as a crime because they don’t recognize women as having individual rights. Tribal belonging yes, rights no. The hierarchy, whether it’s the USSR or OWS or any other similar monstrosity sees it as a crime against public order, and their goal is to maintain that order in the name of the larger cause. But that order can be maintained by suppressing rape or by suppressing reports of rape. Totalitarian systems usually practice a measure of both, manufacturing the illusion of order by suppressing crime and reports of crime, depending on the level of incompetence of those in charge.

Collectivism insists on an ideal that trumps the real, that invalidates the rights of specific individuals in the name of everyone’s rights. The greater good. This ideal never works and its failure must be covered up so that the lie continues.

The free market offers the real equality of achievement, while Obama and OWS promise subsidized equality. How well does subsidized equality work? Go look at the economic position of African-Americans, particularly after the subsidized mortgage implosion. Subsidized equality exists at the mercy of a hierarchy while the free market provides breathing room from hierarchies.

[…]

The collectivists offer the subsidized equality of their hierarchy, which is tyranny with a slogan. Not only can’t they promise equal rights to the country under their system, they can’t even practice it in their own encampments. If OWS’s raped women are expected to keep their mouths shut for the sake of the movement now, what can the whole country expect under an OWS system?

Read the rest: Rape and the Occupation

Tags: Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish
Posted in Barack Obama, Communism, France, Islam, Liberal Fascism, Progressives, Socialism | 59 Comments »

The Professional Protester

by Mojambo ( 20 Comments › )
Filed under Communism, Liberal Fascism, Progressives, Socialism at November 10th, 2011 - 11:30 am

The Knish examines the phenomena of “The Professional Protestor” i.e. that species of human being who shows up at just about any protest (all of them left-wing) and basically protests for protesting sake. The Professional Protestor comes in all shapes and sizes – “community activists”, anarchists, Paulians, LaRouchians, Jew haters, Trotskyites – but what they have in common is a leftist nihilism that seeks to destroy the foundations of our nation, and they can count on the support of the radicalized unions, academia, and a supplicant media.

by Daniel Greenfield

Contrary to their own claim that they represent the 99 percent and the media’s ceaseless hype, OWS is about as representative of ordinary Americans as your average professional protester. Which is not very.

Even opponents of the Tea Party could not seriously claim that it was a movement of professional protesters, but that’s exactly what OWS is, leavened with assorted hippies, homeless people and bored students and aging radicals along for the ride.

The professional protester is the left’s answer to everything, built around a core of far-left groups and community organizations that use local protests as a form of blackmail, these are the people who show up at everything from anti-war rallies to budget meetings with variations of the same tired agenda.

The rioting and anti-semitism are hardly a surprise. The professional protester contingent has its anarchists who can be counted on to start smashing things at the wrong time and groups who run the gamut from supporting Hamas to believing that Jews are actually reptilian space monsters in disguise.

Big unions who have their own paid non-union picketers to come out and shout slogans or hand out leaflets targeting whatever business has run afoul of the bosses this week, who don’t believe anything they’re saying, but are also much less likely to start screaming racial slurs or otherwise embarrassing their union employers. (No health care benefits of course, this is a strictly freelance arrangement.)

The left can turn out numbers, but their core runs the gamut from Communists to the LaRouchites who will show up to every rally and claim to be ordinary people who are fed up with the banks, the wars and the Queen of England. And those rallies don’t get big until they draw out every aging radical and bored college student, and when they do, they still have to contend with with the core.

[……]

The anti-war rallies overseen by radical Communist groups, that even other Communists think are radical, were always described as gatherings of grandmothers, veterans and people who love puppies and hate wars. OWS is getting the same loving treatment from media corporations who know the truth but refuse to tell it.

Rallies were easier to manage than encampments, which are permanent rallies where no one is supposed to go home and no one really knows what to do. Combine the Battle of Seattle with Woodstock and you get Occupy Whatever Place You Happen to Feel Like Occupying. The rapes, disorder, assaults and hygiene problems should surprise no one. It’s only a generation that never heard of Altamont that couldn’t see where this was going.

Back in the Soviet days the chain of command was easier to manage. Dozens of front groups reported back up a chain of command that stretched all the way to Moscow and took orders from there. The Communist party was a ruthlessly controlling organization and its members were quite good at getting people to do what they wanted. The closest thing to Moscow now is D.C. and the administration is too chaotic to properly control itself, let alone the protesters.

That leaves the tidal wave of professional protesters, many of whom have their own agendas, quite a few of whom have mental problems, and very few of whom are good at taking orders. There are too many organizations in the mix and too many people showing up for someplace to sleep, free food and a chance to be on the news.

In a crowd at a rally, the professional protester doesn’t look all that bad. Sure he might be snapped brandishing a sign about aliens, WTC 7 or the Jews—but the picture won’t show up anywhere besides a few conservative blogs, and the organizers will disavow any connection to them. But stick those people in one place and try to use them to build a miniature society and you run into major trouble.

[……]

The USSR solved those debates with mass purges of most of the people who actually made the revolution happen. OWS can’t do that, not without the NYPD stepping in. It can’t even kick out the non-ideological “parasites” who just want a meal, a place to sleep and maybe do some stealing. There is no real leadership, just experiments in leadership, that like most hierarchies end up creating an inner group that makes all the decisions, but who lack the power to enforce their authority.

Its only goal is simple enough, to stay put and keep soaking up the headlines, but even that is proving to be too much for a movement that has all of the radicalism, but none of the discipline. The left succeeded in weakening the West at the behest of Moscow, but it also weakened the population it was to draw its next generation of activists from. The old disciplined radical willing to make sacrifices and even die for his cause is now a distant memory.

That is what makes the decline of OWS more than just a case in study in the folly of the personal protester, but a metaphor for the dysfunction of the left. The professional protester is the true believer, the foot soldier of the left’s causes, always there to agitate for the pre-approved agenda. His job is to bridge the disconnect between the leftist elites and the general public by maintaining the facade of activist democracy with the squeaky wheel getting all the grease.

This form of the professional protester is the dominant form, the one that eventually evolves into a community organizer. And it’s no coincidence that OWS is closely tied in with the backers of the Community Organizer in Chief, and its own facade of activist democracy is another form of the same sham.

[…..]

Look closely and OWS is a less disciplined form of the same game, the real purpose of which is to raise the profile of both sides while drumming up press coverage. Anyone familiar with urban politics already knows how it works. But not everyone understands the game. Some suckers think the community organization are really fighting for them and others think that they can actually change things with their protests.

This entire arrangement marks the fusion of leftist activism with the political machine until there is no telling the two apart. This is the origin point of Obama’s career, it’s the game being played down in Zuccotti Park, but not everyone there understands the game. Most don’t.

OWS has a core purpose, to finally launch a grass roots challenge to the Tea Party while kicking off the reelection campaign with its class warfare theme. But a lot of the professional protesters have a different game in mind. The anarchists want to smash things, the homeless want to camp out, the drummers want to drum, the hippies want to recreate a lost paradise and a whole lot of people just want to be on TV or complain about their student loans.

Activist democracy is easier to fake when it’s narrowly targeted, but kick it off as a national movement and it melts down. That’s where the difference between the Tea Party and OWS lies. The Tea Party is a genuine grass roots movement which has rallied around a common agenda. It’s not a movement of professional protesters and assorted dilettantes, but people who actually have a specific cause that they can rally around without hand signals and human microphones.

The professional protester is the left’s attempt to hijack representative democracy and the rule of law, but it’s also where its efforts melt down. The radical political machine that needs them to play at being the intermediaries between the 99 percent and the 1 percent in Washington D.C. is broken. If it wasn’t broken, then it wouldn’t need them.

Read the rest – The Professional Protestor

Tags: Daniel Greenfield, OWS
Posted in Communism, Liberal Fascism, Progressives, Socialism | 20 Comments »

A Pakistani “love story” – coming soon to a neighborhood near you

by Mojambo ( 87 Comments › )
Filed under Islamic Invasion, Pakistan, Sharia (Islamic Law) at November 7th, 2011 - 5:00 pm

The Sultan Knish turns a spotlight on the misogyny of Islamic society and sounds an alarm that such Islamic brutality towards women is not limited to the Islamic world but inevitably follows wherever Muslims go, and as Islam becomes more and more mainstream in the West, the more common these stories will be. As the Knish says “Pakistan isn’t just over there, it’s over here“.

by Daniel Greenfield

It’s still quite a while till Valentine’s Day in the United States, but in Pakistan the day of love came early as a Romeo named Ahmed Yusuf threw acid in the face of his 9 year old Juliet, his wife/cousin causing extensive burns over her body.

Ahmed Yusuf couldn’t have known any better. Throwing acid at a woman in Pakistan is their culture’s version of roses and chocolate. And since he was only 10 years old, his father and brothers were happy to help out.

After the father who had married off a 9 year old girl to her 10 year old cousin noticed the acid burns, which the family tried to pass off as a skin condition, he earned a “Father of the Year” trophy by taking her back home, but that didn’t dissuade his brother and nephews who showed up and thew acid on her again.

Now the acid burned girl and father are on the run with the Pakistani police in hot pursuit because the local law favors turning the girl back to her husband. The whole thing might end in an honor-killing or charges of adultery, a term that in the Muslim world covers everything from marrying without a father’s permission to being gang raped in an alley.

[…]

This whole lovely scene took place in Faisalbad, one of Pakistan’s largest cities built up by the British as Lyallpur after Sir James Lyall that was later renamed Faisalbad, after King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. The new name is far more fitting than the old, Lyall for all his faults was not known to rape and torture nine year old girls.

Quite a lot of Pakistan is named after that old Saudi prune, who was a backer of its Islamist ruling thug, General Haq and his Hudood laws which made any woman bringing a rape complaint guilty of adultery. 9 out of 10 female prisoners in Pakistani jails are there under the Hoodud laws.

When Faisal was finally put down by one of his own nephews who had gone to Berkeley, dropped acid and decided that maybe modernization was the way to go, he left behind a legacy of Saudi power used to leverage Islamism around the world.

[…]

Don’t fear the Islamists in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Turkey and Libya. They’re well intentioned folks who want democracy. A democracy under which 9 year old girls are property to be bought and sold by the acclamation of the voters, who just happen to be doing the buying and selling.

Saddam may have had his rape rooms and Mubarak’s thugs may have assaulted women, but under the Islamists every house has its rape room and every marriage is an assault.

Men like Austria’s Josef Fritzl or America’s Phillip Garrido are not an aberration under Islam. They are the norm, as mainstream as a white picket fence and chapel. And as Islam becomes mainstream in the West, the end of the protection extended to children is also coming to an end. It was a long battle to raise the age of consent in the UK with the Criminal Law Amendment Act in the 19th century, but as London turns to Londonistan, it will go the way of female rulers, cartoons and ham sandwiches.

There are plenty of love stories like these coming out of Faisalbad. A 12 year old girl was sold off in marriage to an 82 year old man, whose third wife he had murdered by the girl’s father. The father got out of jail and got five acres of land, and a girl who in America would be going trick or treating ended up in a nightmare that her American counterparts could not even begin to imagine.

As the 82 year old landlord put it, he was “owed a wife” and it doesn’t much matter where you get the wife from. Since his murdered third wife had been a cousin of her murderer, it was all kept in the family. The only good news here is that he might be too arthritic to throw acid in her face.

According to the police no laws were broken, “because the girl is an adult as per Islamic Law and Shariah. She is 12-years-old and that is not too young for marriage” Being an adult doesn’t mean that she can get married on her own, or drive a car or vote– it just means she’s eligible to be raped every night by an 82 year old man. That’s the only adult status allotted to Muslim women.

Don’t get the idea that Pakistani law enforcement is completely useless. When a 5 year old was married off, they did intervene to the bafflement of the fellow who was sanctifying the love match. “This marriage is allowed in Islam and it is not against the law.” And he does have a point. The prophet of Islam married a 7 year old, though he may have waited as long as two years before sexually assaulting her.

The difference between a 5 year old, a 7 year, a 9 year old and a 12 year old is one of those things that you have to be an Imam to properly understand. What did it matter that, “the child had no idea what was happening. She didn’t know she had gotten married or that her father was also getting married to her new sister-in-law.” Aisha was playing with dolls until her father traded her for a top spot in Mo’s brand new religion. The nameless 5 year old girl’s father traded her for a marriage to her husband’s sister.

Why does all this matter to us? Pakistan isn’t just over there, it’s over here. Jessie Bender, a 13 year old girl from California, ran away before she was set to be taken to Pakistan and married off by her mother’s Pakistani boyfriend. How many other girls like her never got the chance to run away? How many of them weren’t 13 but 9 or 7 or 5?

[…]

What does a 13 year old American girl go for in Pakistan? Three thousand dollars. You might want to remember that number the next time another episode of Mosque on the Prairie airs or an expert says that we shouldn’t fear the rise of political Islam in Libya or Tunisia or London. The next time you see a cheerful news report on a local Muslim community celebrating Eid, remember the number.

Three thousand dollars or three thousand lives, it doesn’t matter much. Once we agree to let Islam in then all the talk about moderates and standards is a matter of setting the price. The question is do we want to bargain for the lives and rights of our children?