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Posts Tagged ‘Franklin Delano Roosevelt’

Keep your doctor and your health plan? Not likely.

by Mojambo ( 118 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Health Care, History, World War II at October 29th, 2013 - 5:00 pm

What gets me is that there were people willing to be fooled by such a false statement.

by Jonah Goldberg

“All we’ve been hearing the last three years is if you like your policy you can keep it…. I’m infuriated because I was lied to,” one woman told this newspaper, as part of a story on how some middle-class Californians have been stunned to learn the real costs of Obamacare.

And that lie looks like the biggest lie about domestic policy ever uttered by a U.S. president.

The most famous presidential lies have to do with misconduct (Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook” or Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations”) or war. Woodrow Wilson campaigned on the slogan “He kept us out of war” and then plunged us into a calamitous war. Franklin D. Roosevelt made a similar vow. “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

Roosevelt knew he was making false promises. He explained to an aide: “If someone attacks us, it isn’t a foreign war, is it?” When his own son questioned his honesty, FDR replied: “If I don’t say I hate war, then people are going to think I don’t hate war…. If I don’t say I won’t send our sons to fight on foreign battlefields, then people will think I want to send them…. So you play the game the way it has been played over the years, and you play to win.”

The burning question about Barack Obama is whether he was simply “playing to win” and therefore lying on purpose, or whether his statements about Obamacare were just another example of, as Obama once put it, “I actually believe my own” spin, though he used another word.

“No matter how we reform healthcare, we will keep this promise to the American people,” he told the American Medical Assn. in 2009. […….]

No matter how you slice it, that was a lie. As many as 16 million Americans on the individual health insurance market may lose their insurance policies. Just in the last month, hundreds of thousands have been notified by their insurers that their policies will be canceled. In fact, it appears that more Americans may have lost coverage than gotten it since Healthcare.gov went “live” (a term one must use advisedly). And when the business mandate finally kicks in, tens of millions more probably will lose their plans.

Ah, but they’ll get better ones!

That appears to be the new rationalization for Obama’s bait-and-switch. “Right now all that insurance companies are saying is, ‘We don’t meet the requirements under Obamacare, but we’re going to offer you a better deal!'” explained Juan Williams on “Fox News Sunday.”

A better deal according to whom? Say I like my current car. The government says under some new policy I will be able to keep it and maybe even lower my car payments. But once the policy is imposed, I’m told my car now isn’t street-legal.  [……..]Why, even though you live in Death Valley, your new car will have great snow tires and heated seats.

This is what the government is saying to millions of Americans who don’t want or need certain coverage, including, for instance, older women — and men — who are being forced to pay for maternity care. Such overcharging is necessary to pay for the poor and the sick signing up for Obamacare or for the newly expanded Medicaid.

[…….]

At the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Obama talked at great length about the middle class and not once about the poor. His critics on the right said he was lying, that he was really more interested in income distribution. Such charges were dismissed as paranoid and even racist. But the critics were right. Obama was either lying to himself or to the rest of us — because he was playing the game to win.

Read the rest – Obama’s big lie

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Posted in Barack Obama, Health Care, History, World War II | 118 Comments »

Barack Obama’s Last Stand

by Mojambo ( 131 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Cold War, Communism, Democratic Party, History, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Liberal Fascism, Mitt Romney, Progressives, Republican Party at October 25th, 2012 - 7:00 am

I have to disagree with the Knish on two points – Truman did not lose China, the Kuomintang did. Also while I agree that JFK was far from the heroic figure that the Left has portrayed him since 1963, he was a sincere anti-communist.

by Daniel Greenfield

Democrats do not have a great track record in the White House. The number of Democratic presidents who have won second terms is small and becomes much smaller with the second half of the 20th Century. Unlike Congressional shifts which reflect regional politics more than a national referendum, the Presidency is a referendum on the usages of the nearly unlimited power of its holder.

The Democratic strategy has been to substitute iconography for competence and their iconic presidents have invariably been men of dubious character. FDR rode to power on the coattails of the Roosevelt name, after conducting a smear campaign against Teddy Roosevelt’s son who would have been the natural candidate.

Once in power, FDR assembled a grab-bag of bad ideas from European Socialists and Fascists and employed a small army of writers and artists as propagandists to lionize his programs. Marginally competent, Roosevelt the Second cultivated an aristocratic paternal air, surrounded himself with experts and programs to create public confidence.

FDR did not fix the economy, but he did lead the country through World War II while preemptively losing World War III, which was enough to give him the iconic status that had made his presidency possible.

[……..]
Before WW2 the USSR had been a regional backwater power with a network of international agents at its beck and call. After WW2, Communists were on the verge of swallowing up Western Europe and had taken China.

Truman’s disastrous China policy led to the Communist takeover of a potential world power and to the bloody Korean War. The aftermath of the FDR Administration was largely preoccupied with covering up the disastrous results of its Communist-friendly program. The campaigns against McArthur and McCarthy were necessary to cover up the consequences of Truman’s China policy and FDR’s USSR policy.

The Democrats lost the White House and the public turned to Eisenhower to clean up the strategic mess left behind by the progressive party. The great national crisis was Communism and the Democrats had not seen the crisis coming and had no credibility in deploying a policy to combat the Soviet Union.

[………]

FDR had been the avuncular figure in the chair; JFK was to be the youth candidate. The new man, a creature of the old Joe Kennedy, with fresh new ideas written for him by ghostwriters. Like FDR, JFK was a manufactured figure. And like him, JFK was a man of ideas with no ideas who disguised that lack with an army of experts and the cultivated illusion of intellectualism.

JFK was not particularly Anti-Communist, but that was a necessary qualification for any candidate looking to carry on FDR’s work. The Democratic Party had adapted to the collapse of its old coalition of New York merchants and Southern plantation owners after the Civil War by embracing Republican Unionism with a vengeance and jettisoning the last of Jefferson to become the party of big government.

[……..]

The underlying program in both administrations had nothing to do with the depression or war; but of building up a national political machine using the same methods of urban political machines. The core ingredient was class warfare. FDR put a genteel patina over class warfare while JFK phrased it as an idealistic ambitious form of American Exceptionalism that made it seem American.
FDR and JFK both borrowed Lincoln’s martyrdom, FDR by acting as a long-serving wartime president, and JFK, posthumously through his assassination. Obama has taken on a crude form of that martyrdom by virtue of race.

JFK’s death left his upgrade of Eisenhower’s “Dime Store New Deal” unfinished. LBJ took up the baton as the consequences of Vietnam tore apart the coalition between Liberals and Leftists leading to a culture war.

FDR died before events would have forced him to block Communist ambitions in Europe and turned the intelligentsia against him, allowing him to retain the services of the progressive propaganda corps. But JFK’s façade of Anti-Communism had committed him to international policies that broke apart the coalition between Liberals and Leftists. As much as the left might have supported JFK’s domestic program, and even forgiven his domestic show of affiliation with the Anti-Communists, by the time he was replaced by LBJ, the stress fractures were just too big and they tore apart the Democratic Party.

After that the Democrats lost the ability to compete on national security. Their attempts at salvaging the white male vote led them to two southern governors. Carter imploded on National Security, but Clinton thrived through two terms in the Post-Soviet period when history no longer seemed to matter. But history did matter.

The Communism menace had risen on FDR’s watch. Muslim terrorism began its ascent under JFK and reached critical levels under Clinton. The Democratic failures on Communism made Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan possible. Their failures on Islamism made Bush possible.

Obama was the third Democratic bid at an iconographic presidency. Like FDR, he was confronted with an economic crisis, and like JFK he faced a global conflict. And like both men, he proved inept at handling both, relying on armies of experts and making unwise decisions. As with JFK’s first term, the consequences of his foreign policy have not still struck home with a decisive enough emphasis to turn the public against him, but unlike FDR, there is no war to distract from the economic situation.

Obama has been running on his iconography for a while now and like an old beat up car, he never noticed that it gave out on him a while back. The debate was a wakeup call, but it won’t be the last one. He has to run on something, but he can’t run on the economy or race and that just leaves national security. The Benghazi attack emphasized the disastrous consequences of his foreign policy, but they also did him a favor by shifting the debate to the foreign policy arena.

With FDR fading and the cult of JFK not as strong as it used to be in the twilight of the Boomers, the Democratic Party needed a third icon to further integrate its political machine into the infrastructure of the government.

The Democrats needed to win badly in 2008 because it put them in a position of exploiting a crisis to protect and expand their institutions, both private and public, that might have otherwise been targeted by a Republican on an austerity mission. Defeating McCain, who despite his own reputation for pork had a cost-cutting streak, was a major victory because it avoided the specter of having McCain do to them what Prime Minister Cameron, another non-conservative conservative, had done to the institutions of the liberal state in the UK. Defeating Romney, who is also running as a cost-cutter, is an even bigger priority for the same reason.

The ideological and emotional issues are secondary to this core bureaucratic mandate of protecting the political machine that the post-Civil War Democratic Party had built up. Unlike Bush, Romney is not running as a compassionate conservative looking to reconcile social spending with conservative politics. And Romney’s campaign is not focused on the international politics that might divert him from putting the domestic house in order.

Pushing Romney back into Bush territory, as Benghazi may have done, may neuter him even if he wins, and shifts the focus away from the economy. But the public does not appear prepared to follow that shift with polls still showing the economy as the primary focus. And that focus contains a dangerous trap.

Any shift to foreign policy risks a dangerous discussion about the Islamist rise to power that was aided and abetted by Obama, in the same way that FDR had aided and abetted the rise of Communism. The Democrats did not survive the debate when it broke out during the Truman Administration. Should an honest discussion begin about the defeat in Afghanistan and the Muslim Brotherhood takeover of the Middle East under the guise of the Arab Spring, the result may be as great a blow to Obama’s prospects.

Obama’s last stand is also the Democratic Party’s last stand. A hundred years of foreign policy and economic failures at the hands of a corrupt mafia is about to come home to roost. The Democratic Party has marginalized itself, abandoning mainstream Americans while openly embracing a trillion dollar welfare state.

Iconography elevated Obama as it did FDR and JFK, but it cannot see him through a constellation of crises. And if he falls, then his party falls with him.

Read the rest –  Obama’s Last Stand

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Posted in Barack Obama, Cold War, Communism, Democratic Party, History, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Liberal Fascism, Mitt Romney, Progressives, Republican Party | 131 Comments »

Leaving heaven on earth, the three waves of progressivism

by Mojambo ( 151 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Cult of Obama, Democratic Party, Fascism, History, Politics, Progressives, The Constitution at October 3rd, 2012 - 2:00 pm

Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and now Barack Obama – all Democratic Progressives with totalitarian tendencies and a contempt for the United States constitution. A long but worthwhile review of Charles Kesler’s  new book  I Am the Change.

by Ramesh Ponnuru

Utopian rhetoric is so commonplace in our political life that we scarcely question or even notice it. Part of Charles Kesler’s achievement in I Am the Change is to help us see that familiar utopianism in all its strangeness.

Consider a commencement address by newly elected senator Barack Obama at Knox College in 2005. “So let’s dream,” said our future president. Make sure that college is “affordable for everyone who wants to go,” among other things, and “that old Maytag plant could re-open its doors as an Ethanol refinery that turned corn into fuel. Down the street, a biotechnology research lab could open up on the cusp of discovering a cure for cancer.” How did we reach the point where a politician could, as Kesler writes, “dangle before the citizens of Galesburg, Illinois, home of Knox College, the prospect not merely of a biotech research lab opening up down the street, but one that is on the verge of curing cancer”?

The answer lies in the three waves of progressivism that have washed over America in the last century. Kesler — a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and longtime ornament of these pages — has been studying this history for his entire career. He illuminates it mostly through close and characteristically wry attention to the words of the progressive presidents associated with each of those waves: Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. He identifies them as the leaders of attempts to transform the country’s politics, economics, and culture, respectively.

Wilson, Kesler notes, was the first president to criticize the Constitution and its premises, treating checks and balances as outmoded and natural rights as a fiction. He was rhetorically crafty, misleading listeners then and since with his remark that “the history of liberty is the history of the limitation of governmental power.” He did not say that liberty’s future would follow this pattern. He cast the state as the “‘Family’ writ large” and adopted the image of the “perfected, coordinated beehive” (these are all Wilson’s own words) as the goal of political community.

[……..]

Like Wilson, whom he revered, FDR was impatient with the Constitution. In his first inaugural address he suggested that it might be a good idea for Congress to grant him “broad executive power to wage a war against” the Depression. FDR said he would use his power to engage in “bold, persistent experimentation,” and ever since then pragmatic improvisation has been part of the liberal self-image. It was always a canard: FDR’s policies were mostly nostrums retrieved from the Progressive shelf, and few of them were ever discarded except under duress.

Under FDR, the president added to his job description the task of moving all of us to a morally better world, especially a less selfish and materialistic one. The president was no longer one among many government officials charged with protecting the natural rights, and especially property rights, of citizens. Instead he was to redefine those rights, renegotiating the contract between “rulers” and citizens for each generation. (In an endnote, Kesler cites Federalist 84, in which Alexander Hamilton explicitly rejects the metaphor of a contract with a ruler.)

[……..]

FDR redefined the opposition to progressivism too, and with a degree of demagoguery that has been airbrushed out of the popular history of the era. In his 1944 annual message to Congress, he warned that if “we were to return to the so-called normalcy of the 1920s . . . we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.”

Johnson wanted to “out-Roosevelt Roosevelt,” and was president at the high tide of liberal confidence. The promises he made were extravagant: “to end war and preserve peace, to eradicate poverty and share abundance, to overcome the diseases that have afflicted the human race and permit all mankind to enjoy their promise in life on this earth.” In addition, he wished to improve “the quality of our American civilization.” In the Great Society, he said, “leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness.”

Liberal intellectuals and student activists were surprisingly unappreciative. Kesler comments: “In the Great Society [Johnson] thought he was giving them all they could have asked for, and much more than JFK would ever have managed; but he had little idea of how much they were prepared to ask for.” The unboundedness of progressive aspirations was Johnson’s undoing: “The lower the poverty rate or the unemployment rate, the more intolerable it seemed.” The results of the Great Society included “a bigger and bigger government we trust less and less,” and a progressivism that began to lose faith in the American people, with their selfish reluctance to transform themselves.

The traces of all of Obama’s progressive predecessors can be found in his presidency. Like the earliest progressives, he creates a mock alternative to his creed in Social Darwinism — erasing more than a century of debate about the purposes of government that started with natural right rather than survival of the fittest. His metaphors date from Wilson: He frequently describes the state as the instrument by which we act as “our brother’s keeper” and occasionally suggests that our politics would improve if we all saw ourselves as part of the armed forces.

Like FDR, he does not struggle with constitutional niceties. Kesler avoids the error of thinking that Obamacare’s individual mandate is its only constitutional deficiency. At least as hostile to constitutionalism is the “Independent Payment Advisory Board” the law creates, grants sweeping legislative powers, and insulates from accountability. (The legislative language is murky, but it appears to tell Congress that it cannot abolish the board unless it introduces legislation between January and February of 2017 and passes it by a three-fifths vote of both chambers by mid-August.) In general, both that law and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation are “administrative to-do lists” rather than laws in the sense of the rule of law.

And like the progressives of the late Sixties, Obama has his doubts about America’s founding principles. Kesler argues that Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope implicitly concludes — and that nothing else Obama has said revises the conclusion — that those principles were “racist and even proslavery.” On this basic question Obama sides with Lincoln’s opponents, not the Great Emancipator he spent the early days of his presidency ostentatiously invoking.

[…….]

Kesler views Obama’s health-care law as “the centerpiece of [his] whole political enterprise.” Its repeal, he argues, would deal a body blow to the progressive project by calling into question whether “change” is really headed inexorably in the direction it desires. He even suggests that the explosion of government spending on health care may cause the progressive cause to go bankrupt — before the country does, let’s hope, though Kesler wisely declines to speculate.

Kesler is the reader for whom Obama has long been asking, in the sense of “asking for it,” and this book is the examination of the One we’ve been waiting for.

Read the rest  – Escape from Utopia

 

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Posted in Barack Obama, Cult of Obama, Democratic Party, Fascism, History, Politics, Progressives, The Constitution | 151 Comments »

The Progressive roots of Free Trade and Globalization

by Phantom Ace ( 78 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Communism, Democratic Party, Economy, George W. Bush, Liberal Fascism, Progressives, Republican Party, Socialism, Special Report, Tranzis at April 30th, 2011 - 2:48 pm

Free Trade has become an article of faith among Conservatives. Many on the right are blind to the disaster unfettered Free Trade has done to America. Wages have declined, Manufacturing discriminated and America’s living standards have declined. I was under the impression Conservatism was concerned about the economic well being of the nation.

So it’s stuns me that many Conservatives view this as Conservatism. The truth is Free Trade is Progressives. Just like Conservatives have adopted Wilsonian Democracy spreading as their foreign policy, they have adopted another Progressive ideology as Conservative. Free Trade was promoted by none other than, Woodrow Wilson himself.

With the North winning the Civil War, Republican dominance was assured over the Democrats. Republicans continued to dominate American politics until around the early 20th century. President William McKinley stated the United States’ stance under the Republican Party as thus:

“Under free trade the trader is the master and the producer the slave. Protection is but the law of nature, the law of self-preservation, of self-development, of securing the highest and best destiny of the race of man. [It is said] that protection is immoral…. Why, if protection builds up and elevates 63,000,000 [the U.S. population] of people, the influence of those 63,000,000 of people elevates the rest of the world. We cannot take a step in the pathway of progress without benefiting mankind everywhere. Well, they say, ‘Buy where you can buy the cheapest’…. Of course, that applies to labor as to everything else. Let me give you a maxim that is a thousand times better than that, and it is the protection maxim: ‘Buy where you can pay the easiest.’ And that spot of earth is where labor wins its highest rewards.”

Southern Democrats gradually rebuilt their party, and allied themselves with Northern Progressives. They had many differences but both were staunchly opposed to the great corporate trusts that had built up, and Republican corruption was endemic.[citation needed] This marriage of convenience to face a common enemy reinvigorated the Democratic Party, which catapulted back into power. Northern Progressives sought free trade to undermine the power base of Republicans – Woodrow Wilson would admit as much in a speech to Congress. A brief resurgence by Republicans in the 1920s was disastrous for them. Woodrow Wilson’s ideological understudy[citation needed], Franklin Roosevelt, would essentially blame the Great Depression upon the protectionist policies exemplified by the previous Republican President,Herbert Hoover.

That’s right, Free Trade is a Leftist concept. It is part of the Left’s goal to implement a global Socialist state. Free Trade destroys small companies and empowers huge Corporate entities. These entities in turn make alliances with governments to keep competitors out of business. Hence the result of Free Trade is Bigger Government, something Conservatism used to opposed until The Bush years. In fact, the last real Conservative President, Ronald Reagan was no free trader!

When President Reagan imposed a 100 percent tariff on selected Japanese electronics in 1987, he and the press gave the impression that this was an act of desperation. Pictured was a long-forbearing president whose patience was exhausted by the recalcitrant and conniving Japanese. After trying for years to elicit some fairness out of them, went the story, the usually good-natured president had finally had enough.

When newspapers and television networks announced the tariffs, the media reminded the public that such restraints were imposed by a staunch free trader. The less-than-subtle message was that if “Free Trader” Ronald Reagan thought the tariff necessary, then Japan surely deserved it. After more than seven years in office, Ronald Reagan is still widely regarded as a devoted free trader. A typical reference is that of Mark Shields, a Washington Post columnist, to Reagan’s “blind devotion to the doctrine of free trade.”

If President Reagan has a devotion to free trade, it surely must be blind, because he has been off the mark most of the time. Only short memories and a refusal to believe one’s own eyes would account for the view that President Reagan is a free trader. Calling oneself a free trader is not the same thing as being a free trader. Nor does a free- trade position mean that the president, but not Congress, should have the power to impose trade sanctions. Instead, a president deserves the title of free trader only if his efforts demonstrate an attempt to remove trade barriers at home and prevent the imposition of new ones.

By this standard, the Reagan administration has failed to promote free trade. Ronald Reagan by his actions has become the most protectionist president since Herbert Hoover, the heavyweight champion of protectionists.

That’s right, Ronald Reagan was not a fanatical fan of Free Trade. He knew it lowered the wages and living standards of Americans. Reagan also knew that it destroys small business, empowers big government and sets the ground work for a Global regime. It actually promoted the goals of Marxists, Communists and Progressives he opposed. This is not a Conservative position, they believes in National sovereignty and economic opportunities for its citizens.

One myth the Free Trade crowd promotes is that Smoot-Hawley worsened the Great Depression. Well that is a total and outright lie. This myth was started by FDR, who was no Conservative and a Progressive. He created this talking point to discredit people opposed to the Leftist Free Trade ideology. It’s ironic that Conservatives who hate FDR, are repeating one of his lies!

The debate over free trade is riddled with myth after myth. One that keeps resurfacing, no matter how many times it is discredited, is the idea that protectionism caused the Great Depression. One occasionally even hears that this same protectionism — specifically, the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 — was responsible in significant part for World War Two! This is nonsense dreamed up for propaganda purposes by free traders, and it can easily be debunked.

Let’s start by reminding ourselves of a basic fact: The Depression’s cause was monetary. The Federal Reserve had allowed the money supply to balloon excessively during the late 1920s, causing it to pile up in the stock market as a bubble. The Fed then panicked, miscalculated, and let the money supply collapse by a third by 1933, depriving the economy of the liquidity it needed to breathe. Trade had nothing to do with it.

The Smoot-Hawley tariff was simply too small a policy change to have so large an effect as triggering a depression. For a start, it applied to only about one-third of America’s trade: about 1.3 percent of our GDP. One point three percent! America’s average tariff on goods subject to tariff went from 44.6 to 53.2 percent — not a very big jump at all. America’s tariffs were higher in almost every year from 1821 to 1914. Our tariffs went up in 1861, 1864, 1890, and 1922 without producing global depressions, and the great recessions of 1873 and 1893 spread worldwide without needing the help of any tariff increases.

World trade did indeed decline, but this was due to the Depression itself, not higher American tariffs. This is no surprise, as declines in the values of the currencies of America’s major trading partners wiped away much of the effect of the tariff anyway.

Why many Conservatives don’t realize the damage Free Trade and Globalization has done to America is amazing. It has reduced our wages, living standards and national sovereignty. Globalization empowers International institutions ate the expense of the Nation State. This is a Progressive ideology and not far removed from what Marxists and Communists want.

This shows the extent of which Progressive ideas have infiltrated modern Conservative. In fact, the Modern Conservative movement and the Republican Party are actually Center-Left and resemble the 1950’s/1960’s Democrats. Where they diverge from the New Democrats is in their attitude for America. But the truth is both the Republicans and Democrats are Leftists. The GOP is Center-Left and the Democrats Far Left.

This puts people like me on the Right in a conundrum. If we don’t support the Republicans, then Tranzi American hating Democrats take power. But the Republicans are Leftists as well, but at least they don’t hate America. In the current situation, those of us on the Right should back the GOP in 2012 to get ride of Obama. But afterwards, we should start a New true Rightwing Party that believes in Fiscal responsibility, National Sovereignty, Border Security, Strong Dollar, Tax/Regulatory reform and a Jacksonian Western Hemispheric Economic interest based foreign policy. However first we must defeat Obama, then we should break off from the GOP and go our own way afterwards.

Free Trade and Globalism is not Conservative, it’s Progressive. Protectionism is not the solution, instead we need to implement policies that benefit America as a nation and not prove some academic theories , Multinational Corporations who support Global Socialism or empowering global institutions. We need real Conservative solutions, not Progressive masquerading as Conservative.

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Posted in Barack Obama, Communism, Democratic Party, Economy, George W. Bush, Liberal Fascism, Progressives, Republican Party, Socialism, Special Report, Tranzis | 78 Comments »