Class Warfare: It's Not Just Obama

American left pushing class war buttons hard

To announce an economic program at the University of Chicago is nothing if not making a statement.

In an era in which the failures of Keynesian economics are being paraded for the world to see, announcing an economic program on the historic turf of Hayek is bound to turn some heads.

That alone would have been enough to send Pawlenty's message. But Pawlenty had a serious bone to pick with President Barack Obama, one that is proving to be a defining issue between conservatives and progressives in American politics: simply that Obama seems more interested in playing ideological politics than in solving serious problems.

"President Obama is a champion practitioner of class warfare," Pawlenty declared. "He's spent three years dividing our nation, and fanning the flames of class envy and resentment all across the country to deflect attention from his own failures and the economic hardship they have visited on America."

It's not just Obama who's playing at class warfare in place of actually addressing America's real problems.

Consider Rachel Maddow. Now, it's hard to imagine she could possibly confused about how horrible her show's ratings are when her big "scoop" on Newt Gingrich is that he's on vacation in Grrece.

That, and a credit account at Tiffany's.

Maddow attempts to needle Gingrich over his fiscal conservative positions, essentially questioning why someone fiscally conservative would use credit. She (unshockingly) misses the detail that being fiscally conservative doesn't revolve around whether or not one uses credit, but what one does with that credit.

For example, making purchases on credit and then quickly paying them off is entirely permissable for a fiscal conservative. Continually driving up the credit account, and then conveniently increasing one's own credit limit, is not permissable to anyone with a lick of sense.

No one should be surprised to hear this kind of mendacious tripe from Rachel Maddow. This is, after all, someone who thinks that even the most vacuous drivel is made more compelling as long as it's delivered through a smug grin.

Maddow attempts to justify all of this by appealing to Americans' sense of outrage at hypocrisy. That no actual hypocrisy is actually present doesn't seem to be what Maddow considers a salient detail.

It isn't about "hypocrisy" at all. It's about Maddow pandering to her audience, and stoking the fires of a segment of the American population eager to engage in socially-destructive class warfare.

Barack Obama shouldn't have to carry the "class warrior" distinction all on his own. He's getting plenty of help.

Signing Onto Democratic Monotony

It isn't very often that Rachel Maddow offers much to the public discourse other than left-wing, pro-Obama tripe.

But in a recent segment on the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, Maddow recently managed to bring an important political issue to light.

That issue is actually not Taxpayer's Bill of Rights -- it's unsurprising that Maddow would oppose this -- but actually the cash-for-signatures industry in which petitioners pay private companies in order to gather signatures for ballot initiatives.

As Maddow notes, this industry has helped to perpetuate the constant return of initiatives like the TaBOR -- which Matt Miller describes as a "lunatic measure". It allows the supporters of these frequently-defeated policy proposals to continually defer to the spirit of populism.

Paid signature gatherers are particularly important in states like California, where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has used them as one of his favoured tools of governance.

The high demand for these signatures leads the companies that employ paid gatherers to put a dollar value on not only every signature they gather, but a dollar value on virtually anyone's signature.

Regulating the signature-gathering industry may be worth considering. It simply stands to logic that if signatures are worth enough to any particular petitioner there may be little or no constraint on how far paid gatherers are willing to go in order to get them.

Although it is interesting to note Maddow's opposition to the proposal. The idea of allowing the citizens of any particular state to set limits on how much the government can spend, and requiring the state to attain citizen consent before spending outside those limits.

It's an effective means of constraining what James Bovard describes as "leviathan" -- the out-of-control growth in the size of government in the United States that has been fostered by both Republicans and Democrats.

This doesn't justify continually reviving long-defeated ballot measures over and over again -- particularly not through the buying and selling of signatures.

The Nobel No Prize

Nobel Peace Prize as much a burden as an honour for US President

As various leftist sychophants continue to preen over US President Barack Obama recently being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the lion's share of the commentary over the matter seems to revolve around whether or not Obama actually deserves the prize.

Almost certainly, he doesn't -- not yet, not even by the specious line of reasoning used by Rachel Maddow.

But even under the questionable reasons given for awarding the prize to Obama -- encouraging him to embrace diplomacy over American force -- the award committee hasn't truly done Obama any favours. In fact, as Andrew Cohen posits, the "promisary note" award may actually prove to be a millstone around Obama's neck.

In many ways, it turned out to be precisely that for Lester Pearson, who received his Nobel Peace Prize before ever becoming leader of the Liberal party, let alone Prime Minister:

"...The prize may have been the worst thing that ever happened to Mike Pearson. To many it turned him into a peacemaker and a pacifist. It conjured up an enduring image of a toga-clad high priest atop a stony mountain, uttering mystical mantras into the winds.

Pearson was just embarking on a feverish decade as Leader of the Opposition and Prime Minister. Twice, in both roles, the prize would come to haunt him.

In 1963, Pearson reversed his party's stand and agreed to accept the deployment of US nuclear weapons in Canada. It was a political master-stroke that helped split John Diefenbaker's Conservatives and propel the Liberals to power that spring.

But Pearson angered his party's left wing. His critics couldn't believe that a Nobel laureate could countenance nuclear weapons. An angry Pierre Trudeau famously called him 'the defrocked prince of peace' and refused to run as a Liberal that year.

In 1965, as prime minister, Pearson came under pressure to urge Lyndon Johnson to end the bombing of Vietnam. The question arose: how could our poster boy of peace remain silent during the greatest aerial bombardment in history?

Once again, Pearson acted as a conscientious, practical politician, not as a pacifist. He had long tried to contain 'thermo-nuclear weapons,' as he called them, but believed that Canada had to honour its commitment to accept them as a member of NATO, which he had helped conceive and shape in 1949.

He opposed the war in Vietnam and gave a contentious speech in Philadelphia proposing a halt in the bombing. For his trouble he was picked up and dressed down by LBJ the next day. Ever the pragmatist, Pearson then went silent in public, worried about damaging relations between the two countries."

Pearson's experience demonstrates that the kind of expectations produced by a Nobel Peace Prize win can create expectations that would, if satisfied, permanently divorce that individual from realism. Moreover, observing diplomacy just for the sake of diplomacy can often paint a leader into a corner in which they can't criticize the actions of another country for fear of offending them.

For Barack Obama, the problems of living up to the expectations set for him by a Nobel Peace Prize are obvious. They are the same as the problems of living up to the expectations set for him by the progressive movement that so deftly delivered him to power in the first place.

If Obama continues -- as he must -- to prosecute either of the two wars his country is currently engaged in (and abandoning Afghanistan is simply not an option for him) he will certainly disappoint many members of the global "peace" movement who believe his Nobel Peace Prize should provide the impetus for retirement from the field of battle.

Obama is almost certain to disappoint and anger a great number of people no matter what he does from here on out.

At the very least, however, the Rachel Maddows of the world, suffering from the sycophantic strain of Derangement Syndrome, will still applaud no matter what.

MSNBC Wants You... To Be Scared Shitless

John Acton once famously remarked that "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

As one apprises the state of the American left-leaning media, the former part of this maxim becomes almost immediately apparent.

Once upon a time, the American left-wing derided the excesses of FOX News and other right-leaning media outlets. They were (often quite rightly) accused of being toadies for the governing Republican party, fear mongering, and otherwise helping to steamroll political dissent.

A recent segment from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow show serves as a perfect example, wherein Maddow seeks to stir up fear of anti-health care reform protesters by comparing them to anti-abortion terrorists.

In an interview with Dr George Hearn -- who himself has had many threats made against his life -- Maddow attempts to conflate as closely as possible those who are protesting health care reform with violent anti-abortion zealots.

Appearing on the show, Hearn offers a very illustrative account of how he sees the abortion debate and how it turned to violent. It's clearly his view -- for example, he insists the anti-abortion movement of becoming more and more "harsh and aggressive in their rhetoric" (they have), but declines to note that the pro-abortion movement has become more and more harsh and aggressive in its rhetoric, to the extent that applaud and celebrate acts of violence against anti-abortion activists.

Hearn and Maddow insist that violence perpetrated against anti-abortion extremists sets a trend toward political violence that will spill over into the health care debate. Yet neither of them provide any substantive examples of the health care debate moving in this direction.

Not that there hasn't been any cause for concern. The presence of two gun-toting individuals at Barack Obama's health care town hall meeting in New Hampshire last week is clearly an eye-opener.

But on his own show, Hardball, Chris Matthews clearly put on his Bill O'Reilly hat before hosting William Kostric, interrupting him numerous times, and bombarding him with numerous irrelevant questions.

"Who did you vote for last November?"

"What do you think of President Obama?"

"Do you have any problems with his legitimacy as President?"

"You're not part of the birther movement or anything like that?"

"Where are you on the issue of whether he's a legitimate President of the United States?"

"You're not making any claim that he's not a citizen?"

Kostric clearly is not the sharpest individual, as only an idiot would bring a gun to meeting where any international leader. But for Matthews to work as hard as he did attempting to portray Kostric as an erstwhile assassin just shows how far left-leaning media outlets like MSNBC are willing to in order to use fear tactics to marginalize the opponents of health care reform.

Certainly, there has been a lot of inflammatory nonsense peddled under the guise of legitimate dissent on this issue. Sarah Palin's recent self-humiliation is a perfect example of this.

But setting up a universal health care system is a costly proposition, regardless of what model the United States elects to follow. Individuals like Kostric have every reason to be concerned. The efforts of individuals like Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow splendidly illustrate precisely how far they're willing to go in order to terrify people from their bully pulpit.

Someone Get Rachel Maddow a Sandwich

Rachel Maddow has shown a bizarre fascination with the meals of politicians recently -- from mocking the National Committee for a New America for holding a town hall meeting at a pizza parlour to practically swooning over Barack Obama and Joe Biden treating a bunch of White House press pool reporters to lunch at a burger joint (an obvious photo op if there ever was one).

One would wonder what to make of this fascination if the answer weren't plainly obvious -- she's just very, very hungry.

Someone get that poor woman a cookie or something.