Lost in Translation, Right Might Not Mean Right

I have written before about how the left sees words as important and tries to redefine them in ways that benefit the left,

Words evolve. They take on new meaning over the years. Social and political movements appropriate certain words, redefine them, and then use them to shape the ideological battlefield. The classic example of that, of course, is "bolshevik" and "menshevik." The Bolsheviks were, in fact, the Mensheviks and vice-versa. The word bolshevik, derived from the word meaning "majority," was appropriated by the radicals who were in reality the minority of the old Social Democratic party. The minority labeled the majority the minority and got away with it. Clever. There are many other examples of this in history such as the insistence on calling nazis and fascists right-wing when they are clearly left-wing products.

The left is very good at this since, in most if not all of the West, the left controls not only academia, but the legal, press, entertainment and arts industries as well as governmental institutions where the words are crafted, recrafted, defined, redefined, and ruled in or out of fashion.

I thought of this, again, while reading an interesting post on Europe by Walter R. Mead at The American Interest. Worth the read. In it he describes many of the phenomena I have discussed several times before (here, here, and here, for example--there are many more) re the unfortunate effects of the Euro and the EU on European politics and standards of living. I am not going to go over all that again, and Mead does a good job of covering it.

I am more interested in what he reports about the European "right." He informs us that,

In France, the people I spoke with worried about the rise of the National Front. According to some polls the ultra-right could emerge as the biggest party in France in the next round of regional and European elections. The French Socialists under the increasingly unpopular President Hollande don’t seem to have much idea about how to move forward; their most popular politician at the moment is a Minister of the Interior who is trying to compete with the National Front for the anti-immigrant vote by breaking up encampments of Roma and denouncing them as immigrants who don’t want to assimilate.

And,

One of the reasons Europeans are so fearful of the Tea Party is that they assume that because it is right wing and populist it is like the National Front in France or Golden Dawn in Greece. Today’s small government American Tea Partiers are much farther from Huey Long and Father Coughlin in their political views than some European right wingers are from the darker demagogues of Europe’s bloody past, and until the European establishments understand this, they will likely continue to misjudge the state of American politics.

This is very similar to what I have found in my own trips to Europe, reading the European press, and just talking with my European relatives and friends. The standard accepted notion of the political "right" in Europe is nazism, fascism, and anything else that the ruling elite does not like.  In France, as I wrote before, Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front (FN) mentioned above by Mead, is facing legal charges for having dared compare hordes of Muslims in the streets of France to hordes of Nazi occupiers. Here you have a political leader, who might be heading the biggest party in France, being labelled a far-right extremist because she makes disparaging comments about nazis and the flood of aliens swamping France's cities and society. The comfortable elites don't like Le Pen, so she gets labelled a far-right nut. If one bothers to read the platform of the FN, one won't find much there that meets the definition of "right." I have said the same, and repeat it now, about the EDL (English Defence League) in the UK, there, likewise, is not much about the EDL's platform that would qualify it as "right,"

Having read much of what the EDL has written and gone to its website, I am not clear what it is about their positions, remarkably well-written and thoughtful for a bunch of "football hooligans," that makes them far-right. I do not know what their economic policies are and what they think about socialized medicine and welfare payments or the size of government. The positions they take on defending England from Islamic extremism, however, seem very reasonable and something most Americans could support. I don't find them racist, at all. Again, I don't know them well, and might be embarrassed by some smoking gun firing "racist bullets," but I get suspicious when the media and the political establishment dismiss a grassroots movement as "far right extremists" and provide no evidence.

In Greece, we see the government elites trying to ban the Golden Dawn for being far-right fascist extremist--forgetting, of course, that fascism is a left wing pathology. Some of their positions are certainly not ones I agree with, and they fall outside of the mainstream of European elite political thought, but I get suspicious of efforts to ban "far right" groups and wonder what might really be behind it--probably not hard to guess.

The European press, when writing about American politics, routinely labels the Tea Party or even many GOP politicians as "extreme right" knowing that in their readers' minds that will conjure images of nazis and fascists. Both the European and the American elite media and politicos agree on depicting any organization that opposes rampant immigration as "far right." As with the label nazi or fascist, this is curious litmus test considering how it was, in the US anyhow, for years that the labor unions, including the one once run by the now sainted and late-Cesar Chavez, were rabidly anti-immigration. In addition, of course, Democratic-run labor unions in the USA were virulently anti-black.

The American right, especially as represented by the Tea Party/movement is, in fact, one that favors smaller government, lower taxes, less regulation, and more individual freedom, responsibility, and accountability. It favors liberty, and is the antithesis of communism, fascism, nazism, and socialism, all left wing phenomena which minimize the individual and elevate the state. The Tea Party/movement is a classic liberal one from when liberal meant liberal--as it still does in Australia--not what it means in today's American politics, to wit, believer in more and more government. It is tough to find a similar pro-liberty movement in Europe, perhaps the UKIP, as Europe is a place where the political battle is conducted overwhelmingly on the left side of the field.

Be very leery of the label "far right" and reject the notion that "right" and fascism lie on the same side of the political spectrum.  Jim Crow, the KKK, segregation, and slavery are fruits of the Democrat loom, just as nazism and fascism spring from the same cesspool as communism and socialism.

Is it 1854, yet?

It's hard to get optimistic about the future given what we have seen the last five years, and, in particular what we have seen the last few months, week, and days. On the international scene, the USA has become an irksome joke. The Nobel Prize committee, for example, has once again awarded its prize to an institution, the UN's OPCW, that has yet to do what it has been awarded the prize for doing--sound familiar? The prize, of course, is a rebuke to the US and our vague threats to bomb Syria for having CW. The Iranians laugh at us; Moscow sees an opportunity created by Obama's ineptness in the Mideast that the Russians could never have dreamed of having; the Chinese, covering up their own impending economic crisis, are busily advocating an "American-free" world; the jihadis are gaining ground throughout the world; and Latin America drifts away. Allies such as Israel, Canada, and Australia must shake their heads, and wonder what has happened to America.

At home, we have an executive branch run by people who comprise a lethal mix of incompetent; untruthful; disloyal to or ignorant of our culture, history, and political traditions; and followers of a progressive creed that sees only more government as the solution to the problems created by past expansions of government. More government: That's all that's on offer from the progressivism that has taken over our political institutions, media, and schools.

Opposition to this progressivism, so far, has proven largely confused, or better said, inchoate and unable to push to the fore leaders who can galvanize the great numbers appalled by the destruction forced upon us by progressivism. Opponents simply have been overwhelmed by the brazenness of the power grab, including the "banana republic" use of federal agencies to crush dissent and frighten potential opposition, all abetted by the complicity of the powerful academic and media industries and the bloated public sector unions. I note, for example, the ongoing veterans' march on DC. The national media almost completely have ignored it. We see thousands of persons, many wounded veterans from our wars, peacefully protesting in the capital and insisting on keeping public parks and monuments open during Obama's fake government shutdown, and getting little to no coverage--unlike, as you remember, the cartoonish antics of the Occupy Wall Street crowd. As I write this, for example, the CNN website does not even mention the event, except in a dismissive yawn of just "another Tea Party" event. We can assume that if an act of violence occurs, or, worse, somebody unfurls a rebel battle flag or a "racist" banner, then the media coverage will prove massive. Imagine a demonstration in DC by veterans during a Republican administration; we would have endless stories comparing it to the 1932 Bonus March.

The GOP establishment has proven clueless and largely out of touch with the great anger in the country over what Obama and his Chicago gang are doing. I communicate with friends in DC, good, smart, semi-conservative (by DC standards) people, and find them merely bemused by the scattered reports they read of citizens opening national parks in defiance of the Feds, and of the fury I find among people stunned by what Obamacare means for their families' financial outlook and quality of medical care. Even politicians in whom I once had some faith, such as Paul Ryan, appear distant from the rising populist anger, and seem eager only to get things back to "normal" in DC, i.e, end the "shutdown." I have written before about this manifest cluelessness and won't repeat that now.

We need change to get back the hope that has been the trademark of American life for over two centuries.

The standard meme in a typical American history class or book, and in the media, holds that so-called third parties have no realistic prospect for success in the USA. The leadership of both major parties, naturally, agree with this interpretation and are eager to stifle any moves to create a party outside of the long established two party system--the Democratic party, by the way, has a legitimate claim to be the world's oldest political party. A quick glance through American political history would seem to support the conventional wisdom's argument against a "third" party. We have several examples typically served up to us as part of the cautionary tale.  One of the most famous efforts was Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party, aka Bull Moose Party, which he launched in 1912, after becoming upset with Republican President Taft's failure to pursue TR's "progressive" agenda. TR's party succeeded in knocking the Republicans out of the White House for one of the few times since 1861, and putting in place the calamitous Woodrow Wilson. While the Bull Moose Party crumbled away within a few years, many of its platform planks eventually became accepted, e.g., women's suffrage, eight hour day, a form of social security.

Another notable "third" party effort came in 1948, with the States's Rights Democratic Party, better known as the "Dixiecrats." Headed by Senator Strom Thurmond, this party argued, inter alia, for the right of Southern states to maintain racial segregation. Former two-time FDR Vice President Henry Wallace's hard left, pro-USSR Progressive Party--another "third" party effort in that same election-- also syphoned off Democratic votes in some key constituencies. Between these two "third" parties eating away at Democratic votes, Truman almost lost the 1948 election to Dewey, but managed to eke out a win. Both of the 1948 "third" parties quickly disappeared. There are other examples such as George Wallace's American Independent Party, John Anderson's Independents, Patrick Buchanan's Reform Party, and H. Ross Perot's Independent Party which also failed to win the White House but, nevertheless, had considerable impact on their respective elections and on post-election political developments.

Oops! Missing from this list of "third" parties is none other than the Republican Party, itself. Without going into a detailed history, widely available (see for example, Eric Foner's, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men), the Republican Party began in 1854 with a mix of anti-slavery Whigs and Democrats appalled by the perceived collusion of the Whigs and the Democrats in allowing slavery not only to remain but to expand westward. The Republicans, in 1856, ran their own candidate, explorer and hero of the Mexican war John Fremont--the man who freed California from Mexican rule. Although the campaign lost to Democrat Buchanan, it succeeded in destroying the ossified Whig party and lining up the Republicans for victory in 1860 with Lincoln.

I am not saying--necessarily--that we are at the point of seeking the destruction of the GOP a la the Whigs. I think, however, that the GOP establishment needs reminding of their own party's origins. My gut feeling is that the Tea "Party" cum movement has been growing, despite the media's repeated announcement of its death and attempts to throw it in a grave. This movement still, as noted, is somewhat inchoate; that some might argue is a source of strength in that there is no single Tea leader who can be disgraced by the media, and, hence, bring down the movement. At various times the media seek to name a politician or another as leader of the Tea party, and go gunning for him or her. They fail to understand that unlike the Bull Moose, the Dixiecrat, or most other "third" parties, this is a movement driven not by a dominant personality but by everyday working and tax-paying Americans fed up with the state of the country and the quality of leadership and thought dominating our political discourse. I would like to see the Tea movement take over the GOP and turn it into a genuinely conservative alternative to the progressive Democratic party, rather than have to go through setting itself up as a "third" party. That option, nevertheless, should not be discarded all too quickly.

Sorry for the Delay

Been wrapped up in all sorts of boring personal stuff and haven't been feeding the blogbeast. Will have something out in the next day or so.

Ozymandias Returns: The Arrogance of Obama

In the 11th grade, I had an impossibly old fashioned English teacher, Miss Petersen. The strongest word she ever used was "Gosh!" This elderly lady loved literature, and most of all poetry. She lived for books, and desperately wanted all of us pampered Baby Boomers to love and appreciate Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, Eliot, and on and on as much as she did. Most of us were too stupid to appreciate the gem we had in Miss Petersen: a high school teacher who today easily could have been a professor of English literature at any university in the world--except, of course, for the political correctness angle, she, after all, was religious and conservative.

Miss Petersen told us that the greatest poem ever written was Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias,"

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

She challenged us to memorize it: not an easy task, even though it is not long--I, for example, kept substituting "ancient" for "antique." She had the poem posted in large letters on the wall in front of where I sat. I spent nearly a year staring at Shelley's words, and eventually managed to memorize "Ozymandias," filing it away in the back of my brain somewhere from whence, to the chagrin of colleagues years later, on occasion snippets of Shelley would erupt such as, "Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair."

Only long after high school did I come to understand Miss Petersen's point. Shelley's little poem is an extraordinary and powerful indictment of arrogance. In about one hundred words, Shelley punctures the hubris of rulers and empire builders. It heartened me, as it would have the late-Miss Petersen, to see the poem have a bit of a "comeback" thanks to the TV show "Breaking Bad," which titled one of its best episodes "Ozymandias." The show's star, Bryan Cranston, by the way, does a terrific reading of the poem--well worth spending the minute or so listening to it.

It is tough to read or hear the poem without thinking about what has been happening in our country the last few days. I watched just a bit of His Mightiness's press conference yesterday. Sickening is the kindest word I can use to label it. He had the Ozymandias "wrinkled lip and sneer." It was all about him. Everything is about him and how he stands up to the "radicals" in the GOP. He derides them for "wanting it all" but gives every indication that he himself also wants it all. (He sounds like Stalin deriding Hitler for wanting Poland.) This is not a man who knows how to lead, or engage in rough-and-tumble but yet restrained "non-nuke" democratic political negotiation. Reagan and O'Neil knew how to do it; Clinton and Gingrich did, too. This man is just a practitioner of community organizer thuggery. As I have written before and others, too, the most blatant example of this thuggery, one not even the MSM can ignore, has been the use and abuse of the National Park police to terrorize and threaten Americans to stay away from the parks and monuments which the American people have paid to maintain. There are, of course, many other examples: his use of the ATF to arm Mexican gangs to give law abiding American gun owners a bad rap; the use of the IRS to crush political dissent; the use of the NSA to eavesdrop on American citizens; and now the Obamacare fiasco to grab control of health care and the infinite amount of sensitive data associated with it. The Park police abuse, however, remains the one that will be the iconic feature of Obama's absurd government "shutdown."

I served presidents from Carter to Obama loyally while in the Foreign Service. Yes, I was a conservative, but when dealing with foreigners I defended the policies of Clinton as much as I did those of Reagan. I, however, cannot stand this presidency and what it is doing to our country. I just hope that one day Obama and his cohorts will come to appreciate that they, too, will suffer the fate of Ozymandias, "Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away." Assuming, of course, that it is not our country that is covered by those "lone and level sands."

Progressivism, Chaos, Tyranny, and the Community Organizer's Blackmail and Extortion

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has called opponents "modern day anarchists,'' all because we do not swoon at the prospect of a phony government "shutdown" such as the one we now see. As long as the Senator from Nevada is going to go all early 20th century on us, we should return the favor and call him a modern day Bolshevik. There, I think that makes for perfectly civil discussion, and serves as lead in to today's topic: the chaos of progressivism.

One more thing before we get going. In the process of following Aussie politics, I have noted that one of the very many admirable things about that great nation is that,

conservatives in Australia have preserved the word 'Liberal' for themselves and not allowed it to be stolen and warped by the left. 

It is time we did likewise in our own beleaguered and increasingly less great nation. American "liberals" are just old fashioned "progressives," AKA socialists, who seek an ever growing state with more and more control over every aspect of our lives. There is nothing "liberal" in American "liberalism."

Everywhere we look in America we see the chaos and tyranny generated by progressive thought and policies. Without repeating all I already have written about the results of progressivism in our country, I note one item I wrote six months ago (substitute "progressive" for everywhere you see the now banned "liberal"),

Liberal welfare policies create havoc throughout our society. What slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK, and racial discrimination could not do, liberal polices have done, to wit, destroy the black family and turn millions of blacks into permanent wards of the state and of the liberal political machines that control most of our cities. Liberal immigration policies, beginning with the disastrous 1965 Kennedy-Johnson immigration law, insure a constant stream of poor third world immigrants, altering irrevocably the nature of our society and ensuring that the struggling black (and white) American poor cannot compete with the ultra-poor pouring in from Mexico, El Salvador, Bangladesh, and so on. Liberal minimum wage laws ensure the disappearance of the starter jobs, once a platform for the poor to spring out of poverty. All of these people, the old poor and the newly arriving poor, need, of course, social programs and more and more government help. The liberal political machine dispenses jobs and money, and the productive sectors face rising taxes, a labyrinth of regulations, and the constant presence of "helpful" government regulators and enforcers. Let the poverty and misery spread!

Liberal gun control policies also target the poor. The poor in our cities must live with the drug dealers, gang bangers, and the other hoods in the hood. The comfortable liberals live in secure high-rises, and tony suburbs well protected by overpaid and over equipped police and fire departments and expensive security firms. The poor must put up with the inability to defend themselves; they must allow themselves to be murdered in the name of ridding America of gun violence.

In the last few days, we see even more examples of the chaos brought to our shores by progressivism, all highlighted by the phony government shutdown and the despicable boot-licking mainstream media--one knows, for example, that the government is shutdown is phony because the government's mouthpiece MSNBC is still on the air. The government "shutdown" has targeted much-frequented national parks and monuments not because it costs much if anything to keep them open--in fact, it costs more to close them--but to inflict discomfort, generate confusion, and, yes, chaos. As I wrote before,

a conservative's default position must be to oppose all new government programs, regardless of how high-sounding they are, and constantly seek to eliminate or reduce existing programs. Any government program in the "socio-economic-humanitarian" realm will get taken over by liberals [substitute progressives].

We see our National Parks, a Republican idea, used to further the progressive's notions of expanding government. The US Park Service, once a model of what a government agency could be, has become just another tool used by progressives to create chaos in furtherance of progressive goals. Park Rangers, once admired for their knowledge of American history, geography, flora, and fauna are now just tools of petty repression. They are used to roust elderly veterans out of the monuments built to honor those elderly veterans, and to prevent taxpayers from viewing the great parks and historical locations in our country, many of them partially, mostly, or even entirely built with private funds.

In sum, what do we see? We see the community organizer tactic of using lies, chaos, and the uncertainty that flows as tools of blackmail and extortion. The progressives have moved into almost every aspect of our lives, and when they encounter resistance to further encroachment, they threaten us by shutting down the other services on which they have made us dependent. It's blackmail, pure and simple. We have the extraordinary spectacle of an American President predicting economic disaster and warning Wall Street of tough times to come if he does not get his way. We have a President pushing the stock market to crash, and dissuading businesses from investing and creating jobs, all over a dispute about his seriously flawed health care policy. He, again, is the Chicago community organizer threatening the local landlord or McDonald's franchise with instability, violence, and disruption if he does not get what he wants. Imagine what he can do to you, if he controls your health care.

Chaos in the service of tyranny. The only way to defeat this is to stop the encroachment of government on our lives and begin a serious campaign of rollback.

A Few Friday Thoughts: Cops Gone Wild

It's been an eventful week for the media: A government shutdown; a glitch-infested roll out of the disastrous Obamacare; and, of course, a deranged white male Tea Party member, with a Ted Cruz pin, carrying an AR-15 attacked the White House while screaming racial and Islamophobic epithets.

Well, sort of.

That last one, not so much, and much to the chagrin of the liberal media and politicians. It turns out, of course, that all the shooting was by the Keystone Capitol Hill cops. Those Guardians of the Peace, members of that Thin Blue Line standing between order and chaos, after terrorizing downtown DC, shutting Congress with a fusillade of rounds, engaging in a wild twenty-vehicle chase, crashing a couple of cars, injuring one of their own, managed to shoot and kill a disturbed unarmed African-American single mother apparently AFTER her car had come to a halt and presented no danger. One wonders where the Trayvon Martin supporters are on this.

This blue mayhem also conjures up memories of last year's NYPD shooting orgy near the Empire State Building. In that one, the cops pumped out 16 rounds to kill a suspect, who never fired a round, and wounded several innocent bystanders.

The police are out of control. This cop craziness has to stop, if for no other reason than to allow the media to focus on the real danger, you know, white male Tea Party members with AR-15s.

The Big "Shutdown": So Much About So Little; So Little About So Much

Well, it happened. No surprise. The federal government has "shut down."

It has done this seventeen times since 1977, and--Surprise!--despite dire predictions, the Republic has survived. The media commentary on the shutdown is generally absurd, predicting a "cataclysmic" result which will cost the economy billions of dollars. Many of the press reports, and the commentary on Tweeter by the low-info crowd which makes up the base of the Democratic party, seem to equate government shutdown with country shutdown. There is a concerted effort to let Obama evade any responsibility for the shutdown, and to promote a mind-set that argues that Republicans in Congress have to go along with anything Obama and Reid want. Much of the commentators need to read the Constitution and understand that the basis of our Republic is "checks-and-balances." No branch of the government has all the powers, and for every power a branch has, it is counterbalanced by a power residing in another branch. It is an intricate and extremely clever document that seeks to avoid government overreach. And that is the subject of tonight's rant.

A seemingly infinite number of stories (I won't link to them, you can find them easily enough) are discussing the "shutdown" in breathless terms. It's a phony "shutdown." The government, read the politically motivated masters of our executive branch, are closing down activities which make no sense to close but which draw lots of public notice. They, for example, shut down the World War II Monument in DC, putting up barricades and Park Police to keep tourists out, when the Monument, essentially an outdoor plaza, easily could have been left open at much less cost than closing it: it takes more police to prevent an activity than to allow it.

The Pentagon has announced plans to cancel the already sold-out Army-Navy football game, which, of course, makes no sense. On a more bright note, however, the White House has suspended Michelle Obama's Tweeter account, stating that, "Due to Congress’s failure to pass legislation to fund the government, updates to this account will be limited." An impertinent question: Why does the FLOTUS have a government supported and staffed Tweeter account? Can't she tweet herself? The account is free, after all, and FLOTUS is not a federal employee. Go on the FLOTUS account, and catch up on the absurdity of it, and see some very funny tweets left by people  reveling in the account being down. Congress, of course, will continue to get paid, and unlike shutdowns in the private sector the relatively small number of Federal employees furloughed will get all their pay retroactively without getting docked for annual leave. I wonder, can we 40% who actually pay Federal income tax, prorate our 2013 tax bill to deduct for the days the government was "shutdown"? Let's all "tweet" the IRS and find out.

I see little commentary, however, on something much more important. In 1962, for example, total employment by the federal government (military included) was 5.35 million persons. In 2011, that employment number was 4.4 million, about one million fewer. Sounds impressive except the decline has come from the military which went from 2.8 million uniformed personnel in 1962 to 1.58 million in 2011. The legislative branch employment went from 30,000 persons to 64,000--more than doubling in fifty years. Executive branch civilians went from 2.48 million to just under 2.76 million. (NOTE: It is not clear from the OPM data how the US Postal Service is handled. The 1962 numbers might well include USPS workers, while the 2011 numbers do not.) More important than those raw numbers, however, the role of the federal government in all of our lives has grown exponentially in those fifty years. We have allowed the federal government to become much too important and much too much of a factor in our lives. As I have written before,

The liberals insist that the country is the government and vice-versa, at least when they run it, and when they don't, well then, they have folks such as Bill Ayers. The liberals have gone from bombing the government to running it; from desecrating the flag to now wrapping themselves in it and insisting that it stands for the government; from resisting the government to using it to transform permanently our country.

and also wrote earlier that ,

The GOP goal should be a government in which 95%-98% of the time it makes no difference to the average American citizen who is president. The US President should matter more to foreigners than to Americans. Except for foreign policy, national defense, times of national crisis, and providing a very broad economic vision, it should not matter who controls the White House. That means keep the government out of as many areas as possible, and where it has been involved deeply and for a long time, try to push the responsibility and resources out to the states, counties, cities, and people.

That is the real tragedy of what we are seeing played out on TV sets and on the other media outlets: the obsession with government. The government, simply, should not matter to our lives the vast majority of the time.