Progressive Insanity Endangers America
If we should not blame 10 million law-abiding American Muslims for the shooting, why then would you blame 50 million innocent gun owners for what some psycho does?
“This is the saddest day of my life. I can’t even wrap my mind around the horror of what happened … in Orlando, where 50 joyful dancing queers were murdered by a religious extremist. I’m sad — devastated, in my soul — about that; but I’m also sad that the events of Orlando have shattered my political beliefs, as I can no longer swear allegiance to a peace-love-and-unicorns progressive philosophy that only helps to get my fellow queers killed."—from a column written by "Anonymous” for PJ Media.
Anonymous was just getting started. Later in the same column he utterly eviscerated the progressive obsession with identity politics. “I also now realize, with brutal clarity, that in the progressive hierarchy of identity groups, Muslims are above gays,” he states. “Every pundit and politician — and that includes President Obama and Hillary Clinton and half the talking heads on TV — who today have said ‘We don’t know what the shooter’s motivation could possibly be!’ have revealed to me their true priorities: appeasing Muslims is more important than defending the lives of gay people. Every progressive who runs interference for Islamic murderers is complicit in those murders, and I can no longer be a part of that team.”
Unfortunately, it’s not just the hierarchy of identity groups. It is also the progressive determination to obliterate common sense and replace it with political correctness. Thus, following pressure from Muslim organizations like CAIR — utterly irrespective of their status as an un-indicted co-conspirator in the 2004 Holy Land Foundation terror fundraising case — the Obama administration purged any references to Islamic terror from the FBI’s counter-terrorism training materials beginning in 2011.
Yet it’s even worse than that. The FBI had Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. They had Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. They had San Bernardino killers Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife. They interviewed Orlando murderer Omar Mateen three times and not only let him go, but refused to put anything in his file that would have prevented him from buying a gun.
Why? “Former FBI Agent John Guandolo said the FBI mistakenly closed its investigation because it had no idea how to respond to jihadist threats because the bureau does not teach agents about Islamist doctrine, such as Sharia law, that is used as a guide for terrorist operations and activities,” reports the Washington Beacon.
“I was ordered by my superiors at the Department of Homeland Security to delete or modify several hundred records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups like Hamas from the important federal database, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS),” explained former DHS employee Philip Haney in February. “These types of records are the basis for any ability to ‘connect dots.’”
Why delete or modify files to the point of operational impotency? The administration’s obsession with political correctness demands nothing less.
To what degree? In 2008, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed offered to plead guilty to that atrocity in a military hearing at Guantanamo Bay. A year later, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder rejected that plea and suspended the hearings because the Obama administration insisted the slaughter of 2,996 people was a “law enforcement” issue requiring a trial in civilian court. Public outrage sent the case back to the military commission, where the case remains bogged down by an endless series of procedural roadblocks engendered by the Military Commissions Act. When is a resolution of the case anticipated to occur?
In 2021 — literally one generation removed from an act of war.
And make no mistake: The carnage will continue. It will continue because the American Left, with ample help from an utterly corrupt mainstream media, will continue to obscure the carnage wrought by Islamists, by declaring a lack of gun control to be the principal problem. Thus, it doesn’t matter that strict gun control laws in both Paris and Brussels didn’t stop terrorist carnage there, that gun control laws mean absolutely nothing to terrorists or criminals, or that extrapolating on the Left’s despicable “logic” would necessitate a ban on box cutters, knives, pressure cookers — and jetliners.
All that matters is deflection. Deflection from the reality that Islam has institutionalized contempt for homosexuals, a contempt the Left has tried to equate with that of Christian Evangelicals, even as they remain willfully oblivious to the difference between Christians professing reservations about the homosexual lifestyle, and Islamists tossing them off rooftops and stoning them to death. Deflection away from the innumerable warnings given to this administration as far back as 2014 that allowing a “JV team” like the Islamic State to remain viable gives them enormous recruitment powers. Deflection that equates a desire to limit Muslim immigration, conduct law enforcement investigations of mosques, or notice that enormous numbers of Muslims have views utterly antithetical to this nation’s founding principles, constitutes Islamophobia.
Even worse, deflection away from cultural differences the Left insists do not exist, or are simply two sides of the same coin. Thus at the National Prayer Breakfast last year, Barack Obama declared that global jihad “is not unique to one group or one religion.” A year earlier, Hillary Clinton insisted “smart power” requires “respect even for one’s enemies — trying to understand, insofar as psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view.”
Perhaps Hillary might ask the families of the Orlando victims how much “empathy” and “respect” they have for Omar Mateen.
And when the Left isn’t busy denying reality, they are simply censoring it. Facebook and Reddit removed pages and posts revealing Mateen’s religion. Ironically, the story was reported by Russia Today (RT), a Russian government-funded television network. What does it say about the current state of progressive ideology when a news site in a “former” totalitarian nation is more reliable than American social media sites?
What it says, among other things, is that progressive ideology has devolved to the point where it is every bit as sick and twisted as Islamism. It is an ideology that elevates post-atrocity handwringing and candlelight vigils over national security and self-defense. It is the ideology of “borderless” futures, “outdated” Constitutions and the mindless “diversity” and “multiculturalism” that abets Balkanization in lieu of assimilation, even as that orchestrated divisiveness literally endangers our lives. It is the ideology of an arrogant and feckless president more interested in confronting those who oppose him than those who would annihilate us.
“There is only one religion whose adherents are consistently involved in murder for political purposes,” writes New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin.
And there is only one ideology consistently dedicated to the denial of reality. One whose adherents' relentless attempts to bend the national conversation toward their bankrupt agenda must be rejected with impunity.
Our survival as a nation depends on it.
SOURCE
****************************
America desperately needs relief from regulations. Ryan's plan is a good place to start
The United States is in the midst of a constitutional crisis. The lines that clearly delineate the boundaries of the three branches of government, specifically, the executive and legislative branches, have become blurred. Presidents have claimed powers that far exceed what the framers intended, and Congress has been complicit by its failure to reestablish itself as the rightful and sole lawmaking authority.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, however, unveiled a plan this week that begins the process of reclaiming the ground Congress has ceded to the executive branch and its ever-growing army of unelected bureaucrats.
The regulatory state -- which has become an unconstitutional fourth branch of the federal government -- has been a serious problem for years. Notably, President George W. Bush aggressively expanded the regulatory state. “The Bush team,” Veronique de Rugy wrote in January 2009, “spent more taxpayer money on issuing and enforcing regulations than any previous administration in U.S. history.”
But it has only come into focus under President Barack Obama, who, boastfully, with his “pen and phone,” has frequently circumvented Congress to create law, and his regulatory agenda pales in comparison to his predecessor. Left to pick up the cost are businesses and consumers.
Regulations are the silent killer. In its most recent annual report, Ten Thousand Commandments, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) estimated that rules and regulations cost Americans nearly $1.9 trillion each year. At a cost of roughly $15,000 per family, regulations dwarf ordinary household expenditures, save for the cost of housing. In fact, these hidden taxes cost more than food, clothing, and health care, combined.
This $1.9 trillion in 2015 regulatory spending, not including the cost of state and local regulations, is a staggering 11 percent of of the $17.95 trillion U.S. GDP. If the regulatory state were its own country, it would have the tenth largest economy in the world, ahead of the Russian Federation, Canada, and Australia.
Ryan’s regulatory reform agenda takes aim at the regulatory state in several ways, such as enhancing congressional involvement and oversight of the rulemaking and regulatory process, ending the judiciary branch’s deference to executive-level agencies, and asserting more control over agencies in the appropriations process, and increasing oversight of the executive branch. Another part of the Speaker’s agenda is the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act, or REINS Act, which mandates that any major regulations, those with an annual cost of $100 million or more, must be approved by Congress.
The Obama administration has a particular proclivity for major regulations. As CEI noted, “President Obama’s seven years so far have averaged 81, or a 29 percent higher average annual output than that of Bush. Obama has already issued 570 major rules during his seven years, compared with Bush’s 505 over eight years.” This administration owns six of the seven highest annual numbers of pages added to the Federal Register, which documents all proposed and final rules and regulations.
The red tape of the regulatory state is strangling the economy, preventing Americans from experience the benefits of the prosperity and opportunity that would come if the economy were allowed to achieve its full potential. The problem, of course, is that President Obama and Democrats, as well as many big government Republicans, view the government as what makes America great.
If the Speaker and House Republican leadership can successfully move this regulatory reform agenda through the lower chamber, it would be a victory for grassroots conservatives, who are anxious for Republicans in Washington to fight back against the regulatory state.
Let’s hope that when this agenda clears the House, that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell acts to send it President Obama’s desk. Even if Obama vetoes these reforms, passage out of both chambers of will show that Republicans are serious about taking one of the real threats to our prosperity head on.
SOURCE
****************************
Pro-Clinton College Professor: Repeal Second Amendment!
At a time when it’s more important than ever to maintain the right of the American people to keep and bear arms for self-defense, law professor David S. Cohen is calling for repeal of the Second Amendment. “Americans’ rights are in mortal danger,” he says, unless Hillary Clinton is elected president and stacks the Supreme Court with progressive judges.
In the repeatedly discredited rag, Rolling Stone, Cohen writes, “sometimes we just have to acknowledge that the Founders and the Constitution are wrong. This is one of those times. . . . The Second Amendment needs to be repealed because it is outdated, a threat to liberty and a suicide pact.”
By “outdated,” Cohen means that the Framers of the Bill of Rights were unable to conceive of 19th century semi-automatic firearm technology. “When the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791, there were no weapons remotely like the AR-15 assault rifle (sic),” he said.
However, as the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, “Just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communications and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search, the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.”
And in any case, there is nothing outdated about the underlying principle of the Second Amendment: to prohibit the government from interfering with the ability of people to acquire, possess and develop proficiency with arms they might one day need to defend themselves and their loved ones.
Cohen’s rant is just one example of an astonishing amount of sheer nonsense that has filled the Internet since the terrorist attack in Orlando. Anti-gun politicians, and so-called opinion columnists and TV talking heads – who pretend to be “experts” on every topic under the sun, but who in reality know virtually nothing about even one topic – are confidently calling the AR-15 an “automatic” weapon, a “military” weapon,” and a “weapon of war,” and telling everyone that the most popular rifle in America should be banned.
Of course, the First Amendment protects the right of pundits to demonstrate that the size of their egos are only matched by the depth of their ignorance on firearms and the Second Amendment. And so it should be.
If history repeats itself, the recent slew of half-baked, culture-war-based, ideologically-motivated, attention-seeking statements against guns will only increase support for the right to arms, and additional support may develop as people increasingly realize that President Obama and Hillary Clinton, who are urging gun bans, are the very politicians most responsible for the rise of overseas terrorist groups who inspire and possibly direct evildoers within our midst.
All the more reason for the American people to protect their right to protect themselves.
SOURCE
*********************************
For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
***************************
