And British liberals are showing how its done:

Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz surveys the British political scene and muses on whether the recent rise of the British National Party tells us anything about how a European society can be infatuated with the Left one year and switch over to fascism in a relatively short period…

…If fascism and Left wing socialism share most of their political DNA then this process is easy to understand. When the vital 5% — or whatever crucially differentiates them — flips then one becomes the other. The BNP is not a ‘conservative party’ in the American mold. It is essentially a racist but economically Left wing organization which accepts a large state role in managing the economy. Where it differs with the Left is for whose benefit the economy should be managed. For the Left the answer is: for the benefit of what it defines to be the historical victim — Muslims, immigrants from former colonies and people with special sexual needs. For the BNP the answer to the question is: for the benefit of the poor white; the indigene; the people who have lived in the British isles. The Left correctly accuses the BNP of dividing the nation. What it fails to recognize is that the BNP is simply paying them back in their own coin. This exchange of toxic currency has set up a zero sum game. It has cast the Left as the champions of one side and the BNP is happily casting itself as the champions of the other.

Indications are the that the British National Party (which is essentially National Socialist in ideology) will do quite well in the British elections expected in May of next year. Now, the BNP isn’t going to win a majority in the Commons, but it shows the danger in having any sort of ideology which puts the State at the center of politics and makes the people mere cogs in the machine. The lower class Brits are merely making the smallest of adjustments – still socialists hoping for the government hand out, but now insisting that the Moslem immigrants be kicked out. Other than that one thing, there are no fundamental economic differences between Labour and the BNP.

It is the individual who is endowed by the Creator with rights – the State has no right except those delegated to it by the people. This is the distilled essence of American ideology and it is pretty much non-existent in European thought these days. Government is the path to all things – power, wealth, privilege, honor. And so people fight over who gets to be in control of government…and if someone is clever enough to graft a bit of racism on to socialism in order to appeal to a class of people who feel dispossessed in their own land, who on the left really has the right to complain? You think the BNP cannot be replicated in the United States? Of course it can – and it would command the votes of millions…anyone who feels that the GOP is the party of big business and the Democrats the party of the “other” and that neither party is addressing their needs can be induced to be National Socialist.

This is why it is so crucial for we conservative Republicans to really make clear that we are on the side of the people – all the people, everywhere. Why I harp upon the sanctity of human life, why I harp upon the need to find a path to citizenship for the illegals; why I harp upon the need for strict border controls; why I harp upon the need to reign in the big corporations, especially the banks; why I harp upon the need for us to make, mine and grow more of our own stuff – because when we address the real concerns of average folks, we’re doing the real business of government: catering to the needs of individuals as they run their own lives.

We have a choice to make, and we’ll make it over the next four to six years – will we be the nation our Founders created, or will we become, in one manner or another, a fascist State? That our fascism might be liberal-fascism where we ostensibly try to be nice won’t change the fact that the mailed fist will still be there – as will the soul destroying ideology which will set us on the path to national extinction. We can fight for what we are, or allow ourselves to be destroyed. The choice is ours.

73Wire has the details – seems that the venue is closely connected to the Democrat. Not exactly a fair venue for a conservative, you think?

When we really pull the lid off this Administration, we’re going to be astounded at how corrupt it is:

Here’s something Goldman Sachs, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, American International Group’s former CFO, and Goldman’s former chairman have all declined to comment on:

While negotiating how much loss large banks would have to take on credit default swaps with the bankrupt insurer AIG, the New York Fed, then under Geithner, rejected a 40 cents-on-the-dollar deal in the works and made taxpayers pay at least $13 billion to ensure the banks suffered no losses…

Its becoming clear just what we’ve got here in Geithner – the banker’s protector. If you think he’s out there trying to get the economy going, you’ve got rocks in your head. All he’s doing is bailing out the banking industry he comes from and likely hopes to return to.

President Obama, its time for a new Treasury Secretary – I’m no fan of yours, but I don’t want Geithner making a bigger mess, even if it works against you…because it will also work against the American people. I’m sure there is some approximation of an honest liberal out there who would serve better.

Interesting:

In advance of President Obama’s and the Democrats’ coming push for immigration reform, support for so-called comprehensive reform that would include a path to citizenship for many illegal immigrants already in the United States is building among a surprising constituency: conservative religious activists.

The effort includes not only socially conservative groups that have partnered with Democrats on other issues in the past—like the National Association of Evangelicals and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops—but also more staunchly conservative groups and figures closely aligned with the Republican Party.

“There was this rhetoric in the last immigration debate that was, frankly, harsh,” says Mathew Staver, dean of the law school at Liberty University, founded by the late Jerry Falwell. “We need to understand that we are still a nation of immigrants, and we need to bring people out of the shadows and make them legal.”

And that last statement will make some of my fellow religious conservatives go bonkers. But, once you’re done pounding your computer screen in frustration at our “softness” on immigration, let’s have a look at the issue. First off:

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne, and all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.’

Then the righteous will answer him and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?’ And the king will say to them in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’ – Matthew 25:31-40

Its hard to get around that – in a very real sense, for Christians, that illegal who just crossed the border and is no trespassing on someone’s land and looking for a drink of water is Jesus – to refuse to give him what he needs is to refuse to give to God. Not a position a Christian wishes to be in.

Of course, the practical matter is that all 6 billion human beings cannot live within the borders of the United States – and given that everyone can’t live here, the government of the United States has the right and the moral obligation to secure the borders and fairly regulate who can come in, when and for how long. The trouble is, the United States government through gross negligence all but invited the 12 million or so illegals to come here – while an engraved invitation was not sent, the ease of crossing the border and the lack of punishment for being caught illegally in country was just short of that engraved invitation. And don’t think the citizens of the United States are just the hapless victims of government incompetence. First off, we citizens are responsible for ensuring the best government possible. Secondly, its not like we were complaining over much at the inexpensive goods and services the illegals provided.

So, how to bring the two halves together – how to be a proper Christian and be a good citizen? To me, it will take comprehensive immigration reform. Now, when our liberals say “comprehensive” what they really mean is “immediately make everyone here a citizen so they’ll vote for us”. What conservatives really mean when they say it is, “get the illegals out and triple bar the borders”. Both concepts are half right, and thus all wrong. We need both – a path to citizenship for those we de-facto invited to come, and a secure border so that we can henceforward carefully regulate who comes in.

And if you think it over, fellow conservatives, I think you’ll come ’round to my views – after all, the people coming here are almost all hard working, Christian and well behaved. Our liberals want to hook them on welfare and turn them into a permanent underclass dependent upon liberals for sustenance, but we can turn these people in to full-throated, join-a-tea-party conservatives – dedicated to doing for one’s own and fierce in their defense of individual liberty. Its a matter of eventually having Juan, Nguyen and Kamau with you at the NRA meeting. Ya dig? These new arrivals are conservatives in prospect – just as the prior waves of Irish, Italians and Poles were…and it was previous generations of conservatives who signed away all rights to Irish, Italian and Polish votes because of anti-immigrant sentiment. As it turns out, that led to two generations of liberal Democrat domination of the country. You want that, again? If you don’t, then figure out a way to start reaching out to the immigrant community.

This is getting excruciating:

Yesterday, fourteen Americans died in helicopter crashes in Afghanistan, the deadliest day for Americans there since June, 2005, in what has been the deadliest year for international and US forces there since the 2001 invasion. Meanwhile, in Baghdad, where Obama has ordered our troops into slow retreat, two massive suicide car bombs claimed hundreds of lives, including those of at least two dozen children, while destroying three major government buildings. And then, of course, came news that Obama had now played more golf while in office than our last president did in nearly three years.

All right, I don’t begrudge Obama the golf. It’s his dithering and cowardice I find shameful. During the campaign, he told us Afghanistan was the necessary war. In March, he told us he had completed a major review of the situation and come up with a new strategy. The commander he put in place has told him he needs 30- to 40-thousand more troops to finish the job. Civilians are dying in the war he wants to abandon. Our soldiers are dying in the war he swore he’d win. And Obama, caught between campaign rhetoric and reality, can’t figure out what to do.

Again, I’m not an expert, but I’m beginning to smell disaster, big time disaster.

President Obama: do something. Get in. Get out. Don’t just sit there dithering and having endless meetings. Councils of war are the tools of cowards – you are the President. Make the decision. I’ll back you on it, come what may – and so will millions of other Americans. What we can’t take is continued indecision while our soldiers are dying and innocents are being murdered.

A little less golf. A little less time making speeches. A bit more time doing the bloody job we hired you to do.

Doesn’t this just cut you liberals to the quick?

Conservatives continue to outnumber moderates and liberals in the American populace in 2009, confirming a finding that Gallup first noted in June. Forty percent of Americans describe their political views as conservative, 36% as moderate, and 20% as liberal. This marks a shift from 2005 through 2008, when moderates were tied with conservatives as the most prevalent group.

Poor, little liberals – you managed to sucker the moderates in to voting for Obama, but now the mask is off and people are running back to conservatism.

2010 and 2012 will just be soooo much fun!

We here at Blogs for Victory wish him the best of luck and a safe return:

…any future George P. Bush political ambitions will have to be put on hold as his Navy Reserve unit is set to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan in the coming weeks.

Lt. Junior Grade Bush, 33, joined the Navy Reserve in 2007 as an intelligence officer. The Navy recently told him, like thousands of others, that the two ongoing wars required him to go active-duty overseas, potentially in Iraq or Afghanistan. “It’s been communicated to me that it’s not a question of ‘if,’ it’s a question of ‘when,'” Bush told The Daily Beast. “It’s just a matter of time.”

Bush, who said that he was inspired by the service of his grandfather George H.W. Bush as well as former NFL star Pat Tillman, signed up for an eight-year term in the Navy Reserve in 2007.

Yep:

Why did things go south for Carter so fast? Because America’s enemies had taken measure of the man during his first, change-filled year in office. They saw weaknesses they could exploit. In the second year, they made their move.

In Year One, Carter invested all the international prestige of his presidency in diplomacy and image-making. His energy was dedicated almost exclusively to “making nice” on the world stage. It’s what drove his actions in the Israeli-Egyptian peace process, at strategic-arms limitation talks and in negotiating the Panama Canal Treaty.

It was a perpetual exercise in “soft power.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Except …

While Obama and co might think they are living in a post-modern world where everything can be deconstructed in to meaninglessness, the rest of the world lives in reality where power matters. In fact, for the leaders of Russia, Iran, China and Syria, the only thing which matters is power. Even supposing the left wing narrative is right (ie, that what we’re dealing with is blowback from our previous policy errors and crimes), it doesn’t change the fact that enemy leaders simply don’t care one way or the other about it. They only care about their power, and getting more of it – and in the global competition for Tyrant of the Year, wrecking US policy is always a sure winner.

They don’t care that Obama is black. They don’t care that Obama is cool. They don’t care that Obama speaks fluent liberalese. They are delighted we are essentially telegraphing that we won’t use force to get our way. They are thrilled to find that Obama is willing to give up strong positions on the theory that by so doing we’ll make the tyrants willing to work with us for the common good. And they are now crafting their plans with all this in mind.

And that means we’re in for a bad couple years. Welcome back, Carter.

To be sure, Club For Growth would want such a poll result, but we’ve no reason to doubt their honesty:

A poll released today by the Club for Growth shows Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman surging into the lead in the special election in New York’s 23rd congressional district to replace John McHugh, the former congressman who recently became Secretary of the Army.

The poll of 300 likely voters, conducted October 24-25, 2009, shows Conservative Doug Hoffman at 31.3%, Democrat Bill Owens at 27.0%, Republican Dede Scozzafava at 19.7%, and 22% undecided. The poll’s margin of error is +/- 5.66%. No information was provided about any of the candidates prior to the ballot question.

This is the third poll done for the Club for Growth in the NY-23 special election, and Doug Hoffman is the only candidate to show an increase in his support levels in each successive poll. The momentum in the race is clearly with Hoffman.

Of course, its very hard to figure out who will really show up on election day, and that 22% undecided is certainly something which can end up being a game changer. On the other hand – it will be Hoffman voters who are most motivated. He just might pull this off.

UPDATE: DCCC has an ad hitting Hoffman. Its a stupid, class warfare ad…but it shows that the Democrats figure Hoffman is the man to beat.

It is an important question because on our side of the aisle – in a desperate bid to stop socialism – we have become identified not so much as the party of free markets, but the party of big business. We’re trying to defend the right of a small businessman to run his business but we’re often ending up defendng the ability of a JP Morgan/Chase to loot the economy. We have to be careful about what we’re really about – and this article by Luigi Zingales is the best explanation I’ve seen. I do recommend reading the whole thing – here is what struck me as vitally important for our national debate:

…because the free-market system relies on this public support, and this support depends to a certain extent on the public’s impression that the system is fair, any erosion of that impression threatens the system itself. Such erosion occurs when government connections, or the power of entrenched incumbents in the market, seem to overtake genuine free and fair competition as the paths to wealth and success. Both government and big business have strong incentives to push the system in this direction, and therefore both, if left unchecked, pose a threat to America’s distinctive form of capitalism.

Although the United States has the great advantage of having started from a superior model of capitalism and having developed an ideology to support it, our system is still vulnerable to these pressures — and not only in a crisis. Even the most persuasive and resilient ideology cannot long outlive the conditions and reasoning that generated it. American capitalism needs vocal defenders who understand the threats it faces — and who can make its case to the public. But in the last 30 years, as the threat of global communism has waned and disappeared, capitalism’s defenders have grown fewer, while the temptations of corporatism have grown greater. This has helped set the stage for the crisis we now face — and left us less able to discern how we might recover from it.

In our financial system, especially, who among us would deny that entrenched interests heavily connected to government rule the roost? And if this is capitalism, then we can see why people are getting dismayed with it – but it isn’t capitalism; its a mockery of capitalism…a quasi-socialist, corporate-Statism counterfeit of a free market system. A place where the Masters of the Universe (in government and corporate board rooms) will stoutly assert that the market is free, but unless you come with suitable introductions, don’t try to enter it.

On our side, we must become the defenders of the free market against both Big Government and Big Corporation. Because someone works on Wall Street it doesn’t necessarily follow that he’s in love with freedom and the free market…he might be very much in love with sweetheart deals and backroom bribes. The author concludes in part:

We thus stand at a crossroads for American capitalism. One path would channel popular rage into political support for some genuinely pro-market reforms, even if they do not serve the interests of large financial firms. By appealing to the best of the populist tradition, we can introduce limits to the power of the financial industry — or any business, for that matter — and restore those fundamental principles that give an ethical dimension to capitalism: freedom, meritocracy, a direct link between reward and effort, and a sense of responsibility that ensures that those who reap the gains also bear the losses. This would mean abandoning the notion that any firm is too big to fail, and putting rules in place that keep large financial firms from manipulating government connections to the detriment of markets. It would mean adopting a pro-market, rather than pro-business, approach to the economy…

And that is it, in a nutshell: pro-market, not pro-business. We don’t care if any particular business lives or dies. We only care that the playing field is level, that no one is getting a rake-off from the taxpayers and that anyone who wants to enter the field may do so. America is a meritocracy and it must remain such – if we cease to be a place where the little guy can get ahead, then we’ll just become another socialist dystopia heaving for slow death, as most of Europe is now.

Obama and his Democrats – along with the entrenched, big corporate interests – see this crisis as the prime opportunity to completely close down the avenues of advancement. They wish to freeze us in place and turn us in to mere cogs in a government/corporate machine…where government pretends to help us and corporations pretend to compete. It will be “fair” in the mind of the left because (a) the left will be in charge, (b) the top people in government and business will be very well off and (c) everyone will have just enough government hand-outs to maintain a comfortable slavery. But we won’t be free – and we will start to die, just as the Europeans have.

Our ancestors built this nation for the Average Man – not the privileged man and not the lazy man. Just the average person who wants to work hard, play fair and get ahead to the best of his abilities. As such a nation we will continue to grow and secure for the world this bastion of liberty – or, we can choose to go Obama’s route, and slip in to a senescent slavery, where bureaucrats in government and business tell us where to live, where to work, what to buy, how much money we’ll have…

I want to live in the America our ancestors built – where do you want to live?