Blogs For Victory

Gotta say, I like what I hear – he understands the problem. He has hard words for all of us – our sense of entitlement to government benefits is firmly condemned. Our requirement to do our duty – to God, country and fellow man – is emphasized. Whether or not Santorum becomes the next President of the United States remains to be seen – what cannot be doubted is that the next President, if he is to reform America, must agree with Santorum’s understanding of the problem.

Now, the hard part – putting forth a reform plan which will turn Santorum from a dark horse candidate in to a potential nominee. He can’t leave that hanging…he has to tell us what he plans to do, in some detail, or he’ll just be one of a half dozen people vying for TEA Party backing…and lacking money and national clout, he’ll never emerge from the pack. The plan is the thing for Santorum…we’ll see if he delivers.

Victor Davis Hanson explains:

Nemesis is always hot on the trail of hubris, across time and space, and the goddess has been particularly busy in destroying the carefully crafted images of Bono, John Edwards, Timothy Geithner, Al Gore, Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Anthony Weiner, and a host of others. What do their tax hypocrisies, sexual indulgences, and aristocratic socialist lifestyles all have in common?

Collectively, they represent a self-appointed or elected global elite that oversees, lectures about — in sanctimonious fashion — the ethical responsibilities of the redistributive state…

The reason our Founders sought to limit the power of the government was not because they feared a jack-booted Gestapo kicking down our doors – the Founders knew of no such things – but because our Founders were incredibly wise to human nature. These were, for the most part, practical men of affairs. Well off, as far as things went in 18th century America, but not fabulously wealthy – men who had to work and scramble to get ahead and thus understood the weakness of humanity. Our inflated opinion of ourselves; our willingness to rationalize our desires; our slowness to give credit where it is due; our penchant for falling in to financial or sexual corruption…men are weak, so don’t give them too much power over other men.

What we have done wrong over this past century is that while men have remained as weak as ever, we have assigned ever more power to them. This is why, in practice, all Big Government programs fail – even if you really could work out to a nicety exactly what should be done, you’d still have to confide the execution of the plan to people just like you…in other words, people who are likely to mess up again and again and again. Remember that – best plan in the world put in to place with the best of intentions: it will still be screwed up. Just can’t get around it – just can’t get around the fact that people will have to carry it out. And the more authority you assign to these screwed up people, the greater the scope of the disaster. Consign a company of soldiers to a dimwit and you might get a company of soldiers wiped out by an error…put an army in to such hands and you might have an entire war lost. See how it works?

But it gets even worse…an army commander still doesn’t command the whole of the country. Now take that witless army commander and put him in charge of health care; of manufacturing; of the legal system…worse and worse and worse it will become. This is why the Catholic Church, quite a long while ago and at the dawn of the super-State ruled that “subsidiarity” must be the rule. Having no illusions about the nature of Man, the Church held – and still holds – that action must take place at the lowest level possible. This is because the closer you are to a problem the more likely you are to find the right solution – and the smaller the error will be if you mess it up on the lowest level possible. There was a reason the Psalmist wrote:

I Put no trust in princes, in mere mortals powerless to save.

When they breathe their last, they return to the earth; that day all their planning comes to nothing. – Psalm 146:3-4

Trust God, but for heaven’s sake don’t trust your fellow men – not even yourself – with too much power. Even if it means something doesn’t get done, better that it should be so than risk putting a complete scoundrel in charge…and you will get that complete scoundrel the more you repose your trust in men.

The good news is that we can fix this – by returning our government to its Constitutional norms. Are you tired of all the Weiners out there making a mess of things? Then take away their power and give it to no one…then you will have seen the last of them. Oh, they’ll still be there…but they’ll only be ruining their own lives, not all of ours.

Just got this feeling that some big news will come out today – but as I have to work and then have a Knights of Columbus meeting later, I might not be able to write something up until late in the day. So, use this thread to discuss all the big stories of today…or to comment on how boring it was this Monday.

Isn’t the definition of insanity, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”? From The Hill:

House Democrats this week have amplified their calls for new spending on infrastructure and other federal projects in the face of May’s discouraging job-creation figures.

Even as Republicans are insisting on “trillions” of dollars in spending cuts, Democrats maintain that a targeted injection of additional federal dollars in the near-term would go a long way toward reversing the hiring slump. Friday’s disappointing job report, they say, only bolsters their case…

This is seriously what they’ve got – spend more money on infrastructure and federal projects. They expect none of us to notice that, hey, we just spent a lot of money on just that…shouldn’t we have some primo infrastructure, by now? But, this what Democrats will run on…just spend more money; and aren’t those Republicans meanies for not spending?

The real purpose here, of course, is to keep unionized workers on the job through 2012. The last thing Democrats need is a huge pool of campaign cash and political muscle to dry up. So, spend bags of more money – print it up in whatever amount proves necessary. Gotta get Obama re-elected, ya know?

We can crush them. They’ve got nothing. Their plans have fallen off from silly to downright stupid. All we need do is attack, attack and then attack some more. As long as we fight this out, the people will come our way…we offer a future of greatness, they offer another hand out to their special interests. We can win this running away, if we set our selves to the task.

A dire prediction quoted over at Zero Hedge:

…We consider it likely that food inflation will prove to be more pernicious and durable this time than in the Seventies.

Why?

Because, back then, food shortages generating food inflation were almost entirely caused by weather or crop diseases. Today, we still have problems with weather disruptions in key grain-growing regions, but pesticides and herbicides have dramatically reduced crop losses of earlier times. However, we now have man-made assaults on food supplies, and they have every indication of being both dangerous and durable. Politicians cloaking their personal political greed in green garb could easily create food shortages of Biblical proportions.

Indeed. We have the capability not just of feeding the whole world, but of over-feeding it. The last thing which should be suffering inflation is food. We’ve really got the technology on this one nailed down. But a series of short sighted policies ranging from government subsidies to environmentalist idiocy has curbed the ability of the United States and the rest of the world to produce sufficient food. The bowl is getting empty and we’re busy killing off the means of re-filling it.

This doesn’t affect Americans too much. For Americans, higher food prices are really an inconvenience. If food prices spike another 10 or 15%, it will hurt and it will have a severe effect on the economy (more spent on food, less spent on other goods…presto!, recession)…but it won’t ever risk an American’s life. On the other hand, those areas of the world which have short food supplies at the best of times and where people spend half or more of their income just on food would be catastrophically hit if food prices continue to rise. As is usual when liberal elites set to work (in this case, in “saving” the planet) it is the poorest of the poor who suffer the most.

We really need to reform American government from top to bottom. A century’s worth of liberal idiocy has wormed its way in to our institutions and unless we can purge this nonsense we’ll never fully recover. America is supposed to be the economic powerhouse of the world – in food as well as in all other activities. We’ve bound ourselves hand and foot with liberal policies, and now some places of the world are running out of food because of it. Time for a real change – and 2012 just can’t get here fast enough.

Remember the day:

They are almost all gone now, the men who liberated Europe. A few very old men linger on and we are thus privileged to have them with us for a little while. But the day will soon come when all of them will have gone home – gone to be with the brothers they left on the beaches and fields of Normandy. I wonder who will laugh most – those who died there, or those who died many years later?

For us, it is a matter of remembering – what they did and why they did it. We forget too fast these days, especially in the younger generation. We forget that regular, every day Americans quitted their lives and went to liberate people they didn’t know and places they had never been. Evil had risen in the world, and in trusting faith they went forth and did their duty – more than 300,000 of them giving, in Lincoln’s words, “the last full measure of devotion”.

From Reuters:

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou starts a campaign on Monday to secure a new international bailout by imposing years of austerity on a nation already seething over corruption and economic mismanagement.

Unease is growing within Papandreou’s ranks about the consequences of waves of budget cuts demanded under successive deals with the European Union and IMF — and this could turn into alarm after at least 80,000 Greeks crammed a central Athens square to vent their anger over the nation’s dire state…

To put it in proportion – this is like more than two million Americans showing up in DC to shout defiance at the government. Can you imagine what would happen if such an event took place? More than likely, our government would cave to that level of anger…or, the party on the “out” would swiftly take advantage of it and clean up at the next election.

So, why, then, does the Greek government seem prepared to buck their people and go forward with the bail out? Because if you think the Republicans and Democrats are two sides of the same coin, you’ve never seen nothing like Europe. Over there, all the parties really are the same…with only the most minor differences. The difference between, say, Labour and Tory in Britain is that the Tories will have Britain go bankrupt slightly slower than Labour would. Portugal just tossed out their government because of the bail outs…and what do the winners propose to do? Go forward with the bail outs, naturally.

Everyone of the elite in Europe is simply aghast at all this – the deal was they’d provide lavish benefits and the people would just quietly accept the dictates of government. But now popular revolt is brewing…and you just watch: if this keeps up, the more extremist parties in Europe will start to gain strength. Not because Europeans are particularly extremist, but because of frustration with all the current major parties…no one is speaking up for the people who are to be burdened with taxes for a generation in a vain attempt to pay off bondholders who should have been smart enough not to loan money to States which cannot repay.

It is quite a mess over there – and it where we’re heading unless we get our act together in the 2012 election.

This kook is trying to find ways to punish us global warming deniers, of course – early in the piece he suggests tattooing us but then mulls over the Nazi implications of that and comes up with a better sanction:

…So how about they are forced to buy property on low-lying islands, the sort of property that will become worthless with a few more centimetres of ocean rise, so they are bankrupted by their own bloody-mindedness? Or what about their signed agreement to stand, in the year 2040, lashed to a pole at a certain point in the shallows off Manly? If they are right and the world is cooling – ”climate change stopped in the year 1998” is one of their more boneheaded beliefs – their mouths will be above water. If not …

Deal, with this caveat – we don’t have to pay for the beachfront property until 2040. If it is underwater, we agree to pay double the price it would bring today. If its still above water, we get to keep it, for free. And I am hereby staking my claim to Al Gore’s new beachfront digs.

Well, heck, it is only Syrians being massacred…so, what do we care?

Homeowners foreclose on Bank of America.

Poll: 43% are involved in politics just to keep the idiots at bay.

The (Unemployed) Man of La Mancha – seems that the government there is really, really broke.

Profiles in Running Away.

The good news? A Catholic valedictorian is fighting for her right to pray at graduation. The bad news? That she has to fight for this basic, human right.

Obamunism! Dow has longest weekly slide since 2004.

RIP: Twin brothers, who became friars, die at 92 on same day.

Iowahawk strikes again: Farewell, My Weiner

Just prior to the French Revolution as government started to break down, the peasants of France started to arm themselves in what is called the “Great Fear”…it seems that with Mexico descending in to drug-lord anarchy, that is happening in Mexico, too. From the AP:

…The mutilated body of a man was found inside the trunk of a vehicle along a federal highway, police said on Monday. Officials also reported finding the bullet-riddled body of a 20-year-old man with his feet and hands tied in a residential neighborhood. Police gave no motives or identities of the men killed.

Ramon Almonte, the Guerrero state police chief, said on Monday he will ask the federal congress to make it easier for common citizens to get permits for weapons to defend themselves.

Almonte’s brother was killed on Jan. 1 in a rural town in Guerrero by unidentified gunmen. The state has been plagued by such executions.

“When you fight someone and at least you have a ‘piece,’ the person who is attacking you might think twice,” Almonte said. “We cannot go on the way we are.”…

Mexico has very strict gun control laws – the sort of laws our liberals would love to have: you can only have low-powered weapons and you have to go through a difficult process with, believe it or not, the Mexican Department of Defense in order to get a permit. Naturally, most law-abiding Mexicans don’t have weapons…of course, the criminals get all they want, including very powerful, military-style weapons (and not, it must be noted, by buying them from gun dealers in the United States…in fact, it seems that they get a lot of their weapons via corruption in the Mexican law enforcement and military departments). Just as we bitter-clingers have always said, if you make it illegal to own guns, only criminals will own them.

The fact of the matter is that the Mexican army and police, even if they were freed from corruption (a very tall order) cannot be everywhere at once. The joke “when seconds count, the police are only minutes away” is exceptionally true – especially in Mexico. Under the best of circumstances, the people of Mexico cannot rely upon the authorities for their safety. As is usual – and as is in direct accordance with American ideals – the people must in the last resort defend themselves. Thus our “right of the people to keep and bear arms” in our Constitution.

An armed population would give the drug lords no end of trouble. They wouldn’t be able to just lord it over the people of Mexico. To be sure, an armed Mexican population would almost certainly result, in the worst hit areas, with some vigilante committees…but desperate times call for desperate measures; and while such committees would make mistakes, it is still far better than just allowing things to continue to deteriorate.

I hope Almonte gets his way – and that his views prevail over the whole of Mexico. The people are being oppressed by a horrible injustice, and it is time the people were allowed to strike back.

HAT TIP: The Truth About Guns