Blogs For Victory

From Victor Davis Hanson:

…We inherited a wonderful infrastructure from our parents. A superb system of politics and economics was likewise given to us at birth. Many of us try to copy our grandparents and parents whose values and work ethic we increasingly eulogize. But against all that is that Roman notion of luxus, untold wealth and leisure that we see juxtaposed with shrill cries and accusations that we are too poor, exploited, and in need of someone else’s income. The wealthier we become, the louder and angrier we become that we are not even more wealthy.

In short, what ruined Rome in the West? Lots of things. But clearly the pernicious effects of affluence and laxity warped Roman sensibility and created a culture of entitlement that was not justified by revenues or the creation of actual commensurate wealth — and the resulting debits, inflation, debased currency, and gradual state impoverishment gave the far more vulnerable Western Empire far less margin of error when barbarians arrived, or rival generals marched on Rome. For a while the Romanization of the wider Mediterranean subsidized this ennui, but eventually the old western and southern provinces neither could protect what they had created nor could continue to be as productive as in the past nor believed that being Roman was any better than the alternative.

The historian Will Durant, after surveying the decay of Rome in the 1st century AD, noted that “by its own exhausted will, the great race (of Romans) was beginning to die”. That is important – decline is a choice, not a fate. We are touched with decay while the rest of the western world is shot through with it. Thus far, the people of what was once called Christendom are choosing to die. Meanwhile, even those states which might want to supplant us have also started to choose to die – but being further back on the road, there is that prospect of a brief supremacy.

It was not a perversity on his part that St. Francis said, “Grant me the treasure of sublime poverty”. While we look back at the 13th century as a time of grinding poverty, the fact is that St. Francis was of a wealthy family and living in a society growing highly prosperous – perhaps as well off as anyone had been since the height of Rome. St. Francis knew, though, that wealth can be a killer – a killer of courage, mercy and love. Sublime poverty is what keeps a person – and a society – healthy.

So, are we all to burn our cash and go live as peasants in the countryside? It is a choice of “farm or die”? That depends on how one wishes to look at it – the real choice is between doing things and doing nothing. If we continue to do more and more nothing, then we’ll get progressively weaker, and eventually die. Not in a cataclysm, but in a slow drift to national senility and an eventual breakup of the nation and our replacement by anyone who wishes to do things on the land we slept upon.

One of the hardest thing for us to wrap our minds around is that, all along, sublime poverty was provided for us. Remember that our federal government is directly indebted for nearly $13 trillion dollars. The “most wealthy” nation spent $13 trillion it didn’t have – and when you tack on personal and State government debt and combine it with the unfunded mandates, we’re many tens of trillions of dollars in the hole. The harsh fact is that we weren’t as rich as we thought we were.

To be sure, we were vastly wealthy – and in very real terms, we retain such wealth. Its in our soil and in our ability to invest in sweat equity. We haven’t wanted to sweat and we’ve listened to idiots about the environment and thus closed off vast amounts of native wealth. But we never were rich enough for all those millions of people to get “free” health care. Never were rich enough for kids to get government grants to go to college. Never were rich enough to provide welfare for tens of millions of people. Our politicians talked of “how can the richest nation in the world not afford X” and we nodded our heads like morons – never fully understanding that being the richest nation in the world isn’t the same as having unlimited wealth for whatever struck our fancy.

We must get back to work. We must, in the end, have the courage to tell a high school graduate that he’s going to have to go to work and entirely pay for college on his own – or not go to college. We’re going to have to tell the shiftless poor that it is time to shift for themselves. We’re going to have to be brave enough to say to a person, “its sad you can’t afford that quadruple bypass”. We don’t have an endless supply of money – we do have an endless supply of resources and ability to work; an endless supply of love and generosity (maybe that oldster’s friends can pool their resources to pay for the bypass?), but we don’t have an endless supply of money. Sublime poverty sits at our knee, waiting for us to wake up.

And if we do wake up and get back to work and understand that all our whims will not be granted, then we will cease to die. We will become what we were – the America of our grandfathers will return. The choice is ours – live, or die. I chose to live and I’m beginning to believe that a large majority of my fellow Americans wish to live, too and understand what it will require.

Cross Posted at Noonan for Nevada

The news:

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, mounted stiff resistance tonight to any swift bailout of Greece, as a rift opened up between European capitals over how best to tackle the risks posed to the euro.

Despite a show of Franco-German unity on the crisis and the first statement from EU leaders pledging to safeguard the currency’s stability, hopes on the markets of a German-led rescue plan to shore up Greece’s critical public finances were dashed by Merkel, who repeatedly emphasised that Athens would need to put its own house in order and brushed aside all questions of financial support.

“Germany is stepping totally on the brakes on financial assistance,” said a senior EU diplomat. “On legal grounds, on constitutional grounds and on principle.” Another senior diplomat said of the Germans: “They’re not waving their chequebooks.”

Even if Germany wanted to, she can’t – there isn’t enough money in Germany to bail out all the troubled nations of the Euro-zone. Spain is actually in worse shape – while Portugal, Ireland, Italy and a host of other nations in Europe teeter on the brink of disaster. They’ve taxed, borrowed and spent themselves in to oblivion – and not having children over the past 30 years hasn’t helped, either (you know, if they had some kids in Europe they’d have workers and innovators and such…).

The ball cannot be kept in the air forever – and while Germany is healthier than all other European nations, it is on the skids to financial disaster, too. In fact, all nations pretty much are – or, at least, any nation which runs a regular annual government deficit. Even if we wanted to suppose that government spending can stimulate the economy (it can’t; not in any meaningful sense, but lets grant it for the sake of argument), this would only work in short spurts. Well, aside from a couple odd years, all the major economic powers of the world have spent the last 70 years “stimulating” their economies via deficit spending.

What we have, now, is a situation where there isn’t enough wealth to tax to make up for the shortfall – only massive reductions in government spending offer a way out of the mess. And this is precisely what short-sighted politicians don’t want to do because it will really anger an electorate to have its baby-bottle ripped away. This could result in the biggest nightmare a politician has – losing election. Politicians hope never to face such a thing – they hope to keep things going and that, some how, an exhausted, bankrupt economy will produce the funds to paper over the fiscal cracks.

But it cannot go on. Eventually, you not only have to balance the budget, you have to keep it balanced until such time as you are out of debt. Think in terms of decades of no deficits – or, at worst, very small deficits which will be made up within a year or two. There is nothing left.

The party is over.

The bill has come due.

Patrick Kennedy to bow out?

Wow, Patrick Kennedy not running for re-election? Maybe he thinks he’d be the voter’s next whipping boy?

WASHINGTON — A Democratic official says Rep. Patrick Kennedy has decided not to seek re-election for his seat representing Rhode Island in the U.S. Congress.

The official spoke to The Associated Press only on the condition that his name not be used because he was not authorized to speak ahead of the official announcement.

The decision by the eight-term congressman comes less than a month after a stunning Republican upset in the race for the Massachusetts Senate seat his late father, Edward Kennedy, held for almost half a century…

Such a reliably liberal (and equally reliably foolish) Democrat quits in a very blue State?

The times, they are a-changin’…

UPDATE: More blood in the water?

And given this, its bound to come out that one or two of them are bastards:

Now, the Obama-Biden pair that opposed the Iraq war and its tactics and predicted their failure is prepared to accept credit for its success.

It seems that Biden, who’s from Delaware when he’s in Delaware and Pennsylvania when in Pennsylvania, is certain now that Iraq will turn out to be one of the Obama-Biden administration’s greatest achievements.

No, really.

Here’s how Biden put it to Lar:

I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration.

No, Joe, Iraq is not one of your achievements or Obama’s achievement. Victory in Iraq is brought to you by the magnificent men and women of our armed forces under the courageous leadership of President George W. Bush. Blowhards like you had and have nothing to do with this – had we followed your drooling-idiot advice on Iraq (or, worse, followed Obama’s!) we’d have a catastrophe in that area of the world.

This just burns me up.

Michael Yon has the latest from the campaign in Afghanistan.

Say a prayer for our troops.

Is anyone surprised?

President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.

Obama, in a Feb. 9 Oval Office interview, said that a presidential commission on the budget needs to consider all options for reducing the deficit, including tax increases and cuts in spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

“The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table,” the president said in the interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.”

Obama repeatedly vowed during the 2008 presidential election campaign that he would not raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 and households earning less than $250,000 a year.

He gave us his word – his most solemn promise. Of course, he’s already broken many such promises.

Naturally, Obama sees the middle class as a ripe target for taxation – they already strongly oppose him and he’ll call it “taxing the rich” to play up to the idiot envy of the poorer leftist base…meanwhile, Obama’s rich, bankster buddies will continue to rake it in.

…because you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. On Friday, the first federal appeals court to consider the topic will hear oral arguments (PDF) in a case that could establish new standards for locating wireless devices.

In that case, the Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their–or at least their cell phones’–whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that “a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records” that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.

So, what do you think? Democrats were up in arms when Bush wanted to tap the calls of terrorists who want to attack our country… Obama wants to track American citizens because we have no “reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Bring Back Bush. Down with Big Brother.

Yeah, they also said the stimulus would keep the unemployment rate below 8 percent.

The United States is likely to average 95,000 more jobs each month this year, while personal savings will remain high as credit remains tight, according to a White House report released Thursday.

The Council of Economic Advisers also trumpeted the $787 billion economic stimulus package, which it said has saved or created about 2 million jobs.

In a message to Congress, President Obama pointed out that the economy he inherited was losing 700,000 jobs each month.

“I can report that over the past year, this work has begun. In the coming year, this work continues,” Obama said in a letter he sent to the Capitol attached to his economic update to lawmakers. “But to understand where we must go in the next year and beyond, it is important to remember where we began one year ago.”

You know, Obama attacked Republicans by falsely claiming they offered no ideas of their own on health care and saying that opposing everything isn’t leadership. Well, guess what Barry, blaming your predecessor isn’t leadership. It’s passing the buck.  Pushing these ridiculous “jobs saved or created” numbers all the time isn’t leadership, it’s lying to save your ass.

It is time for Obama to start accepting responisible for economy he made worse. With millions of jobs lost on his watch, the people are going to have no interest in saving his job in 2012.

I’ve read some policy points of various Republican candidates for office. One of the most common refrains is something about cutting spending – working towards reducing the deficit; repeal Obama’s bail outs; bring fiscal responsibility to government. On and on – but I’ve yet to read one which makes this simple statement:

“A nation $12 trillion dollars in debt cannot afford any more debt; I will not introduce, sponsor or vote in favor of any budget which is not balanced.”

This is the proper complement to the various tax pledges most Republican candidates will sign. They are two sides of the same coin. A no tax pledge is a promise not to take any more money from the people of the United States – but it is a false pledge if the money will just be taken in the form of borrowing from the future.

The United States is in fiscal crisis – for decades we have talked about “out of control spending”, but never really did anything about it. Now, we must. The debt we are currently piling up threatens our ability to maintain a first class military, to pay for high skill law enforcement, to maintain the roads and harbors we need for commerce. We must stop piling up debt. Right now.

Now, our liberal friends – seconded, as always, by RINOs – will protest that the drastic cuts necessary to balance the budget will cause the most vulnerable to suffer. This is a flat out lie – it isn’t budget cutting which threatens the vulnerable, but there is the fact that the supposed tribunes of the vulnerable who will see to it they suffer as a means of getting the budget restored.

The United States government is shot through with waste, fraud and abuse. No one knows just how much money really flows through the government agencies in a given year. Investigations have shown that literal tens of billions of dollars have gone missing over the years – missing as in “no one knows where it went”. Right now, President Obama and his Democrats are set to spend, in deficits alone, $1.6 trillion dollars in 2011. There is no way to wrap one’s mind around such a sum – but one can easily understand that with such large amounts, a lot of chicanery is sure to be going on.

If you go to the A-Z Index of US Government Agencies, you’ll find the following: Domestic Policy Council, Economic Business and Agricultural Affairs; Economic Development Administration, Economic Adjustment Office, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Economics and Statistics Administration and the Economic Research Service…with all that, just found in a short glance, our economy should be booming. Right?

Wrong – and of course we know its wrong. How much duplication of effort is there in all that? How much entirely wasted effort? How many people could be let go in there and still get the vital job done? If there are any vital jobs contained therein, at all. This is the monster we’ve fed for nearly 80 years now. It grows by leaps and bounds and adds agency to bureau to department and it never stops growing and things, once grown, never dies away.

Our opponents will lie and say we are determined to kill granny or the children or what have you with our draconian cuts – but we know we would not be doing that. And now, in 2010, I think that the people are willing to hear and act upon the brutal truth. It is my bet that at least half the non-defense and law enforcement personnel of government could be let go with no negative effect on the day to day lives of the American people, including the most vulnerable. What is more, I’ll further bet that you, reading this, will admit to it (even if, as liberals, some of you will still stoutly deny what you know to be true). Finally, I think the American people in general know this, as well.

If we wish to save our nation, it isn’t good enough for us to pledge to tinker around the edges of the problem. The sad facts of life are that, as far as government goes, all we conservatives have managed to conserve is FDR’s New Deal. It is now time for us to conserve America and our Constitution – and that will require a revolutionary change, and a complete end to the false promises of the welfare state.

If we whittle away at liberalism, then it will eventually grow back – we must hack at it, root and branch. We must have done with it, for good. To do this, we must pledge ourselves not to merely being not-Democrats, but being true conservatives set on a revolutionary rescue of our nation and our people. Plant that flag of liberty, defend it ferociously, and let the chips fall where they may because in this year of 2010, I think the chips will all fall our way.

They just can’t help themselves, it would seem:

The Department of Homeland Security admitted today that it improperly conducted a threat assessment on pro-life and pro-abortion groups in Wisconsin. The assessment came before an expected rally last year in response to the University of Wisconsin Hospital board decided to allow abortions.

In February 2009, pro-life advocates planned to protest the hospital’s decision to open up a new Madison Surgery Center doing abortions.

The Associated Press reported today that the department said in a memo that it “destroyed all of the copies of the assessment after an internal review found it violated intelligence gathering guidelines about ‘protest groups which posed no threat to homeland security.'”

AP indicated the assessment was reportedly only shared with the director of Wisconsin’s intelligence-sharing center and local police in Middleton, Wisconsin, the site of the rally.

Today, a pro-life organization in Wisconsin informed LifeNews.com of its concerns.

In response to an open records request by the Alliance Defense Fund and Pro-Life Wisconsin, the Middleton Police Department and the Wisconsin Department of Justice, along with the Department of Homeland Security all refused on February 4 to release copies of the threat assessment.

Probably because they don’t want to look like a bunch of fools. I really don’t blame the cops on this – it was probably liberal, political higher ups who ordered it done. Because you know how we gap toothed, knuckle dragging Bible-clingers are ready to go off on a violent rampage at a moment’s notice.

We simply must return to the Constitutional order of things – this is getting entirely out of hand.