"Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America."—Barack Hussein Obama Inaugural Address, 20-Jan-09.

Based on what has been exhibited so far: the parade of tax cheats proposed into the upper echelons of the administrative functionaries, an attempt to nationalize the economy by taking over bad debts, appointing czars of various shades from car manufacturing to government efficiency and resizing of the ‘middle class’, every American of all shades and sorts of persuasion should be apprehensive respecting what America is being remade into.

It appears that the celebrated architect of Brooklyn aphorisms, Yogi Berra, was correct when he opined that the more things change the more they seem to remain the same. For one thing, the prevalence of Clinton era rethreads amongst the Obama appointments does invoke the feeling of “déjà vu all over again.” It just seems so proper and fitting that tax cheats become the characteristic attributes of Obama appointments.

What does not seem proper is that Republicans in Capitol Hill do not find it incumbent on themselves to make an issue of it. It was supposed to be the function of the minority party to be scandalized by lapses of judgment committed by the ruling party. When there is hardly any sign of protest, the American public ought to be scandalized. As Bob Dole once asked, “where is the outrage”?

We should all be outraged that the Obama Administration is implementing the Europeanization of America. We once took pride in being known as the New World. There is no pride to take in becoming the New Europe.

Throughout my conscious adult life one word has become so naturally associated with the notion of being "American."  The word is "Exceptionalism."  Then came the age of Obama.  Then lou and behold, as promised, things changed.  Now "Apologetics" has become the associated word.  Let the world know that the POTUS is not apologizing in my name.  I became an American as a result of a conscious adult choice.  The American I have chosen to be and the Americanism I choose to abide by has nothing whatsoever that needs apolgizing for.  Least of all to the Arab world which is breeding and exporting terrorist of the most abominable sort. 

 

 

This presidential election cycle had been one of the longest in recent memory, mainly as a result of the tediously dragged out Democratic Primaries. This partly explains why I am sort of bothered and bewildered to come across a Rasmussen Report indicating 9% of the sample to be undecided a mere hours before the actual polling booths open.

Whatever your pet issue, it is simply ridiculous that you have not made up your mind who best to lead the country after the conventions and the four debates. On all the crucial issues, e.g., the economy, the war, abortion, judicial appointments the candidates’ position could not be put in any clearer contrast than they have propounded at these events.

Let us revisit these issues for refreshers:

The war: McCain was for the surge and victory, Obama for cut and run and negotiate.

Economy: both voted for the bailout. Obama is for “spreading the wealth around,” McCain is for growing the wealth.

 Abortion: Obama for on-demand availability; McCain for parental consent restrictions.

Foreign Policy: Obama wants to make us more like Europe; McCain believes in American Exceptionalism.

Energy Policy: McCain is for oil drilling domestically; Obama believes domestic oil production is pointless.

After all these, if you have not made up your mind yet, why don’t you just close your eyes and pull the lever for McCain /Palin. After all, you seem to not know what you want, anyway!  

 

It is a very reliable indicator that somebody is going to effectively fight for our interests if that somebody has already effectively put life and limb on the line to defend us. Such a candidate is Lee Zeldin.

Deploying him to Washington after his successful tour of duty in Iraq is a very logical next step for the proven fighter and defender of the American Dream.

Pull the lever for Zeldin, McCain/Palin on Tuesday and tell your friends and family to do the same.

 

The MLK dream was: that people shall be judged by the content of their character not the color of the skin. Secretary Powell’s endorsement of B. Hussein Obama is the exact anti-thesis to this dream.

When there was buzz about Gen. Powell being the best presidential timber in the yard, he did not make public his party affiliation. Or if he did, I simply missed it. My take is, Gen. Powell was acutely aware that the color of his skin was a significant component of his popularity. A Democrat/Republican angle would slice deeply into that popularity, especially given the fact that the black community is overwhelmingly a Democratic constituency.

It is misleading to assume that he is a Republican just because he was SOSOTUS in a Republican administration. After all this Compassionate Conservatism administration nurtured a Clintonite Mineta in its cabinet.

The Powel BHO endorsement is a quintessential anti-MLK moment. It is another eloquent illustration that this presidential race is all about race. Why else is BHO billed as the transformational candidate by the MSM? It is the triumph of pigmentation over character.

Kudos to Geraldine Ferraro for being the first one to point out this fact in public. She was taken to the cleaners by the mainstream media for it. But it only further illustrates the point how this presidential race is all about race.

Speaking of racial divides, B. Hussein Obama did consciously select his racial identity. Despite his white mother and his white grandparents who raised him, he went off as a teenager to seek out his black identity. Contrast this with Tiger Woods who publicly objects being identified as an African American on the grounds that it is disrespectful of his mother’s Asian heritage to be so labeled.

When BHO repeatedly points out that he looks different from the presidents pictured in the dollar bills, better believe that he is race baiting. Also better believe that he is doing it rather effectively. This is the only explanation that seems to make sense why there is a dearth of campaign posters and bumper stickers in the NY Suffolk county neighborhoods.

I consider it an act of political cowardice to buy into this racial nonsense. We have too much at stake in this election. It infuriates me that some are intimidated into not expressing ourselves. It infuriates me that my white neighbor who took from me a McCain/Palin yard poster but does not put it up on her yard because of her next door neighbor which happens to be a household occupied by a black family.

 If we are cowered into not doing what we want during an Obama candidacy, what else will we volunteer not to do in an Obama presidency?

For the record, I am a first-generation American. I am a non-white, married into three generations of a white family.  I am a registered Independent who voted for President Bush in 2004 as my first vote as an American citizen. I am outraged that in this election cycle we seem to be effectively intimated by the Obama campaign.

So I enjoin you, fellow Americans: Don’t let the racial bigots take away your right to vote your conscience. Not in an election cycle when we are at war with bigots of all shades and colors, most prominent among them being Red!

 

This is a rejoinder to Mona Charen’s column entitled Fair Taxation.

There are Reid, Pelosi, Obama, and ‘The Combination Thereof’. It's a housewives' tale but the secret to making delicious tea: you put one spoon for each person served and one spoon for the pot.

It's a basic dialectic of existence that the combination counts for something most important. That's why marriage is not just tea for two. There's the husband (hopefully a man), the wife (most preferably a woman), and the combination thereof.

When all three branches of government is controlled by the redistributive ideology, the fact that all three are in, is the lethal ingredient that brings in the doomsday scenario.

The judiciary will follow suit. If government no longer protects and promotes the pursuit of happiness, wealth and the most productive elements of society would ship offshore to Monaco, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and kindred places.

Then America becomes a wounded giant left to lick its wounds. This definitely is the change that Obama-mania promises.

As it is wisely said, any nation always gets the leadership it deserves!

Regain & Sustain                

Win Clean . . . Regain                

McCain/Palin

 

 

Much as the Obama camp and its various enablers want the issue of his twenty-year association with the Right Reverend Jeremiah Wright to go away, I consider it a civic duty to keep it in the mix. The fate of the Republic is at stake. Most of us ordinary mortals use a church to provide moral compass to help us navigate through crises of all sorts.

If we take Obama’s word at face value, i.e., that he did not have any idea Wright was preaching abominable anti –American sentiments, that simply means he was clueless for twenty (of forty-six?) years. Why should the American people want somebody clueless to occupy the Oval Office?

If he had some inkling into what Wright was all about and he has stayed in that church all this time, it means he subscribes to the anti-American abominations. Why should America put at the helm of state somebody who is against all the good that America stands for?

If he was aware of what Wright was all about but did not have the courage of his convictions to denounce it, why should America put in the Oval Office somebody so spineless as to not even have a hiccup through twenty years of such insults to America?

I am a first-generation American and I am deeply offended. Is there anyone out there who feels the same way as I do?     

Stop insulting Lyndon LaRouche by mentioning him in the same breath with anything related to the Obama/Biden ticket. The book “Dialectical Economics” which arguably is one of the more notable “lengthy Lyndon LaRouche disquisitions,” contain more astute scholarship than anything that Obama produced (if you can find any) as president of the Harvard Law Review.

 

Political advertisement should not be considered negative if it contains an element of truth. It enhances the substance of the political conversation. An ad is negative only to the extent that it distorts or conceals facts for the purpose of deceiving the public.

In this respect, the McCain/Palin ad which divulges the Obama/Ayers collaboration on certain projects should be considered a valuable public service. It exposes the quality of judgment and decision making that a potential president has.

  The dearth of campaign yard signs in my neighborhood boggles the mind. One month before the most historic presidential election in memory, why is everyone seem to be dozing away the blues? Obama-mania coupled with the biggest government takeover of the private sector can usher in a tsunami of socialism which will transform the American dream protection of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness into a gulag nightmare of low expectations and guaranteed outcome.

Here are a couple of things which bother me. I wonder if a few others are worried about them:

1.     Why is there very little talk of what Obama thought and did while in Columbia and Harvard. I contend that those intellectual maturation years provide a window into the ideological underpinnings of Obama’s ‘Audacity of Hope,’ before the preaching of Rev. Wright nurtured it to full bloom.

2.    The most notable executive position which Obama held was as chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. His initiatives, decisions, and accomplishments in that job ought to be a good part of the campaign conversation. The same executive reflexes may flourish in the Oval Office!

Roughly a century before the Nazis swept into power, in his Ode to Germany the poet Henrich Heine wrote, “Oh Germany, land of oak and stupidity”! The thought of a poet writing a century hence, “Oh America, your karma is to go down in Obama-mania!” is a torment to the soul, indeed.

 

This piece was written as an email message to Ziba, an Iranian colleague in Graduate School who is now living in Houston. It was initially triggered by my rejoinder to a Thomas Friedman Op-Ed piece in The New York Times on Moslem Moderates in Iran.

 

To keep the piece in its proper context, the original rejoinder and Ziba’s response thereto are reproduced in full herein.

By now I gathered from your messages that you are pretty much disappointed with the websites I routinely visit and the tendencies  I’m inclined to read and indulge my fancy. I know that you know that you are not alone in that regard. Since quite a few of your messages were left unanswered, I don’t know where to begin. 

Let’s start with the question of moderate Moslems: where are they, what are they doing a propos of the present conflict, what is the most likely influence they will have in the direction and outcome of conflict resolution.

Let us stipulate, for the sake of argument, they exist. I submit to you that to the extent that they are silent on the issues they render themselves irrelevant to the process let alone to its outcome. The silent majority become de facto collaborators to the factions that drive the events that set the agenda.

I have to concede: my knowledge of theoretical Islam is limited to a one-semester course on the Cultural History of Islam in the Philippines. This is supplemented, perhaps by three semesters of working as a Research Assistant to a professor doing her doctoral desertion on the subject. I therefore would not presume to give an analysis of the various sects of and tendencies in Islam to probe into and prove or disprove were moderation lies.

Rather, I’d propose to speak from real life experience with our version of Islam in the Philippines. Admittedly, this experience is not as extensive as yours. Garnered between the ages of 18 and 29, I submit to you however, that it is equally instructive and diverse: as a student, an office worker, a manual laborer, and a faculty member in a prestigious university. I had classmates, professors and students who were Moslems.

I have shared working and lodging quarters with both the politically active and the completely apolitical. I had argued with them, fought with them, joked with them, negotiated with them, lobbied with them. At one point I even fancied romantically courting one of them. I had my life and limb threatened on more than one occasion resulting from differences in opinion on rules of procedures in Student elections.

The conclusion gleaned from this experience, as obtains in the Philippines, at least: there are no radical and moderate doctrines of Islam. {Hereafter I will not repeat the qualification. All references to Islam pertain to my specific Philippine experience. When it is extrapolated onto other settings, it shall be so explicitly stipulated.}   There are only varying degrees of adherence to the same doctrine. This distinction is by no means academic.

It is one thing to have an institutionalized deliberation of what the doctrine entails, teaches and promotes or prohibits, i.e., an institutionally conscious architecting of a belief structure and its societal and sociological implications. It’s quite a different story to have individuals decide to adopt or discard certain parts of the doctrine as a matter of practical convenience.

The former is wont to produce religious/ideological enlightenment. The latter, more often than not, results in political and/or commercial opportunism and cultural relativism of the worst kind. In effect, the typical Moslem intellectual assumes a split identity: one when he is conscious of his adherence to Islam, (his islamhood so to speak), and the other when he discards, wittingly or unwittingly, the religious affiliation and constraints.

 

To state it mildly and kindly, it is extremely difficult and problematic to make long-term programmatic political allies out of people with lukewarm convictions. They can reach out and deal with the outside world in a less than antagonistic manner only to the extent that they are able to transcend their identities as Moslems.

This results in always having an ulterior motive in their dealings with the outside world, with the infidels such as myself. Whatever alliance you made with them should be understood to be in the context of a specific set of circumstances and any bonding that ensues from such alliance is non-transferable to the next set of conditions. In other words, you cannot expect any form of loyalty from them because you cannot expect that they will shed off their Islamic identities for your sake.

When you are in conflict with any one of them the notion of who is at fault is decided by the fact that you are not one of them. You should not expect that any one of them would voluntarily look after your interest and intercede on behalf of objective facts of the conflict. When an atrocity is committed on someone not one of them, nobody protests, and nobody bears witness for the victim so the perpetrator is tolerated.

Incidentally, I should mention that the university was created for the express purpose of promoting integration between the Moslems and the rest of the nation. When five Iranian students were robbed, murdered and mutilated in a nearby town, it was the non-Moslem constituent of the university who demanded that the local and provincial (roughly comparable to State here in the U.S.) authorities at the very least condemned the deed. The rest remained silent. Presumably those Iranians were not Moslems. Or if they were, not the kind preached and practiced in the locality. Of course nobody got arrested or answered for what happened.

 

It is entirely possible, indeed, I think it is most likely that the Islam practiced amongst the Iranians and the one practiced in the Philippines are different. I am not going to venture into the difference between the Suni and the Shiite sects. That is completely beyond my domain.

I can say this for certain: of the different nationalities of Islamic cultural backgrounds I have been exposed to in Japan and here in the U.S., Filipinos (in general, and I in particular) seemed to have gotten along rather more easily with people from Iran and/or Turkey.   The fact that, by a confluence of circumstances, I got along with Farid has very little influence in this observation. IF anything, it probably is an indirect result, or at least an illustration of its verity.

Conversely, we seemed to experience more difficulty with people from Pakistan. In fact at the Chiba Foreign Students College, there was open enmity between the Pakistanis and the Filipinos. Granted, this might have been caused by specific incidents. So let us put this aspect of the issue aside and refocus on the treatise of the article, which triggered all this.

Maybe it is true that Iran has all the socio-political institutions conducive to the emergence of an Islamic moderate as a political force. Indeed, there were reports of Candle Light vigils in the streets of Tehran in reaction to 9/11 as compared with celebratory dancing on the streets in the rest of the Middle East. More recent reports of anti-Taliban demonstrations in Tehran also reinforce this encouraging tendency.

Unfortunately, however, political ferment of the sort that can reverse the tide of ideology takes at least a generation to take hold. The terrorist network is actively waging a war on Western civilization now, ironically using some of the tools only Western civilization could conceivably produce.

Are we then to wait around for another generation of enlightened intellectuals to decide whether or not it is a war worth fighting and another generation to actually fight this war? Or shall we deny that there is a war being fought!   The events of 9/11 changed a lot of things. The principle of self-preservation was not one of them.

When somebody comes to my house to cut my throat, my first order of business is to prevent it from happening. I’m not going to debate on the merits and causes and motives of the mission. I can take care of that after the mission has been successfully foiled. It is too late to prevent 9/11 from happening. It is imperative that we deter the perpetrators from making a habit of it.

And here lies my quarrel with Islam. A crime has been committed in its name. Where is the rest of Islam to at least condemn the deed? Where is the outrage? It is not forthcoming. The rest of Islam, as a doctrine, is simply incapable of condemning it because it does not see it as a crime. It sees it as an achievement in the name of Islam, something worthy of a jubilant celebration.   I definitely am not one of those who would argue that there is the slightest possibility to justify or explain away 9/11.

The role of American Moslems needs to be looked into in this connection. The only protest I have come across from that community is about its being victimized, resultant to or as a fallout of 9/11. In a way this is understandable if pathetically pathological in its absurdity. It stresses the fact that this would be the last place to look for Islamic moderates.

At this juncture, I contend, assert and maintain that to convert into Islam from religions associated with the Judeo-Christian cultural traditions is a definite act of intellectual regression. The fact that geographically and historically Islamic cultures have been associated with repressive governments is no accident of history. It is rooted on the proscription of the notion of Free Will from the tenets of Islam that makes its adherents exceptionally vulnerable and susceptible to fear and repression.

Conversely, the assimilation of the concept of Free Will into the doctrines of Judaism and Christianity has undeniably made these religions hospitable and conducive to the flourishing of liberty and kindred values associated with democratic cultures and institutions. This in and of itself makes the latter religions decisively superior to Islam.

It was the liberation of the power of the mind from the clutches of ignorance and religious dogma that propelled Western Civilization, as we know it. Converting into Islam is tantamount to renouncing the benefits of the ages of reformation, renaissance and enlightenment. One must have been utterly and completely disenfranchised from such traditions to be an Islamic convert.

I think I have spoken my peace or have beaten this horse dead many times over.