MikeSheridan89 (CC)

Before becoming a member of the Senate, Lautenberg made a fortune building Automatic Data Processing, the payroll-processing services corporation. In explanation for why he decided to run for the Senate in 1982, he stated,

“I supported Birch Bayh, Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, John Glenn,” he told the Trenton Times in 1982. “I thought, ‘If I’m willing to support them, why shouldn’t I support myself?’ ”

Lautenberg is survived by his second wife – Bonnie Englebardt, four children from his first marriage, two step-children, and 13 grandchildren.

P.S. – I stand with Steven Crowder.

Is there more here than meets the eye?

1. Everyone should get everything for free without paying for it.
2. Anyone should be able to demand that other people work to pay for his wants and needs.
3. Making people work to support their own lives is mean and is therefore unnecessary.
4. If someone forces others to work for him, it shall be known as slavery. If citizens force others to work for them through democratic government, it shall be called “social justice.”
5. If someone wants to keep his own money, it shall be labeled “greed.” If some with less money want to take away from those with more money, that shall be called “fairness.”
6. Politicians know more than the people themselves what are their wants and needs.
7. Healthcare is a right, so anyone can demand that another citizen provide him free medical treatment on the spot and it is illegal to refuse.
8. Housing is a right, so if you don’t have a home, force your neighbor to build one for you.
9. Wages are arbitrary, and therefore, everyone deserves a raise.
10. Debt is irrelevant, so we’re just going to pretend it’s not there.
11. If you don’t feel like working, just retire, because it doesn’t matter how many people are supporting your needs.
12. It doesn’t matter what country you’re from, we will give you money, whether or not you put anything into the economy.
13. A job is a right, so everyone is now officially working for the government.
14. All monopolies are outlawed, except for the government, which has a monopoly of coercion.
15. If a citizen takes something by force, it shall be known as theft. If the government takes something by force, it shall be called “redistributive justice.”
16. Taxing the rich will pay for all of our wants and needs forever.
17. Success shall be punished, and failure rewarded.
18. Hard work and talent shall be compensated with higher taxes, and mediocre work and idleness shall be compensated with government handouts.
19. The only thing one must do to sustain these laws of economics is to continue voting Democrat.

DonkeyHotey (CC)

“A former George Bush campaign insider told us, ‘Your Libertarian Presidential candidate Gov. Gary Johnson may determine who wins this Presidential campaign,’” Howell wrote. “You and I and our fellow Libertarians can seize this huge opportunity – IF we’re ready for the last 6 weeks before Election Day.”

That’s from Carla Howell, the Libertarian Party executive. Now, either Howell is extremely stupid, or she sincerely wants to hand the White House to Obama for a second term. If that is what the Libertarian party leadership stands for, I wonder what the rank and file Libertarian voters really think about that. Maybe she drank the same Kool-Aid Rand Paul has, and views the political landscape with the same lens. As Ramesh Ponnoru already observed, it is facile to assume that Libertarian views on social issues would virtually guarantee more moderate Democrat and Independent votes in traditionally blue states. For one thing, it ignores what I refer to as “brainless voting” – the ability of voters to simply choose “straight ticket” instead of actively choosing in each race. It is a depressing fact, but there is still at least a plurality of voters in many precincts that know nearly nothing about the candidates and issues they are voting on in a given election – they simply cast a ballot on party lines. That alone makes a case for the resurrection of poll tests, not to exclude a given race, but to exclude individuals that don’t bother learning anything about the people or offices they are choosing.

And there lies one of the major reasons why we still have a two-party system. History tells us where the current Libertarian movement is during this election season. Johnson could go down in history as the GOP’s Ralph Nader. Eye Desert made the observation that Republicans need to start listening to Libertarians, and most importantly, he has pointed out two possible outcomes if Romney does not win. If the GOP blames Libertarians, it could spell the end of the party. If not, it could mean a stronger, big-tent conservative party. It’s a solid thesis, and is nothing new. Barry Goldwater predicted the potential demise of the Republican Party years ago. He was there for the beginning of the takeover of the party by religious leaders, and the rise of social conservatism as we know it now. And Goldwater knew that would cause rifts within the conservative movement. Add in the big government spending that has been adopted by the GOP over the years, and that is a toxic mixture that has given rise to this latest growth in popularity for the Libertarian Party, and the Tea Party.

But, we’re not there, yet. The Libertarian message is growing in popularity, but it is not enough. Until it makes sense for voters in states like Pennsylvania to switch their parties to the Libertarian side, we’re not there yet. And, sad but true, until the Libertarian Party sheds its fringe image due to people like Ron and Rand Paul, we won’t see multiple candidates up for election in closed primaries, like we do for the Democratic and Republican parties. While I would greatly enjoy seeing the GOP forced to address its problem with overspending and overly invasive legislative objectives in the name of saving everyone’s souls, we can’t afford four more years of Obama, period. It boils down to this – right idea, but absolutely the wrong time. Sure, it might feel nice to buck the system, and vote for Johnson this November. However, if supporters of Johnson end up handing Obama a second term, then what? I don’t agree with Eye Desert on this one. If the Libertarian Party ends up getting blamed for a Romney loss this fall, the GOP will destroy the Libertarians, rightfully so. It’s what the Democratic Party should have done to Nader and the Green Party, but unlike that party, losing the Libertarian Party would be a real loss. Since it’s becoming fairly clear that the Republican establishment can’t seem to play well with the Tea Party, it seems that is where the work needs to be done. Imagine the political landscape in 2016 if the Libertarians and Tea Party join forces. Now, that is how you build a relevant third party in this country!

9 a.m. – 10 a.m. Morning Prayer Gathering (Room 211AB/212AB).

10 a.m. – 2 p.m. Caucus Session 1. Women’s Caucus (Ballroom ABCD).
9:30 a.m. – 11 a.m. R+D and America’s Energy Outlook. Moderator: Amy Harder, Energy and Environment correspondent, National Journal. Panelists: Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.); Marvin Fertel, president and CEO, Nuclear Energy Institute; Mike Howard, CEO, Electric Power Research Institute; Michael Levi, senior fellow, Council on Foreign Relations; Richard Newell, Gendell Associate Professor of Energy and Environmental Economics at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, and director of The Energy Initiative.

10 a.m. – 10:15 a.m. Introduction – Speakers: Madeleine Albright, former secretary of state and chairman of the National Democratic Institute; Kenneth Wollack, president, NDI; Dan Murrey, executive director, Charlotte in 2012 Host Committee.

10:15 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. The 2012 Campaign: The Role of Primaries, Nominating Conventions and Presidential Debates. Panelists: Frank Fahrenkopf, former chairman of the Republican National Committee and co-chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates; Paul Kirk, former senator, co-chairman emeritus of the Commission on Presidential Debates, and former Democratic National Committee chairman; Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont and former DNC chairman; and Elaine Kamarck, Harvard lecturer and former Clinton White House senior policy adviser Moderator: Eugene Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, The Washington Post.

11:30 a.m. – 2 p.m. Latino leaders luncheon: Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, chairman of the Democratic National Convention, will be honored.

Location: Marriott City Center (Grand Ballroom), Charlotte .

12 p.m. – 2 p.m. Caucus Session 2. LGBT Caucus (Room 203AB). Senior Council (Room 211AB/212AB).

12 p.m. – 2 p.m. The U.S. Conference of Mayors delegation holds a luncheon and press availability.

Location: Omni Hotel, Grand Ballroom, 132 East Trade St., Charlotte.

2 p.m. – 4 p.m. Caucus Session 2. LGBT Caucus (Room 203AB). Senior Council (Room 211AB/212AB).

3:15 p.m. – 4:45 p.m. How They Would Govern – Panelists cover how the next administration would turn campaign promises into reality, including working with Congress and setting priorities, all within the context of our contemporary political process and challenges in the U.S. and throughout the world. Panelists: Tom Daschle, former Senate majority leader, co-chairman, ONE Vote 2012, and vice chairman of the NDI; Vin Weber, former congressman and former chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy; John Podesta, chairman and counselor of the Center for American Progress, former White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton; Ryan Lizza, Washington correspondent for The New Yorker; Scot Lehigh, columnist for The Boston Globe – Moderators: Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute; John Fortier, director of the Democracy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

3 p.m. – 5 p.m. – Voto Latino hosts policy forum “People Powered Politics,” addressing immigration, economics and education. Participants include: Rosario Dawson, Maria Teresa Kumar, Cecile Richards, Javier Palomarez, Lily Eskelsen, Jose Antonio Vargas and Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.).

3:30 p.m. – 5 p.m. Religious Liberty Panel – Catholics for Choice hosts a panel discussion on “Keeping Faith in the Democratic Party: Protecting Religious Liberty for Everyone,” featuring speakers from member organizations of the Coalition for Liberty & Justice.

Location: Holiday Inn Charlotte Center City, 230 North College St., Charlotte.

Speeches from the Time Warner Cable Center:

5:00 P.M. – 6:00 P.M.:

1. • Call to Order by DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz
2. • Invocation By His Eminence Metropolitan Nicholas, Bishop of the Greek Orthodox Diocese of Detroit
3. • Presentation of Colors, Disabled American Veterans, The Stanly County Chapter 12 Honor Guard
4. • Pledge of Allegiance, 3rd Grade Class, W.R. O’Dell Elementary School from Concord, North Carolina
5. • National Anthem by ‘Glee’ actress Amber Riley
6. • Stephen J. Kerrigan, Chief Executive Officer of the Democratic National Convention Committee
7. • Welcome Video
8. • Presentation of Credentials Committee Report from Co-Chairs
9. • Presentation of Rules Committee Report from Co-Chairs
10. • Appointment of Convention Officers
11. • Gaveling-in of Permanent Chair
12. • The Honorable Steny Hoyer
13. • Andrew Tobias
14. • Alice Germond
15. • Roll Call for Attendance

6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.:

1. • Platform Committee Remarks by Rep. Barbara Lee (Calif.) and Lieutenant General Claudia Kennedy (Retired)
2. • Platform Video and Remarks by Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker
3. • Remarks by N.C. Gov. Bev. Perdue
4. • American Hero Video: Education
5. • American Voices Remarks by Ryan Case
6. • Mary Kay Henry from International President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)
7. • Rep. Charles Gonzalez (Texas) and Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (N.Y.)
8. • Gov. Pat Quinn (Ill.)
9. • Ohio firefighter Doug Stern
10. • Va. Senate candidate and former governor Tim Kaine

7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

1. • Charlotte Mayor Anthony R. Foxx and Sen. Harry Reid (Nev.)
2. • An Economy Built to Last Video: Education
3. • Women of the US House of Representatives
4. • Jimmy Carter Video
5. • Ken Salazar
6. • Kennedy Family Tribute Video
7. • Remarks
8. • Joe Kennedy III, Mass. House candidate
9. • Singer Ledisi
10. • Fomer Rep. Robert Wexler (Fla.)

8:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

1. • Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak
2. • Rep. Jared Polis (Colo.)
3. • Stronger Together Video: Reproductive Choice
4. • Maria Ciano, American Voices
5. • Nancy Keenan , President of the National Abortion Rights Action League – Pro-Choice America (NARAL)
6. • Progress for People Video: American Veterans
7. • Nate Davis, American Voices
8. • House candidate Tammy Duckworth (Ill.)
9. • Gov. Lincoln Chafee(R.I.)
10. • Rep. James E. Clyburn (S.C.)
11. • Progress for People Video: Health Care
12. • Stacey Lihn
13. • Rep. Xavier Becerra (Calif.)

9:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.

1. • Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland
2. • HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius
3. • Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel
4. • Kal Penn, actor and former Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement
5. • Craig Robinson and Maya Soetoro-ng, Brother of Mrs. Obama and Sister of President Obama
6. • Stronger Together Video: Equal Pay
7. • Lilly Ledbetter
8. • Gov. Deval Patrick (Mass.)

10:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m.

1. • Gov. Martin O’Malley (Md.)
2. • Joaquin Castro, Texas House candidate and brother of keynote speaker
3. • Julián Castro, Mayor of San Antonio
4. • Michelle Obama Video and Remarks by Elaine Brye
5. • Michelle Obama
6. • Benediction
7. • Recess

The 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina

Watch here:

“But folks, I can tell you that I’ve known eight presidents, three of them intimately,” Biden said at a speech yesterday.

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“I don’t think that Governor Romney is somehow responsible for the death of the woman that was portrayed in that ad,” said Obama. “But keep in mind this is an ad that I didn’t approve, I did not produce, and as far as I can tell, has barely run. I think it ran once.”

But while President Obama said that it only ran once on television, according to a Senior Republican media strategist, the Obama SuperPAC has paid at least $169,047 to promote the Youtube video of the ad online.

“YouTube has a video analytics tool that allows you to determine the number of views per video through advertising,” the media strategist explains. “If you have the number of views that a video has obtained through advertising, the only question is how much they paid. Cellar is $0.35 per view and ceiling is around a dollar $1.00 per view. Therefore, the cost estimate we have developed per view is really very conservative because we went with $0.35 per view.”

He provides us with this chart:

Basically, it only ran once on television, but the outrageous ad continues to circulate online.

Follow me on Twitter: @chrisenloe

Johnson briefly participated in the Republican primaries and debates before switching over to the Libertarian ticket, and per Fox News, Johnson is polling about 5% nationwide, which isn’t particularly bad for a third party candidate. Despite his low numbers, Johnson isbeginning to show a little pull in a few battleground states out west which includes New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado.

Libertarian Party Presidential Candidate Gary Johnson

According to the same poll, he is polling at about 9% in Arizona and 13% in New Mexico – it’s not enough to win, but it could certainly be enough to hand out a disadvantage to the major party candidate that he is taking votes away from.

Earlier in the week, the Libertarian Party had this to say about Gary Johnson, “Libertarian Presidential Candidate Gov. Gary Johnson Could Deprive Mitt Romney of 5 battleground states, 74 Electoral Votes, 27% of the Electoral Votes needed to win in 2012.”

No one can be certain on what kind of effect Gary Johnson will have on the outcome in November, if any, but he wouldn’t be the first ‘monkey to throw a wrench in the machine’.

Twenty years ago in the 1992 presidential election, third party candidate Ross Perot collected an astounding 19% of the popular vote. Some have come to think that Perot’s influence aided Bill Clinton into the White House with just 43% of the popular vote, and disadvantaged incumbent George H. W. Bush.

However, Ross Perot had a large amount national support, something of which Johnson is currently lacking. But with the race between former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and President Obama being so tight and within the margin of error, Johnson’s influence could likely turn a state red or blue.

To add, some think that Johnson might not just hurt one side of the aisle, but both. While most think that Johnson will pull votes away from Romney, the Liberal PPP (Public Polling Policy) believes that Johnson could hurt Obama in Colorado.

“He’s going to be a problem for somebody, somewhere,” writes political strategist and Fox News contributor Joe Trippi. “We don’t yet know which candidate he might harm the most … both campaigns should be looking over their shoulders at that guy almost nobody is talking about.”

All of the numbers and opinions aside, Gary Johnson is a legitimate candidate for presidency, and shouldn’t just be thought of as a ‘vote stealer’. Johnson is the third party alternate in an election where the two major candidates are thought to have a lot of similarities. Johnson stands for a lot of what the other two candidates won’t stand for, simply because of political ramifications.

Follow Me on Twitter: @chrisenloe

Paul Ryan, the 2012 Republican Vice President Candidate

A considerable amount of this surge amongst young voters for Romney can be attributed to his youthful running mate, whom is the first of his generation to make it onto a major party national ticket. But don’t stop at this single poll. A poll that received far less notice from the liberal PPP group came out with the exact same results: 41% of young voters said they supported Romney, while just 49% of young voters supported Obama/Biden. In this same survey, young voters disapproved of President Obama’s performance in office, 57% to 37%, and an astonishing 75% of those polled said they thought the country was heading into the ‘wrong direction’.

Generation Opportunity, a conservative group that reaches out to young conservatives and Americans alike, has recently reported that the unemployment rate among young people is substantially higher than the national average – 12.7% of young people are unemployed compared to the ‘mere’ 8.3% national average. Generation Opportunity also noted that 1.7 million young Americans aren’t even being counted in those statistics, because they have completely abandoned the workforce all together.

But are we even getting the whole story? What isn’t being reported about Obamanomics is that the majority of the job ‘growth’ is coming from part-time and temporary jobs, while unemployment of full-time workers continues to skyrocket. This makes it even harder on entry-level workers, most of which hold a college degree and are young Americans, as they are competing with people that have much experience in the workforce.

It has also been found that a majority of young Americans are cynical about Big Government social safety-net programs such as Social Security and Medicare, and rightly so. Young Americans realize that there isn’t much of a chance that those programs are going to be

around when they reach retirement, unless dramatic changes are made to the system. Some young people just accept their loss, but others are realizing that they are on the wrong side of massive debt, instability, and an ailing country.

With all of this being said, why does the Obama/Biden ticket still have the support of the majority of young Americans? It might have to do with the “happy, go-lucky” feel a young person gets when they are told if they share their wealth a little, it will decrease poverty. Maybe it’s because the American college system is infiltrated with liberalism and progressivism. But for any reason, this point in the election has marked a stark improvement for Republicans amongst the youth in America.

Follow me on Twitter: @chrisenloe

Funny, but oh so true in oh so many ways!

Representative Keith Ellison has been making a public push lately to get “money out of politics.” According to Ellison, there are far too many donors contributing money to political campaigns outside their own districts.

“In a state of only six million people, $60 million was poured into the race, $50 million of which went to Governor Walker. And almost half of that was spend by outside groups — most of them not based in the state of Wisconsin.” – Rep. Keith Ellison, Huffington Post Op-Ed, June 2012

The congressman is up for reelection this year and has raised over $1 million for his 2012 bid. Ellison holds a significant fundraising advantage over his competitor, retired Marine Chris Fields.

In a move best described as presidential potty mouth, the official twitter account of President Barack Obama posted “Still a BFD” hours after the ruling on the Affordable Health Care Act, obviously referring to the hot-mic incident at the bill’s signing. Vice President Joe Biden displayed a little diarrhea of the mouth whispering, “this is a big f—ing deal,” on live television.

Apparently, the official “tweeter” for the president failed to see the backlash from a social media faux pas courtesy of Democrat National Committee Executive Director Patrick Gaspard that occurred earlier in the day. Several hours before the president’s juvenile tweet, Gaspard took to Twitter to gloat saying, “it’s constitutional. B-tch-s.”

Gaspard later apologized, but the obnoxious statement had already been re-tweeted over 1,500 times.

Keeping the lack of class and complete disrespect for the office of the presidency going, Obama Campaign Manager Jim Messina proceeded to send a hasty email from the official campaign address just a few hours later with the subject line, “Let’s win the d-mn election.” The short content of the message repeated the vulgarity as if to prove beyond doubt the act was intentional and well-thought.

Perhaps the president, his campaign staff and the DNC could take a manners class to learn proper language and respect. In the meantime, I’ll continue to line my new puppy’s crate with the newspaper stories about the presidential potty mouth. I’d be willing to bet he’ll be potty trained faster than the president can fix his behavior.

But too often lost in the passage is the caveat that, “Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated, which will always be as long as he abstains from the property of his citizens and subjects and from their women.”

Suffice to say, we can temporarily be at ease that the ruling elites do not intend to seize upon our women, but the promulgation of like fear in the public mind has been sustained for so long that the two dominant parties, perpetually resorting to the contrivance of crisis to shore up their shortfalls and to mask their failures, are breaching upon new territory: abject hatred of both.

When Richard Hofstadter, the highly esteemed and most pre-eminent of political scientists, a card-carrying member of that sequestered class of lofty law-givers whose penchant for impartiality and altruistic distance from the statist program never ceases to astound, colored American politics as portraying a “paranoid style,” he was speaking, all winks and nods aside, particularly of right-wingers, and particularly of opposition to the amoral and gutless rule of the technocrats.

But all clear-sighted and wise politics stems from paranoia; in the sense that a free people is always watchful of the statist wolf in the proletarian henhouse. When men become distracted from fear of the government, that’s when the nation’s politics go awry.

What made Mr. Hofstadter, if one may characterize him as a mere man, “paranoid” is the idea that the unenlightened proles would seek a measure of self-rule without the meddling of utopian technocrats. After all, what mad world might result if the trend towards chaos and disorder was not reversed? What mad world if all individualism were not subjugated to the one cause, the elite-determined caused, which should triumph and reign for eternity?

Alas, the inextricable human condition of self-interest makes such fantasies as those possessing the global governance fetishists impossible to transfigure into reality. The inability to remove self-interest, this ineradicable barrier to unlimited manipulation of the human psyche, has turned the hatred of self-interest into the hatred of humankind: what else is the explanation for sacrificing man to mosquitoes, crushing his dreams to safeguard avian ova? Snatching him from the jaws of polar bears to drown him in a sea of regulatory red ink? Cutting down his habitations in order to preserve in tact sacred tree bark?

The fear of nature has been facetiously wielded against the unmoved masses for two decades; ever clamoring for the end times, ever clamoring for a bigger slice of the public dime, the eschatological guild of environmentalism has sought to profit from its dire prophecies; but it has become common knowledge that the apocalyptic utterance is a lie, if not through scientific exposition, then through the sheer elapse of time.

It would be remiss not to remind the reader that it is consensus within both political parties that manmade global warming (yes, you read that right, scientists of the future!) represents a grave threat to human civilization; and therefore, proceeding with airtight logic, all progress within human civilization, all accoutrements of industrial society making us safe from the vicissitudes of nature, along with the intellectual freedom that made those innovations possible, and along with the economic system that allowed invaluable goods to be so widely distributed – must be scuttled in order to prepare the way for a new man, a mediocre society, and a cowardly political order: one of blind irrationality within the public and calculating hyper-rationality within the political elite.

Such a schism results when one considers that rationality is the greatest enabler of freedom, so long as it is promulgated throughout the whole of society. But when state-controlled schools become a breeding ground for ignorance and irrationality, there must necessarily be a gaping chasm into which liberty falls. And when academia becomes a haven for a collectivist priest class, whose dichotomy in profession is the public pronouncement of teleological bromides like the inevitable triumph of socialism and the private hoarding of scientistic psycho-political manipulation, society falls prey to sundry schemes.

But only for so long. Despite the rantings of the lunatic leftists, the war-championing of the rabid right-wing, and the daily dissembling of the press, the American people have been fairly inoculated to the fear-mongering. Estimates of the drivers of political fear show “big government” far and away the leader, seconded by “big business,” and “big labor.” Big things are apparently scary.

Yet delving into what prevents citizens from focusing their rational fear of tyrannical government (to rephrase their perception more accurately), we find cross-cutting cleavages. Social conservatives fear a godless society, an understandable phobia from their perception, which is fueled by progressives. Those attending the public education system are forbidden the exercise of their free speech rights guaranteed by The Constitution, as the left-wing feigns that religious speech is somehow different from “ordinary speech.” Not to say that classes should devolve into a cacophony of chatter and noise, interrupting the nominal advancement of their intellects; it is to point out that religious persons are persona non grata and religious sentiments intrude upon the secular priest’s hallowed ground.

From the converse point of view, religious ideals frighten the wits out of progressives. The poor souls imagine a restoration of the Malleus Maleficarum, the Salem witch trials, the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, and the burnings of atheist heretics if not for the steady hand of opinion suppressors like themselves. Beyond this irrational fear of the innocuous nature of religion in our current political confines is the unmistakeably leftist program to extricate religion from the cultural conversation so that recognized morality can be wiped clean as a tabula rasa and our sentiments overwritten by unabashed statists.

But the division of Christianity in the United States is such that it is both flourishing in its abundance and brittle in its lack of cohesion and public eminence. This is the secret meaning behind the hysteria regarding the threat of radical Islam. Christians recognize the threat as metaphysical and disallow their fellow citizens the rational faculty of realizing the doctrine is not at all persuasive — perhaps to violent criminals who are a threat in any case.

With realistic appreciation of the enemy’s desire to commit mass murder within the nation, Christians brush by the implication that terrorism is a weapon of the weak; that America will not be laid low by such barbaric techniques of psychological intimidation so long as its society remains united, there is the will to triumph, and its military remains the most effective fighting force, backed by nuclear weapons to boot. So easily we are cowed by these liberty stealers, these faceless abetters of the unlimited state!

The moderates, for their part, fear disunity; and all incumbent accompaniments, such as fractiousness, and rough-and-tumble politics. And on their behalf those who rationally fear unchecked government are scolded to sacrifice the heat of their rhetoric, to tone down their verbal epithets, and to concede that the middle is comprised of the “reasonable” ones.

We the extremists are implored to revere the sagacity of the centrist, the wisdom of the pragmatist, and the far-sightedness of the know-nothing fool. In a climate of fear propagated by the government, we are meant to adore the calm hand of the cool-toned chameleon, who strokes our hair, reassures us the experiences of the past sundry years were all but nightmares, the government indeed means us no ill, and the bitter acridity of our tea would best be replaced by the somnolescence of warm chamomile.

But we are mutually afraid. Fear of death, war, terrorism, tyranny, atheism, heresy, pollution, disease, natural disaster, cataclysm, the end times, extinction, makes us vulnerable to the depredations of politicians, who shamelessly redirect our imagination from the rational fear of government towards numerous irrational fears.

And under guise of protecting us from the realization of these fears, the government robs us. Donning the face of the friend, it constantly stabs us in the back.

In some ways, the original party of government-fear, the former Republican Party, was put in an impossible position. Charged with representing people who were both apathetic and hostile to government, Republican politicians were put in the position of self-loathing; implored to hate the very power it was entrusted to wield. The Democrat Party suffered a psychical break during the era of radical politics; its Alinskyite doctrine taught that power is neither good nor evil, and the all-too-eager converted then shamelessly and guiltlessly grasped the reigns and never looked back. Over time, the Republican Party was bullied into recognizing its public pretensions were unreal; that power was a cudgel to wield against its adversaries lest it be bludgeoned to death.

The Republican Party developed two enemies: the Democrat Party and the freedom-loving American people. And just as voters have had to do over countless years, it chose what it viewed as the lesser of two evils: the Democrat Party.

Both loving power, fame, influence, and wealth, the parties have made a tacit peace; and both have turned against the citizenry, which had been the assumed source of constitutional authority. Sacrificing esteem for material benefit, glory for mundane comfort, and to wit, love for fear, the elites fancy themselves princes ruling over a populace made too ignorant, too distracted, too divided, and too preoccupied by fear to act in defense of self-interest.

And those still unpersuaded to abnegate their self-interest, in a word, those who value freedom, are tempted by the fiat-and-debt conjured welfare that is precisely the perversion of enlightened self-interest.  What is meant by that potentially mischievous phrase is that the public life continually lived at the expense of the future eventually compresses the opportunity of the present until the economy, the society, borders upon crisis.

The rational in society, those who are able to perceive, to predict, to feel this malevolent mechanism in process, are chided to hold their peace, to cease ruminating about their “paranoia,” and to allow the managers to do their magic. All of human history points otherwise – not that we should believe history or our lying eyes, say the fork-tongued technocrats.

Once Americans revered their government as an entrusted protector of their freedoms. That time is no more. Endless deception, calumny, scandal, and crisis has propelled the entity that was to remain in the backdrop of our lives to the forefront. And until the beast is tamed, that inevitable circumstance is here to stay.

Fear is healthy when roused and applied to the rationally recognized fountainhead of our problems. But chasing phantoms of the imagination, chimeras born of demonization, and irrelevant scapegoats leads us into the empty desert. The solutions to our problems begin and end with us, and begin and end with the mind. Mastering our fears is the key to mastering our political future; with reinvigorated courage and steely rationality we can decide our own fates.

Kyle Becker blogs at RogueGovernment, and can be followed on Twitter as @RogueOperator1. He writes freelance for several publications, including American Thinker, Misfit Politics, Independent Journal Review and OwntheNarrative, and is a regular commentator on the late night talk shows at OTNN. He holds an M.A. in International Studies with emphasis on Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies and is an advanced PhD. student in Political Science.

So now Elizabeth Warren is black, Mexican and East Indian. A GREAT parody!

Elizabeth Warren exaggerates heritage to work at Harvard. Lashes out at the rich though she is worth millions. Hypocrite of the nth degree – so why not make a parody?