Tag Archives: culture

A Thought on American Foreign Policy

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The following thought was quoted by David Feith, in a recent The Wall Street Journal op-ed, from a 1975 Daniel Patrick Moynihan essay called “The United States in Opposition.”  Moynihan’s essay was published just before the Democrat became the US Ambassador to the UN.

It is time, that is, that the American spokesman came to be feared in international forums for the truths he might tel.   The point is to differentiate, and to turn their own standards against regimes for the moment too much preoccupied with causing difficulties for others, mainly the United States….  Such a reversal of roles would be painful to American spokesmen, but it could be liberating also.  It is past time we ceased to apologize for an imperfect democracy.  Find its equal.”

It seems that, over the last five years, President Barack Obama has…differentiated…significantly from his Better.

Surveillance vs Freedom

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It is an either/or case.  We can’t have our individual freedoms with Government looking over our shoulders all the time.

To be sure, whenever men form a social compact led by a consensual government, we give up a small measure of our freedoms to that government to enable it to help us protect our freedoms.  This protection includes protecting for us that component of our freedom given over to our government for the purpose.  But that’s voluntary at the time of the compact’s formation, and it does not authorize the consensual government to arrogate ever more of our liberties—or of our responsibilities—to itself on its claimed need.

When Government does such usurping, even “for the greater good” (how Benthamite is that?), that can only come at the direct expense of individual liberty.  After a very low threshold, the trade-off becomes a zero-sum game.

“Surveillance” foiled a train plot, says an intel official.  I’ll elide here the questionable circumstances of this claim by a carefully anonymous official.*

Tim Murphy, a former No. 2 official at the FBI, says the programs [emphasis added]

have been successful in connecting the dots [to prevent attacks].  I can positively say, because of programs like this, people were identified in this country with terrorist ties, and we were able to stop possible attacks[.]

(Never mind that this logic is invalid, in the minds of many, when used to argue against gun control laws.)

On the other hand, alert citizens foiled a bomb plot in New York City.  Courageous citizens foiled an airliner-as-bomb attack on the White House.  Incompetence foiled an airliner bomb plot over Detroit.

We’ve also seen, further, that “surveillance” has been used to make direct attacks on individual Americans and groups who disagree with the present administration.  “Surveillance” has been used to directly and overtly attack our free press and individual members of that facility.  “Surveillance” also has been used to turn over personal information of American individuals and groups to foreign countries—even when the citizens or groups are wholly unrelated to the subject of the…investigation…but are simply caught in the Government’s generalized dragnet:

[T]he British government has also been secretly gathering intelligence from US Internet companies via the US National Security Agency data-mining project.

President Barack Obama has insisted this broad surveillance isn’t Big Brother in action, but then he said,

[T]he modest encroachments on privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers and duration without a name attached and not looking at content, that on net it was worth us doing[.]

Phone numbers without names is an utterly disingenuous claim to make.  It’s child’s play to attach a name to a number after the number has been collected.  See White Pages, for instance, and Get Human, and Spokeo.  Those are just some of the publicly available sources.

Next, how do we know Government isn’t “looking at content?”  The process is secret.  Further, we know Government is looking at content through PRISM; that’s the purpose of that blanket surveillance.

As even The New York Times is beginning to figure out,

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.

With the demonstrated dishonesty of the present administration (in truth, the dishonesty isn’t unique to this administration—which emphasizes the danger—this one’s transgressions are just the present and most publicized ones), how is it possible to accept Government assurances of “trust us?”

James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, who declassified information about the programs this past week so he could defend their use, warned: “Discussing programs like this publicly will have an impact on the behavior of our adversaries and make it more difficult for us to understand their intentions.”

That’s certainly a risk we run in an open, and so free, society.  The obverse, however, of keeping such invasive programs secret and away from the public’s discourse is a far more terrible risk to our security.

Again: there is no balancing our individual liberties with our security.  Additionally, the Constitution doesn’t protect our liberties “except when Government asserts a greater need.”  We have no security without our liberties.  There is a need for surveillance, under certain closely specified conditions; however, there cannot be surveillance and freedom under Obama’s cynical “trust us” conditions.

 

* This official is behaving suspiciously along two dimensions: he’s making a “trust government” claim, and he’s saying “trust me” while telling us things he’s not authorized to tell us.  On what basis do we believe him?

The Left’s Racism

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…is getting ever more blatant.

Karen Carter Peterson, Chairman of the Louisiana Democratic Party and Louisiana State Senator, had this to say last week about the ongoing opposition to Obamacare:

I have talked to so many members both in the House and the Senate, and you know what?  You ready?  You ready?  What it comes down to?  It’s not about how many federal dollars we can receive, it’s not about that.  You ready?  It’s about race.  I know nobody wants to talk about that.  It’s about the race of this African-American president.

It’s not possible, you see, to criticize a policy when its proponent is black—that must be racism.  It’s not possible to criticize the man who constantly proposes such policies when the man is black.  That must be a racist criticism.

Peterson then defended her remarks:

To be clear, I didn’t call any person “racist.”  Rather, I was simply relaying the truth about conversations I’ve had with my colleagues and the factors they considered on the expansion of Medicaid.

Saying a criticism is only about race isn’t to say the criticism is racist.  No, not at all.

This from the Party of Jim Crow.

It’s Time

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…to fire some school “leadership.”

Just a few short weeks ago the Kountze High School Cheerleaders and all of America celebrated when Liberty Institute secured a victory in the famous Bible Banner Case.

But now, joining a host of radical left groups like the ACLU and the extremist Freedom from Religion Foundation, the Kountze ISD wants to eliminate the free speech rights of its students.

Faith.  Jesus Christ.  Hope.  Love—these are dirty words for students in Kountze, Texas.

Maybe not for the students, but certainly for the Kountze ISD School Board.  Or maybe not even for them, maybe joining the appeal is a measure of their timidity in the face of FFRF or ACLU pressure.

In the end, though, this assault on our religious freedom—which includes both clauses [emphasis added]

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….

—must be stopped.  Groups like FFRF actively wish to deny us that second freedom—to freely exercise our religion, demanding that the only religion to be allowed to be freely exercised is the religion of atheism.

And a primary way of stopping the attack must include firing leadership that is too timid to defend the freedom or that actually agrees with the FFRFs of the country that such a freedom cannot be had.

The Kountze ISD school board must be replaced.  En masse.  Right away.

Immigration and Integration

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Michael Adebolajo, the terrorist who butchered a British soldier, is along with his accomplice, a man who has no use for British culture, British economics, British politics, British mores, British anything.  He is a soldato [sic] in an Islamic jihad that seeks to destroy Great Britain.

[Founder of the now-banned Islamist organization al-Muhajiroun Anjem] Choudary says that he was [Omar Mohammed, a radical Islamist cleric who urges his followers to fight the jihad] Bakri’s right hand.  Working together, he says, they aimed to rally Muslim youth throughout the country against the policies of the British government and usher them onto the streets.

When he is asked how he wants to change the UK, Choudary smiles gently.  …  He insists that he wants to introduce Sharia law throughout the country as well as ban alcohol and gambling.  And, of course, abolish the monarchy.  He wants to transform Buckingham Palace into a mosque.  Choudary sees jihad as a means of defending Islam.  He has praised the 9/11 terrorists—and he refuses to condemn the London bombers from 2005.

And

A friend of Choudary’s steps up to the table.  He calls himself Mohammed and also wears a black robe.  He is in an excellent mood.  “The entire country’s afraid now,” he says with glee.  Mohammed says that he happened to run into Adebolajo a few weeks ago, “but didn’t notice anything special about him.”

These people did not “immigrate” into Great Britain in order to participate in and take advantage of all that Great Britain and British culture had to offer.  They came to radically change the very culture that made the country great, to make it over into the country from which these people came.

They refuse to assimilate into British society; instead they demand that British society assimilate into their homeland’s society.

The British have no obligation to accommodate them, nor do the British have an obligation to accept into their country people such as these—indeed, no nation has an inherent obligation to accept any individual or group who wishes, for any reason, to enter.

The British should accommodate these people and their ilk in one respect, though: accept their refusal to assimilate—send them back home.  The safety, the very identity, of the country demands it.

And so does the safety and identity of the United States demand similar responses to those who do not wish to integrate themselves into that which has made us so great, but who, on the contrary, wish to radically change us, to make us over into an extension of their homeland.