Shaping the Debate

I love the fact that Juan Williams works for Fox News. His commentary and input gives Fox News programs a balance of viewpoints lacking on other news networks. Juan has always been one of the few liberals in the mainstream media that actually attempts to explain liberal ideology. One cannot fault Juan when his attempted explanations usually come across as rationally weak. Modern liberalism has little basis in reason or logic which makes it very difficult to make a coherent argument in favor of your position, but he does at least make the attempt. His approach of true and open dialog is somewhat rare for pundits on the left. Most on his side of the debate resort to leveling unfounded allegations and ugly smears at those who disagree with them because it is easier to demonize a political opponent than it is to convince others of the superiority of your own ideas.

Thursday night during the Republican presidential nominee debate, however, Juan resorted to a tried and true tactic often employed by the left. That is: posing cliché, personal faith questions to conservatives and Republicans that are rarely asked of candidates of the other side.

This is something you can expect to see a lot more of as the debates move on to other, more “mainstream” settings. “Do you believe in God” or “Do you believe in evolution” or some other question of personal faith. The unasked, but blatantly implied question being “are you one of those ignorant, extremist, conservative Christians who want to ban abortions and don’t believe in evolution?”

I eagerly anticipate the day when a candidate does not attempt to dodge the question. I believe they would garner a great deal of respect and support from the American people if they attacked the question head-on and with complete honesty.

First, they should reject the premise of the question.

You are asking if I am a Christian? I say without any hesitation and with pride that, yes, I am a devout Christian who believes in the salvation offered by Jesus Christ through his death and resurrection. If you wish to know that, just ask it. The sneaky, insinuating manner in which so many ask that question belies the true intentions behind it. You believe the American people will immediately draw the conclusion that I am an ignorant person who does not believe in evolution, same sex marriage or that I believe that a woman should not have the “right to choose”.

Well, I reject the premise of your question. For decades now, liberals and the left leaning mainstream media has been allowed to frame the debates surrounding these questions.

For instance, they've shaped the abortion debate into a debate about a woman's right to choose what she does with her body. That's not what it is about for myself and millions of other religious people in this country. It was never about women's rights. The debate should have been wether abortion was murder or not. After all, I don't think any person, liberal or conservative, atheist or religious would say that murder is not wrong.

Think about it, even Mr. Obama said in a 2008 debate that “no one is pro-abortion”. He said that abortion should be the last resort and that it was a “deeply moral choice” for individuals to make. If a fetus is simply a soulless lump of tissue and flesh, why would it be a moral choice? Why should it be the last resort if the debate is only about a woman's right to choose? Religious people have problems with murder... not woman's rights, as the left has been allowed to frame the debate.

The debate over evolution and the public school's teaching of alternative scientific explanations for the origins of life has suffered a similar fate. Many claim that conservatives just want to turn schools into religious recruitment centers by introducing the theory of intelligent design into the school's curriculum. This notion is absurd. In fact, the debate over intelligent design has been shaped by those who have taken up an almost religious devotion to the theory of evolution.

Questions about the differences in macro evolution and micro evolution aside, asking if one “believes in evolution” or if one “believes in evolution as the origin of life” are two very different questions. Even the most ardent atheists should admit that despite the title of Darwin's book, evolution doesn't address the questions about the ultimate origin of all life.

Even the world's most learned men are seemingly reduced to far-fetched speculation when asked where the very first organism at the very base of the evolutionary tree came from, given the astronomical odds against a perfect mix of chemicals and conditions in the primordial ooze. Scientists haven’t been able to replicate this in well-equipped labs with the perfect conditions carefully constructed and the exact chemicals placed in the manufactured “primordial ooze”. Such an organism would have also had to have popped into existence immediately with the ability to reproduce, further reducing the odds of coincidental creation. As seen in Ben Stein’s documentary, “Expelled”, even renowned atheist and scientist Richard Dawkins could come up with no better explanation than “alien seeding”. Alien seeding would constitute “intelligent design”, by the way.

Of course, I would have only gotten to the end of my first paragraph before the harsh buzz of the moderator's bell reminded me that I only had 90 seconds to answer... but, hopefully, my point is made.

I didn't really get to same-sex marriage, but that deserves a blog all on it's own. My position on that may surprise some and merits some exposition.

For too long, we conservatives have allowed liberals to shape the debate in their terms. We cannot afford to do this any longer. We must remember that the large majority of Americans share our principals and sensibilities. Poll after poll has shown this to be true. We truly are the silent majority and as long as we coherently articulate our positions, the only way we can lose is if we allow others to define our policies and core beliefs, as they will surely try to do. That is the only way they can win and they know it.

OBL Raid Story Inconsistencies...

Lots of people are asking questions about why the story seems to change almost daily.

At first, Osama used a woman as a human shield and shot at the Seals... and then he didn't.

Then there was a furious shoot-out... now, only the courier even had a gun.

At first, the famous pins-and-needles picture of the "situation room" depicted  administration officials witnessing the events unfold first-hand... and then they had no live video at all during the raid.

One major inconsistency I've seen no one else point out: there were no phone lines, no Internet and Bin Laden was so paranoid about electronic surveillance that he didn't trust computers, nor did he allow anyone to use one around him. So where did the "hard drives" and "computers" come from that Leon Penneta says Seal Team Six confiscated?

Don't get me wrong... I'm not one of these conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones who doesn't think they really got OBL in the raid. I don't believe the Obama administration is THAT deceitful. I do wonder why the administration can't seem to get their stories straight. I think it's probably more likely that they did not find any real intelligence on the raid, but want to be able to claim that information was gathered from sources other than Bush era interrogations.

Just conjecture on my part, but this is why it is said that if you tell the truth from the start, you don't have to worry about remembering what you said later.

The Lost Art of the Follow-Up Question (Part 1)

My new weekly series of quick suggestions for followup questions for the journalists who seem to have forgotten how to ask them since Jan 2009.

Today when asked about the release of the Osama bin Laden “death” photos, President Obama and White House officials finally (after a great deal of rather characteristic indecisiveness) shot those plans down citing a weariness in giving an additional propaganda tool that could put our deployed servicemen and women in further danger and a reluctance to insult “Muslim sensibilities”. 

Example Follow up question:

Why the sudden consternation over angering Muslims and endangering deployed service men and women? Over the past two and a half years, you've already leaked photos of alleged “Al-Qaeda detainee abuses” under the Bush administration, secret legal memos defending the legality of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (also conveniently damaging the prior administration) and you even managed to leak the names of those lawyers and judges who wrote said memos. These "enhanced interrogation" techniques were key in tracking down OBL as Leon Pennetta now admits. 

In short: If Seal Team Six would have put underwear on bin Laden's head, would the photo have been released?  

Justice is Done

First up, I’ll say what I think of the Bin Laden “hit”. Thank God Mr. Obama had the courage to order the kill, regardless of what his motivation may have been. Bill Clinton did not have that courage and several years after such an order could have prevented it, Bin Laden ordered over 3,000 innocent American civilians killed simply because they were Americans.

Mr. Obama rightfully fulfilled Bush’s pledge that those responsible would be hunted down and brought to justice, no matter where they hid. Those who would do harm to America’s citizenry must be shown that the results of such despicable deeds will result in retribution most terrible. The top priority for our leaders in the federal government should first and foremost be the protection of the citizens. Bin Laden’s demise was the ultimate collection of a debt whose repayment had been long past-due. The collectors of that debt, men and women in the CIA, FBI and US military who have worked for the past three administrations towards that goal. Despite the president's claim that HE had made Bin Laden the CIA's top priority; by being the number one most wanted on the FBI's list for almost two decades, Bin Laden had already been THE top priority target since the Clinton Administration when he spearheaded the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 which killed six American citizens and then the 1998 bombing of two US embassies in Africa that killed another two hundred and twenty four.

The appalling aspect of this last chapter of the Bin Laden saga is the fawning adoration of the Obama administration by the mainstream media and how the left has framed the story.

For the past two and a half years, this administration has done everything it can to distance itself from the Bush administration. “Apologizing” for America’s stubborn resolve to hunt down terrorists everywhere and the secretive nature of our Intelligence Agencies had become almost a joke in its repetitiveness. It was like those particular speech paragraphs and media blurbs were being used over and over again in “copy and paste” like fashion.

They had even gone so far as to block the Justice Department’s lawyers from the defense of the officials of the Bush administration in an unprecedented display of partisan, political pandering to the anti-war left. One of the duties of the Justice Department is to defend federal officials from such lawsuits, no matter which party those officials belonged too. The Clinton Justice Department defended Bush Sr. officials; Reagan Officials defended Carter officials… etc. That is what the Justice Department is supposed to do. To throw Bush officials to the proverbial litigational wolves was blatant disregard for the constitutional duties of the Executive Branch and Justice Department and obviously a blatant political ploy designed to placate the ant-war leftists, extremist Muslim groups and Bush hating elements of the left (which is to say, almost the entire Democratic Party).

The constant calls of the left for the prosecution of Bush administration officials for “crimes against humanity” and “human rights” violations of Guantanamo Bay detainees had become permanent footnotes in the Bush Administration’s legacy. Now that the current administration has capitalized on these Bush era policies of rendition, “enhanced interrogation techniques” and “cowboy diplomacy”, will we ever see this legacy revised? Will the historical foot notes be amended? Don’t hold your breath.

For the past three years, citing “due process”, Mr. Obama and the Justice Department has pursued civilian trials for Al Qaeda prisoners in “Gitmo”, opting to grant them the same protections granted to US citizens in the bill of rights. This, while carrying on their war against Al Qaeda via drone strikes to Al Qaeda bases in remote locations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Apparently, if you are Al Qaeda but were caught under Bush, you deserve due-process. If you are Al Qaeda but have not been caught during Mr. Obama's reign, you deserve death without a trial via high-tech weaponry. This question remains unasked in the mainstream media.

In one of the best examples of hypocrisy, just two years ago, Keith Olbermann, frequent guest of the current president at press club parties and “unofficial White house sit-downs” and vocal spokesman for liberals, declared that the secretive JSOC and Seal Team Six military programs were nothing more than Dick Cheney’s “assassination ring”. Yesterday, he tweeted an eager and cheerful “congratulations” to this same organization for its key part in carrying out the mission in Pakistan.

The left's frantic, self-aggrandizing and convenient amnesia really does show their desperation for any bump they can get in the approval polls. 

Atlas is Shrugging

Ayn Rand's 1957 opus, Atlas Shrugged, tells a tale of a dystopian world where the government and society slips deeper and deeper into the socialist delusion of a perfect “collectivist” world at the expense of the individual. The protagonist industrialists are subjected to heavy handed political tyrants who view the fruits of corporate labors and inventiveness as rightful property of the collective. Through manipulative means and in the name of “the collective good”, the hero and heroine are subjected to government interference and institutionalized theft at every turn. As a Soviet expatriate (and therefore very familiar with the subject matter), Rand tells a frightening, cautionary tale about the power, inventiveness and creativity of the individual and the inevitably corrupt nature of socialist governments.

My assessment of the narrative, once I had finished reading it, was that the events described therein would be impossible in the United States. How gullible and naïve of me. The recent news about the National Labor Relations Board's investigation and attempt to halt the creation of Boeing's Dreamliner manufacturing plant in Charleston South Carolina reads precisely like an event from Rand's voluminous epic.

Claiming Boeing was acting out of “anti-union animus” and the effect would be “discouraging membership in a labor organization”, the NLRB charged Boeing had violated federal law. What law, you ask? No one seems to know. Businesses relocate to states offering more advantageous conditions for operation all of the time. Furthermore, Boeing was not closing down existing plants in unionized Washington state, they were simply opening a new plant to supplement production of it's popular Dreamliner aircraft.

Apparently, the NLRB wants to dictate how Boeing does it's business. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised, after all, the Obama administration has been appointing former union leaders to the NLRB and has received millions in campaign contributions from organized labor. Craig Becker (who once argued that workers should not have any right to opt out of union membership) was appointed as head of the NLRB during a Senatorial recess, effectively bypassing the Senate's constitutional mandate to approve executive branch appointees. The president knew the loophole would be the only way to appoint Becker without public scrutiny. He has acted as consultant and lawyer for such organizations as the AFL\CIO, SEIU and ACORN.

The obvious political backscratching and cronyism on display should be alarming. That a government organization headed by an individual with such deep allegiances to organized labor would so blatantly target private business and the potential workers in a right-to-work state with little to no scrutiny by the mainstream press should scare the wits out of every citizen who is paying attention.

The message the Obama administration and the NLRB seems to be sending is that if you are unemployed in a right-to-work state, you are a non-issue. For all their talk of job creation and economic growth, this policy indicates that campaign politics are more important than individual (or even communal) prosperity, as far as the left is concerned.

What can we do? The left would love it if we simply shrugged it off and considered it a non-issue, but we cannot. Truthfully, if you live in South Carolina, contacting your representative will not do much good. Our Senators and Congressmen are solidly on the pro-right-to-work, conservative side (with the exception of James Clyburn who unquestioningly sides with the Federal Government, no matter how harmful the policy is to his constituents).

You can, however, communicate this farce to your acquaintances, who may, in turn, tell their acquaintances. Facebook, email, texting, twitter... all are invaluable tools we can use to get the information out that the liberal worshiping mainstream press knows would not go over well with the majority of our state. When the presidential election of 2012 rolls around and our electoral duty is upon us, the citizens of South Carolina (and every other state) must know how little regard the left has for the unemployed.

It is within our power to ensure our nation remains the most extraordinary civil society the world has ever known. The day we allow our Federal Government to dictate to our private businesses where they can and cannot create jobs is the day we allow our world to crash down from Atlas's shoulder in a final, calamitous shrug.

Who is John Galt, indeed.  

The South Carolina Amazon.com Debacle

An open letter to the Tea Party:

How far we’ve come since Rick Santelli encouraged the creation of a new Tea Party to oppose “the government's support of fiscal irresponsibility”.

Capped off with the historic beating the Democrats took in the House of Representatives, we’ve had success after success with our movement and put the fear of the people back into our politicians. They understand that they will not get away with totally ignoring the will of the people, no matter how many agenda driven, policy parroting mouthpieces they have in the national mainstream media and no matter how hard they work to smear us.

With this success in mind, we cannot allow our movement to be used by those who lose site of what it is that we stand for. That is: individual liberty, private property rights and the opposition to a massive, out of control government who thinks the only way it can feed its ravenous fiscal appetite is through a tyrannical, confiscatory tax policy.

I now believe some who have appointed themselves “leaders” of our movement have done just that. Not only have they lost site of those principals, they’ve blatantly tossed them aside and sided with tax-mongers on the left. Here’s a quote from Jamie Sanderson, Former Democratic Party chairman of Georgetown County about the recent Amazon tax bill and the Tea Party’s involvement:

"Tea party or no tea party, it's about not selling out the state at thrift-store prices. The state has already cheapened itself enough by having one of the lowest corporate tax rates, being against working people and maintaining profits for big business. So, what else could it do? Give away free land? Even more tax breaks? Please. Go somewhere else, then. It seems to me they weren't dedicated enough to begin with, only contingent on getting a sweet deal.

What was done protected government. It protected sources for revenue. It protected what Republicans can't lie about anymore.”

That’s right… it protected GOVERNMENT.

By the way: his claim that this was a vote against “maintaining profits for big business” is laughable. After all, all those advertisements against the tax deal we saw on the television from “Main Street Alliance for Fairness” were bought and paid for by Walmart, Target, Bestbuy and other “mega-mart” retailers. This group was successful in misleading people, including the choice of their organization’s name. They are not a local group or alliance for local small businesses as their name suggests. For the past year, they’ve been waging an anti-Amazon campaign across the country. And they’ve succeeded. We’ve just treated this high-tech business the same way liberal states like California has.

Furthermore, his statement about “sources of revenue” simply illustrates the left’s mindset: businesses are purely considered sources of tax revenue for the government. The economic security, growth and prosperity of the communities they move in to mean little to the left. They can be allowed to operate as long as they provide cash flow for the tax collectors and a steady revenue stream with which they can fund their entitlement programs (and buy votes in the process).

These past few weeks, the self appointed “Tea Party” leaders encouraged us to help them. Face it: you’ve been duped, Tea Party. Why the “leaders” of the Tea Party committed to such a cause, I’ll never understand. Why they actively worked to keep our state at an economic disadvantage against other states, I’ll never understand. Why they sided with the left on this anti-business stance, I will never understand.

Think about it… you’ve just taken a stand FOR taxes. After screaming and yelling our heads off about spending and taxation for two years, we’ve just sided with the left on taxes. Should we also agree with Mr. Sanderson that our Corporate Tax rate is too low? Perhaps we should agree with his insinuation that we should drop our right-to-work status because it means our position is “against working people”? I would remind Mr. Sanderson that it’s hard to be against working people when the people aren’t working. And it is his position that just prevented 1200 people from working.

I know the leaders of the Tea Party painted this as “standing up for local business” and “no more secret deals with businesses” but that’s not what this was about. Amazon does not compete with local business. People who shop online are not the same customers who shop downtown or locally, now or after Amazon opened up shop here.

The sales tax exemption was only for five years. The benefits not only included the added jobs, but the added cash flow those employees would have brought to the community. More money for the local restaurants from lunch breaks, increased traffic for gas stations, money from shipping truck maintenance for local garages… the local economic impact of a large distribution center are nearly immeasurable.

As members of a movement, we must not lose site of our goals and principals. Private property rights, a free market and LESS government are among the most important principals. We cannot allow those who would appoint themselves as our leaders dupe us again. The real power of the Tea Party is the fact that it is a genuine grass roots movement. We have no one telling us how to think or what our principles are. We are not motivated by special interest groups nor are we susceptible to their influence. Politicians know this and are very aware that our motivations are genuine and that we will not rest until we are sure they have listened and that if they do not listen, we hold them accountable. Republican or Democrat… they will be held accountable.

I intend to use my blog to help anyone who would listen understand conservative principles and how they are what have made our country the freest and most prosperous civil society the world has ever known. As citizens of the United States, we have a lot of power so every political stance we take should be measured against these principles so that tragic mistakes like this Amazon debacle are not repeated.

TheState.com Article about the Amazon.com vote

Congressional Lawmakers Who Oppose "Obamacare" should pass on Federal Healthcare

This is a lame argument that only liberal pundits (and lapdog media) wouldn't be too embarrassed to pose. Because some lawmakers believe (rightfully) that Obamacare is unconstitutional, they should drop their own insurance? How stupid is that? Federal workers insurance plans have NOTHING to do with or in common with Obamacare. They are totally and completely separate. Forcing people to sign a contract with a third party company (insurance companies in the case of Obamacare's mandate) is not the same as accepting an employer provided healthcare plan. These reporters (and all the nit-wit Democrats using this idiotic ploy) really underestimate the intelligence of their readers and constituents if they think people are this stupid. A more credible request would be to force all of congress to use the "government pool" of low quality health plans they set up in the bill (which go into effect in 2014). An Amendment these same democrats rejected and refused. They like their "Cadillac" plans, you see.