The Good News: It's Not About Race

From the page to the screen: Hawk (Avery Brooks) and Spenser (the late Robert Urich), as portrayed in the television series Spenser: For Hire.


"You know what I like here? There's a bunch of black guys waiting in cars to shoot it up with a bunch of white guys, and it's not about race."


Leave it to Spenser, the irrepressibly sarcastic Private Eye from Robert Parker's durable series of detective novels, to find the ironic humor in a potentially lethal situation.



"Be about power and money, mostly," agreed Spenser's fearsome ally, Hawk, employingthe economical street patois he employed while on the job (and abandoned, when it suited him, when he found himself in refined company).



In this instance, as described near the climax of the 2005 novel Cold Service, the duo was quietly preparing for the first volley in a multi-ethnic gang war in a Massachusetts village called Marshport, the government of which was run by a Ukrainian crime ring controlled by the Mayor-cum-mob capo Boots Podolak.



Hawk's motive was revenge: He had nearly been killed in the ambush arranged by Podolak's men, an attack that claimed the life of a man Hawk was supposed to protect. Spenser's motive was primarily loyalty to his friend and comrade from many previous campaigns.



Some of those who assembled for battle did it for purely mercenary reasons, working as subcontractors for Spenser. Others were simply in pursuit of what most people in such conflicts seek: Control over turf, and the apparatus necessary to exploit it through the creative use of duress. To obtain it, Podolak and his clique had to be removed.



In all of this, as Hawk pointed out, power and money played a much greater role than any atavistic attachment to ethnic or tribal loyalties.



That's a gun: The Colt Python .357 Magnum, Hawk's preferred instrument of persuasion. Excuse me while my eyes glaze over with lust.



As the USA careens toward bankruptcy and, perhaps -- hopefully -- some variety of schism, I find myself taking ironic consolation in the fact that the conflict won't be defined by racial or ethnic divisions, despite the best efforts of our rulers to cattle-pen us into such categories.


Granted, this could change very easily. Madame Obama could change her name to Winnie and start hanging around with a murderous "football club." The Holy One Himself (peace be upon him) comes under armed attack by some disposable dimwit with a conveniently conspicuous paper trail through Klan and neo-Nazi groups and a jones for The Catcher in the Rye.



But there's ample reason to believe that the Obamas -- despite their successful shared career in racial shakedown politics and their cynical use of race to make themselves a marketable brand -- aren't interested in pursuing identity politics.



To judge from the composition of the Obama transition team, the Exalted Apostle of Change (we pause to tug on our forelock) is interested in little more than the standard politics of corporatist plunder. Obama's signature touch is to transpose that agenda into the key of cultural Marxism, as opposed to the pious militarism that remains in favor with what remains of the Republican Party.

Oh, yeah, this guy's just itching to rule:
For the record, there is no such
"office" as "President-Elect" --
and this dude's not even
officially entitled to call himself by that title until after the Electoral College casts its votes.

For Obama, the collapse of our financial system was a politically fortuitous event. For reasons that defy rational understanding, the public perceives Obama as a transcendent figure who can cast his gaze upon the turbid markets and command them, "Peace -- be still."



The fact that the markets have reacted to Obama's election with something less than confident relief has yet to register with the True Believers, who likewise remain untroubled by the fact that those whom The One has gathered as his inner circle of disciples include many of the architects of our ever-deepening financial catastrophe.



Rahm Emmanuel, the issue of terrorist loins and one-time servant of an obnoxious foreign power chosen to be Obama's Chief of Staff, made a cool $200 K in 2001 through a sinecure at Freddie Mac; this happened at a time when that government-sponsored entity (GSE) was one of the chief engines inflating the Housing Bubble. Three of Obama's key economic advisers -- Anne Mulcahy, Richard Parsons, and William Daley -- enjoyed similar posts at Fannie Mae.



Clinton-era Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, another prominent figure in the Obama transition team, was a master chef at cooking the books on behalf of Citigroup and a consulting gourmet for Enron when that company's degenerate corporate elite was looking for just the right recipe to use in swindling its shareholders. And more than a third of the spots on Obama's transition team -- which is a farm club for both ambassadorships and more consequential executive branch posts -- are the most successful "bundlers" of corporate donations to His Holiness's campaign.
















The imperial guard: Secret Service agents armed with machine guns prepare to swarm a car that ventured too close to the auto carrying the sanctified personage of The One.



Already assuming the mien of a dictator before formally inheriting the mantle of dictatorship, Obama, asserting the suppositious authority of the non-existent "office" of president-elect (a status he won't actually enjoy until after the Electoral College meets next month), Obama "is pushing Congress this year to approve as much as $50 billion to save cash starved U.S. automakers and appoint a czar or board to oversee the companies," according to a Bloomberg report.



This proposed nationalization of the auto industry, which has the support of the Wee Emperor, has been urged upon Obama by two of his key advisers, former Federal Reserve commissar Paul Volcker and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers -- two veterans of the entrenched Establishment Obama supposedly seeks to de-throne.



In defining how Obama will rule, his practical connections to the entrenched corporate socialist oligarchy are much more important than his cultural Marxist background. There is little danger of Obama instigating a proletarian revolution; as John Derbyshire wryly pointed out, Obama can't incite a worker revolt to seize control over the means of production, since all of our factories have already moved to China.



Besides, what's the point of staging a revolution from below to consolidate power in the state, when the Bush administration has already done all of the heavy lifting? The most tangible accomplishment of a generation of Republican rule is the creation of an apparatus of regimentation and wealth redistribution that Lenin would have coveted.


The Commissar in the cowboy hat: Jeb Mason, former flunky to White House political hack Karl Rove, now supervises the delivery of plundered taxpayer "bailout" money to corporations.


There is not a particle of hyperbole in that statement. Witness the observation offered by Jeb Mason, the Treasury Department's liaison to corporate lobbyists seeking a portion of the $700 billion in "bailout" boodle. Under siege by supplicants, Mason, a 32-year-old GOP apparatchik who served under the feculent Karl Rove, commented to a friend: "This must have been how the Politburo felt."



As I've noted before, the mechanism of wealth redistribution from the middle and working classes into the hands of corporate parasites is now fully autonomous: With the Treasury Secretary and the Fed Chairman able to create "money" in any volume they please, and disburse it as they see fit, with no oversight or accountability, Congress really doesn't have a role -- other than that of misdirecting the public.



Those actually in charge of looting the country before its collapse -- whether in the commanding heights, like Comrade Bernanke and Herr Paulson, or in the trenches, like K-Street Pimp Jeb Mason or the Wall Street bagman bearing the deliciously Dickensian name Neel Kashkari -- are entirely unaccountable. From their perspective, the uninitiated have no right so much as to know how much is being spent, let alone for what, and for whose benefit, the sums are being spent.



The $700 billion that raised the public's ire and attracted the attention of corporate lobbyists is merely a small bucket drawn from the immense pool of "liquidity" flowing from the Fed. The ruling economic Triumvirate has actually taken on $5 trillion in liabilities since the financial collapse began last March, and I would be surprised if that figure didn't at least double before Obama, sitting astride his magic unicorn, stages his triumphal entry into the Imperial Capital next January.

Cryogenically cool: "That man Hawk is one baaaaad mutha-" "Shut yo' mouth!" "I'm just talkin' bout Hawk!"



Once again, as Hawk might put it, all of this "be about power and money, mostly," even though the racial aspect of Obama's impending advent is quite useful to the Power Elite that created his campaign, and are eager to exploit him as a human shield.


When The One acts as a conduit for policies created by the same gang of parasites that have ruled our nation for decades, every criticism will be cynically supplied with a spurious racial subtext. This tactic will inspire critics on the left to stifle themselves. It could eventually be used to imprison critics on the right.




On sale now!










Dum spiro, pugno!

Why Obama Will Be Worse Than Bush

To my substantial delight, a movement is already coalescing to impeach President-Elect Obama.


My reaction doesn't simply reflect my opinion that Obama is uniquely unsuitable to the office he will acquire next January.


I'm of the view that all presidents should be simultaneously inaugurated and impeached, and that there should be a streamlined procedure to expedite their conviction and removal from office upon each president's first documented violation of his constitutional oath.


This would be more than merely a convenient time-saving measure; it is entirely justified in light of the alacrity with which presidents become enemies of the Constitution. Nearly all newly installed presidents reveal themselves to be perjurers before the echo of their insipid inaugural addresses dies down. Indeed, in our degenerate socialist democracy it's impossible for a politician to become a "serious" presidential contender without promising, in extravagant detail, the crime wave he intends to preside over once enthroned.


But since there's no acceptable procedure for impeaching a candidate before he obtains public office, we would have to settle for a system in which presidents entered the office under the burden of impeachment and haunted by the prospect of immediate removal.


Granted, this would result in an executive turnover akin to that experienced by Argentina following its financial collapse earlier this decade, when that country went through five presidents in less than a year. Governmental paralysis would ensue, with legislation lingering unsigned, executive appointments left unmade, and "rogue" nations left un-bombed.


Some would describe the resulting state of affairs as a crisis. I'd describe it as a miraculous improvement on the status quo.


In an interview with the redoubtable Lew Rockwell, former Federal Judge Andrew Napolitano -- one of the few jurists in our history to display actual respect for the Constitution -- yielded to what he called the human virtue of hope by opining that it's possible Barack Obama (we pause to observe a moment of chastened reverence) will prove to be a friend to constitutionally protected individual liberties once he assumes office.


Judge Napolitano correctly points out that Obama, whose absence during critical votes has been a consistent trait of his legislative career, made a point of being present to vote in favor of renewing the PATRIOT [sic] Act and the revised FISA law that supposedly authorized unconstitutional electronic surveillance. (Not mentioned in that interview, but relevant to this discussion, is Obama's explicit disavowal of any intention to pursue investigations or criminal prosecutions of Bush administration figures implicated in torture and other abuses once he is in office.)


However, Napolitano suggested that those votes reflected a cynical, election-year design on Obama's part to neutralize criticism that he was in some sense "soft on terrorism." So the best case to be made here is that Obama was willing to abet the assault on individual liberties in order to win election so as to be able to undo the damage he helped inflict on the Constitution. This would mean, in principle, that he is willing to impose tangible injury on innocent people in exchange for power while piously insisting on the purity of his intentions.


So we'd be seeing a familiar routine: A politician compromises his professed principles, insisting this is necessary in order to obtain the power he needs to act on those discarded principles.


Judge Napolitano did make a substantive point when he observed that the Democratic Party, unlike the GOP, has a civil liberties constituency, even if its influence is negligible. But whether or not Obama sympathizes with that element of his coalition and harbors a desire to rectify atrocities committed by the Bu'ushists in the realm of civil liberties, the hyper-activist role he prescribes for the State will inevitably mean that his reign will be even worse for individual liberty than that of his predecessor.


During the era of Bush the Lesser, conservatives who claimed to oppose big, intrusive government at home embraced unlimited government for the purpose of conducting imperial warfare abroad. As the history of previous empires demonstrates, pretending that such an arrangement is possible is an exercise in purile self-deception: War is the definitive big government program, and -- to quote James Madison yet again -- "No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."



The same principle applies with even greater acuity to the enhancement of government power for domestic purposes. It is impossible to mobilize government power on behalf of wealth redistribution without commissioning widespread and wholesale violation of individual rights -- beginning, obviously, with the fundamental right to own and dispose of one's wealth and property.


Governments that get really serious about this sort of thing tend to kill all productive activity outright; often the only significant industry that remains is the manufacture of corpses out of once-living, breathing, productive human beings.


Barrack Obama, a one-time professor of constitutional law, has famously criticized the Constitution for defining liberty in terms of "negative" liberties -- meaning protections against various forms of state action. This is a hoary truism often invoked in theories of Constitutional law that were rooted in Marxism and nurtured by the federal government's post-New Deal demand for legal apologists and executors.


Obama, speaking as a state legislator in a recently discovered and inadequately publicized 2001 radio interview, observed that the civil rights revolution of the 1960s sought to overcome this "negative" concept of liberties, but was too wedded to the idea of pursuing its social revolution through the courts.


As he pointed out, "the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and the more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.... [O]ne of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think there was a tendency to lose track of the community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which to bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.” (Emphasis added.)


Here in one paragraph Obama at once reveals his core ideological commitments and answers the much-asked question, "What does a `community organizer' actually do?" From Obama's own words (soon to be printed in double-column, red-letter text on gild-edged, leather-bound paper, according to his more devoted followers) we learn that a community organizer is someone who assembles "coalitions of power" in the interest of "redistributive change."


This is an elborate way of saying that a "community organizer" is what less sophisticated people would call a Communist agitator.


Obama, who reads a teleprompter with panache and knows how to pose for a photo, often finds himself foundering when asked to extemporize.


He does have a certain facile glibness of the kind often mistaken for wit, as we saw when he dismissed charges that he is a socialist by "confessing" to sharing his brownies in kindergarten.


This was actually a moment of self-aggrandizing compound dishonesty worthy of Bill Clinton: In one stroke -- a carefully rehearsed "spontaneous" one-liner -- Obama offered a non-denial of his intentions while at once lying about the nature of socialism and adding another line to his auto-hagiography (a work constantly in progress):
















1) And the Child Obama, seeing that the multitudes in his kindergarten were an hungered, did say:
2) Behold, my bosom abounds in compassion for you.
3) Therewith He did take of his brownies and -- offering thanks unto the Almighty State for its wisdom in erecting tax-subsidized child care through the great bounty of its divinely plundered wealth -- did break them and offer them to the others,
4) saying: Take, and eat; And the other children did eat, and gave thanks to Obama the Blessed for his divine generosity,
5) foreshadowing the day when He, the Embodiment of Change and Hope, would have the power to compel those heedless of the requirements of social justice to surrender their brownies for redistribution to those more worthy.
6) And the Child Obama did wax mighty in the Spirit of Ailinsky, and great wonders were wrought by his hand.


At the risk of committing heresy, I have to point out something His Holiness sought to conceal: Socialism isn't about sharing one's own brownies, but rather about the forcible collectivization of brownies by seizing them from others at gunpoint -- and then the ever-escalating use of lethal violence to regiment society once the inevitable shortage of brownies (or bread, or any other good subject to distribution through political rather than economic means) develops.


All State efforts to redistribute wealth and regiment the economy are, in principle and generally in practice, warfare against the rights of the governed. Obama's most impassioned supporters, some of whom have sung arias lamenting the criminal foreign aggression carried out by the Bush Regime, are already chanting hymns of praise in anticipation of the Holy One's war against the American bourgeoise.



Prominent among those psalmists is Norman Solomon, who wrote a splendid book indicting the corrupt entente between the Establishment media and the presidential warmaking apparatus (War Made Easy:How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death). Solomon insists that Obama's victory is nothing less than a mandate for war on Americans who stubbornly insist on the sanctity of their personal wealth.


"Two days before he lost the election, John McCain summarized what had become the central message of his campaign: `Redistribute the wealth, spread the wealth around -- we can't do that,'" recalls Solomon. "Oh, yes we can. The 2008 presidential campaign became something of a referendum on `spreading the wealth.'"


Solomon complained -- inaccurately, alas -- that the Republican presidential campaign "recycled attacks on the principles of the New Deal. Like Franklin Roosevelt when he first ran for president in 1932, Barack Obama put forward economic prescriptions that were hardly radical. Yet, in the next few years, Obama's administration could accomplish great things -- reminiscent of the New Deal...."


Assuming that he's familiar with the relevant history, Solomon is actually assuming that Obama's campaign was a work of deliberate deception, as FDR's initial presidential bid certainly was. As I've noted before, the 1932 Democratic platform actually criticized Herbert Hoover from the right, condemning his profligacy, demanding a balanced budget, endorsing a sound currency backed by precious metals and the expansion of free trade. FDR's first running mate actually accused Hoover of shepherding the United States into socialism.



Once in power, of course, FDR pivoted sharply to the left, filling the executive branch with squalid Bolsheviks and building a corporate socialist state along the lines prescribed by Italian technocrat Giovanni Gentile, a key adviser to a disavowed disciple of Lenin named Benito Mussolini. FDR ran as a conservative, and governed as an aspiring totalitarian.


Obama campaigned as an unabashed European-style socialist and, if he is given the means, will rule like a post-colonial African dictator.


I say the latter not because of Obama's attenuated African ancestry, but rather because of his preferred style of mobilizing public support -- the grotesque Leni Riefenstahl-meets-Tony Robbins public spectacles that portend the advent of an Americanized version of Africa's "Big Man" theory of government.


Given Obama's youth, the bottomless devotion of his followers, the depth of our impending economic disaster, the eagerness of the mass media to help the Holy One "make history," the well-earned political disintegration of the Republican Party, and the totalitarian powers of the office Obama inherits, he may very well become America's second president-for-life, following the course set by FDR before he died and went to hell.


Can Obama rule by decree? Thanks to Bush's example, his answer would be: Yes, I can!


Can he and his followers overturn the 22nd Amendment? Yes, they can!

Can they succeed in creating an egalitarian paradise through forcible redistribution of wealth from the productive to the parasitical?


No -- they can't.


But that won't stop them from trying, even if they have to destroy what remains of our liberties in the process.



Essential reading to prepare for the dawning Age of Obama (peace be upon him).










Dum spiro, pugno!

Briefly Considered: Coda in Owyhee County

Last night, Daryl Crandall prevailed in his campaign to unseat Gary Aman as Owyhee County Sheriff.


This morning, at the urging of Chief Jeff Eidemiller, Crandall's misdemeanor complaint against Tony Lopez for "defacing" a campaign sign was dismissed, and the citation was withdrawn.


Speaking to a small group (which included Mr. Lopez, his wife, and two of their sons) outside his office next door to the Magistrate Court, Eidemiller emphatically expressed his desire to be rid of the matter, which he believed should have been dealt with privately. Once Crandall had signed a complaint, however, State law dictated that the police duly serve it to Lopez, which was the only reason the Homedale PD got involved in the matter, insisted Chief Eidemiller.


The Chief, visibly relieved that the conflict came to an end without further action in the courts, said that the controversy over the "defaced" campaign sign had generated "a media tornado" and created conflicts among Homedale residents.


His face knotted in incredulity, Eidemiller recalled a threat he'd received from a local senior citizen -- a very agitated older lady -- to "kick my butt" over his role in the affair (which, once again, consisted of serving the citation to Lopez).


Lopez himself, a youthful husband and father of four who somewhat resembles southpaw bass guitar virtuoso Jimmy Haslip, was understandably relieved that the charge was dropped and the citation revoked.


However, he said that several of his friends at the Sheriff's Office are very unhappy over the change in administration and will probably be leaving the force.


Election night brought other unpleasantness, as well. According to Lopez, Crandall supporters -- in a festive mood and most likely into their cups -- drove by his home repeatedly until late at night, honking and otherwise taunting their candidate's most conspicuous critic.


Unpleasant as his experience has been, Lopez points out, the media's interest will mean that the publicity-shy and dubiously qualified Sheriff-elect "will have to tread lightly and mind his p's and q's for at least a little while."


It's in the interests of accountability that "the `No Crandall' sign will stay up for the next four years -- unless an unexpected change makes it unnecessary," Lopez said, with a defiant twinkle in his eyes and a satisfied smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.


(N.B. -- Yes, I know the photo of Jimmy Haslip was gratuitous and didn't have any news value, but the guy's a world-historic musical genius who has collaborated with many of my favorite musical titans, so I thought I'd find an excuse to give him a shout-out.)



Want to know more about the police state apparatus inherited by Barack the Blessed (PBUH)? Get the book!









Dum spiro, pugno!