Ron Paul: Politician, Obstetrician, Gynecologist, and Zionologist

This is what a Zionologist looks like.

If it is a new election cycle, it is a new round of Dr. Ron Paul controversy.  By far the most popular one is the alleged racism towards Blacks by the House of Representatives member for Texas, an issue that crops up like clockwork every four years.  Another is the growing evidence of Ron Paul's thinly veiled antisemitism.

Gun toting Socialist, David Weigel

This post is not so much about Paul's racism as much as it is about the antisemitism.  David Weigel of Slate produced some historical evidence linking Paul to racist comments in his news letter and he has been following this issue for several years.  If you did not know, Weigel is a fired Reason staffer who interviewed Ron Paul in 2007 about his 9/11 Trutherism.  In the comments of that article one Eric Dondero, now a source about Ron Paul's alleged lack of racism in almost every blog besides Reason's, claims to have been given a $10,000 bonus by the Ron Paul machine before departing and clams that he was not fired (this was the first link in the Eric Dondero search of the Reason blog).  Ron Paul's office has been claiming for years that Dondero was fired.  If you want to know more about Ron Paul and his decades long bigotry controversies, please point your favorite search engine in that direction.  This post ties Ron Paul to Zionology.  Not as a pioneer or researcher, more as an evangelist and it matters little if he is a knowing or unknowing practitioner.

The practice of Zionology, also known as Soviet Anti-Zionism, appears to have originated in the Ukraine.  The brief Wikipedia article on the topic currently describes it as:

Soviet Anti-Zionism was a doctrine promulgated in the Soviet Union during the course of the Cold War, and intensified after the 1967 Six Day War. It was officially sponsored by the Department of propaganda of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and by the KGB. It alleged that Zionism was a form of racism and sometimes argued that Zionists were similar to Nazis. The Soviet Union was officially opposed to racism of any kind, and therefore Zionologists stated that they were not anti-Semitic or racist themselves.

The way this has played out over the years is similar to the Stalinist Soviet view that National Socialism is Right Wing, a falsehood which over 90% of the people educated in the West since World War II believe.  In the same repetitive manner, Soviet attacks on Israel took on a life of their own through the Stalinist fellow travelers in the commanding heights of western society, eventually adopted by many who wanted to shoehorn Jews in as a scapegoat for any conspiracy that they saw.

Remember, true Conservatives tend to use descriptive words when they speak and Socialists tend to use codewords.  Socialists love to accuse people of using codewords just to call them names, or to make some false point of faith with a 'bonus' of smearing a Conservative at the same time.  Examples like "individual choice is code for racial discrimination" do not come from people who abstain from codewording, it comes from those who engage in the practice.  When you hear people complain about: The Israeli Lobby, Neo-Conservatives, Zionists, and similar, you can bet these people are engaged in codetalking to veil their antisemitism.

How does this relate to Dr. Paul?  Quite simply he uses all the right words along with the tactic of emboldening any antisemitic group that comes along.  Just see his comments on Israel vs. his comments toward Iran on very similar issues.

In a June 2011 interview with Don Imus, Ron Paul defends terrorist group Hamas, a country with a charter that calls for the destruction of Israel.  Paul attacks Israel for defending itself in a war that Hamas started.  The subject of the exchange is the legal intercept of a ship trying to run Israel's legal Gaza blockade.

Throughout the interview, Ron Paul ignores the fact that the blockade was a joint effort between Egypt and Israel gets his blame for everything.

Ron Paul thinks Hamas are the nice guys.

He opens with some non-interventionist boilerplate and then says that we have every right to intervene against Israel, justifying it with a short list of military hardware that was made in the United States.  Not one word about aid to Gaza's Hamas terrorist government.  The first paragraph of the Hamas charter for Gaza calls for the destruction of Israel and Ron Paul says that Israel created Hamas. This echoes the Soviet client state relationships during the Cold War, when they began claiming that Israel had no right to exist and started rumors that Israel was the secret puppet master behind every ill in the world.

As transcribed by The Right Scoop:

[Ron Paul] I think it’s absolutely wrong to prevent people that are starving and having problems that are almost like in concentration camps and saying “yes we endorse this whole concept that we can’t allow ships to go in there in a humanitarian way”.

I think it’s just terrible and I don’t think we should be part of it. Even though if we weren’t involved I would say nothing. So I think this would be a perfect opportunity to argue the case that, you know, “Israel, if you want to do this, you’re on your own. We’re not backing you up!”

To his credit, Don Imus tries to inform Dr. Paul that humanitarian aid was not being blocked by Israel.  Interestingly enough, Ron Paul says not a word about Egypt's blockade of Gaza, in an alliance with Israel at the time of the interview.

When the topic is an actual act of war by another country with a dedication to destroy Israel, Dr. Paul takes a different stance, the same stance the Soviets took and their useful idiots parroted around the world during the Cold War.  He says that Iran's talk of destroying Israel is just big talk and that is the way tough guys talk in that part of the world (also revealing a whole other facet of soft bigotry).  Blocking the Straits of Hormuz is perfectly understandable, in the words of Paul.

Iran says they want nuclear weapons, and Ron Paul says that Iran needs them to make things equal.  Now, just examine that for a moment.  Iran wants nuclear weapons to "wipe Israel off the map," but Paul says that is just talk.  Then Paul says that the international belligerent behind 9/11 (per US District Court, Manhattan, 23 December 2011), and funded the Hezbollah war with Israel in 2006, needs nuclear weapons to make things equal.  He also condemns the only country in the region that needed a nuclear deterrent, Israel, for having nuclear weapons.  Ron Paul has been warning of an American/Israeli invasion of Iran, that never happens, for ages.  He uses that as his basis to debase Israel and try to gain support for those who want to wipe Jews from the earth.

Ron Paul supporters have recently begun accusing the United States of bombing Iran.  They cite an article from 2003 where claims were made that a village bordering Iraq was bombed.  Frequently Ron Paul sounds like these are his closest advisers.

Countries or political movements with a stated goal to destroy Israel that Ron Paul openly supports are:

Judaism Without Embellishment

Another tactic common to both the Soviets and Ron Paul is switching public positions when it suited them, just like George Orwell's 1984.  In the case of Ron Paul, he comes out with occasional statements saying he supports Israel's right to exist, before going back to supporting any group that wants to incinerate all the Jews in Israel.  In the case of Zionology, first the Soviets published and promoted Judaism Without Embellishment, by Trofim Kichko.  When fellow travelers around the world got upset about the antisemitic contents of the book, the Soviets made an April 6, 1964 press release through their own news service, Pravda, denouncing the publication of Judaism Without Embellishment (If you have a strong stomach, you can view some of the book's illustrations  here):

LONDON, Apr. 5 (JTA) –

The Ideological Commission of the Soviet Communist Party this weekend criticized the publication by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences of the anti-Semitic book, "Judaism Without Embellishment," it was reported here today from Moscow. The book, which contains anti-Jewish caricatures reminiscent of Nazi propaganda, has already been attacked by Communist parties in various Western countries.

The Soviets continued to smear Jews internally and just three years later the Soviets dusted off, published and distributed at least 12,000 copies of this antisemitic tripe labeled as science.  The 'science' of Zionology was born in response to the 1967 Six-Day War.  The Soviets continued their 'work' in the 'field' of Zionology, publishing other antisemitic books, including Trofim Kichko's Judaism and Zionism in 1968 without much resistance by Communists in the West.  The Communists even gained a few more apologists.

Today, Ron Paul picks up the torch of Soviet Zionology and presents it to a new audience already prepared by Helen Thomas, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and of the throngs who continue to support Stalinist Socialism, as well as those who just hate Jews.

Another Soviet tactic, shared by Ron Paul, is showing off Jews in their respective camps.  This has the added benefit of giving cover to anybody who wants to join in on the race to shove Jewish Israelis into the Mediterranean.  Many keep forgetting that Socialists are Socialists first and Jewish, Catholic, Atheist, Pagan, or anything else, second.  Socialistic Jews are no different and the Soviets capitalized on this for most of the 20th century.

This is not to say that Ron Paul is a Socialist at all, far from it.  He is as far away from Socialism as one can get on fiscal issues.  That said, one can still adopt the unquestionably effective tactics of Socialistic rhetoric to use against a nation full of people that you hate.

Ron Paul has been so effective at getting his Jew hate message out that he gets financial support from White Supremacists who specialize in antisemitism and all but owns the 9/11 Truthers who blame the USA and Jews for the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.  Much of that support gained when Ron Paul blamed the USA for the 9/11 attacks on the floor of the House of Representatives before the smoke had cleared.

Rival politicians who do not share Ron Paul's Zionology are attacked by Ron Paul for "hating Muslims."  There is no evidence at all that Michelle Bachmann hates Muslims.  What she does speak out against is something that Ron Paul is for, Islamic terrorist organizations that want to destroy Israel and Ron Paul translates that into Bachmann hating Muslims.

This position by Ron Paul has absolutely no basis in fact.  If all of these "Muslim haters" in the US government only wanted to murder Muslims they would be paying a lot more attention to attacking the most populous Muslim nation on earth and ignoring the seat of Islamic jihad.

For more on Ron Paul's anti-Israeli history, read this.

About Those Libertarians, Take Ron Paul For Example

Libertarianism is not a strange thing to most people in the United States, it is just a strange word to them.  The desire to be left alone by government is widespread.  However, libertarianism comes in many stripes and those who profess to be libertarians can express an odd combination of beliefs.

It is not within the libertarian ethos to have government create regulations that hinder competition, especially those that favor big businesses over smaller businesses.  Conversely, it is within the libertarian philosophy to defend the nation from military attack.  However, the line where defense becomes interference in the affairs of another country seems to be set in different places by different libertarians.

Judaism Without Embellishment

For example, a large portion (being conservative here) of vocal libertarians are also pacifists.  Pacifist to the point of inadvertent advocation for enslavement of all under the jackboot of brutal authoritarian expansionist regimes.  Like when some talk of Israel vs. Palestine and begin using Zionoligist talking points, without having ever heard of Zionology.

Now, I am not talking about 20/20 historical vision, like say, what if Abraham Lincoln had actually extended the 1862 emancipation of slaves beyond the confines of the nation's capital.  Although that would have been the right thing for the Congress and the President to do, and quite expensive, there is little doubt that the States that began leaving the Union in December 1860 would have returned at that point.  Of course, war could have been averted if the federal government had recognized the right of any State to secede from the Union in the first place, as was the thinking among some at least as far back as 1798, long before the secession of South Carolina.  No, I am talking about wholesale rewrites of history by people who should know better and/or are banking on the fact that their listeners do not know any better either.

Which brings me to the case of Doctor Ron Paul, Republican Representative to the Congress, from Texas.  In 2007, his solution for averting the American Civil War was for the Union to purchase slaves from their Southern owners. (video)

Beyond what I mentioned above, and as you probably know, the Civil War was already underway before Lincoln took office and seven States had seceded.  This is far from the only case where Dr. Paul has been historically or fact challenged and it fits in with the pacifist leanings of him and his supporters.

Recently, Dr. Paul had a simple solution to the ongoing issues that Iran is having with pretty much every nation on the planet, other than China, North Korea, Venezuela and Russia.  Unarguably, the greatest friction is between Iran and the countries that are within range of Iranian ballistic missiles, or will be within range in a few years.  According to Dr. Paul, all President Obama needs to do is pick up the phone and call Iran, and he likens it to when President Kennedy "called Nikita Khrushchev" to avert a war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (Around the 3:00 mark in the video):

Again, Dr. Paul misses a great deal of the factual historical record, like the fact that Kennedy never called Khrushchev.  Here is his comment via MondoWeiss.Net:

Paul: "If she (Michelle Bachmann) thinks we live in a dangerous world, she ought to think back to when I was drafted in 1962 with the nuclear missiles in Cuba. And Kennedy calls Khrushchev and talks to him and talks him out of a nuclear excahnge (sic). You’re trying to dramatize this... we have to treat Iran like we've treated Iraq and kill a million Iraqis and 8000 some Americans have died since we've gone to war.

Shortly after the debate where Representative Paul uttered this comment, Charles Krauthammer and others began pointing out a few items Ron Paul left out.  The highlights (some from me, some from the Krauthammer video, some from other places around the 'net):

- The hard evidence that the Soviets were installing nuclear tipped missiles in Cuba came partly from reconnaissance flights by U2 high altitude jets over Cuba.  Part of the analysis was the similarity to the layout of the missile installation to aerial photographs taken by US reconnaissance aircraft of the same model of Soviet missiles in the USSR.  These flights were by manned high altitude aircraft performing the same mission as the US drone recently captured by Iran.  In the same debate, Ron Paul complained about the US "flying drones over Iran."

- Human intelligence from Cuban ex-patriots living in Miami, Florida was the first indication of offensive Soviet missiles in Cuba.

Condolence letter to Mrs. Anderson

- U2 Pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson was shot down and died over Cuba, 27 October 1962.

- Later, Kennedy ordered low level flights by Crusader jets over Cuba once every two hours.  Hardly a reduction in provocative actions.

- President Kennedy ordered a blockade of Cuba, arguably an act of war even though the action was approved by the Organization of American States.  Kennedy fell back on the typical Leftist tactic of renaming things, calling it a quarantine.  Part of the quarantine terms were to board and sink, if necessary, any Soviet ships sailing to Cuba.  It began 800 miles from Cuba and was later brought to within 500 miles of Cuba.

- Kennedy never picked up any phone to talk to Khrushchev!  The two exchanged letters, the first sent by Khrushchev about a "serious threat to peace and security of peoples."  Kennedy's letter in response laid the responsibility of the crisis squarely at the feet of the Soviets.  The letter exchanges did result in a typical Leftist capitulation, the US removed missiles in Turkey in exchange for Soviet removal of missiles from Cuba.  The Soviet officials that President Kennedy and his brother, the Attorney General Robert Kennedy (the president's little brother) were Ambassador Dobrynin and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko.


The praise Ron Paul gives for John F. Kennedy's actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis are the same actions that he condemns even contemplating with Iran.

Congressman Paul is by far the libertarian with the highest profile in America today.  He has a fantastic education and a successful son who represents Kentucky in the United States Senate.  However, Ron Paul's idea of national defense is tantamount to issuing every coastal home a musket and two rounds of ammunition.  His attitude is shared, or seen as somewhat hawkish, by throngs of libertarians with roots in the modern Left.

Iran is an international belligerent beyond the level of Cuba when they were marching around Africa and South America until the collapse of the Soviet Union.  With Iran's training and support of Hamas and Hezbollah, they have launched direct attacks on US allies, most notably on Israel in 2006.  They threaten international shipping through the Straits of Hormuz and receive the wholesale support of neo-Marxists worldwide, as well as by Ron Paul.  In another post I plan to outline Dr. Paul's ideological alliance with the hard Left and Palestinian terrorists.  Note that Ron Paul is charging Israel with "acts of war" that he ignores in his Kennedy praise.

One tactic that both Marxist and some libertarians use is the "elected government" excuse, i.e., Gaza elected Hamas as their government, therefore Hamas can do whatever it likes.  Well libertarians, I ask you, whatever it likes to whom?  For one thing, the first acts the Gaza government did  (after Israel gave the Gaza strip to them) was to refuse to acknowledge Israel as a legitimate government and then declared war on Israel.  Somehow, the Ron Paul libertarians miss these little historic fact points and jump to the declaration that Israel is committing an act of war by enforcing a weapons blockade of Gaza.  While it is laughable when Marxists invoke that excuse, since the occasional novelty of elected Marxist governments did not begin until around the late 1970s, it is tragic when people who say that they know history and value freedom use the free election excuse.

The big difference between National Socialists and International Socialists is that the National Socialists tend to gain power by winning free, honest elections.  International Socialists rarely bother with elections and opt for military takeovers.  Do these libertarians truly believe that Hitler and Mussolini should have been left alone because they were elected?

No, a strong line needs to be drawn between the free peoples and the Socialist slavers.  Iran falls fully into the ranks of authoritarian Socialist republics, they just happen to use the Koran instead of the Communist Manifesto as their top-down planning guide.

If the libertarian position is truly on the opposite side of the spectrum from Socialism, then it should be there because it opposes the imprisonment of the mind and soul that Socialism thrives on.  Libertarianism cannot stand idly by and watch oppressors gobble up victims one border at a time, or worse, mirror the anti-interventionism of the British Union of Fascists.

Let The Appeasement Begin! NYT, North Korea Edition

The North Korean Bureau of Tourism

Just days after the demise of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, Nicholas D. Kristof gives a vivid account of his 1989 visit to North Korea, one of the last remaining International Socialist outposts that is still around.  Read the whole thing here: A New Kim. A New Chance?

The title itself is curious enough.  A reasonable person would think that now is North Korea's time for a new chance to enter the ranks of freedom, but no, Kristof is telling the United States and others that it is our new chance.

Curiouser still, Kristof visited North Korea in 1989, while South Korean self-defenses were still ramping up after the Jimmy Carter North Korean appeasement acts of 1976 - 1978.   Many do not recall that Carter unilaterally removed all nuclear weapons from South Korea and wanted to remove all US forces, other than the US Air Force, from South Korea.  He did reduce the US ground forces by 3,600 Soldiers.  Unremarkably, the attack forces on the northern side of the border did not evaporate.

President Carter's miscalculation did not result in the reunification of Korea from the North, as may have been his objective.  It did result in an ever more provocative North Korea, along with a South Korea that rearmed itself, increased military proficiency, and by 1988 the US military was spending quite a bit of time trying to keep the South Koreans from ending the standoff via a victory over the North.  Recently, former president Carter "wished Kim Jong-Un every success as he assumes his new responsibility of leadership" to the new dictator, Kim Jong-Un.

Somehow, none of this is mentioned in the NYT Op-Ed.  He did lead with an informative narrative about life in North Korea, which included:

- The Loudspeaker affixed to a wall in each home. (to pipe in propaganda whenever the state wishes)

- people with disabilities are often expelled from the capital, Pyongyang.

- During a famine, North Korean news media warned starving citizens against overeating by recounting the cautionary tale of a man who ate his fill, and then exploded. This one reminded me of a Radio Moscow short-wave broadcast in the early 1980s boasting that while Soviet citizens consumed less meat per capita than people in the West, the Soviets distributed the meat more equally among their population.

- When videos (of movies, music or religion) began to be smuggled in from China, police began to turn off the power to entire buildings. Then the police would go door to door and examine what video was stuck inside players. A smuggled tape could mean the dispatch of an entire family to a labor camp. This begs the observation that is never stated at Reason or in the New York Times, yes it is possible to have even less religious freedom than in China.

- All those North Koreans crying because of Kim Jong-il’s death? Their grief is probably sincere. He is quite correct in this and he expands on it well.

Of course, it does not take Kristof long to pull the predictable Leftist u-turn with this:

Don’t try to isolate North Korea.

The West has reacted to North Korean’s nuclear program by sanctioning and isolating the country. But isolation has mostly backfired. It’s one of the things that keeps the Kim family in power, and we’re helping enforce it.

Moreover, economic pain is not going to destroy the regime. In the mid-1990s, perhaps one million people died in famine, and the regime was unhurt.

Our failures in North Korea are manifest. In 1994, we came close to war on the Korean Peninsula, averting it with a nuclear deal that rested on false hope: The Clinton administration thought the regime would collapse before the West had to deliver civilian nuclear reactors as its part of the agreement.

Traffic Girl in traffic free DPRK

Note that everything in this passage happened long after Kristof's 1989 visit to North Korea where his vivid descriptions of a bleak life, beyond 1984 Orwellian, with robot-like school girls who recite state propaganda to strange Westerners passing through.

He blames the North Korean refusal to feed its own people on the West, when the problem was the same as with all mass starvations in the 20th and 21st centuries: The people with the guns did not let the defenseless people have any food.  In this case, it was the absolute statism of International Socialists performing a reenactment of Stalin's Ukrainian Holodomor. This time, the role of The Great Duranty is played by The Great Kristof. In both cases, appeasement only strengthened the sitting dictators and terrorized their neighbors.

The Great Kristof concludes:

There are no good solutions. But let’s take advantage of the leadership transition to try a dose of outreach. If we can inch toward diplomatic relations, trade and people-to-people exchanges, we’re not rewarding a monstrous regime. We just might be digging its grave.

How about this: Give the new leader an ultimatum for a reunification of Korea, under South Korean management.  The "Great Successor" does not have the reputation of, say Saddam Hussein's children, yet.  Un is not known for any crimes, yet.  And stop blaming the USA for crimes Socialist dictators commit inside their own borders.

http://Liberal-Fascism.Com

More: Obama Coddles Radical Islam Just Like FDR Coddled Communists

Following up on Obama Coddles Radical Islam Just Like FDR Coddled Communists

Here we have Rep. Dan Lungrin (R-CA), during a session of the House & Senate Homeland Security & Government Affairs Committee, asking repeatedly if the US is at war with radical Islamists, or if they are at war with the USA.  If anybody is following along, the Al Qaeda network is composed exclusively of radical Islamists. Obama's Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas' Security Affairs, Office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Paul N. Stockton, cannot bare the possibility that radical Islamists have declared war against us (link to full testimony):
Andrew C. McCarthy at National Review has a great commentary on this abomination -

The Obama Defense Department: Willful Blindness HQ
December 15, 2011 6:54 A.M.
By Andrew C. McCarthy

If you want to know why Maj. Nidal Hassan was able to carry out a jihadist attack at Fort Bragg Hood [ACM: senior moment -- my apologies] one of the most fortified targets imaginable; if you want to understand why, despite months of neon signs that he was a jihadist, Hassan was able to murder 13 United States soldiers and support personnel (i.e., about double the number killed in the 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center); then look no further than this video clip.

It features testimony at a House hearing on threats to our military by Paul Stockton, President Obama’s Assistant Defense Secretary for Homeland Defense & America’s Security Affairs. He is unable to bring himself to utter the word “Islamist,” much less admit what ought to be the undeniable fact that Muslim terrorists are motivated by Islamist ideology.

It reflects the Obama philosophy that we cannot even hint that an interpretation of Islam — drawn literally from Islamic scriptures — is the force motivating our enemies. Even though this is unquestionably true, to say so, to acknowledge it in any way, would mean, according to administration thinking, that we are at war with Islam itself — with all 1.4 billion Muslims, including the hundreds of millions who do not subscribe to this interpretation. Unwilling to entertain the possibility that the enemy has a coherent, knowable doctrine — which is a powerful catalyst precisely because it draws credibly (not inarguably but credibly) on scripture — we have forfeited the natural right to defend ourselves and the troops who make it possible for us to live freely.

This is criminal recklessness. It is idiocy beyond description, so I should just stop trying to describe it. Watch it in all its jaw-dropping ignominy. Three and a half minutes — although it will take you longer than that because you’ll need to watch it a few times in order to come to grips with the fact that it’s not a parody but the real thinking of top officials in the Defense Department and throughout the administration.

UPDATE: I am doing something wrong in trying to embed the video. Until someone who actually knows what he’s doing arrives, click here.

What Do Mussolini, Hitler, Obama and Newt Gingrich Have In Common?

What Do Mussolini, Hitler, Obama and Newt Gingrich Have In Common?

They loved FDR, in the beginning.

They all praised Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a great President with great policies.  Yes, it is true, Mussolini and Hitler praised FDR  in the same way that Progressive Newt Gingrich does today.  As George F. Will wrote on December 2, 2011 of Gingrich:

Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how. Conservatism, in contrast, is both cause and effect of modesty about understanding society’s complexities, controlling its trajectory and improving upon its spontaneous order. Conservatism inoculates against the hubristic volatility that Gingrich exemplifies and Genesis deplores: “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.”

As any thinking person knows, there is precious little difference between Marxism and the other Socialisms, beyond marketing.  "Progressive" is just the latest relabeling of National Socialism, an authoritarian system of government that began as Yellow Socialism in France, but did not catch on in Europe after it was made popular in the USA by Theodore Roosevelt, his cousin FDR, and Woodrow Wilson.

If that is not enough, just read this: Newt Gingrich Praised SEIU Head Andy Stern's Forward-Looking Vision. If you have been following this blog, you will know that Andy Stern is a Socialist who endorses the latest crony capitalism/central planning developments in Red China.  The Huffington Post quotes Gingrich as saying this in his book Real Chance: From the World That Fails to the World That Works:

Andy Stern, the head of the Service Employees International Union, is the union leader who probably best understands the challenge of the world market and the need to make American union members productive in the face of world competition. Sadly, he is a distinct minority among union leaders.

The thing that divides Progressives like Newt Gingrich from libertarians like Ron Paul is freedom, especially the freedom for the consumer to chose in a free market. The sad thing is, Gingrich can play the nomination game better than the Ron Pauls of the world.

More On Obama And His Fast And Furious National Socialists

Obama 2012?

Update to previous post: How Fast and Furious 2011 is like the Reichstag Fire 1933


Actually, the current crop of National Socialists running the United States are worse than the National Socialists of old.  Worse in obscuring the execution of their pathetic, transparent plots to grab more political control, and worse in the safety of execution.

Fast and Furious vs. Reichstag Fire: Safety

Comparing Fast and Furious to the 1933 Reichstag fire on the safety front, nobody died in the Reichstag fire, but at least one police officer, Bryan Terry, and who knows how many others have died in Fast and Furious.

Fast and Furious vs. Reichstag Fire: Execution

By execution, I mean pulling a violent political stunt and turning it to the advantage of the party that will benefit the most from it.  In the case of Fast and Furious, it is most certainly the Democrat party of the United States that stands to benefit the most from the scheme, had it been kept secret.

It is still uncertain of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP, aka, Nazi Party) set the fire, or if the International Socialists of the Communist Part Of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands – KPD) set the Reichstag fire.  We do know a Communist was convicted of setting the fire, he said he acted alone, and was murdered (purged) by the Stalin in 1940.  This sort of indicates that it was indeed a Communist plot, if only plotted by one, that resulted in the demise of the KPD, which probably upset Stalin a little too.

The event was used to great advantage by the NSDAP to limit the rights of citizens and consolidate one-party-rule in Germany.  Remember a motto of the Socialist, never let a serious crisis go to waste.

Shifting to the modern day, a United States Democrat regime lead by Barrack Hussein Obama, hatched a scheme to let Mexican drug lords buy guns in the USA, (who are more lethal than radical Islam) in order to curtail the rights of Americans to own guns, and then they blame the people who defend the rights of citizens.

Rep. Hank Johnson, D-GA

The first wave of the propaganda war has been launched, spearheaded by Democrat Hank Johnson, of Georgia:
Via The Daily Caller:

Georgia Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson accused the tea party movement and the National Rifle Association of creating an “manufactured” controversy over Operation Fast and Furious Thursday.

Johnson’s comments came during an interview with The Daily Caller outside the House Judiciary Committee hearing room. Attorney General Eric Holder was testifying before the committee about Fast and Furious — a Justice Department program where Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents facilitated the sale of about 2,000 guns to Mexican drug cartels.

“I think this is another manufactured controversy by the second amendment, NRA Republican tea party movement,” Johnson said.

This is the same Georgia Democrat who thinks the Guam might flip over if any more American troops are stationed on the American island.  He also takes the Socialist view that the "promote general welfare" wording in the preamble of the United States Constitution is a mandate on the Congress to provide National Healthcare.  If you watch the second video link, you will see that Johnson's Town Hall Meeting security will eject anybody who asks a question on the Constitution, they will be ejected.  Representative Johnson is obviously a Socialist and it does not really matter if his flavor is National or International.

Without much mainstream media fanfare, which is no surprise since the MSM is nothing more than the public relations branch of the hard Left in the USA, National Rifle Association (NRA) officer Wayne LaPierre responded to the absurd notion that the NRA was responsible for the Obama administration plot to sell guns to Mexican drug lords:

More from the Newsmax story:

"Over a period of two or three years they were running thousands and thousands of guns to the most evil people on earth. At the same time they were yelling ’90 per cent… of the guns the Mexican drug cartels are using come from the United States."

"That was a phony figure from the very start. Even the Wikileaks cables from our own State Department prove they are coming from Central America, they are not coming from the U.S. Every police officer will tell you that they’re coming from Russia, they’re coming from China, most of them are coming from Central America and a lot of them are coming from defections from the Mexican Army,” said LaPierre, the NRA's executive vice president and CEO.

But LaPierre said that President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were determined to make it appear that most weapons used by the Mexicans came from north of the border, “so they could stick more gun legislation on honest American gun owners of the United States.”

The bottom line is simple.  Fast and Furious is a botched attempt by the Obama administration to limit the rights of all Americans and they are still trying to salvage this operation to restrict the rights of Americans to own and purchase guns.  They are attacking licensed gun dealers, even those that were cooperating with the government, and they are using this as a propaganda device to blame Mexican drug war violence on innocent Americans.

How Fast and Furious 2011 is like the Reichstag Fire 1933

"It's like ATF created or added to the problem so they could be the solution to it and pat themselves on the back," says one law enforcement source familiar with the facts. "It's a circular way of thinking."

German Reichstag Fire, 1933

Followup story here: Left vs. Libertarian on Fast and Furious

Answer to title: Both events were attempts by the political classes to grab power in their respective republics.

In the case of the Reichstag* Fire (Reichstagsbrand), the National Socialists of Germany succeeded in scaring the public into thinking they needed more National Socialists and fewer International Socialists to protect them, along with bestowing more power on an already wildly popular Chancellor Hitler.  However, nobody died in the Reichstagsbrand.

Chancellor Obama?

How is the US federal government "Fast and Furious" operation similar to the Reichstagsbrand?  The latest news indicates that it was an effort by the Obama administration to infringe upon Amendment II to the United States Constitution.  While nobody died in the Reichstag fire, Agent Brian Terry's death is the direct result of operation Fast and Furious.

Via CBS News - Documents: ATF used "Fast and Furious" to make the case for gun regulations

On July 14, 2010 after ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. received an update on Fast and Furious, ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait emailed Bill Newell, ATF's Phoenix Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious:

"Bill - can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks."

On Jan. 4, 2011, as ATF prepared a press conference to announce arrests in Fast and Furious, Newell saw it as "(A)nother time to address Multiple Sale on Long Guns issue." And a day after the press conference, Chait emailed Newell: "Bill--well done yesterday... (I)n light of our request for Demand letter 3, this case could be a strong supporting factor if we can determine how many multiple sales of long guns occurred during the course of this case."

This revelation angers gun rights advocates. Larry Keane, a spokesman for National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry trade group, calls the discussion of Fast and Furious to argue for Demand Letter 3 "disappointing and ironic." Keane says it's "deeply troubling" if sales made by gun dealers "voluntarily cooperating with ATF's flawed 'Operation Fast & Furious' were going to be used by some individuals within ATF to justify imposing a multiple sales reporting requirement for rifles."

Here is some email between the the ATF and a licensed gun dealer.
Email 1

Email 2

ATF's group supervisor on Fast and Furious David Voth assures the gun dealer there's nothing to worry about. "We (ATF) are continually monitoring these suspects using a variety of investigative techniques which I cannot go into detail."

Two months later, the same gun dealer grew more agitated.

"I wanted to make sure that none of the firearms that were sold per our conversation with you and various ATF agents could or would ever end up south of the border or in the hands of the bad guys. I guess I am looking for a bit of reassurance that the guns are not getting south or in the wrong hands...I want to help ATF with its investigation but not at the risk of agents (sic) safety because I have some very close friends that are US Border Patrol agents in southern AZ as well as my concern for all the agents (sic) safety that protect our country."

"It's like ATF created or added to the problem so they could be the solution to it and pat themselves on the back," says one law enforcement source familiar with the facts. "It's a circular way of thinking."

More at the CBS website.
This latest That revelation comes from the same administration that has nationalized a large segment of the automobile industry without any Congressional approval and  has nationalized the health care industry during a period of same-party domination of both houses of Congress.  National Socialism?  Yes.

Update 9 DEC 2011 from The Daily Caller:

Georgia Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson accused the tea party movement and the National Rifle Association of creating an “manufactured” controversy over Operation Fast and Furious Thursday.

Johnson’s comments came during an interview with The Daily Caller outside the House Judiciary Committee hearing room. Attorney General Eric Holder was testifying before the committee about Fast and Furious — a Justice Department program where Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents facilitated the sale of about 2,000 guns to Mexican drug cartels.

“I think this is another manufactured controversy by the second amendment, NRA Republican tea party movement,” Johnson said.

Bolding mine.
This is growing to be identical to what the National Socialists pulled in 1933.

Before anybody assumes (since I have not mentioned it on this blog before this) that I am comparing the Obama administration's actions to the 1938 German Weapons Act at all.  That act deserves a post of its own, since the 1938 German Weapons Act bears more similarities to Wilsonian and FDR era gun restrictions targeting race: Jews were forbidden from the manufacturing or ownership of firearms and ammunition. (page 22)  Otherwise, the much misstated Hitler-era German law expanded citizens rights to be armed.


More On Obama And His Fast And Furious National Socialists

*German Parliament of the Weinmar Republic

Obama and the Telephone Operators

Rough Rider Obama

Obama's 6 December 2011 Speech, Osawatomie, Kansas

What is this love that president Obama has for a pre-Industrial Revolution society?  He has been on a kick about automation for months.  He is still yammering about ATMs, travel agents, and the Internet.  Now he has added telephone operators?  It goes hand-in-hand for his hate of the Industrial Revolution.  A few months ago, on 17 August, 2011, he was using the bank teller example:

Abolish the Drive-Thru too?

When I go into factories these days, what’s amazing is how clean and how quiet they are, because what used to take 1,000 folks to do now only takes 100 folks to do. And one of the challenges in terms of rebuilding our economy is businesses have gotten so efficient that -- when was the last time somebody went to a bank teller instead of using the ATM, or used a travel agent instead of just going online?

This was on Obama's meandering path to telling his audience that he wanted more public education money.  The sad thing is, the ATM was an invention to make banking more convenient for people.  Over-regulation of the banking industry made the ATM indispensable.

Ernestine the Operator

On December 6th 2011, in Kansas, Obama bleated this:

Factories where people thought they would retire suddenly picked up and went overseas, where workers were cheaper. Steel mills that needed 100 -- or 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100 employees, so layoffs too often became permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle. And these changes didn’t just affect blue-collar workers. If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs and the Internet. 

So, let's go back to the days before automatic switching and see how this works out.  Via PBS, we can see that calls per person per year in 1940 was around 250 (PDF).  The US population was 132,164,569, according to the 1940 Census, so that is about 33,041,142,250 telephone calls annually, handled by about 350,000 operators.  Each operator handled about 94,403 calls per year.

In 2000 (the last year in the PBS chart) US population was 281,421,906. At the call rates of 1940, that is 70,355,476,500 calls and a demand for 745,267 operators.  However, by 1997 (last year noted in the PBS chart) Americans made an average of 2,325 calls per year.  If we use the 2000 census, that is 654,305,931,450 calls that would demand 6,930,986 operators for voice calls only.  Forget about text messages, Facebook, chat or the like.  The technology that Obama approves of does not support that.  Also remember, if we kept 1940s technology it is highly unlikely that people would make 2,000-plus calls per year either.

There is a lot of mythology around the telephone operator profession in America that built over the years that the Bell System as a government protected monopoly.  "Ma Bell" was generally hated by everybody in the USA.  Since they were a monopoly, by edict of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the customer service experience Americans had with them was not much better that the worst department of motor vehicles office in America today.

Sexism and "unfairness" emerged as epithets against the Bell System and that got mixed in with 1970s hate for the phone company.  The sexism narrative was that Alexander Graham Bell himself hired only women as operators because they were cheaper.  Of course, as most socialist narratives, this was false.

It is well documented that boys were originally hired as telephone operators, just as they had been hired as telegraph operators.  A few choice mentions:
In One Man's Life: A Telephone Set About 1889-90

Holmes had presently dis- missed his staff of boys as being noisy and unruly, replacing them with girls

THE HACKER CRACKDOWN
Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
by Bruce Sterling

Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the telephone company did not employ women for the sake of advancing female liberation. AT&T did this for sound commercial reasons. The first telephone operators of the Bell system were not women, but teenage American boys. They were telegraphic messenger boys (a group about to be rendered technically obsolescent), who swept up around the phone office, dunned customers for bills, and made phone connections on the switchboard, all on the cheap. 

Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell's company learned a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and telephone switchboards. Putting teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift and consistent disaster. Bell's chief engineer described them as "Wild Indians." The boys were openly rude to customers. They talked back to subscribers, saucing off, uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip. The rascals took Saint Patrick's Day off without permission. And worst of all they played clever tricks with the switchboard plugs: disconnecting calls, crossing lines so that customers found themselves talking to strangers, and so forth.

Nobody tell Obama.  Next thing you know, he will want us to go back to the pre-telephone days of the telegraph, or earlier.

Maybe mentioning jobs that people are used to being filled by women ties into the Obama nostalgia for the days when a budding Progressive National Socialist movement was all the rage?

Now, for this, Roosevelt was called a radical. He was called a socialist -- (laughter) -- even a communist. But today, we are a richer nation and a stronger democracy because of what he fought for in his last campaign: an eight-hour work day and a minimum wage for women -- (applause) -- insurance for the unemployed and for the elderly, and those with disabilities; political reform and a progressive income tax. (Applause.) 

(for more bizarre politicians invoking Teddy Roosevelt, see this)

Obama is steeped in mythology in many areas.  From the earlier quoted part of his Kansas speech, Factories where people thought they would retire suddenly picked up and went overseas, where workers were cheaper. Not exactly.  Overregulation of many forms deove American factories overseas where the total cost of production was lower.  Steel mills that needed 100 -- or 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100 employees, so layoffs too often became permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle.  In the past, Obama has invoked the images of South Side Chicago steel mills "leaving".  Now he says American steel mills are more efficient, so now that is a problem to him.  In reality, overbearing environmental regulations ran the steel mills out of the country.  Mini-mills, like those from Nucor Steel, operate today reprocessing scrap steel.  It is no mistake that they generally operate in right-to-work States.

David Bernstein wrote about the myth of early 20th century Progressives and minimum wage for women in response to Obama's speech:

Oddly enough, Obama also praises Roosevelt for supporting a minimum wage for women. Chapter 4 of Rehabilitating Lochner describes the impetus for such laws, and much of the relevant the information in that chapter can be found in this paper published in Law and Contemporary Problems. The history is too rich to give an adequate summary here. Let’s just say that the history of such laws is not pretty. The laws’ primary supporters included male-only labor unions that wanted to keep women out of the workplace–women-only minimum wage laws almost never passed without strong from unions that typically opposed minimum wage laws for men; eugenicists who wanted women to stay home and take care of their children; bigots who thought that only the lower order of men (including Eastern European immigrants) would allow their women to work for wages; moralists who believed that low-wage women were susceptible to vice and should therefore stay out of the workforce; and economists who believed that, as Felix Frankfurter summarized in his brief in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, women who wanted to work but could not command a government-imposed minimum wage were “semi-employable” or “unemployable” workers who should “accept the status of a defective to be segregated for special treatment as a dependent.”

You really cannot trust anything that comes from the mouth of a Socialist.

Now for a lesson in doing your own research, something that Obama's people might want to try.  As soon as I heard Obama say "operators" I was reminded of this interesting statistic from William F. Buckley, Jr. that he voices at a 1991 Young Americans for Freedom forum (unembedable video at the link):  

10:40 - If we had frozen our technology at the level of nineteen-hundred-and-forty, and the same number of telephone calls were made today, per capita, as were made then, every woman between the age of twenty and sixty-six would have to serve as a telephone operator to make possible these transactions.

As soon as I began checking the numbers, I realized that the notion was flawed.  It sounds good, a nation of nearly 300 million people would make a lot of telephone calls, even at the 250 per capita rate of 1940.  However, the female population 20 - 24 of 1991 could easily handle the load with millions of women left to do other things.

China vs. China

Friedmania is in the air.

Hot For Sweaty Asian

Communist Red China is in the news again, mainly because the mainstream media Stalinists love anything Big Communist.  Maybe I should lower-case that to "stalinists" since it refers to the default position of everybody on the Left, and as we all know Stalin defined the Left and the Right in 1928.

Ronald Bailey

This time Reason sent their decidedly anti-Communist Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey to the latest Red China showcase event: The U.N. Climate Change (sic) Conference in Durban, South Africa.  The self-professed fan-boy of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) was actually amazed that so many pundits buy the claptrap that if we only accede to Red Chinese demands we can save the world.  Those demands being Communist China gets to do whatever they want and all of Red China's industrial competitors get to provide welfare to "developing" (aka backward, aka Third World) countries.  Read his article, he was there and covers it better than I can.  It is a breath of fresh air after a short series by the insufferable Friedmanosis .

Tom Friedman, Red China Fanboy

During the past week the Friedmanista concubines of Red China have been touting the big strides of Red Chinese crony capitalism and warning the US that we need to watch out for them.  They have seen the future and it is Capital Communist!  Never mind that they are channeling Lincoln Steffens and Will Rogers at the same time, they have the guts to say that the US will be 'overtaken' by a country whose economy is smaller than Mexico's.

About this "economic overtaking" business for a moment.  Who cares?  As long as we have freedom and a comfortable standard of living it really does not matter who is "bigger," it matters only that we are free to make our own choices as individuals and that we have a decent comforts.  Do you know who cares?  Andy Stern and others who wish to scare us deeper into Socialism, that's who.

If you do not know who Andy Stern is, Worker's World glowingly describes him like this (links added by me):

Andy Stern, former head of the giant Service Employees union in the United States, recently visited China as part of a delegation organized by the China-United States Exchange Foundation and the Center for American Progress. Stern, knowing very well that U.S. workers are in the midst of a long-term crisis of unemployment that shows no letup, was highly impressed with the goals of China’s 12th five-year plan, which were explained to the visiting group by high-ranking Chinese officials.

Deirdre Griswold expands on the 'virtues' of central planning.  The requisite "commanding heights" phrasing always entertains me, but she sounds serious about it -

China allows capitalism to exist — it has stock markets, private ownership of some of the means of production, a growing bourgeoisie, and many social features of capitalism, like a big income gap between rich and poor. But it also has state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, especially the major banks, as well as the industries vital to China’s infrastructure.

If you are into Red porn, read the rest.  I did it so you don't have to.

The Stern article in question is one the Wall Street Journal published by Stern on 1 DEC 2011, China's Superior Economic Model The free-market fundamentalist economic model is being thrown onto the trash heap of history.  Skipping to the important parts of Stern's audition as the 21st century Sino-Eisenstein:

While we debate, Team China rolls on. Our delegation witnessed China's people-oriented development in Chongqing, a city of 32 million in Western China, which is led by an aggressive and popular Communist Party leader—Bo Xilai. A skyline of cranes are building roughly 1.5 million square feet of usable floor space daily—including, our delegation was told, 700,000 units of public housing annually.

Of course, the word of the PRC government is good enough  for Stern.  One wonders why scenes like this were not mentioned.  Perhaps they were not on the tour?


Back to the Stern article:

Meanwhile, the Chinese government can boast that it has established in Western China an economic zone for cloud computing and automotive and aerospace production resulting in 12.5% annual growth and 49% growth in annual tax revenue, with wages rising more than 10% a year.

For those of us who love this country and believe America has every asset it needs to remain the No. 1 economic engine of the world, it is troubling that we have no plan—and substitute a demonization of government and worship of the free market at a historical moment that requires a rethinking of both those beliefs.

America needs to embrace a plan for growth and innovation, with a streamlined government as a partner with the private sector. Economic revolutions require institutions to change and maybe make history, because if they stick to the status quo they soon become history. Our great country, which sparked and wants to lead this global revolution, needs a forward looking, long-term economic plan.

Do not confuse the Stern's idea of streamlined government with anything a libertarian would envision.  His version of streamlined government is more like Mao, Mussolini, Hitler or Stalin.  Or perhaps what Obama would be doing if that pesky Congress and those radio talk people were not standing in his way.

These reports resemble the infrequent dispatches about Idi Amin's Ugandan  public works projects from the 1970s, on a much larger scale.  They are also reminiscent of Soviet endeavors to make "the biggest", like airplanes that were 1/4" longer than the American version.

Jonah Goldberg did a fine job of dissecting Stern's WSJ piece:
The Problem with China Envy
What liberals want to copy is the authoritarianism.

Stern sees the Chinese government’s allegedly keen ability to “plan” its way to prosperity as the new model for America. It is an argument of profound asininity. China had five-year plans before it started getting rich. Under the old five-year plans, China killed tens of millions of its own people and remained mired in poverty. What made China rich wasn’t planning, it was the decision to switch to markets (albeit corrupt ones). The planners were merely in charge of distributing the wealth that markets created.

Indeed, rapid economic growth always makes government planners look like geniuses when the reality is that the planners are more like self-proclaimed rainmakers who started dancing only after it started raining. When the rain stops, which it will, they’ll have much to answer for.

Oh, and what about labor? There’s one labor union in China, and it’s run by the government. (The Nazis had pretty much the same system.) Stern doesn’t seem to care.

Goldberg is much more generous than me with the When the rain stops, which it will, they’ll have much to answer for. phrasing.  They will not be answering to anybody, as George Will said to Charlie Rose:


Enough with the Red China envy and support.  Speaking well of anything going on mainland China today is nothing short of propping up a slavery colony.  One only needs to glance at a comparison to Taiwan to see that Communist China is a paper tiger.  The PRC and the ROC began at roughly the same moment. If you want to talk income gaps, China has 115 billionaires and at least 115 million people living on a dollar a day or less. Nearly all of those billionaires got rich gaming a corrupt political system. Remember that when you see whining like this: The most prosperous 20 percent of Taiwanese reported average disposable incomes of NT$1.79 million last year, or 6.34 times the income of the poorest 20 percent, government data showed. (apparently 2010 stats)

Piss on Mao, and Stalin too

We need to abandon the notion that consumer goods will bring Communist regimes to their knees too, as George F. Will mentions in the video with Charlie Rose.  The only thing that brings authoritarian regimes to their senses is force.  Showing the Soviets that they could not possibly compete with us militarily is what toppled them from within.  The lesson China took from that was to keep their society closed, befriend the wandering useful idiots in the west, and offer up slave labor for western commercial enterprises.

Even with their central planning, massive monuments to government, public works projects that are the envy of Tom Friedman, and central planning, Red China is still a third world economy train wreck.

The Train Wreck That Is Red China