Obama's African Poverty Program

"Obama urges poorer nations to fight global warming".

That was the lead-in to a story on Yahoo news a few days ago. As I've mentioned previously, there's a segment in the BBC documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle" that depicts the devastating effects of environmentalism in the third world. Watch it to see the perpetual destitution that Obama seeks to consign to his brethren ("I have the blood of Africa within me"). This even as he exhorts Africans to progress ("Yes you can").

Mark Steyn (NRO) spotlights the environmental movement's drive to push us all (except for a selected elite few) into third world poverty. Here he cites the Greens' romantization of poverty.

"I don’t think a lot of electricity is a good thing,” said Gar Smith of San Francisco’s Earth Island Institute a few years back. "I have seen villages in Africa that had vibrant culture and great communities that were disrupted and destroyed by the introduction of electricity,” he continued, regretting that African peasants “who used to spend their days and evenings in the streets playing music on their own instruments and sewing clothing for their neighbors on foot-pedal powered sewing machines” are now slumped in front of Desperate Housewives reruns all day long.
One assumes Gar Smith is sincere in his fetishization of bucolic African poverty, with its vibrantly rampant disease and charmingly unspoilt life expectancy in the mid-forties. But when a hereditary prince (Prince Charles) starts attacking capitalism and pining for the days when a benign sovereign knew what was best for the masses, he gives the real game away. Capitalism is liberating: You’re born a peasant but you don’t have to die one.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YzMzMDBkNzYxOGIyMjQ3ZjJjYjA1NjVjOTg4M2U5M2E=

Finally, as the press gushes (again) over Obama's supposed unique potential to create change in that poorest of continents, it's important to remember that he has a tough act to follow. No one. NO ONE! EVER! has done more for Africa than George W. Bush with his AIDS initiatives. As Mona Charen wrote late last year,

“Bush Has Quietly Tripled Aid to Africa.” So headlined a Washington Post story from 2006. But the president has been trying not to be quiet about it. On the contrary, he’s been touting it as often as he can.
But he gets precious little credit. Yes, Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church has awarded President Bush the “International Medal of Peace” for his humanitarian efforts in Africa. And a few agitators for international aid like Bono and Bob Geldof have put in a few good words for the man. Actually, Geldof was pretty interesting. He said George Bush had done more for Africa than his predecessor and was “pissed off” at the press for failing to report it.
But for the most part, the beautiful people in America — the Hollywood and university types, the book and magazine publishers, and of course, the major media — have shown complete indifference to George W. Bush’s dedication to a cause they purport to value. In fact, they’ve pointedly ignored it. It goes without saying that if Obama does even half of what Bush has done for AIDS sufferers in Africa, he will be — in the eyes of those same people — a candidate for canonization.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2Q0MTM4YjdiOWNkNWEzMDgwNmE0MjhkYzBlNTcyOWM=

Likeminded and Funny

It’s almost enough to make a person pity Bernard Madoff. That poor shmuck got a 150-year prison sentence, and he only screwed Americans out of about 65 billion dollars.

The words are Bert Prelutsky's, commenting on President Obama's confiscation of our nation's wealth. (Like Madoff, Obama calls his thievery investment).
Prelutsky is one columnist that I'll always read, based solely on his byline. This is not because he presents detailed and enlightening analyses of current events but because 1) He's consistently funny, and 2) He shares my amazement and outrage that radical, foolish, inexperienced (in the President's case), misguided, dishonest, ignorant, unpatriotic (etc, etc), politicians like Obama, Pelosi and Reid have managed to achieve their present positions of power. Prelutsky is also Jewish and a former liberal, so he has other commonalities with me as well.

Here are a couple of columns exhibiting Prelutsky's bewilderment and consternation about our current state of affairs. They appeared recently on Townhall.com.

http://townhall.com/columnists/BurtPrelutsky/2009/07/10/gathering_my_thoughts

http://townhall.com/columnists/BurtPrelutsky/2009/07/10/im_mad_as_hell!

Why I'm No Longer A Democrat (Reason #683)

Since their mismanagement of the Vietnam War, Democrats have had a moral equivalence problem. The party's predominant strategies in the late stages of the cold war were appeasement and "conciliation". This approach continues today with our war against radical Islam and with ongoing conflicts with vestigal communist states. Just as Microsoft sells software and Ford sells cars, America's business, our essence, is democracy and freedom . With the notable exception of Joe Lieberman and maybe a few blue dog Democrats, there is no one in the party willing to promote and sell these values to the world. This despite, as events in Iran make clear, there being many potential buyers.

That was then...

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
Harry Truman

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
John F. Kennedy

If you believe in the cause of freedom, then proclaim it, live it and protect it, for humanity’s future depends on it.
Henry "Scoop" Jackson

This is now...

What we showed here is that we can make progress when we’re willing to break free from some of the stale debates and old ideologies that have dominated and distorted the debate in this hemisphere for far too long.
Barack Obama (referring to his recent giveaway deal with Russia)

Let’s put ideology aside. That is so yesterday.
Hillary Clinton

Yeah, dude, like, communism, fascism, democracy, salafism, whatev.

The 9/11 Republican

In his latest NRO contribution, Jay Nordlinger cited an essay written 4 1/2 years ago by Cinnamon Stillwell, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. In it she explains her conversion from Bay Area (hard left) liberalism to staunch conservatism. An eloquent expression of many sentiments that I share.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2005/02/24/cstillwell.DTL&type=printable

Worse and Worse

I noticed a curious bumper sticker yesterday - "Pray For Obama". This is a significant attitude change. (Assuming the request is from a fan). I thought Obama was God. It seems that he's coming up short in that regard. Anyway, I have a prayer for him. (With apologies to "Fiddler On The Roof").
May God bless and keep the President...far away from us.
Actually, I'll be happy to pray for Obama, just as fervently as his supporters prayed for his predecessor.

Meanwhile the Obama train wreck continues to wreak havoc. (The wreck wreaks weekly). He's siding with the wrong folks in Iran and Honduras. In his latest apologia tour, he gave away far too much to Russia, getting nothing in return. (For a good analysis see the Ralph Peters article in the NY Post).

http://www.nypost.com/seven/07072009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/desperate_deal_177977.htm

And with the unemployment rate now 1.5% higher than the peak predicted by his highness, there's talk of putting together yet another stimulus package. We're told (constantly) about Obama's smarts. The inability to learn from past mistakes is not a sign of intelligence.
Stimulus plans never work. Not in 2002. Not in 2008. Especially not in 2009, badly designed as it was. The "experts" say not to worry. They expect the recovery to begin late this year and pick up steam next year. The trouble is, we should have seen a bump from the stimulus by now. If we're getting one, it's been negligible. And we'll have to start paying soon (i.e - higher taxes) for the "stimulus" and the bloated, pork filled budget and the bailouts and cap and trade and socialized medicine. That will throw ice water over any recovery.

Speaking of socialized medicine. A WSJ editorial today focuses on that part of the British national health system, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), that rations health care in that country. It's neither nice, nor excellent. The American equivalent, coming soon to a health care provider near you.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124692973435303415.html

Chambers vs. Rand

An absurd misconception, promoted of course, by the media, is that conservatism is a “small tent” ideology, with a very narrow tolerance for competing ideas. In reality, if anything, the opposite is true, as liberalism demands its adherents to toe the line, or else. (see Lieberman, Joe). In contrast, the right allows a wide spectrum of viewpoints. A case in point is the ongoing feud between two conservative factions – one championed by William Buckley and Whittaker Chambers and the other by Ayn Rand. Both groups were (and are) vehemently opposed to Communism. The former based its objections from a religious standpoint – that a Godless society is necessarily evil. That people are imperfect sinners and any system that lifts man to the level of God will eventually degenerate into immorality and oppression. The Rand (Objectivist) viewpoint is that all great achievements come from the minds of free individuals. No restrictions should be placed on man’s freedom to think, produce and enjoy the fruits of his labors. Rather than providing a moral compass for humankind, belief in god is one of the two great sources of oppression in the world – the other being state power.
The dispute came to a head with Chambers’ December, 1957 blistering review of Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged". No critique by a liberal observer could have been any harsher.

http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/flashback200501050715.asp

I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous.In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive story known as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures.

Chambers see little difference between Rand’s human-centric materialism and Karl Marx’s.

(Marx), too, admired "naked self-interest" (in its time and place), and for much the same reasons as Miss Rand: because, he believed, it cleared away the cobwebs of religion and led to prodigies of industrial and cognate accomplishment. The overlap is not as incongruous as it looks. Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc., etc. (This book's aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned "higher morality," which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.
Here occurs a little rub whose effects are just as observable in a free-enterprise system, which is in practice materialist (whatever else it claims or supposes itself to be), as they would be under an atheist socialism, if one were ever to deliver that material abundance that all promise. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure, with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit. No doubt, Miss Rand has brooded upon that little rub. Hence in part, I presume, her insistence on man as a heroic being" With productive achievement as his noblest activity." For, if Man's heroism" (some will prefer to say: human dignity") no longer derives from God, or is not a function of that godless integrity which was a root of Nietzsche's anguish, then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness and its replenishment his foremost activity. So Randian Man, at least in his ruling caste, has to be held "heroic" in order not to be beastly.Something of this implication is fixed in the book's dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber — go!"

This reading of Rand’s philosophy naturally raises the ire of her fervent supporters. A typical retort (excerpted) is the following.

http://www.morethings.com/log/2005/01/ayn-rand-vs-whittaker-chambers-and.html

Whittaker Chambers was an ex-communist who had turned to become a religious conservative, famous as the main witness against Alger Hiss, and a hero among conservatives in a way that only a convert can be. This apparently got him the deference to use the pages and prestige of Bill Buckley's magazine to write perhaps the most malicious and carefully dishonest hatchet job I've ever seen published as a "book review."
For starters, he spent a few hundred words saying that the book was nearly worthless as a fictional story. Ayn Rand was, in fact, a very effective dramatist and writer, even if you didn't like much of the message. She had skills. You could argue about aspects of her approach that you find inadequate, but to pretend that she was a crappy writer with few redeeming features seems extremely hard to justify objectively, let us say.
The factual wrongness of this review is breathtaking. A big part of the point of her work was to denounce communism and fascism, and to dissect the philosophical underpinnings that enabled their monstrosities. On top of which, Ayn Rand was originally a Russian Jew who famously fled the budding Soviet Union. For this ex-commie Chambers to be so speaking of this Jewish survivor of the Soviet holocaust is somewhere beyond words in its offensiveness.

This is, as it always is, a vacuous argument. The ethnicity or experiences of a writer is irrelevant to the validity of her views.

The basis of his accusation that Rand was a fascist dictator in waiting ultimately was simply that ALL atheists are ultimately fascist. He slightly camoflauged such a ridiculous statement by using the word "materialist" rather than simply atheist, which is what he meant.In truth, Chambers appears not so much to have been writing a book review, but attempting a party purge- an instinct no doubt left over from his commie days.

Incidentally, the preceding was written in 2005, evincing the enduring nature of the disagreement.
Despite the protestations of her defender, Chambers is certainly right with his opinion about Rand’s fiction writing ability. Cartoonish characters, insipid dialogue and politburo length speechmaking deaden her storytelling. Ideologically, both Chambers and Rand were anti-collectivist, pro-freedom. To Chambers freedom was a spiritual matter – the freedom to find God. He had a fundamental distrust of man as superman, whether in a socialist or capitalist system. Rand’s freedom was materialistic - the freedom to achieve for one’s own ends whatever they may be. She believed in the primacy of the reasoning human mind and the great achievements it produced. To Rand, striving to achieve is humanity's highest calling. To Chambers, this thinking is a pathway to tyranny. As he states in his A.S. review,

The trouble is…when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

Chambers needn’t have worried. There is no possibility of an elite-led society, with a minimalist government of the type that Rand proposed. Quite the contrary, to our detriment, we’re moving in the opposite direction. We won't ever know if the Randian prescription would create unprecedented prosperity, drastically reduce poverty, eliminate war. As she noted, the closest the world has come to pure unbridled capitalism was in the hundred or so years between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the beginning of the First World War. And it was a period of unprecedented growth and relative peace. So even a more moderate approach, (a la Milton Friedman), would be welcome. Concerning our current economic downturn, Rand would have justifiably said, “I told you so”. We’re presently living an “Atlas Shrugged” type scenario : The government in its effort to “do good” has distorted the market. It sought (in our present case) to make home ownership "affordable" to all. Piling this onto our economy, already overburdened with entitlements, resulted in a cascade of negative effects. As in Rand’s book, the government is attempting to “fix” the damage with even more intervention. Unlike Rand’s book, the productive class isn’t united enough to call a general strike. There will be no societal collapse followed by regeneration. We’ll just slog along, with lower living standards, less dynamism, and less freedom. Until, at least, another Reagan or Thatcher comes along.

An Encouraging Trend

As people gradually figure out what President Obama is really up to, his approval ratings will continue to fall. Some day I'll be able to break out my "I Disliked Obama Before It Was Cool" bumper sticker.