America Archives - Page 44 of 55 - Common Sense Evaluation

This is our must read of the day. Even though Reagan’s gave his speech in 1964, so much of it applies today. Truer words were never spoken and we need to heed them now more than ever.

Ronald Reagan’s 1964 speech, “A Time for Choosing,” arguably, was the pivotal moment when Reagan became the Reagan America knows. He gave “the speech,” as he often referred to it, not long after switching from FDR’s Democratic Party to the Republican Party of Lincoln. The theme of Reagan’s speech was that Americans had to choose between up versus down, freedom versus servitude, self-government versus bureaucratic fiat.

“The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people,” Reagan explained, “and they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose.” So, he concluded, “we have come to a time for choosing.”

Reagan became Reagan by studying the political science of the American founding, without which he could not have ushered into American politics a new kind of conservatism, Reagan conservatism. Reagan sought to reign in government by recovering the authority of the Founders’ Constitution and the principles that informed it. He believed nothing less would save freedom in America.

Reagan’s challenge was to remind Americans of the importance and goodness of constitutional government in a time of constitutional darkness, a time when virtually all the leading intellectual and political lights in America had come to ignore or twist beyond recognition the meaning of the Constitution.

In this way, Reagan’s statesmanship paralleled that of Lincoln, who tried to preserve the principled ground of constitutional self-government — the idea that each human being is endowed by the Creator with equal, unalienable, natural rights — at a time when that idea was denied and ridiculed by most prominent minds in America.

Today, the lights of the Constitution have again grown dim, as the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats unfold what is amounting to be the most massive government budgetary and regulatory expansions in American history.

Everyone seems fixated on the costs associated with Obama’s corporate bailouts, universal healthcare, environmental regulations, and other items on his liberal to-do list. But few people, in or out of government office, ask whether these policies are constitutional. The reason, sadly, is that few people care.

Our challenge today of recovering the authority of the Constitution is greater than Reagan’s and perhaps even greater than Lincoln’s was. Since Roosevelt launched the New Deal in the 1930s, several generations of Americans have grown up knowing nothing but big, paternalistic government.

The feisty independence and healthy suspicion of government power that characterized the founding generation of Americans — think of the people who defiantly flew the flag with the coiled-up snake announcing, “Don’t Tread on Me” — is now mainly the stuff of boring history textbooks.

It’s no exaggeration to suggest that the Constitution itself has become radical. Most Americans today probably cannot imagine what truly constitutional government might look like—virtually the entire federal bureaucracy, for example, would need to be eliminated. That’s why the Constitution cannot be used as a club to smash unconstitutional proposals and programs, because no one cares. If you doubt it, ask Ron Paul how much success he’s had waving his pocket Constitution at every unconstitutional policy.

Still, the extravagant spending and regulating and interfering with the private sector economy happening in Washington DC today forces upon us a choice: Either we allow it to continue, or not. Either we choose to remove all limits on government power and scope in exchange for promised socialized security, or we choose a government that operates within certain limits and we accept certain responsibilities for ourselves. This is again a time for choosing.

If we do the former, if we trade freedom and limited government in the hope that bureaucratic “experts” can govern and provide for us better than we can govern and provide for ourselves, then let us be honest about what we are choosing. And let us acknowledge openly what Reagan and Lincoln and the Founders understood, that a government of unlimited power is less likely to provide security for us, more likely to threaten us.

If, however, we choose to limit our government, we need not even agree right now on what the limits are. Reasonable minds can differ on where the line should be that separates government power from private freedom. But if we can agree in principle that limited government is the only kind befitting a free people, then we can begin asking how we might limit government’s power.

A constitution, if recognized and obeyed, is a useful means for limiting government. And if well designed, a constitution can also help us identify and enjoy the ends of political society—justice, domestic tranquility, security from foreign and domestic threats, prosperity, freedom, all within the framework of a more perfect union. Indeed, a constitution is what we need most today. The good news is that we already have one. Let us choose to understand and defend it.

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Must read of the day!

In this article, Joan Swirsky tells the truth about the man that we see destroying our country. America has been sold a bill of goods by a street thug in an attractive suit.

What Obama doesn’t realize and didn’t take into account is the strength and determination of all the modern day America Patriots that oppose him.

In the last century, the impassioned words and actions of patriots like Winston Churchill – along with America’s heroic help and sacrifice – saved Europe. The eloquence and actions of “I’ve been to the mountaintop” Martin Luther King Jr. brought America to an unprecedented level of social justice.

The peerless oratory and tireless diplomacy of the man who would become Israel’s Foreign Minister, Abba Eban convinced the entire world that after the wanton murder of six-million Jews in the Holocaust its straggling survivors deserved their own state of Israel. The inspiring words and decisive actions of President Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War, tore down the Berlin Wall, and restored economic prosperity to America. The efforts of these towering figures resulted in a more highly-evolved world.

We have also seen the opposite in totalitarian leaders like Hitler, Mussolini, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, Mao, and Saddam Hussein, among others, who exploited their masses, destroyed their economies, brought havoc, turbulence, grief and massive death within and outside of their countries, and made the world a more dangerous and threatening place.

The one thing all of these virtuous and evil men had in common was love for their respective countries, in fact a burning passion that superseded all else. The virtuous believed in freedom and democracy. The evil believed in subjugation of their peoples and lifetime tenures for themselves in order to actualize their goals of conquering their eternal enemies – Americans and Jews.

Today, we have a new crop of inveterate America- and Jew-haters, among them the Marxist leader of Venezuela Hugo Chavez, Nicaragua’s president Daniel Ortega, Iran’s “death-to-America-and-Israel” study-in-abnormal-psychology Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the ever-sabotage-America and anti-Semitic “leaders” of the 22-Arab states that surround Israel.

I have either read about or observed firsthand all of these people. Yet in my decades of commenting on the political scene, I cannot recall a single leader of any country or regime who has ever spoken negatively of his country or tolerated others speaking ill of the land or the people he represented

Until now

Bizarre and, yes, repugnant as it is to our essentially centrist country, America now has a president who has broken that time-honored tradition. Barack Obama, on the campaign trail and as the leader of the free world is the first U.S. president to proclaim to anyone within earshot that he, like his wife, is not proud of his country, and is all-too-willing to offer serial apologies – for America! – to Americans and foreigners alike.

As Ed Lasky writes: “We know that during the campaign [Obama] warned that criticism of his wife was `off-limits’. But criticism of America – well, that is fine.”

We also know that during his run for the presidency, Obama expressed sneering condescension towards all those bible-clasping, gun-owning yahoos who “cling” to those silly things, and that in Europe he consistently gave voice to America’s supposed “sins.” But all that pales in comparison to the clear contempt – looks more like hatred to me – that Obama feels for the United States of America and for its most revered founding document, the U.S. Constitution.

In just the first 100-days of his tenure, Obama’s words and actions have demonstrated that he is no friend of the country he leads. This is only a smattering of what happened on his recent three-continent trip abroad and to Mexico:

In France, Obama told his audience that America “has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive” toward Europe.

In Prague, Obama – in true utopian-kindergarten fashion – pledged “with conviction” that America will “seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” In other words, destroy big bad America’s ability to defend itself!

In London, Obama made clear that the world’s financial wealth was no longer made by those inferior leaders Roosevelt and Churchill, effectively ceding America’s leading role in creating and sharing wealth to nations that have never measured up to our country’s bountiful generosity or spirit of free-market entrepreneurship.

In Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Obama sat passively while the Marxist Chavez handed him an American-bashing book and delivered another revile-America speech, while never once rising to defend our country.

In Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Obama again sat passively while the Marxist Ortega blamed the United States for a century of what he called terroristic U.S. aggression in Central America, again emitting not a whisper of defense on our country’s behalf.

In Turkey, Obama said – incredibly and inaccurately – that America was not a Christian nation.

And in his recent trip to Mexico, Obama said that the escalating border violence was essentially America’s fault.

Scan you memory. Can you think of any other leader in world history who so consistently badmouths his own country, or fails to defend it? I can’t.

Wall St. Journal writer Dorothy Rabinowitz notes that Obama “had gone to Europe not as the voice of his nation, but as a missionary with a message of atonement for its errors. No sitting American president had ever delivered indictments of this kind while abroad, or for that matter at home. When [our allies] see Obama’s moral equivalence, they realize they are on their own and must cut their own deals to survive – understanding that multicultural trendiness is now a cynical cover for moral laxity and ‘can’t we all get along?’

Historian Victor Davis Hanson also noticed something odd about Obama’s apology tour. “Despite this fresh climate of atonement, there was a complete absence of a single apology from any other foreign leader…not a word came from Britain about colonialism…nothing from Germany on the Holocaust…not a peep from France about Algeria or Vietnam. Turkey was mum on the Armenian killings…Russia said nothing about the 30 million murdered by Stalin…Nothing came from China about the 70 million who perished under Mao…Mr. Medvedev said nothing about Putin’s brutish rule…We saw no concrete evidence of any help — or hope and change — from any foreign leader. Zilch.”

In addition, Hanson continues, “We hear nothing about our Gettysburg, or our entry into World War I. Iwo Jima and the Bulge are never alluded to. Drawing the line in Korea and forcing the end of the Soviet monstrosity are taboo subjects. That we pledged the life of New York for Berlin in the Cold War is unknown. Liberating Afghanistan and Iraq from the diabolical Taliban and Saddam Hussein is left unsaid. The Civil Rights movement, the Great Society, affirmative action, and present billion-dollar foreign-aid programs apparently never existed. Millions of Africans have been saved by George Bush’s efforts at extending life-saving medicines to AIDS patients — but again, this is never referenced.”

Blogger James Lewis says that Obama’s “obsessive need to put down his own country shows a stunningly ignorant man who has evidently never spoken to a concentration camp survivor, a Cuban refugee, a boat person from Vietnam, a Soviet dissident, or a survivor of Mao’s purges.”

And Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell adds, “Obama `gets’ the America-haters.”

Abandoning allies, Embracing enemies

“If you are a longtime enemy of the United States, count on a grand reception from the Obama administration. All is forgiven and, worse, forgotten,” write Dick Morris and Eileen McGann. “But if you have a track record as an ally or friend, you won’t get the right time of day.”

Of course apologists for Obama & Co. point to “progress” in our foreign policy, ignoring, as Caroline Glick points out, that “America’s betrayal of its democratic allies makes each of them more vulnerable to aggression at the hands of their enemies – enemies the Obama administration is now actively attempting to appease.” Glick lays out the cold hard facts:

Obama abrogated America’s strategic commitment to the defense of our ally Japan when his administration reacted to North Korea’s ballistic missile test by saying the U.S. would only shoot the missile down if it targeted U.S. territory.

Obama slapped our ally India when he refused to make ending Pakistan’s support for jihadist terror groups attacking India a central component of its strategy for contending with Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Obama failed to assure our ally Iraq that democracy and freedom will be secured before U.S. forces are withdrawn next year.

Obama de facto abandoned our allies in Eastern Europe when he announced his intention to forge a new alliance with Russia. “The Czech, Polish, Georgian and Ukrainian governments,” Glick says, “were quick to recognize that Obama’s strong desire to curry favor with the Kremlin and weaken his own country will imperil their ability to withstand Russian aggression.”

Obama “is sacrificing the U.S.’s alliance with our ally Israel “in a bid to appease the Arabs and Iran by supporting the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state,” which, Glick warns, “requires Israel to commit national suicide in exchange for `peace.’” Obama also made clear “that from the administration’s perspective, an Israeli strike that prevents Iran from becoming a nuclear power is less acceptable than a nuclear-armed Iran.” In addition, Obama sent Hamas $900 million of foreign aid, “channeled through the UNRWA, a United Nations front filled with Hamas operatives”

Obama slapped our ally England when he returned the bust of Winston Churchill to Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Obama slapped our ally Colombia and its president Alvaro Uribe when he refused to submit the free trade deal with Bogota to the Senate.

“What a great time to be our enemy!” Glick exclaims. “What a terrible time to be our friend!”

And speaking about appeasing Iran, the Obama administration recently asked a federal judge to throw out a $6.6-billion class-action lawsuit against Iran filed by 52 American diplomats and military officials held hostage for more than a year at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran 30 years ago. Nothing like selling out Americans to make brownie points with a bloodthirsty dictator!

Barry Rubin explains: “Friends, especially in Europe, are pleased, applaud, but then add that they don’t have to give this guy anything because he is all apologies and no toughness. They like the fact that he is all carrots and no sticks. If, however, they are states more at risk…they worry that they cannot rely on the United States to help and defend them. Enemies or potential rivals…say that this guy is weak and defeated. He apologizes, offers unconditional engagements, and promises concessions…they’ll eat the carrots and, if possible, their neighbors as well.”

NY Post writer Ralph Peters, a former military intelligence officer, sums up the hate-America core tenets of the “Obama Doctrine” as follows:
(1) We’re to blame,
(2) Problems can be negotiated away,
(3) Problems that can’t be talked out can be bought off,
(4) Islamist terrorism doesn’t exist,
(5) It’s all our fault,
(6) Israel’s the obstacle to Middle East peace,
(7) Our nukes threaten world peace and we need to get rid of them,
(8) Our military is dangerous,
(9) Our intelligence services are even more dangerous than our military,
(10) It’s only torture if we do it, and
(11) Blame President George W. Bush.

Obama is clearly not satisfied with threatening the safety of our tried-and-true allies abroad. He is also determined to undermine the bedrock foundation of America’s security – our military and intelligence agencies. By disclosing interrogation memos – and planning to release photographs associated with military probes into prisoner abuse – he has betrayed every heroic person who risks his or her life for our country, and unforgivably given aid-and-comfort to enemies who seethe with virulent anti-Americanism and lust for our demise. And in the Department of Homeland Security’s infamous memo, he has called members of our military, among others, potential domestic terrorists!

“After September 1th, the general outcry was, ‘Why don’t we have better overseas capabilities?’” said Porter Goss, director of the CIA from September 2004 to May 2006. “I fear that in the years to come, this refrain will be heard again. It is certainly not trust that is fostered when intelligence officers are told one day ‘I have your back,’ only to learn a day later that a knife is being held to it.”

How horrifying to contemplate that it is the President of the United States himself who is wielding that back-stabbing knife!

Questioning Obama’s patriotism

Before the November election, legal scholar Henry Mark Holzer wrote – and scrupulously documented – a stunning indictment of Obama in which he stated that Obama’s repeatedly professed claim to be a patriot is “a fraud on the American people – and an insult to the countless true patriots who, for over two hundred years, have loved and loyally and zealously supported the United States of America.”

“Patriots,” Holzer concluded, “don’t associate with and derive sustenance from terrorists, America-haters and anti-Semites; they don’t countenance fixed elections; they don’t keep secrets from voters; they don’t intimidate their enemies; they don’t denigrate and degrade our military; they don’t gratuitously interfere with their government’s efforts to protect our country; and they don’t disdain the symbol of this great nation, which for over two centuries men and women have fought and died: the American flag. Whatever Barack Obama is, we can be certain that he is no patriot!”

The events that have followed Obama’s election, Holzer says, “have compounded the proof of the president’s lack of patriotism,” which he has recently spelled out in a follow-up article. A few of the many examples he provides of what “a patriotic American president does not do include:

Bankrupt this country and court massive inflation in order to implement his vision of a fascist/socialist nation.

Sit on his hands with a straight face while a South American thug insults his country.

Appoint America-haters to his cabinet.

Cozy up to a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iranian madman.

Impotently watch the probably-already-nuclear-armed North Korean Stalinists lob a ballistic missile across the Pacific.

Fail to stanch the flow of illegal aliens across the Mexican-United States border.

Cut the defense budget.

Strangle innovation during a serious recession by raising taxes.

Close Guantanamo Bay without a clue of how to handle the enemy combatants incarcerated there.

Publicly announce what measures military and CIA interrogators can use to extract information from terrorists.

Apologize to the world for what has made America great and grovel to persons, nations. and institutions unfit to shine our shoes!

Cede American sovereignty to the American-hating United Nations.

Defy the Second Amendment and a Supreme Court decision by making an end run that substantially reduces the supply of certain ammunition.

Repudiate the policy and practice of missile shield installation.”

Some dare call it treason

It is one thing to question a president’s patriotism, but even more serious to accuse him of treason. In an open letter to Obama on Treason, Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, III (U.S. Naval Academy, Class of 1975)minces no words in accusing the president of sending Army forces to Samson, Alabama, and Boston in violation of the Constitution. Here are excerpts of his letter:

“I have observed and extensively recorded invidious attacks by military-political aristocrats against the Constitution for twenty years. Now you have broken in and entered the White House by force of contrivance, concealment, conceit, and deceit. Posing as an imposter president and commander in chief, you have stripped civilian command and control over the military establishment…
“We come now to the reckoning. I accuse you and your military-political criminal assistants of TREASON. I name you and your military criminal associates as traitors. Your criminal ascension manifests a clear and present danger. You fundamentally changed our form of government. The Constitution no longer works….

“I identify you as a foreign-born domestic enemy. You are not my president. You are not my commander in chief.

Fitzpatrick is not alone. John Smith – a blogger on Townhall.com, titled a recent article “Obama Is a Traitor.” Commenting on the president’s release of the “torture” memos, Smith says:

“Given the actions of Barack Obama in recent days, one has to wonder how many soon-to-be released State secrets have been gathered by radical left-wing traitors and hidden in the dark recesses of Washington, awaiting the Manchurian Candidate’s command to publish them…

“The motivation for Obama’s recent intentional disclosure of Top Secret CIA memoranda…was an act committed solely to increase his own political power through appeasement of the radical left…or was it …guided by the twisted moral imperative uniquely embraced by the Left, which dictates that only those actions that serve to limit individual liberty, punish patriotism, and destroy the traditions and culture of the United States of America are good?…

“Were Obama’s actions motivated by a deeply rooted desire to harm this Nation?…

“Article III of the Constitution defines Treason against the United States as “… levying War against them or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort…”.

“Top Secret information is the highest level of classification that we have on a national level. By definition, such material, if made public, will cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security…

“The willful disclosure of Top Secret information is an act of Treason against the United States….A sitting President of The United States of America has committed Treason.”

Fitzpatrick and Smith are among a rising tide of voices – in and outside of the military – who have observed with growing horror Obama’s proclivity to destroy our capitalist economic system, subvert the U.S. Constitution, endanger our military and intelligence services, and obsequiously embrace America’s sworn enemies.

Dr. Jack Wheeler, a consummate Washington insider, goes one step further. “The evidence that the President of the United States is a traitor is mounting. The evidence that the President of the United states is a mortal danger to America’s national security is mounting. The evidence that the President of the United States will not defend America from threats and insults from every two-bit fascist dictator in the world …is not only mounting, it is overwhelming.”

Writer Amy L. Geiger-Hammer states: “I do wonder if Obama should be called a traitor or just incompetent…does he ever talk about what a great country America is?”
And UK journalist Gerald Warner echoes that rising tide: “If al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest of the Looney Tunes brigade want to kick America to death, they had better move in quickly and grab a piece of the action before Barack Obama finishes the job himself. Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people – not even Jimmy Carter. Obama’s problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead, it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US Constitution. “

Is America Lost?

Multiple lawsuits to find proof that Obama is Constitutionally ineligible to be president are ongoing and will ultimately determine if he is an American or Kenyan or Indonesian or UK “natural-born” citizen. To this date, he has spent over a million dollars blocking the suits about his still-missing birth certificate, and there is increasing evidence that the birth certificate attested to by FactCheck.org, FightTheSmears.org, and DailyKos.com are forgeries. And of course we still have not seen Obama’s Selective Service record, medical records, multiple visas, college transcripts, et al.
If Obama is proven to be the fraud and interloper many suspect, every one of his edicts, bills, laws, dictates, Supreme Court selections, et al, will be overturned , leaving America to cope with serious problems – under the leadership of the incomprehensible Joe Biden – but nothing approaching this hate-America president’s far-left socialist domestic programs and appease-our-enemies foreign policy.
The huge national turnouts at the Tea Parties of April 15 were only the beginning of a movement that was spurred by ordinary Americans waking up to Obama’s destruction of our economy, his attempts to reshape America into a banana republic, the grave damage he’s inflicted on our military and intelligence services, and his unsavory predilection for embracing our enemies and apologizing non-stop for the most magnificent nation on earth.
In short, they are waking up to the president who hates his country.
Editor Charlotte Baker predicts that “the Tea Parties and other, more aggressive, protests will grow exponentially, and that the Obama juggernaut can and will be stopped.” It’s crucial, she says, “for all Americans to recall the history they learned in school – at least before the Left hijacked what used to be known as `education.’ The Europeans, Japanese and Russians were all taken over by one form or another of totalitarianism because their combined history was one of absolute rulers – kings, czars and `divine’ emperors. They were totally conditioned to tyranny.
“But the monstrous anti-American gang that rigged the voting system on November 4, 2008– as they do routinely in Obama’s Chicago Machine politics – to push Obama into We-the-People’s White House, have shown – even before his inauguration – the kind of overreaching that arrogant tyrants always demonstrate. Hitler, Mao, Tojo and Stalin all got away with overreaching, but they weren’t brutalizing Americans.

“Tolerating totalitarianism is simply not in the genetic code – the DNA – of Americans!” Baker adds. “Freedom and Liberty run in our blood!”

Indeed!

Source…

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Until now

Abandoning allies, Embracing enemies

Questioning Obama’s patriotism

Some dare call it treason

Is America Lost?