Maggie's Farm

...this silence results from the fact that everyone has his state-granted privileges that he fears to lose (journalists, for example, pay lower rates of tax than ordinary mortals). The one thing that unites the French is resistance to change, not because the present is so happy and glorious, but because few understand the causes of past progress, and most look to the future with fear.

Read entire.

Mexico has been invading the US illegally for many years. But without arms, without armies, and with only covert governmental support from Mexico. What kind of President wants its population to leave their country? The East Germans used to dig tunnels to get out, but Mexicans are digging tunnels to get into the US.

In recent years, their armed forces have been engaged in this invasion, behind the scenes. Thanks to the blogs, this quiet war is getting some attention. The MSM ignores it, due to psychotic political correctness or something like that. Kind of similar to the Moslem invansion of Europe.

My suggestion is that Mexico get its act together, and become a country people want to live in and stay in. Why can't they do that? No-one is stopping them, and the US does all it can to help them. They have natural resources, great beaches, good hunting, a big population of nice folks, religion, a work ethic - everything you need to make a proud, successful nation without trying to colonize the US. (We tried being colonies already, and we did not like it very much.)

Message to the invaders, and legal immigrants too from around the planet: Why not stay in your own country, and make it a better place? It's not like the 1920s anymore - there is a world economy and the internet, and we are all connected. Show some pride of homeland - some patriotism. You can do it. Everyone in the world who wants to breathe freedom and who wants to take the risk of economic opportunity and personal development and achievement instead of being weak dependents of a totalitarian or corrupt or socialist State, wants to come to the US. We only have room for a few of you brave good people, and it is a big loss for your home country to have the ambitious and most energetic folks walk away.

Why should the US and Australia be the only Meccas for those excellent, energetic people seeking such fine but difficult things? Be patriots, honor your own traditions, and fix your own place. We did it here. India is doing it, too, Vietnam, even Libya - of all places - among others. It is not easy. For us, it required a war or two or three, but we paid our dues. It is worth the effort.

While chuckling over The Barrister's post yesterday about spying, I arrived at a mini-epiphany: those goofy but loveable entertainers Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are right: the American Left really does hate America.

And the Democratic Party follows their lead just like a pig on a leash. I hate to admit it, because I like the idea of a two-party system, with each holding the other to account, but both loving their country and what it stands for. That ain't what we have now.

So, for amusement, next I Googled "anti-war" and some variants therof and saw what popped up. Please sample some of these to see where the current anti-war movement is coming from. Talk about living in the past!

Truthout, via Geocities, Communist Tactics for the Anti-War Movement, Lessons from Vietnam, Socialist Viewpoint, Tom Dispatch, Veterans for Peace, again Socialist Viewpoint, The Nation, Atheism.com

Now I do not mean to smear anyone with serious and principled misgivings about the War on Terror, or the liberation of the Middle East, with Communist intentions. But I think these sorts of people on the links are where the rhetoric, the talking-points, and the attitudes are coming from: Vietnam and a wish for the defeat of the US, just like The Barrister's character with the tin-foil hat. Too bad they're too young to remember World War 2, or are willfully forgetting it.

Daily Pundit on "The coming catastrophe in Britain:"

To add to Lastango's series of posts on the decline and fall of the United Kingdom, come two related articles in The Sunday Telegraph. The first is one of the leaders, which details how Labour's handling of public-sector pensions could end up bankrupting the country, The second is by Max Hastings, the military historian (and no fan of the Iraq war). He states that the cult of human rights legisaltion is gutting the British armed forces, long regarded as among the finest on the planet. Taken together, the articles make for depressing reading.

Read his entire piece.

Culturally, religiously, genetically, and economically, we Americans feel most connected to Europe, and to the Anglosphere. It's only natural, but it isn't necessarily for the best.

In the US, our interest and attention has quickly moved to India, China, and to the east in general. You are being left behind by the movement of history, but there is no-one to blame but yourselves that India is more friendly to business growth, innovation, jobs and creativity. More friendly to the future and more committed to the Work Ethic.

But at Maggie's Farm, we are deeply concerned about the direction being taken by our European cousins. And not because of any self-interest - it is purely an emotional and nostalgic family matter to us. When one watches a close family member heading for disaster, it is impossible to be indifferent or to remain silent. All we can do is to talk to you with love and concern.

We are concerned with your judgement and prudence:

You have taken sanctimonious, pseudo-neo-Maoist Political Correctness to a self-satirical and suicidal extent.

You have regulated your businesses to the point of suffocation.

You have taken moral equivalency to the point of endorsing moral nihilism.

You have endorsed masochistic pacifism -  a self-destructive pacifism, since the "Better Red than Dead" days, (if not before).

Your loony do-gooders are destroying your noble and historic culture and traditions.

You are abandoning the idea of "family" by letting "the State" become the surrogate parent, and getting comfortable with people becoming children, as in feudalism.

You don't have three or four children because you cannot afford them, or because you have no confidence in your future, or because you are self-obsessed - and your native population is declining.

Your antiquated, dusty socialist and "third-way" Nanny State notions destroy entrepreneurialism, growth, energy, and a can-do attitude, and reward sloth, lethargy, discouragement, "working the system", dependency, excuse-based values, and hedonism.

Your taxes tax the human spirit, discourage effort, defeat invention, and drive business, and work, away to more friendly climates.

Your tax-supported subsidies support long-dead industries and businesses and their parastic unions, like brain-dead bodies on life-support - and thus drain capital from new vibrant enterprises.

You welcome too many immigrants from alien cultures because you have no confidence or pride in your own. Sure, permit limited immigration, but not invasion or you won't have your country anymore.

You reward the sociopathic and weak, and seem to resent and punish your achievers.

You deprive your people of arms, and welcome murderous invaders. Can it be true that you are not allowed to shoot intruders in your home? That is nuts. Why not simply castrate your men at birth, if you don't want your men to protect and preserve their families. Call a copper? Please!

Your antipathy for religion (unless it's the religion of others) has left you with a spiritual and moral emptiness - a vacuum -  to be filled with...what? What sacred values? Is there nothing you believe worth dying for? You are better than that!

Your losses of your Empires has left you with no easy source of national pride and seemingly with no avenue for adventure and energy and heroism, and with multiple avenues for exhaustion and defeat and dependency - and ultimately moral, economic, cultural, and spiritual poverty.

And you don't listen to enough Country Music.

This is the definition of cultural decadence.

You are heading in a direction which will lead you to becoming a minor backwater of the world - self-preoccupied, comfort-obsessed, culture-less, childless, economically pathetic and, ultimately, a Disney-type travel destination into past history (like a San Gimignano run by Moslems) living on long-past glory like beggars, instead of a growing, energetic, inspiring and vital part of the planet which is grounded in a profoundly important heritage of freedom and thought and energy and pride. You chose a false security over vitality, and that will never work out in the long run. You have given up too much, and replaced it with a big nothing. Or with an illusion of comfort and ease, like spoiled children. That is not what man was made for, and it is not mature and not manly and not noble.

And what is this EU nonsense? An endless source of rules produced by a million un-elected bureacrats who only want you to be "better"? What? You need that? You want that? The EU is nothing but a multi-billion-dollar bitch of a Kindergarten teacher, and not one of them has more sense than the average Brit tradesman or French artichoke farmer or German banker. Less - or those over-educated bureaucrats would have real productive jobs in the real world.

It is painful to the millions of Americans of European heritage to watch this happening before our eyes. It feels, to us in the US, like having a suicidal child - or even worse - a suicidal parent.

Well, it's your life and these are your countries, and you will do what you want, even if it is destruction of spirit and history and future. But we have to, at least, speak out about it. This is a battle of spirit and soul and heart and cultural confidence - a battle without armies, from which the USA cannot and will not rescue you, because the damage is self-inflicted.

The rest of this big world is going to "eat your lunch" culturally, economically, and in every other way - without a single shot being fired (deGaulle, Churchill, and Eisenhower are weeping in their graves), unless you pull up your socks and get with reality - fast.

Your friends and relatives in the US pray that you will.

(Yes, that is Winchester Cathedral.)

The answer has to do with a critical shift in the Republicans' governing strategy, dating to the late 1990s. From 1981 through 1998, Republican reformers' thinking was dominated by Dave Stockman (President Reagan's first budget director) and Newt Gingrich (the reform-minded House speaker of 1995 to '98). Both were movement politicians who believed that, by cutting spending, Republicans could build prosperity, tame Big Government, and win majority status.

The trouble was that budget cuts brought short-term political backlashes that kept interrupting the program. Burned by President Clinton in 1995-96 and then spanked by voters in 1998, Republicans decided to reverse the sequence. First they would build a political machine; then, once safely entrenched, they would reform Social Security and Medicare, shrink government, and so on. The new course was set by DeLay and Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political strategist -- both machine-builders par excellence.

And so, under DeLay and Bush, the Republicans spent generously, even profusely, to build their base. The number of budgetary earmarks increased from 2,100 in 1998 to 14,000 in 2005, according to Citizens Against Government Waste. To disarm the Democrats, the Republicans gave up on reducing entitlement spending and instead dramatically increased it, notably with an expensive new prescription drug program. (According to Richard Kogan, a senior fellow with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Republicans have added $540 billion to entitlement costs over the 2001-to-2011 period.) They cut taxes and spent heavily on the Iraq war and defense. (Real spending on defense and security has risen by more than 7 percent a year since 2001, Kogan says.)

When, last year, DeLay blurted out that the budget had no fat left, he meant that it had no political fat, and he was right. Every dollar now served a constituent group in DeLay's carefully built machine. Phase one had worked. In 2005, with Bush safely re-elected and their congressional majorities cemented, Republicans launched phase two: a reform effort aimed at Social Security.

Then came a shock. Social Security reform collapsed and spending proved all but intractable, both for the same reason: Large-scale reform needs a popular majority, not just a parliamentary one, and Republicans constitute only a third of the country. In building their machine, the Republicans had made Democrats hostile and independents suspicious, and the support that remained was far from enough.

Bush is no Reagan, nor did he ever have the kind of mandate for change that Reagan enjoyed. After all, Clinton did hold to - or was held to -meaningful fiscal discipline, which is part of why he was popular among financial types. Read entire.

Jim Pinkerton has a straight-forward thesis at TCS about the formation of regional religio-cultural blocs around the world - the Western/Christian, the Chinese/Confucian, the Indian, etc. The caliphate aspires to be one of them. A quote:

So regional blocs, based on a common characteristic, such as religious and cultural ancestry, are naturally powerful. And of course, if one country is the leader of such a bloc, it doesn’t want a rival within that bloc to emerge -- and thus it can’t be displeasing to American strategists that the European Union is foundering. Just as Europeans were once eager to keep the rest of the world divided, so we should not lament the failure of a Brussels-based superstate to emerge as much more than a costly red-tape dispenser. America is effectively unchallenged within the Christian Bloc.

But there’s a problem dead ahead: As we look around the world, we can see that other countries are forming blocs of their own, too. China, for example, is pulling together a Confucian bloc in East Asia. The People’s Republic is an empire of its own, people-wise and territory-wise, but it is now using its longer and longer politico-economic hook to reel in as many of its neighbors as it can.

It makes sense. And, as I see it, it's a post-imperial development, since it is no longer necessary to "own" another nation to make money trading with it. It's the new version of Ye Olde Power Game. Read the whole thing here.

For Libertarians and traditional conservatives, any expansion of power by any of the three branches of government is seen as a threat to freedom.

And both would agree that the main threat to freedom is not specifically an imperial presidency, but an imperial Federal Government - a condition which Leftists and Democrats have pursued since FDR. Why a threat? Because it is too far from the people, too far from local daily life, and too arrogant.

When it comes to the national defense, however, things are different. Libertarians and conservatives tend to view national defense as one of the genuine constitutional functions of the Feds, while the Liberals seek to de-fang America for reasons of their own. It's the one area in which they wish to see the Federal Govt weakened.

I happen to believe that anything Bush has done to monitor cell calls was a good idea, and that he would have been tarred and feathered and chased out of the country if he had neglected such a basic defensive tactic. And has nothing to do with tyranny. And any liberal brouhaha about it is pure opportunistic partisanship, hysterical scare tactics, and a pile of BS - which they know but won't admit. Because were they in power, they would have done the same thing. Al Gore wants to be Secretary of State. Or any paying job - he's been living off his inheritance and tobacco farm and trust fund - right? No manly pride in that. Too similar to Ted the Swimmer.

Paul Craig Roberts has written a thoughtful but, in the end, hysterical piece on this subject here.  Off this point, but along the same lines, our Yankee neighbor Tom Bowler clarifies some political differences here.