This note is a guest post for my friend Bud Burrell, a SPEC OPS Vet and respected financial advisor. Bud is in Arizona, and, with the recent cross-border invasion of illegal children and gang bangers, he has clearly had about all can stand of the present administration’s “I have a pen” Tyranny and contempt for the Constitution. Like Sarah Palin, Bud clearly thinks it is time to start preparing articles of impeachment.
But before we go there, I want to draw your attention to one of the best non-fiction books about America that I’ve seen, America: Imagine a World Without Her.
The publication of this book made its author the target of “selective law enforcement” by several Federal Bureaucracies, including the IRS. It saw a major retailer, COSTCO, whose CEO is a major Obama campaign donor, pull it from their shelves – until public outrage forced a policy reversal. It is seeing frantic efforts to discredit the author, and to suppress this book and its companion movie. All of which, to me, makes it a MUST READ.
Here is an Amazon link, or see it below:
http://www.amazon.com/America-Imagine-World-without-Her/dp/162157203X/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
My own “5-star” review is here. Printed blow is the current “Most Helpful” Amazon review for this book, an excellent review which goes into more detail:
We are in the middle of a fundamental transformation of America from her traditions to something new. Will it still be America?, June 4, 2014
By
Let’s get it right out of the way. While his critics will use his legal troubles against him, the arguments and evidence in this book (and the movie) should stand on their own. I think they are solid and stand up powerfully. Remember, when you have the facts, you argue the facts. When you don’t have the facts, you argue the law, and when you don’t have the facts or the law on your side, you attack the person.
When you hear his opponents bad mouthing Dinesh D’Souza personally, you know they do not have an argument to make. This is why you hear politicians trying to turn themselves into victims of personal attacks because it serves to deflect the serious arguments being made against their policies and actions in office.
Be alert, my friends. Be alert! The idea of this book isn’t that America is about to disappear any time soon, but rather that we are in the middle of a fundamental transformation so profound and severe that it changes what America is and her place in the world.
Essentially, the country will have the same name, but the new management has transformed it from its traditional principles to radically new ideas completely disconnected from and antithetical to those of its founding and history. I think we can see this clearly.
Of course, if you like the new ideas, you think it is a wonderful thing. If, like me, you despise the new ideas and revere the founding and traditions, you are horrified by what is taking place. But that it is taking place seems obvious and not debatable to me. How about you?
He sets up the argument that the end of American Civilization is the end of Western Civilization since Europe is already in thrall to the Left and Socialist ideals. He points out that the external threats we see to America are not the real problem, but the replacement of our Constitution and our Founding principles with these new ideals.
And what are they? He uses as an illustrative point the view of America held by two influential Frenchmen. For the Founding we get the case made about what America was by Alexis de Tocqueville in his famous and important book “Democracy in America”. And for the new ideas that are rapidly replacing our Founding we get Michel Foucault, whom the author new when he was a student at Dartmouth and Foucault was a teacher there. One is an ideology of action, energy, confidence, liberty, and real progress. The other is a political ideology of power, government, resentment, dependence, and futility.
America used to be about leaving the country richer for the next generation. Present America is about spending the livelihood of generations yet unborn and sticking them with the tab. As Madison, Jefferson, Washington, and all our Founders understood, government is necessary and useful for some things. But it is oppression and must be limited and contained and used properly as a fire can be used to heat the home and cook food.
Left to itself, government will, like a fire let out of control, consume everything and destroy the entire house and destroy the lives of the people who used to inhabit the home.
How many times do we have to relearn the lesson that men and women are not angels and will misuse power for their own purposes if left without constraint? We also get to see how Obama was raised by Leftists, sought out Leftists, was educated by Socialists and Communists, and has friendships with radicals such as Bill Ayers, Edward Said, Robert Mangabeira Unger, and Jeremiah Wright. There are many others.
D’Souza also recounts his own conversation with Allen Ginsberg while at Dartmouth and how this influence sprang from the same anti-Founding Socialism that Obama drank deeply from while growing up. Their basic belief is that America obtained all its riches by stealing it from others and that it must be dismantled and the wealth returned. America’s moral guilt is otherwise irredeemable.
We must retreat from the world stage and allow others to take center stage and assert their values (whatever those may be). And anything done in the service of making that happen is justifiable and “true” no matter who it conflicts with trivialities like facts and historical truth. Ideology is all that matters and the power to implement it constitutes all that is true.
We are introduced to Saul Alinsky, his principles and methods, and how they influence not just Obama, but the Clintons and all their associates on the far Left today.
As the author points out: the commonplace is that if we elect Hillary in 2016 we get Bill. But we also get Saul and all his baggage, as well.
D’Souza also examines the very effective tool used today; especially in our schools, universities, and in our mass media. It is the idea that our values today are suitable for judging all previous eras (as if the future will have the same values we hold and will not misunderstand and misjudge us as we do those in the past).
Of course, they teach the idea that we “stole” America from its original inhabitants. The role of conquest among all peoples and nations is never taught and usually condemned only in Europe and especially by America. D’Souza demonstrates the tribal wars and extinctions of people and tribes among the Native Americans at the hands of other Native Americans. Of course, they did not view themselves as one people. They engaged in brutal attacks on each other and engaged in continual dispossession of the lands and lives of other groups.
They were anything but the peaceful philosopher innocents of the Leftist imagination. The same is true of the Southwest and Far Western United States and our wars with Mexico. The land became part of America, but the property rights of Mexicans were recognized and formerly Mexican residents became American citizens. Nor did the vast majority of these newly minted Americans seek to leave their new country and return to Mexico.
D’Souza also examines the horrors of slavery and the idea of reparations and colonization (separating the former slaves to another country of their own) at the time immediately following the Civil War. Frederick Douglass was among those who rejected both. He wanted his people to stand on their own two legs and no longer to be dependent on the white man or the government for protection different from any other citizen. Frederick Douglass understood that America was founded by white men, but refused to see it as a white man’s country.
So we should today. The author also has a chapter comparing the ideals espoused by Douglass and Booker T. Washington compared to those of the modern Civil Rights leaders from DuBois through the NAACP and Michael Eric Dyson. He notes that Martin Luther King thanks Thomas Jefferson for providing the moral basis for the liberty and rights of all citizens, including blacks. This book also contains a spirited defense of the virtue of prosperity and the morality of free markets.
He shoots down the notions of America as an exploitive evil empire oppressing all but the elite. Along the way he also criticizes the present day GOP for being so inept in its espousing these principles.
D’Souza sees exploitation of the poor and labor by Progressives and their bureaucracies than by the freedom to work and thrive by your own hard work and wits. It is government cronyism that stifles economic growth and freezes out competition from smaller businesses and the formation of new businesses. He points the finger at modern redistributionist government as the biggest thief of all. Not only in the direct appropriation of dollars from the politically unfavored to the politically favored, but through massive and expensive and freedom destroying regulation. Moreover, he sees this ever larger more intrusive government as a prison.
He refers to the American Panopticon; referring to prison design by Jeremy Bentham where the prisoners where kept under constant observation. It is a design that has rarely been used. However, with today’s technology, oppressive laws, regulations, and ever more demanding government, we are all living in a prison of our government’s making in order to be kept “safe”. This capitulation to central authority demonstrates how we are losing our way as a nation and losing our will to resist this loss of freedom and liberty. D’Souza ends by reminding us that decline is a choice, not an inevitability. I really like this book.
My one quibble is that I think D’Souza at times dresses up his arguments with biasing detail such as discussing Foucault’s homosexuality and penchant for sex with strangers and teenage boys. How does this help the core idea he is trying to make? And it invites opponents to resist with side arguments of their own. He does this kind of argument by defaming a few times and while always true, they seem a bit cheap to me. But the sensationalism probably helps sell more books and tickets. Oh, well. Still, it is a good book.
I recommend that you get it and read it. Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Saline, MI
***
Highly recommended, and have not seen the movie yet, but plan to.
AND HERE IS MY GUEST POST
by Bud Burrell
Crises Solved by President Obama? ZERO. Crises Created by Obama? Impossible to Determine.
We have watched Obama carefully through more than 7 years of non-stop campaigning, filled with unending promises and lies. This has gone beyond the pale for what any citizen should expect.
If anyone thinks there is no calculated pattern to this behavior, they are either in denial or they are ideologues without morals. The over-riding guidelines of how Obama has governed are in the classic book, “Rules for Radicals” by the now infamous Communist ideologue Saul Alinsky. Indeed, Obama has so systematically violated his oath of office, he has created a crisis of conscience for anyone who ever took an oath of office to protect and defend this country and the Constitution.
Obama’s arrogance has shown no bounds. His actions with regard to changing and writing laws without Congress violate not only the letter of the law; they are a mortal insult to anyone believing in the balancing of the Separation of Powers in our Constitution. I have spoken with many people who have recognized this, but who seem intellectually paralyzed about making a real political issue of his treasonous behavior.
Cost: $ 263 Million in 2014, through June
Beginning with the issue of his sloppily forged birth certificate, to his 80 Social Security account numbers, to Fast and Furious, to his destruction of our sovereign borders, Obama seems to be above accountability for his conduct. Now, even his own Democratic Party, who master-stroked the insane and inept 2700 page Obamacare, is now abandoning him. If any group should be abandoned, if not condemned, it is the Democrats who elected this fraud our President.
Obama believes he is untouchable, and that he is getting away with his illegal and insulting behavior because his Attorney General, Eric Holder, is completely at his command. Holder personifies the character of the amoral lawyer addressed in fact and satire, and a human shield against the amorality and criminal behavior of his President. When will the American people say enough? Why do they think that will make any difference? Obama has ignored both Congress and the Supreme Court. Who individually thinks they have that kind of power to neuter him?
I am disgusted beyond words. I was always a “My Country, Right or Wrong.” I can no longer say that. I took an oath of office for which many of my friends and acquaintances sacrificed their lives in the name of.
The recent murders of Breibart and his Coroner and Tom Clancy were just the latest crises before the newest one, the illegal importation of children. Obama used his brilliant strategies of never letting a crisis go to waste, and of creating the crises anytime one of his prior failures started to get too much focus from the Press, the House or the Senate.
He has created crises through his incompetence, and by a more evil strategy of destroying this country from within, tearing apart our Constitutional Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. He has no feelings of loyalty to this country. He panders to the very worst of the very weakest members of our society. Anyone reading his 2012 campaign speeches heard the identical repetition of tired rhetoric of the 2008 campaign.
If ever a candidate were slandered, it was Mitt Romney, whose positions on the issues weren’t just right, but systematically so. The Candy Crowell debacle about her erroneous position on what was said or not by Obama, an outright lie, cost her nothing, when she should have been forced to trial for her citizenship. What would have happened to a conservative moderator for such a damaging error? And this caricature of a left wing demagogue never even bothered to apologize, not to Romney, nor to the American Public. No candidate should ever again agree to debate in front of such left wing ideologues, or to have their debates over-sighted by the current Organization responsible for these debates.
I felt compelled to write this, but it won’t change anything, except my demands on my own morality. I hope this act will give me some consolation before the coming conflagration.
I once repeated a story told in a movie about a gigolo who has a conversation with the father of a woman he was “escorting”. The very British father said that a great book (written by the gigolo) had an astonishing observation that women get the relationship they really want. I say the same to the American people. They made this creature President, and they own him. And thus was it ever so.
http://budburrell.blogspot.com/2014/07/crises-solved-by-pres-obama-zero-crises.html