http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323475304578499293514955294.html?mod=trending_now_3 Every day brings new revelations about who knew what about the IRS targeting conservative groups during President Obama’s re-election campaign, but the overall impression is of a vast federal bureaucracy run amok. While the White House continues to peddle the story of a driverless train wreck, taxpayers are being treated to a demonstration of […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323475304578499280989584770.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion Of all the excuses, explanations and alibis pouring forth in the saga of the IRS kneecapping of conservative groups during the victorious Obama 2012 campaign, the one that deserves attention is this from David Axelrod: “Part of being president is that there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know, because the government is […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/349090/illegal-alien-jailbreak-deroy-murdock Just before the sequester commenced on March 1, the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement division (ICE) freed illegal-alien detainees from federal custody. Not to worry, White House spokesman Jay Carney reassured the American people. These were just “low-level, non-criminal detainees.” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said of these inmates, “Several hundred […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/349069/big-government%E2%80%99s-abuses-power-victor-davis-hanson Government is now so huge, powerful, and callous that citizens risk becoming virtual serfs, lacking the freedoms guaranteed by the Founders. Is that perennial fear an exaggeration? Survey the current news. We have just learned that the Internal Revenue Service before the 2012 election predicated its tax-exemption policies on politics. It inordinately denied tax […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/349110/fifth-obama-andrew-c-mccarthy You can always rely on the administration of Barack Obama, a former constitutional-law lecturer (or as his résumé-inflating fans put it, “professor”), to do the sleazy thing when it comes to the Constitution the president is sworn to defend. Thus, the performance on Wednesday of Lois Lerner, chief of the Obama IRS’s Conservative Harassment Division, […]
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3599/america_s_new_isolationists_are_endangering_the_west
MUCH AS I ADMIRE JOHN BOLTON THE FAULT LIES WITH GEORGE BUSH WHO STARTED TWO WARS WITHOUT A DEFINED MISSION OR ENEMY OR ULTIMATE STRATEGY…..IT WAS A WAR ON “THE ENEMIES OF FREEDOM” WITHOUT CLEARLY ENUNCIATING THE WORDS ISLAM OR JIHAD…..AMERICANS ARE TIRED OF FOREIGN INTERVENTION WHICH RESULTS IN NO GAIN ABROAD BUT REAL PAIN IN A TANKING ECONOMY AT HOME…..RSK
The spectre of isolationism is stalking the Republican Party. It is still far from dominant, but we would be ignoring reality to underestimate the risks evident in today’s turbulent political milieu. Ironically, Republican isolationism is in many respects attributable to Barack Obama.
His palpable lack of concern for foreign and defence policy issues, and the public’s false sense of security thereby generated, combined with his massive federal expenditures and consequent budget deficits that threaten the vitality of America’s economic system, have created an unexpected and deeply troubling reaction among Republicans, heretofore America’s national-security stalwarts.
A little recent history. In the late 1990s, many Europeans feared the United States was drifting back into isolationism. They worried that Republican victories in the 1994 elections, capturing control of both the House and Senate for the first time since 1952, inevitably meant a reactionary, inward-turning America. George W. Bush’s 2000 election as president only cemented their fears that, for example, Washington would withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, erect a national missile-defence shield and leave Europe to fend for itself.
These European concerns, shared by the American Left, badly misinterpreted US history. While the United States certainly steered clear of European entanglements before World War I (or tried to), it was not for lack of interest in the rest of the world, but because of preoccupation with building what Thomas Jefferson called “an empire of liberty”. While Europe’s 19th-century empires have disappeared, America’s successful imperialism is memorialised today in once foreign lands named Florida, Texas, California, Alaska, Hawaii and the like. One may find such success irksome, but what Europeans saw as “isolationism” was actually US unilateralism and exceptionalism at work. Of course, many of America’s critics also detest those characteristics, but they are nonetheless conceptually and empirically very different phenomena.
George W. Bush’s presidency made the differences between isolationism and unilateralism completely clear, contrary to the expectations of critics who feared the former and got the latter. Withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, “unsigning” the Rome Statute (which created the International Criminal Court), scuttling a “verification” protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention, and refusing to negotiate a “small arms and light weapons” agreement violating the Constitution’s Second Amendment, and more, appalled the “blame America first” crowd. Of course, what really sent them over the edge was dismantling the Taliban/al-Qaeda regime in Afghanistan, followed by regime change in Iraq without a new Security Council resolution granting humble supplicants from Washington permission.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/22/the-obama-enemies-list/ The Obama administration has an enemies list, and John Dodson was on it. The special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) infuriated his superiors by alerting Congress and everyone else about the government’s gunrunning scheme called Fast and Furious. He had to pay for his act of good citizenship. […]
http://www.steynonline.com/5562/jihad-abhors-a-vacuum Post-9/11, we in the omniscient pundit class were all Afghan experts. Post-Boston, we are all Chechen experts. Strictly between us, I can count what I know about Chechens on one leg. A couple of years ago, while I was in Copenhagen picking up an award from the Danish Free Press Society, a one-legged Chechen […]
http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2013/05/22/irs-abuse-the-guide/?print=1 Cleta Mitchell has prepared this comprehensive guide to the IRS abuse of election-integrity and Tea Party groups. It has everything you need to know to understand the legal environment which sprouted this scandal. An interesting narrative split is developing among the Left. As Bryan Preston notes, the reliable Praetorian Press Guard, formerly known as […]
http://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/2013/05/22/dont-criminalize-the-investigations-immunize-the-witnesses/?print=1
Keep your eye on the mission, which is to save us from an ambitious tyranny. We cannot accomplish this life-and-death task if we turn it over to the lawyers. It’s a political mission, not a law enforcement roundup. We need to know, in detail, what happened. We have to know the details, which will, if we are good, enable us to dismantle an enormously ambitious attempt to change America in precisely the way Alexis de Tocqueville predicted. As I wrote four years ago [1], American tyranny would not resemble those of the past. It would consist of a series of rules and regulations than would enervate us, and reduce us to objects of manipulation by an arrogant state:
That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
We can see this impulse at work in an amazing number of governmental initiatives, from the truly terrifying new speech code [2] for all American colleges and universities that receive federal funds, to the previously unimaginable intrusion of the Feds into our privacy, whether via the IRS or the Justice Department, as in the criminalization of journalists doing their jobs. It goes on and on, from Obamacare to the greatly expanded role of Washington in corporate enterprise, and to myriad regulations–many of which we do not even know–and executive orders.
