The American Icarus

By Alan Caruba

There are certain laws of nature that no one can amend or avoid. In the classic Greek tale of Icarus, despite warnings Icarus flew too close to the sun, melted the wax that held the feathers that had given him the gift of flight, and falls to his death. The law of gravity contributed to his end because what goes up must come down.

These days I think of the nation in general and the Democrats in Congress in particular as Icarus. They have ignored all the warnings about Obamacare and now have the political trajectory of a rock tossed too high in the air.

The voters reaction to the excesses of the Bush administration—-which now seem minor in comparison to those of the Democrats—-catapulted a virtually unknown and literally unvetted, minor first-term senator from Illinois into the Oval Office. The voters had first expressed their unhappiness in 2006 when control of Congress passed from the Republicans.

It seems to me that Americans have been unhappy for a very long time, but I can recall few decades when they were happy. With World War Two behind them, Americans launched themselves into the 1950s with enthusiasm, getting married, having babies, and building an economy that was unrivaled. America became the lone superpower.

By the 1960s, though, things began to sour. A generation of young people began to question all the values that had served their parents and grandparents well. The civil rights movement emerged and by the end of the decade the nation was mired in a war in Vietnam most people did not support. It would result in the death of more than 50,000 of our youth. A drug culture began to take root.

The signal political change during the 1960s was the implementation of Medicare in 1965, a significant expansion of Social Security. It quickly exceeded its projected costs.

By the 1970s, despite the inspiration of having begun to explore space, putting men on the Moon in 1969, and an abundance of material goods, America’s mood was growing dark. Between 1972 and 1974, the Watergate scandal dragged on until the first and only resignation of a president ended it.

In 1973 abortion was legalized. The feminist movement gained momentum. As the decade ended in 1979 Iranians seized U.S. diplomats, holding them hostage for 444 days.

The 1980s were, for conservatives, a golden age led by Ronald Reagan. The economy improved and, in general, so did the mood of the nation. It was also a time in which Islam began to reassert itself with a series of terrorist acts. Democrats in Congress continued to be in control.

At the end of Reagan’s term, George H.W. Bush, his vice president, was elected in 1988, but despite a military campaign to contain Saddam Hussein, the voters opted for a young Arkansas Governor named Bill Clinton.

What came to be seen as a series of excesses by liberal Democrats led to the defeat of the Clinton Medicare expansion effort and, in 1994, Congressional power was transferred to the Republican Party for the first time in some 40 years!

Clinton, despite being reelected, proved to be a major embarrassment to the nation as the result of his sexual appetites. Popular to the end with most Democrats, he would be replaced by George W. Bush as the new century began in 2000.

If the mood of the nation was one of cautious optimism, that changed dramatically on September 11, 2001. Fear swept the nation and a desire to punish the stateless terror inflicted led also to a decision by Bush to alter the direction of the Middle East by removing Saddam Hussein from power. Despite a brilliant initial dash to Baghdad the Iraq war was plagued with a cascade of bad decisions.

A sudden financial crisis toward the end of the 2008 political campaign returned a Democrat to the White House. It has taken just over a year for Barack Hussein Obama to see his performance ratings plummet from around 70 percent to around 40 percent these days. He is rivaling the worse ratings for any president since such polls began.

The bruising battle over the expansion of Medicare at a time of high unemployment and the imposition of high levels of national debt will likely push the President’s ratings even lower before the year is out.

What has been discussed here is not a rising curve of optimism for the future of the nation, but a declining one made worse and seriously endangered by irrational borrowing and spending.

Like Icarus, the nation has flown too close to its source of life, weakened its economic foundations, gave itself over to the greatest hoax of the modern era, global warming, and now has witnessed a Democrat controlled Congress do what most voters opposed.

America has weathered previous crisis, but there is a growing sense that its future is in the hands of people who do not like America, do not like its slow, methodical way of debating and reflecting the will of the people, and who threaten liberties its citizens have taken for granted.

Weighed down by growing debt, threatened by expanded “entitlement” programs that promise to grow that debt while subjecting Americans to higher taxation, the mood of the nation has rarely been at such a critical and dour point.

Gravity is about to have its way with the nation.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Government Health Care

Oh yes, it's ugly.

Talk of Impeachment

By Alan Caruba

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
-- C. S. Lewis (1898 - 1963)

Jeffrey T. Kuhner, president of the Edmund Burke Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank, and a columnist at The Washington Times, might as well have rolled a grenade down the main aisle of the House of Representatives chamber. On March 19 he wrote a column titled, “Impeach the President?”

It is a bold proposal and would end much of the agony that President Obama has inflicted on Americans. In lesser developed nations a leader as unpopular as Obama would risk being seized by a mob and dragged through the streets before being hung.

Of course, we don’t do that kind of thing and, truth be told, impeachment proceedings have been rare in American history and both have failed.

Only two presidents have faced impeachment. One was Andrew Johnson who became president upon the assassination of Lincoln. Taking power in the wake of the Civil War, he was deemed to be too friendly to the defeated South. His removal from office in 1868 was defeated by a single vote.

The other president to be impeached was Bill Clinton in 1998. The charges brought against him included perjury, obstruction of justice, and malfeasance in office. He was no doubt guilty of all three, but the proceeding was initiated primarily as the result of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and a lawsuit brought by Paula Jones.

It was the considered judgment of the Senate that his failure to keep his penis in his pants did not rise to the punishment of losing his job. In hindsight, the senators might have been mindful that they would be installing Al Gore, the vice president, if they removed Clinton.

I cite this to demonstrate that impeaching Barack Obama—while probably the right thing to do—would be an impossibility in a Senate and House controlled by Democrats.

Not to go all legal on you, but Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution says, “The President, Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and, Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Constitutional lawyers deem “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” as acts of criminality in which a law was broken; abuses of power; and something called a “violation of public trust” as defined by Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers. The definition of this is, for all intents and purposes, whatever the House of Representatives say it is. These are, after all, folks who can’t even kick Charlie Rangel out on his kiester.

The two acts of impeachment issued in the past cited exceeding the constitutional bounds of the powers of the office of president; behavior that is considered grossly incompatible with the function and purpose of the office; and using the power of the office for an improper purpose or for personal gain.

Being fellated in the Oval Office by a White House intern did not turn out to be sufficiently grossly incompatible in 1998. Clinton finished his second term, pardoned a lot of felons, and probably had to be restrained from leaving with the White House silver and chinaware.

Kuhner, however, made a very strong case for impeaching Obama. He accused the president of “imposing a leftist revolution” with the de facto nationalization of “key sectors of American life—the big banks, financial institutions, the automakers, large tracts of energy-rich land from Montana to New Mexico” were cited as examples.

The ugliness concerning the healthcare “reform” legislation and the proposed Cap-and-Trade legislation was cited as Obama’s willingness “to devour his presidency, his party’s congressional majority and—most disturbing—our democratic institutional safeguards to enact” both pieces of legislation.

“He is a reckless ideologue who is willing to sacrifice the country’s stability in pursuit of a socialist utopia.”

That is, in fact, what both Stalin did in Russia and Mao did in China. Both inflicted death in the millions and economic ruin on both societies.

The question, however, is whether the process of impeachment can be initiated and, once commenced, whether a case could be made to depose Obama. That is not likely to happen. It has nothing to do with whether a just case can be made, but because of the vast corruption of the political process and the moral decay Americans are witnessing in the Democrat Party.

We are now living in a state of constant crisis in America. That is precisely the way the White House likes it. Such conditions could lead to a complete seizure of power in the name of protecting the Republic.

It worked in Nazi Germany in the last century. It worked in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It worked in Cuba. And it is at work today in Venezuela.

Despotism never sleeps.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Weekend Music Treat: Celine Dion with Tony Bennett

Like the song says, "If I ruled the world, every day would be the first day of spring." And today is the first day of spring.

It's Not Easy Being Muslim

By Alan Caruba

As this is written, we’re just over a week or so away from Palm Sunday, Passover, and Easter in April. I am no expert, but I have found nothing in either the Jewish or Christian Testaments that require Christians or Jews to make war on other religions to convert them. Proselytizing is encouraged, but not with a threat of death.

Islam is not a religion of peace. It never was.

Despite being pre-dated centuries by both Judaism and Christianity (as well as Buddhism and Hindu), from its beginning in the seventh century C.E., Islam made it very clear that it intended to be the only game in town. In predominantly Muslim nations today, practicing any other faith can often get you killed. The decision to leave Islam can also get you killed.

While Islam has had brief periods of tolerance, in the past when Muslims showed up people soon learned that could either convert or be subjected to a very unpleasant social status (Dhimmi) and taxed for their failure to embrace Islam. Wherever Muslims gain in population, they always act to demand that elements of Sharia law be obeyed by non-Muslims. There is no separation of church and state in Islam.

They are easily offended. It can get you killed.

Islam translates as “submission” and even a cursory reading of the Koran reveals a very harsh view of what is moral and what is not. Multiple wives are moral. Concubines are moral. Slavery is moral. Honor killings are moral. It’s a long, unpleasant list.

Converts from Islam continually say they feel like that they have been freed from an insane asylum. You would, too, if you were constantly harangued in the mosque to wage war against everyone who is not a Muslim.

There are more than a billion Muslims in the world, but we tend to think only of Arabs when we think of Islam. It is widespread in Africa and has resulted in rioting and death in many African nations. In the Philippines, the killing of Christians is widespread.

It’s a cliché that not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims. Not quite true, but close enough these days. An American convert to Islam calling herself Jihad Jane pled innocent this week to charges of planning to kill a Swedish cartoonist.

I got to thinking about this on news that an American-born Muslim cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, currently residing in Sana’a Yemen is in the news calling for a jihad against the United States.

“With the American invasion of Iraq and continued U.S. aggression against Muslims,” said al-Awlaki, “I could not reconcile between living in the U.S. and being a Muslim, and I eventually came to the conclusion that jihad against America is binding on myself just as it is binding on every other Muslim.”

Al-Awlaki is afflicted with a very selective memory as is frequently the case with his version of being a good Muslim. He seems to have forgotten all the bombings, kidnappings, and killings of Americans from around the 1980s onwards until, of course, 9/11 in which a group of Muslims killed nearly 3,000 Americans in attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a flight that was diverted from a target in the nation’s capital.

He seems to not recall that Iraq’s dictator for thirty years, Saddam Hussein, waged war against the very Muslim nation of Iran for eight years to a stalemate and then invaded Kuwait, he gassed Kurds to death in his own nation. You could find yourself fed live into a wood chopper in his glory days. If ever a dictator needed removal, Saddam was the poster boy.

In more recent days, Awlaki had been in communication with U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan who thought it was a really good idea to yell “Allah akbar” while murdering thirteen unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood.

To Muslims in America, al-Awlaki said, “How can your conscience allow you to live in peaceful coexistence with a nation that is responsible for the tyranny and crimes committed against your own brothers and sisters?” In short, he is saying that an American Muslim’s first and only allegiance is to Islam, not the United States.

He’s wrong. Muslims have lived and thrived and served America with honor. Their problem, however, is a religion that directly threatens America and all other non-Muslim nations; a religion lacking tolerance, lacking mercy, and lacking the very conscience that permits al-Awlaki to urge treason.

It’s not going to be easy to be a Muslim in America for a very long time to come. Loyal Muslim Americans have an obligation to identify those who are not.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Children and Congress Should Not Play With Guns

Take a Bite and Die

Look what Comrade Pelosi has for you!