“The fact is that President Bush’s misguided economic policies have failed to create jobs. Since President Bush took office, the country has lost 3.2 million jobs, the worst record since President Hoover. And today we learned that in July nearly half a million people gave up looking for a job.”

Meanwhile Obama used the number of half a million people giving up searching for jobs as proof that “we are climbing out of an economic hole.”

But Nancy doesn’t have guts – or convictions for that matter – so she didn’t take President Obama to task in the same way she had President Bush even when the job losses under Obama are far worse than under Bush: 8.4 million vs. 3.2 million. So Obama’s hole is almost 3x deeper.

The U.S. army medic also told members of the research unit that she and her colleagues had to explain to a local man how to get his wife pregnant.

The report said: “When it was explained to him what was necessary, he reacted with disgust and asked, ‘How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean, when one could be with a man, who is clean? Surely this must be wrong.’”

It also explains this:

And makes me wonder how far from the truth the following is:

They were not elitist – or at least they didn’t start out to be. The Beats celebrated the Common Man. They appreciated the artistry and skill shown by workers doing their jobs, a concept which connected them spiritually to Zen Buddhism as exemplified by the poetry of Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Photographer Robert Frank’s landmark work, The Americans, shows slices of everyday American life and manages to convey the beauty and perpetual motion of its land and people in a way missed by the Look and Life photographers of the era.

In the 1960s the Beat Generation gave way to the Hippies.  The inward focus of the Buddhist-influenced Beatniks was replaced by the Marxist-influenced hippie movement. Kerouac hated the hippie movement, blaming it for destroying the American culture which he celebrated in his writing. Other Beats became more politically active and leftist. Kerouac supported the Vietnam War; Ginsburg protested against it, and by the end of the 1960s the leftist activism of the likes of Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin had replaced the more apolitical Beat culture in American society.

The political dichotomy between the two cultures, Beat and Hippie, really is the differences between Libertarianism and Marxism. Both ideologies claim to celebrate the innate power and freedom of the average person, but Marxism struggled with a problem that lay at its core: the conservatism of the proletariat.

Throughout his writings, Karl Marx predicted that Communism would come about by the working class realizing its own power and overthrowing the bourgeoisie. Because countries such as Great Britain and Prussia were the most technologically advanced and were the most mature capitalist societies at the time, he expected the working classes of these nations to be the future of Communism. But attempts at organizing the working classes in these countries failed miserably because the working classes wanted to keep what they earned; they didn’t want to share it with others. In addition they were especially distrustful of outsiders, especially Communist organizers who came from privileged backgrounds and classes different from their own.  Instead of being the engine of communism, the proletariat in these countries put the brakes on the movement, and by the turn of the 20th century, Communism was  going nowhere.

To get around this innate conservatism, Vladimir Lenin proposed that the working class needed intellectuals to guide it and spark the proletariat into action, developing the idea of the Communist Party as  “Vanguard of the Proletariat.” The Party, composed of enlightened, educated, and motivated individuals, would lead the proletariat to a better future – one which the proletariat didn’t understand initially but would come to appreciate under the watchful leadership of the Communist Party.

We all know how wonderfully that worked out.

A true populist listens to the people, follows their instincts and leads them forward by turning the people’s diffuse desires into concrete goals. Marx believed Communism would be a populist movement, but even in his own time he saw that either he was wrong or capitalism had some life left in it and communism would eventually evolve out of it in the distant future. Lenin was impatient, as were many of Marx’s followers – hence the myth that Marx himself was not a Marxist (a myth because Marx himself did come to believe that the natural evolution of capitalism towards communism could be artificially pushed through actions by members of an “enlightened proletariat.” )

The 1960’s activists were not populists. The Silent Majority enjoyed seeing their heads cracked by police batons in Chicago, confirming their belief in the conservatism of the proletariat. The only way forward in the minds of the activists was to take power themselves and force their will on the people. It’s not very democratic, but Marxists realize that the people don’t know what’s best for them: only the Marxist elite does.

The situation President Obama faces today is similar to what the Russian Communists faced a century ago. Having been educated in an academic system at best sympathetic to Marxism, and at worst outright Marxist, Obama confronts the innate conservatism 0f an electorate that in his view doesn’t know what glorious future awaits it. How will he react? Will he listen to the electorate, or will he do everything necessary to drag it kicking and screaming into the future that they are simply too stupid to see themselves?

Given his upbringing, the elitist circles he has traveled in since his youth, how well will the populist mantle that he is attempting to don this week fit? Has he really heard the people’s voices in the elections in Virginia, New Jersey, the NY 23rd district (where a 3rd party candidate lost by a handful of votes), and Scott Brown’s meteoric rise to the Senate? Or will he tighten his grip on the reigns of power to bend the people to his will?

Regardless whether he realizes it or not, the man is a Marxist. He cannot help but do the latter in which case in less than three years the people will sweep him aside.  Expect him to replace Jimmy Carter as a terrorist apologist ex-president beloved by many in the world for his anti-American stances while despised by the people in his own country.

Yes he was giving a speech on education.

Yes it was a serious and lengthy speech.

But come on…
UPDATE:

Yeah, I’m late to the party. But give me a break. Two football championships followed by my reenactment of the final scenes of Das Boot in my basement during a heavy rain have me playing catch up today.

Council: Joshuapundit - Pat Robertson, The Devil And Me

Noncouncil: American Spectator - The Scott Heard Round the World

Full voting here.

Complaints about American actions are pouring in. France blames the USA for the congestion at the Port au Prince airport. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is also claiming that the US is occupying Haiti, a claim that is backed by the French. What started out as a natural disaster is quickly becoming a man-made one as looters and gangs take to the streets in the absence law. Aid is pouring into the country but cannot get through critical chokepoints to those in need.

Although Obama’s lapdogs in the mainstream news media have yet to prick up their ears regarding the similarities between Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake, Howard Fineman writing for MSNBC notes the irony of the situation: “Elected in part out of revulsion at the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, Obama now finds himself confronting an even more devastating and complex humanitarian crisis.” Dan Kennedy writing for the Guardian takes issue with Fineman’s characterization as well as those of others seeing similarities between the two disasters. Kennedy writes, “In fact, though we would all (OK, not Limbaugh) like to see the US alongside other countries and relief agencies doing everything they can in Haiti, the disaster is so large, the people are so poor and the social structure is so dysfunctional that it is bound to end in something that looks like failure.”

Evidently Kennedy isn’t familiar with Louisiana and Mississippi – two of America’s poorest states with state and local governments that are dysfunctional at best, corrupt at worst. While the divisions between local, state and federal government snarled the Katrina relief effort in 2005, the divisions between the UN authority, the US military, US Department of State, French and other governments pouring men and material into the devastated nation are just as bedeviling today. Kennedy argues that it takes time to work through these divisions, but President Bush was not afforded the luxury of that excuse 4 years ago. Why should Obama be exempt today?

It is true that a disaster of this scale cannot be practiced and prepared for beforehand. Nations cannot meet and design a coordinated plan for every possible disaster scenario that may or may not happen. But as President Bush was judged by the actions of the federal government in the Hurricane Katrina disaster, so too should President Obama be held responsible for the failures in Haiti. The precedent has been set Obama himself.

Council: Bookworm Room - The need for an honest, 21st century debate about abortion

Noncouncil: American Thinker/Rabbi Aryeh Spero - President Obama must choose sides

Full voting here.

What concerns me less than ten months out from the midterm election is that the Republicans are not ready for power of any sort, let alone as a credible opposition party that can block legislation and offer alternatives. The Republicans still haven’t figured out what they did wrong. Like the Democrats they’ve taken to blaming George Bush for their ills without realizing that they fully supported his policies that the rank and file had trouble swallowing during his tenure.

Take Compassionate Conservatism for example. Old fashioned conservatism is by its very nature compassionate; it teaches people to be responsible for themselves. If they screw up, they pay the consequences – but if they succeed, that success and the rewards that follows are theirs to keep. There is nothing compassionate about a government that keeps a man in poverty by giving him handouts; and where is the compassion shown to those who work hard only to have the government take an increasingly larger share of the fruit of their labor?

Here in rural North Carolina many are on disability. These people hire expensive lawyers like Binder & Binder who advertise during the work day on Fox News to convince the government to pay them pittances – $500 a month or so – so that they don’t have to work. The problem? Very few of these people are so sick that they can’t hold a job, and receiving a disability check dooms them to poverty for the rest of their lives.

How is that compassionate?

The problem for the Republicans is that they’ve strayed so far away from their conservative ideals that they’ve accepted the beliefs of the liberal Democrats. The Bush Administration and the Republican majority in Congress both increased the size of government and government spending while they were in power. This infuriated their conservative base to the point that it split from the party beginning in 2006 and continuing through the 2008 election. Today much of that base sympathizes with the Tea Party movement more than the Republican party. The Tea Partiers have the ideals of small government, a strong military and decreased spending.

Of those three ideals, the Republicans have only supported a strong military; otherwise they have acted like Democrats. They have spent like Democrats. They have expanded government like Democrats. So how are they not Democrats again?

While much has been made by both Left and Right over the November 2009 off-year election, the Republican Party should take notice of New York’s Congressional election in the 23rd District. In this election, the Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava, was a polarizing figure between the Party leadership and the party electorate. Scozzafava held many liberal positions that weren’t held by the conservatives in her district, but she was a Republican, and therefore received the backing of the RNC and other notables with “R”’s after their names including Newt Gingrich. As much as she was supported by these party insider, she was avoided by the voters who backed Doug Hoffman, a former Republican who ran as a 3rd Party candidate. Scozzafava eventually threw a snit, and her votes, to the Democrats, who won the seat in a squeaker.

What lessons did the Republican Party leadership take from this election? That they needed to keep liberals like Scozzafava from bolting. What lesson should they have taken? They should have jettisoned Scozzafava early and brought Hoffman in to run as a Republican because from the conservative voter’s perspective, the choice between Scozzafava and the Democrat was really a choice between two Democrats, neither of whom represented them.

And that’s the way many conservatives feel today about the Republican Party. We have a choice between the Liberal Democrats – who want to “Mirandize” our enemies and turn America into a Swedish-style nanny state, and Moderate Democrats – who want to kill our enemies and turn America into a British-style nanny state. There are no Reagan Republicans, no small government-strong military politicians left in the party. The Republican Party has been co-opted and neutered by the Washington elite – the same elite that runs the Democrat party – and doesn’t deserve the support of the electorate outside of the Beltway.

So while the Democrats are looking up at the camera with big sad eyes as they fall to their doom off the cliff, the Republicans are not ready to benefit from their demise.

Addendum:
Even Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid’s comments about Obama show the divide between the Republican Party leadership and the rank and file. The Republicans inside the Beltway are using Reid’s comments to attack the Democratic Party. By doing so they are sounding just like the Democrats who attacked Trent Lott for his comments at Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party eight years ago and Rush Limbaugh for his comments about Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb.

The problem is that Lott and Limbaugh’s comments didn’t deserve the attacks they sparked and neither do Harry Reid’s. Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) said “Democrats were really wrong in what they did to Trent Lott, and we shouldn’t do the same thing to Senator Reid.” Republicans should be fighting against political correctness and encourage freedom of speech – unlike the Left which has implemented speech codes. They should not be encouraging self-styled “African-American leaders” like Al Sharpton to get his boxers in a twist over Reid’s poor word choice. That’s what Democrats do.