Fratricide?

Who said when your enemy is fighting amongst themselves, get out of the way?

Who said this: “And in the face of Obama’s deplorable agenda we have “progressive” organizations like MoveOn, which should be declared the Sociopathic Slime-Balls of the Century.”

Rush Limbaugh? Nope. A prominent Left-wing blog, OpEdNews.com.

And who said this: “This is not a simple matter of an organizational oligarchy manipulating its membership, although the avoidance by MoveOn's leadership is a troubling sign.”

George Will? Nope. An excerpt from a column in the Left’s flagship, The Nation, by anti-Vietnam War activist Tom Hayden.

How about this headline? “Violent Crackdowns and Sweetheart Deals. Andy Stern's Rackets.”

Michelle Malkin? Nope. Ralph Nader writing in counterpunch.org.

While the Right is bemoaning The Fall of Western Civilization As We Know It, so, on other grounds, is the … elitist Left.

Looks like the Left’s having a power failure. . . .

Do read the entire article. As the author cogently concludes:

Elitists fear the values of democracy and liberty, more so from within their own movement. Hence Stalin’s assassination of the anti-totalitarian Trotsky…. Politics 2.0 is as much about populism vs. elitism as it is about Left vs. Right; and the shape of the future will depend as much upon whether the elitist Left or the populist Left prevails as it does upon the Left’s emerging power failure.

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Obama's Secular Revival & Charles Krauthammer et. al.

Obamamania is sweeping the secular left in the form of a messianic cult. Here is a round-up and some thoughts.

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Charles Krauthammer weighs in today on the hopemongerer in chief:

There's no better path to success than getting people to buy a free commodity. Like the genius who figured out how to get people to pay for water: bottle it. . . .

And now, in the most amazing trick of all, a silver-tongued freshman senator has found a way to sell hope. To get it, you need only give him your vote. Barack Obama is getting millions.

This kind of sale is hardly new. Organized religion has been offering a similar commodity -- salvation -- for millennia. Which is why the Obama campaign has the feel of a religious revival with, as writer James Wolcott observed, a "salvational fervor" and "idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria."

"We are the hope of the future," sayeth Obama. We can "remake this world as it should be." Believe in me and I shall redeem not just you but your country -- nay, we can become "a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest."

. . . Interestingly, Obama has been able to win these electoral victories and dazzle crowds in one new jurisdiction after another, even as his mesmeric power has begun to arouse skepticism and misgivings among the mainstream media.

ABC's Jake Tapper notes the "Helter-Skelter cult-ish qualities" of "Obama worshipers," what Joel Stein of the Los Angeles Times calls "the Cult of Obama." Obama's Super Tuesday victory speech was a classic of the genre. Its effect was electric, eliciting a rhythmic fervor in the audience -- to such rhetorical nonsense as "We are the ones we've been waiting for. (Cheers, applause.) We are the change that we seek."

That was too much for Time's Joe Klein. "There was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism," he wrote. "The message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is."

You might dismiss as hyperbole the complaint by the New York Times's Paul Krugman that "the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality." Until you hear Chris Matthews, who no longer has the excuse of youth, react to Obama's Potomac primary victory speech with "My, I felt this thrill going up my leg." When his MSNBC co-hosts tried to bail him out, he refused to recant. Not surprising for an acolyte who said that Obama "comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament." . . .

. . . Obama has an astonishingly empty paper trail. He's going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can't possibly redeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs and that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war -- with the hope, I suppose, that the (presumed) resulting increase in American prestige would compensate for the chaos to follow.

Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude.

Read the entire article. You can also find some more thoughts on the nature of the cult of Obama:

Soccer Dad - Hope is Like Bottled Water

American Thinker - Obama's Politics of Collective Redemption

If you wish to see just how truly cultish and messianic the Obama campaign is becoming, do read through the thread on this forum discussing Obama and why the individuals on that site are for him.

Bookworm Room has a thoughtful post on this messianic effect Obama is having on his crowds:

I am not saying that Obama is Hitler. I am saying, however, that both his speaking style and the audience reaction to that style are typical of the connection between a demagogue and his audience. It’s not new, it’s been around for a while, but in an age of inarticulate politicians, we’re unused to it and have no resistance.

(A little historical note: my father, who escaped Hitler’s Germany in 1935, heard Hitler speak at a public rally. And my father, who was Jewish and therefore unlikely to be swayed by Hitler’s words, noticed exactly what Hillary’s friend said: His speeches were commonplace. It was his connection with his audience that was out of the ordinary.)

Read the entire post. She also sites to article by Daniel Henninger, deconstructing Obama's message and speaking style, and Dean Barnett, at the Weekly Standard, who compares the Obamamania effect of a full on teleprompter driven speech with the much less elevating permformance Obama gives when off the teleprompter.

As to the point Bookwormroom makes in her first paragraph, at the American Thinker blog, one individual wrote:

. . . Obama's speeches remind me of the sermons given by a preacher at one of those mega churches. They give feel good sermons using words like change and hope. Now a lot of conservatives go to church on a regular basis and they hear oratory like Obama gives all the time and they wonder what all the fuss is about. A lot of liberals on the other hand don't go to church and they have never heard "sermons" like this before and it really affects them emotionally. . . .

Read the entire article.

Part of the problem in dealing with Obama - a large part actually - is that he is an "identity politics" candidate. Thus, to criticize him or question him on any grounds whatsoever is to be challenged by his acolytes as an unfair attack on his identity.

Cheat Seeking Missiles - The Most Ridiculous Story of 2008? Part 2

American Thinker - The Audacity of Questioning Obama's Commitment to Israel

I find myself more than a bit concerned at Krauthammer's prediction. Everything about Obama - from his plan to withdraw from Iraq, take pressure off Iran and engage in talks, his economic ideas, etc. - seem a disaster in the making. There are several people out there who seem to think the Obama cult cannot survive the reality of a campaign against McCain. I am nowhere near as sanguine on that issue. I think that the realities of that campaign would weigh not at all on the secular converts to the religion of Obama. He will outraise McCain by tons of cash, his meaningless speeches will be saturating television and radio in one minute sound bites, and I think there is a real chance McCain could lose the coming election to Obama.

Some people disagree with me, and make very reasonable arguments in the process. For example, you can see Richard Baehr at American Thinker, who has some contrary thoughts on how this will play out. Rick Moran thinks that Obamimania is more like the Crusades than a cult, and that it can be successfully challenged. Big Lizards thinks that the Obama campaign will be unable to compete with the reality of McCain, writing in How the Democrats Will Attack McCain... and Fail Miserably.

There is some additional information being posted dealing with Obamanomics. WaPo tells us today that Clinton and Obama share a similar economic vision. Given Clinton's radical economic views, I find that distressing. The NY Post discusses the questionable tax policies Obama is advocating. PJM writes on Obama's hard left socialist economic tendencies. Rick Moran has an excellent post out on both Clinton and Obama's health care proposals - Mandate me, baby. And The QandO Blog has an interesting post on Obama, Exxon Mobil, Economics and Populism.

Update: And see this very good round-up at Right Truth, that includes a look at relative tax rates proposed by the candidates.

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Of Federalism & Hookers

The federalization of criminal law is both a waste of resources and a gross assault upon the Constitutional concept of federalism - that the powers of the federal government are limited and there are spheres of governing that can and should be restricted to the states.

Yet the federalization of criminal law continues apace. The latest is legislation approved by the House to make prostitution a federal crime. How we get there is a bit of very well intentioned insanity.

The genesis of this legislation arises out the criminal enterprise of human trafficking – itself already a federal crime. Under federal laws, a person is guilty of trafficking if they hold someone else in "a workplace through force, fraud or coercion." In cases where human trafficking is found, it usually involves prostitution or forced labor. There are highly committed activists who are convinced that trafficking is evil and very widespread. The former is beyond argument, the latter is dubious:

The government estimated in 1999 that about 50,000 slaves were arriving in the country every year. That estimate was revised downward in 2004 to 14,500 to 17,500 a year. Yet since 2000, and despite 42 Justice Department task forces and more than $150 million in federal dollars to find them, about 1,400 people have been certified as human trafficking victims in this country, a tiny fraction of the original estimates. Some activists believe that if all prostitutes were considered victims, the numbers would rise into the predicted hundreds of thousands.

Read the article. So there you have it. If the facts do not bear out their beliefs, these activists are still too emotionally committed to acknowledge reality. So with full confidence in their motivation, they just change the underlying definitions. And a Democratic Congress says fine. Amazing.

The federal government has no business whatsoever inserting itself as a matter of federal law into the wholly local matter of prostitution. That is a purely local concern. Someone living in Washington should not be paying their tax dollars to prosecute a pimp and his girls in Florida just so an activist can sleep better at night. Raise your hand if you feel it more appropriate for the FBI to intestigate national issues, such as terrorism, rather than play vice cop.

Former Chief Justice Rhenquist spoke to precisely this issue when he said:

The pressure in Congress to appear responsive to every highly publicized societal ill or sensational crime needs to be balanced with an inquiry into whether states are doing an adequate job in these particular areas and, ultimately, whether we want most of our legal relationships decided at the national rather than local level."

And from the same ABA bulletin in which the Rhenquist quote appears:

. . . [A]n increase in the volume of federal criminal cases, driven primarily by additional cases that could as well be tried in state courts, diminishes the separate and distinctive role played by federal courts. The role of the federal courts is not to simply duplicate the functions of the state courts. Although many of the newly federalized laws may be rarely used, their presence on the books presents prosecutorial opportunities that may be exploited at any time in the future. There are many other adverse implications of the federalization of criminal law that [a 1998 ABA Report] treats, including the impact for the federal prison system, local law enforcement efforts, on citizen perception of state and federal responsibility, and on the application of limited federal resources. Where federal and state laws exist for the same crime, a citizen prosecuted for a state crime is subject to a set of consequences appreciably different from one prosecuted for a federal crime, and sentencing options—including the length of sentence and location and nature of confinement—as well as opportunities for parole and probation, will differ greatly.

Read the memorandum here. If you want a snapshot of what happens when there is no real federalism, one need only look across the pond to the UK and the EU

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