Quick Roundup 178

Obama, Democrat Whig Whim Candidate for President

Barack Obama won my nomination for most despicable panderer yesterday. Ben Smith reports on some remarks of his that exploit the Blacksburg Massacre as a starting point. And I do mean "exploit" in the lowest sense of the term.

[Obama] takes the massacre more as a theme than as a point of discussion.

"Maybe nothing could have been done to prevent it," he says toward the end.

So he moves quickly to the abstract: Violence, and the general place of violence in American life.

"There's also another kind of violence that we're going to have to think about. It's not necessarily the physical violence, but the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways," he said, and goes on to catalogue other forms of "violence."

There's the "verbal violence" of Imus.

There's "the violence of men and women who have worked all their lives and suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job is moved to another country."

There's "the violence of children whose voices are not heard in communities that are ignored,"

And so, Obama says, "there's a lot of different forms of violence in our society, and so much of it is rooted in our incapacity to recognize ourselves in each other."

Many politicians would avoid, I think, suggesting that outsourcing and mass-murder belong in the same category. [my bold]

Before going further, I must note Dr. Michael Hurd's excellent commentary on the murders.

The Chicago Tribune reported on its website that he [the Virginia Tech killer, Mr. Cho] left a note in his dorm room that included a rambling list of grievances. Citing unidentified sources, the Tribune said he had recently shown troubling signs, including setting a fire in a dorm room and stalking some women.

ABC, citing law enforcement sources, reported that the note, several pages long, explains Cho's actions and says, "You caused me to do this."

Assuming all of these facts are true, I see a connection between these two paragraphs. On the one hand, we have a young man who does outrageous things--set fire in a dorm room, stalking women--that in a more reasonable era would lead to immediate expulsion, if not legal prosecution. Since we're not in a reasonable era, with all the fear of crazy lawsuits and political incorrectness (let's not forget the "rights" of the mentally ill, including the violent), then of course there are excuses made all the way up the chain of command at the university. Then, from the point of view of this sick and twisted, evil young man, when he sees excuses made for him, what happens, psychologically speaking? His sense of being a victim, the mentality of all criminals, is massively reinforced. When he finally decides to end it all, what does he do? Blame others. "Others," after all, were supposed to give him a life. Others are responsible for all of his pain. Others must pay.

Others in Mr. Cho's life implicitly conceded this by not holding him accountable for his outrageous behaviors. When you appease a completely imbalanced, irrational person like this, he's prone to take his premise of victimhood to its logical conclusion....and, well, you can witness, with horror, the results.

Tragedies like this one don't happen in a vacuum. In all the months and years of "expert" commentary to come, decrying the existence of guns and the "lack of mental health services" even for those who obviously cannot be helped, I wish someone other than myself would focus on this. [bold added]

Barack Obama, before the corpses even get cold, is already evading the fact that these massacres are the logical, practical, and psychological culmination of the social and political philosophy he endorses! I have heard it said that he acts as if welfare state leftism is some new revelation, but this is astounding -- and revealing.

To label all one's ideological opponents with the guilt for this crime would make it impossible in a more reasonable world, to borrow Dr. Hurd's term, for someone who does it to remain in serious contention for any office, let alone the Presidency. But these aren't reasonable times. The only question, sadly, is "How unreasonable?"

Obama is labeling anyone who disagrees with his whims as "violent" and in the process, evading the fact that the only way to live by his whims is to initiate force against others.

Save the Humans "Does" Imus

I'm jotting this off from behind a firewall that blocks the site, so I can't post an excerpt, but I got a big kick out of this essay on the Imus imbroglio. It made some good points, as well.

More on Campaign Finance "Reform"

Guess who said this?

Eliminate all private donations to candidates or candidates PAC's. Make every donation to any political group (private firms, PACs, interest organizations, and the like) limited and transparent. Strengthen the firewalls between these groups and campaigns so that they are not in cahoots. Then, create a very nominal campaign tax (some studies estimate it would cost only $5 per taxpayer per year to cover all congressional elections) so that all candidates have a fund of clean money to use while running for public office. Finally, mandate equal and extensive free advertising on all public television, radio, print, and online media outlets so each candidate can express his platform to the public. Campaign finance reforms like these (and surely a few others), will create positively great changes in American politics.

Conservative commentator Armstrong Williams.

Fortunately, if there is anything good left to say about the conservative movement, it is that some of them still respect freedom of speech and have their wits about them.

More than simply being unfair to taxpayers, such a scheme is fundamentally foreign to the system of government that the Founders envisioned. As P.J. O'Rourke says: "You want to get elected to change the government and the only place you can go to get the money necessary to run for election is the government you want to change. Do you see something a little East German about that?"

Bradley Smith's column is pretty good at pointing out the deficiencies of Williams's proposal, but it fails to note explicitly that attempts to regulate campaign finance contributions also violate property rights, and so it does not do what it ought, which is to denounce as immoral and impractical all attempts by the government to regulate freedom of speech and the disposal of property that makes such speech possible.

-- CAV