As I sat and listened to Barack Obama's speech after winning the Iowa caucus I thought to myself (half-seriously actually) "this guy sounds exactly how I think the antichrist will sound when he shows up." Ok out of curiosity I googled '
Barack Obama antichrist' and good grief was I shocked. Apparently a lot of people have had this thought before; some have extensive websites with proof of their suspicions.
Well who knows, I seldom speculate on points of Biblical prophecy and I am very wary of those that do - particularly that make such a thing their trade. However, I suppose if I were going to write down a list of attributes Obama has the "silver tongue" required skill-set down pat.
I fear that despite the ideological holes in almost everything he stands for; granted it is hard to pin the man down on positions from his speeches but one can certainly get a picture of his ideological basis from his dancing words; the American polity will eat up what he is serving.
Nothing any of the GOP front-runners are saying will sell at all with anyone other than the lock-step GOP faithful in a general election. People are sick and tired - rightfully so - of the same old GOP story line related to a failed foreign policy. Continuing the course is not an option for the ordinary American - the Democrats are preaching "change" and the American public is ready to say 'amen".
The GOP had a chance to stop the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 (or at least run a candidate that really stood for what the American people really wanted and really needed). Patrick Buchanan (like him or not) stood firm for the change that America needed. The GOP faithful failed to see that and instead decided to try something old again. Bush the Elder represented everything that has always been wrong with the GOP - he was out of touch with conservatism, he represented not the people but special interest. His world view was akin to some profane merger of Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln. His economic policy was abysmal. George was the GOP's man - Pat's warnings were ignored.
We ended up with eight years of the Clinton dark years - forget the sexual exploits, - Clinton was a horrible president. You simply must recall Janet Reno and her gestapo troops in Waco, Ruby Ridge, down in Florida with the Gonzalez family. You must remember the North American Free Trade Agreement (not really free trade at all), Operation Desert Fox (the precedent for regime change in Iraq), the ridiculous war against Serbia, the Brady Bill, the Iraq Liberation Bill, and the silly 'Don't Ask Don't Tell".
We know now, if we are honest we should know, that America was indeed in the midst of a cultural war in 1992. Sixteen year later we see the results of unchecked illegal immigration, in the coming years we will see more and more the follow-on effects of the erosion of culture that this will have on our society. Ask yourself this, is America a more or less moral place today than it was in 1992. The answer to that, if honest, clearly shows that we have been involved in a war we are losing. In Pat's words:
But the cultural war is broader than two battlegrounds.
We see it in the altered calendar of holidays we are invited - nay, instructed - to celebrate. Washington's Birthday disappears into Presidents Day. States, like Arizona, that balk at declaring Martin Luther King's birthday a holiday face political censure and convention boycotts. Easter is displaced by Earth Day, Christmas becomes Winter break, Columbus day is now a day to reflect on the cultural imperialism and genocidal racism of the "dead white males" who raped this continent while exterminating its noblest inhabitants.
Secularism's Holy Days of Obligation were not demanded by us; they were imposed on us. And while Gov. Cuomo may plausibly plead ignorance of the culture war, the Hard Left has always understood its criticality. Give me the child for six years, Lenin reportedly said, quoting the Jesuits, and he will be a Marxist forever. J.V. Stalin, who was partial to Chicago gangster films, thought that if only he had control of Hollywood, he could control the world.
Too many conservatives, writes art critic James Cooper, "never read Mao Tse-tung on waging cultural war against the West. [Mao's] essays were prescribed reading for the Herbert Marcuse-generation of the 1960's, who now run our cultural institutions... Conservatives were oblivious to the fact that ... modern art - long ago
separated from the idealism of Monet, Degas, Cezanne, and Rodin - had become the purveyor of a destructive, degenerate, ugly, pornographic, Marxist, anti-American ideology." While we were off aiding the Contras, a Fifth Column inside our own country was capturing the culture.
The battle is lost and the few Republicans that still believe it can or should be fought at the national level are simply confused. Mike Huckabee is a glimmer of hope for these confused people - they believe supporting a man that claims evangelical Christian beliefs can right all that has occurred. Wrong - perhaps in 1992 there was a slim chance, no chance what-s0-ever exists for this possibility now at the national level.
The American people are ready for a change but what they are really interested in is change that benefits them personally. The only option at all to correct what is wrong is to attack the very core of the belief system that says it is ok to use the Federal government for "good". As we have seen power in the hands of the Federal government is never used for real good.
The only real counter-argument to the noxious touchy feel-good ideas spread by Obama, Edwards and Clinton is the dish Ron Paul is serving up. Everything every other GOP candidate is preaching is defeatism, the same oldism status quo that has failed so miserably thus far.
The only hope for America is to restore the republic, return all of these critical "hot-button" issues that Federal Government has no Constitutional power to act on back to the states. Let us salve the complicated social issues at the local level and keep the Federal Government out of the business of "doing good".
Labels: 2008 election, El Cid, politics, Ron Paul
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