Are the Democrats under Obama declaring civil war? And does this mean it was a mistake not to vote for McCain?

Fact: the federal government under Obama has labeled essentially all people who disagree politically with Obama as potential terrorists, subject to investigation, as discussed by Andrew McCarthy at NRO.

Fact: most of the Democratic party, as discussed by John Dickerson at Slate, wants to have criminal prosecutions of the Bush administration officials and lawyers who approved the use of strong interrogation measures against Khalil Sheikh Muhammad, the 9/11 mastermind, interrogations that extracted information from KSM that helped prevent other terrorist attacks against America.

The Democrats do not consider our terrorist enemies to be our enemies; they consider the people who protected us from our terrorist enemies to be our enemies and to deserve arrest and imprisonment for defending America.

When we combine the DHS report labeling all conservatives as potential terrorists, with the Democratic demand to try Bush administration officials as criminals for their good faith acts taken in defense of our country from real terrorists, does this not sound like the beginning of a civil war?

What began the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey? The government led by Pompey had recalled Caesar to Rome from Gaul, which he had spent the previous ten years conquering on behalf of Rome. They wanted to try him on some charges, I forget what. If he obeyed their summons and returned to Rome alone, he would arrested and probably executed. So, instead of sacrificing himself, he crossed the Rubicon and illegally entered the territory of Rome with his army, ousted Pompey, and began the ruinous civil war that pretty much brought about the end of the Roman Republic.

When opponents within a political system criminalize their differences and threaten each other’s lives and liberty, the system breaks down and turns into a battlefield.

Is this what the left wants? We know they are not rational, but live in an afflatus of narcissism and hatred. But is this what they really want?

- end of initial entry -

April 25

Van Wijk writes:

Heh. Are you a Secessionist yet? If not, I’ll check in with you again next month.

Kristor writes:

From your VFR Presidential Poll of last fall, just before the election:

Kristor writes:

[I will vote for] McCain. I fear that Obama poses the same sort of existential threat to the entire American order that Hitler posed to the order of German society. It is possible that he would govern as a reconciler, it is possible that his worst excesses would be ameliorated by stiff opposition from an awakened Right. It is also possible that he would govern as a virtual dictator, with total control of both houses of Congress and thus of the Judiciary, and as the idol of a personality cult with millions of members, who control the press, the academy, the organs of government, and the arts. In that case, almost anything could happen; the normal limits could simply crumble, as they did for the Soviet system in 1989. As Bart Debie went to jail for political incorrectness, so could we go to jail. These things do happen. When the Fairness Doctrine is introduced for debate in the first month or two of an Obama administration, is there any room for doubt that its extension to the Internet will be considered? This may all be wildly improbable. I suppose it is. But it is an intolerable risk.

LA replies:

You’re tearing me, you’re tearing me.

Kristor replies:

I do not even mention the far more probable scenario that Obama would govern within the normal, “constitutional” limits to which we are accustomed, and enact insane economic policies that would plunge us into a decades long depression that would eviscerate American military power and leave us open to challenge from a resurgent China, and powerless to punish our Muslim foes in their own lands. Rome fell because of an economic crash (due to a pandemic) that decimated state revenues, so that the legions could no longer be maintained at their former strength. This prolonged the Byzantine war with Persia, exhausting both those empires. The opening thus created enabled the Arabians to take Syria, Africa, Iberia, and thus the waters and trade routes of the Western Mediterranean. That geo-political revolution destroyed commerce in Italy and Gaul, which in turn destroyed classical civilization in the West. The recovery took 500 years. If Obama crashes our economy, so that we lose our (very expensive) control of the seas, we are in big trouble.

[end of excerpt]

When I wrote that, it didn’t even occur to me that Obama would go so far as to characterize us as enemies of the state within the first four months of his administration. I thought he would leave it at re-introducing the Fairness Doctrine and expanding it to cover the web. As it is, we all by now have files on us at DHS.

LA replies:

Here is the entry in which I went through my decision process on whom to vote for in the election. Had I foreseen that Obama would be as bad as he’s been, it clearly would have been a different decision process, and, possibly a different decision.

Van Wijk writes:

Heh. Are you a Secessionist yet? If not, I’ll check in with you again next month.

LA replies:

Who did you vote for last November?

Van Wijk replies:

I voted for Chuck Baldwin.

LA replies:

Right.

I’m going to post a list of the discussions and debates we had last fall about whether to vote for McCain or not. The idea will be to consider how the views, predictions, guesses that were expressed then stand up so far.

Van Wijk replies:

From what I remember, one of the main themes of those discussions was whether or not Obama represented an existential threat to the United States. I would say that Obama himself has certainly confirmed that he is such a threat, and we’re not even six months into his administration. He’s proven himself to be more of a dedicated communist than a sheer political opportunist, and the hopes expressed that he would govern moderately have been thoroughly dashed. I’ll admit that the man’s audacity has taken me by surprise on a few occasions.

That being said, the assertion that there wouldn’t be a radical difference between an Obama administration and a McCain administration still holds. I do not think that there would have been Tea Parties, talks of secession in Texas, or a lawsuit filed against DHS on behalf of we “rightwing extremists” under McCain. And if there had been such a reaction, it would have been viciously opposed by the Republican Party. We would constantly be hearing, “Give his policies a chance to work,” and “Would you rather have a socialist in office?” and other such nonsense. Middle America wouldn’t have the heart to stand up to a tortured ‘Nam vet and perceived patriot, regardless of whether or not he served their interests.

It’s telling that there hasn’t been a huge “I told you so!” expressed at VFR by McCain supporters. In fact, the silence is deafening on that score, especially given Obama’s various end-runs around our constitutional rights. So I think that the pre-election consensus at VFR has been proven correct: that McCain is an enemy hidden and Obama is an enemy revealed, and it is far more advantageous to fight what you can see.

LA replies:

You know, that is very interesting. In the three months since Obama took office, I’ve only been chastised by one reader—bitterly so—for not having voted for McCain, and he was someone who had stopped posting in September because he was angry with me for my criticisms of Sarah Palin, so he was already coming from a base of hostility. It’s remarkable that not one McCain-voting regular reader has said that events have proven his position to be the correct one. Your explanation of why this is so is intriguing.

April 26

Adela G. writes:

You write: “It’s remarkable that not one McCain-voting regular reader has said that events have proven his position to be the correct one.”

There are times when “I told you so” is the absolute last thing a person wants to say, even after events have proven his position to be the correct one. This is one of those times.

I voted against Obama by voting for the only candidate who had any chance of beating him: McCain. I did so because I thought whether you-know-who governed as a centrist or a leftist, the mere fact of his being POTUS would embolden the left to make even more clamorous demands and exact even more authoritarian measures on the rest of us.

Now, with the Alien-in-Chief in office for a mere 100 days, we see all around us, in the Congress, the media, academia, the unbridled hatred and contempt the left feels for white non-leftist America. I think the hostility has greatly increased since January. And I don’t expect things to get better any time soon.

LA replies:

There are times when disagreeing with a person saying “I told you so” is the last thing one wants to do, especially when events seem to make the person correct. But the fact that the left has been emboldened as never before and is letting its true self show forth does not necessarily assure grave and perrmanent harm to America. One of the main arguments for not voting for McCain was that an Obama victory would lead blacks and the left to reveal what they really are, which in turn might awaken resistance on the part of non-leftist whites. In my explanation of my vote last NovemberI wrote:

… just as a McCain victory will produce an intense leftist reaction, an Obama/Democratic ascendancy will produce an intense conservative reaction…. There will be will and energy in the face of a mortal threat.

If we don’t believe in the possibility of such resistance, then we really don’t believe in the possibility of America fighting to save itself, and therefore a vote for McCain simply becomes a vote to go over the cliff at 60 miles an hours instead of at 90. Give us a few more years, the McCainites seem, unintentionally, to be saying, let this cup pass from us, let the curtain fall later, not now.

But maybe there is no time, however strong our wish to put off the ruin. The crisis will come, the crisis is coming, the crisis is already upon us. In the case of Obama, the crisis will take the form of explicitly leftist and anti-American programs and policies. In the case of McCain, it will take the form of the fatal hollowing out of whatever remains of conservatism, softening us up even further for when a leftist Democrat is elected in four or eight years. So if there is to be a crisis, it seems to me that it would be better to let it come now, rather than later. If we fail, we fail. But if we fail, we would surely have failed anyway, and a McCain presidency would not have changed that, but would only make the ultimate failure more likely.

[end of quote]

I thought at the time that that was pretty good reasoning. Now, however, I see a possible error in it. I seem to have been assuming, at least in the immediate context of that argument (though I had spoken differently about Obama elsewhere) that any subsequent Democratic president would be like Obama. But if Obama is materially more leftist, anti-American, and destructive than other leftist and anti-American Democrats (Dems in the mold of, say, Kerry or Hillary), then stopping him would not have meant merely putting off the same or worse until later. Stopping him might have meant preventing something uniquely bad and harmful from happening.

Adela replies:

Now I finally understand our ongoing difference on this—we were arguing from diametrically opposed premises. I was assuming that no other Democrat was like Obama.

Most significantly, his racial views are far more bound up with his identity than is true of other Democrats. So as most of the left-wing agenda disproportionately benefits blacks, he would be more inclined to support, implement and extend it wherever possible than a white POTUS would have been. Steve Sailer really hit home with me when he said that Obama was first and foremost about redistributing wealth from whites to blacks.

So far, I’ve been able to apply that to everything Obama has done. His three big concerns—health care, education and clean energy—all disproportionately benefit blacks. He’s perfectly willing to let white Middle America think universal health care shows his concern for the white factory worker whose injury requires long-term therapy. But my bet is that Obama’s real concern is with all the health problems that afflict blacks disproportionately: AIDS, obesity, high BP, Type II diabetes, etc. Because these health problems require long-term care and because blacks are non-compliant about following medical advice, lots of money is needed for their health care. Education—that’s a no-brainer (and will continue to be so as long as Obama has his way.) Clean energy had me puzzled. I suspect more blacks than white get help with their utility bills so I didn’t see how clean energy really benefitted them. Then I heard on the news that “cap and trade” energy proposal would amount to one of the biggest ever redistribution of wealth from First World to Third World countries. Bingo! I believe Obama cares more about black Africans (who, after all, are “his” people) than he does about white Americans (who weren’t his mother’s people and probably aren’t his, either.) So even the energy policy makes sense in light of Sailer’s analysis. Even his curt nod to Queen Elizabeth, the white head of state of our closest ally versus his deep bow to the Saudi king, America’s adversary, was, I think, deliberately done to signal to nonwhites where his real loyalties lay.

Most white politicos, whether left or right, are about power. Obama is about power and race—and not just as part of his political persona designed to appeal to the left, either. Obama is really about race. And that makes him different from—and vastly more dangerous than—any white Democratic president could have been.

LA replies:

Yes, but the things you are pointing to do not necessary mean that Obama would be able to cause grave and permanent damage to America, or to do so in a way that would surpass what other Democratic presidents might do. We all knew that Obama was extremely objectionable. The practical question was, how objectionable, how harmful would he actually be? Also, again, the rest of the country still has the ability to oppose him and possibly stop his worst measures.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 24, 2009 06:07 PM | Send