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August 31, 2009
"We're seeing the beginning of a peaceful — and I emphasize peaceful — revolt in America."
Thus spoke Senator John McCain at a townhall meeting in Arizona this past week.
Two days later — before his constituents in Chickasha, Oklahoma — Senator James Inhofe declared, "We're almost reaching a revolution in this country. People are not buying these concepts that are completely foreign to America."
The centerpiece of both townhalls, as throughout the nation, was the socialized medicine schemes embodied in bills before Congress and backed to the hilt by the White House. One man at the McCain meeting shouted out, "No more compromise. We're losing our country."
America protests
Successful politicians have a good sense of the mood of their constituents, and right now, they know there is uneasiness across the land. Gradually, Americans perceive that the proverbial "powers that be" are preparing to go beyond the "political correctness" that presumed to instruct them on what they can wear, what they can eat, what they can drive, what kind of washing machine they can have, what kind of controls are mandated for their showers, and — most pointedly — what they can say. And it is well to remember that any time you have to be soooo careful about what you say, the society in which you live is — at the very least — flirting with a police state.
As if the above were not personal enough, we are now threatened with government interference in the relationship between you and your doctor, and (vehement denials to the contrary notwithstanding) government bureaucrats deciding who shall live and who shall die. As soon as the establishmentarians thought they had successfully shouted down Sarah Palin on that issue, up pops a VA booklet advising the same thing.
On top of all that, Mark Lloyd — an Obama "diversity czar" at the FCC who wants to punish conservative radio talkshow hosts — kick them off the air through the back door, actually — was caught on tape approving of Communist dictator Hugo Chavez's takeover of the media in Venezuela and silencing of the opposition after he came to power.
Van Jones — the green-jobs czar — has been exposed for his having been a self-proclaimed communist, and for having said the day after 9/11 that the hit was prompted by "victims of worldwide U.S. imperialism." For that information, we are indebted to blogger Trevor Loudon, Accuracy in Media Editor Cliff Kincaid, and on the front burner this past week by Glenn Beck on FoxNews. (I have stopped patronizing the wimp sponsors who have been cowed by an angry left into pulling their ads from Beck's show.)
In his own words
All of that is scary enough, but then in a frightening way, it appears to add some context to Barack Obama's comment during last year's campaign that — and we quote — "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve national security objectives we have set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, and just as well-funded" (italics added).
Hmmmm. What do you suppose a civilian military-equivalent would be used to enforce? What edicts from the White House? Would local police be displaced? Who would be targeted by a "strong, well-funded" national security force?
Let us explore some possibilities:
Case in point
For the past few days, this column has been looking into a case where well-organized thuggery attempted to intimidate citizens standing on their First Amendment rights to petition their leaders against the "health care" bill as President Obama visited Bozeman, Montana, August 14.
After the visit, an e-mail made the rounds of the internet in an anonymous statement by a woman pen-named "Kathy" who noted the president spoke at the airport near Belgrade, a small town (a bedroom community for Bozeman) in the most remotely located hangar "totally secluded from the public."
Not wanting to go with the story until I could talk to witnesses willing to put their names to it, I found two participants — and through them, quotes from others. Henry Kriegel — a consultant and radio talkshow host at KMMS-AM — and Ken Champion, a painting and dry-wall contractor in the area. Both were able to confirm the substance of "Kathy's" e-mail, though some minor details could not be affirmed one way or the other. Don Hart of Bozeman was also helpful in steering me to these interviewees. What follows is what we were able to ascertain:
The back-story
About a week prior to the Obama Townhall meeting, local Democrats — well-aware of rising sentiment in the community, and acutely aware of the anger and outrage that had erupted at other such meetings around the country — proposed "a joint civility pledge" for their Gallatin County Republican counterparts to sign.
Kriegel says the GOP saw right through this as an attempt to put them on the defensive, and declared that "people have the right to voice dissent." As soon as word got out of the Republican turndown, their operatives were "targeted with obscenity-laced phone calls," all in the name of "civility," of course.
When Kathy and her husband arrived at the airport that morning, they found that an area that had previously been roped off for the Bozeman Tea Party locals had been occupied by (mostly out-of-town) pro-Obama thugs.
What Kriegel affirmed in our interview — and as he told his listeners and wrote in a bylined article — a busload of thugs — "paid," and some affiliated with the SEIU and ACORN, according to the radio talker — had arrived in the middle of the night, and "claimed our permitted area." Champion told us Planned Parenthood placards were also spotted amongst the group. The resulting conflict, he said, "bordered on getting physically violent" and "was in stark contrast to the tightly orchestrated event" inside the meeting itself.
Once the Obama supporters — only a few of whom Kriegel could identify as being from the local area — "illegally" occupied an area that had not been set aside for them, there was no dislodging them. The police and airport security couldn't get them to move, explaining they lacked the manpower (although a few of the disrupters were ultimately arrested) and besides, the law enforcement officers were there to protect the president. The illegal squatters tried to goad "us into a fight and refused to honor the rule of law," the radio host added.
Brown shirts?
The way the event is described, it smacks of something right out of the Marxist playbook. The ACORN/SEIU bunch had hoped to start a riot. Goad the opposition into throwing the first punch. That was the precise tactic used in the Kristallnacht and Reichstag fire incidents in early National Socialist (Nazi) Germany. In that sense, Kriegel's labeling the paid "hacks" as "modern-day brownshirts" is not a far cry from reality. In Montana, the good guys didn't take the bait
Tickets, tickets — whose got the tickets
There is serious question as to whether the meeting itself was a sincere effort to give the president a chance to hear grassroots Montana opinion. One report says of the 1500 tickets that were printed for the event, only 700 (another report says 600) tickets were handed out to the public. The rest just "disappeared," apparently to ensure a stacked, fawning audience. Looked nice and smooth on television, didn't it? A head-of-state who is afraid of his own people is in trouble.
Discipline was enforced inside the hangar as the president spoke. Ken Champion tells me as he tried to approach the mike to ask Mr. Obama a question, a member of the pro-Obama group — the "Gay Loggers" — accused him of being "one of those tea party people" and therefore "one of those people who cause civil unrest, disobedient to the law." This kind of slander was intended to keep protesters who managed to make it inside from asking embarrassing questions. If you hog most of the available tickets, you're going to control the meeting.
Not just health care, either
As Kriegel puts it, "We, like most Montanans, have a high level of distrust, concern, and outrage over government control over private industries and in this case the health care industry, which comprises 17 percent of our total economy. We are tired of bank bailouts, massive unsustainable spending, and government takeover of private industries such as the auto industry, the banking industry, and the insurance industry started under the Bush administration and dramatically escalated under Obama."
There is discontent in the Treasure State. One Montana friend writes this column saying, why "we don't secede from the Union I can't understand."
Paid "hacks"
Kriegel says he and his fellow Obamacare opponents are volunteers. Champion cites a thuggery marching-orders e-mail (that mistakenly fell into the hands of one of the anti-Obamacare people) that "made reference to the fact that they were to meet in Missoula at a certain time prior to coming [to Bozeman], and they'd be paid at a certain rate to show up at the protest."
One pro-Obama community organizing entity, the Fund for the Public Interest — with a chapter in Montana (based in Missoula, says Kriegel) — apparently pays $10 to $15 an hour or up to $600 per week "for campaign workers to go into communities around the country to make change happen."
"Make change happen?" With what? Bullying tactics? If you're the bully on the block, you can make any "change happen" that you want to "happen."
Champion likens the tactics of "intimidating and bullying" to those recommended by Saul Alinsky (one of several shadowy Marxist figures influential in Obama's life) who wrote Rules for Radicals, which includes the tribute to "the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer."
Is the bused-in turnout in Montana a hint of what President Obama envisions when he calls for a "national civilian security force, just as powerful, just as strong, and just as well-funded" as the military? Americans deserve a straight answer to that question. That a group prone to bullying lawful citizens would have the backing (tacit or otherwise) of the incumbent government is frightening.
Connecting more dots
As this column was being written, there appeared on the Drudge Report a story that "Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill [by Senator Jay Rockefeller-D-W.Va.] proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector companies from the Internet." The alarm is not assuaged by the word "companies," bad as that is in and of itself. Give the Big Brothers of the world that kind of power, and they will be out to control your own personal computer.
And even more dots?
Here is a recently-written book review:
"A charismatic Democratic senator who speaks in 'noble but slippery abstractions' is elected president, in a groundswell of cultish adoration, by a nation on the brink of economic disaster. Promising to restore America's greatness, he promptly announces a government seizure of the big banks and insurance companies. He strong-arms the Congress into amending the Constitution to give him unlimited emergency powers. He throws his enemies into concentration camps. With scarcely any resistance, the country has become a fascist dictatorship."
The hallucinations of some present-day wild-eyed paranoid "right-winger?" Hardly. It is a recounting of the novel It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis — written in 1935, resurrected by Joseph Finder in the Wall Street Journal for August 29-30, 2009.
Edward Kennedy — the legacy
It is one thing to pray for the just-departed Senator Edward Kennedy and for his family who have suffered a great personal loss. It is quite another matter to go along with the hero worship that has pervaded much of the media coverage of his passing.
It is reasonable to put the senator's life in perspective — he used family influence to gain acceptance to Harvard; was expelled from Harvard for hiring a fellow student to take his Spanish exam; used his father's clout to avoid combat duty in the army; used Kennedy money/influence to avoid a manslaughter charge for the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne; etc.
This writer witnessed firsthand the inclination of some in the media to protect Kennedy in the Chappaquiddick drowning of Ms. Kopechne: In a recorded radio interview I did with author Richard Reeves — no conservative by any means — he described the senator's failure to report the drowning to authorities for ten hours as something akin to the spoiled rich kid who goes to his dad and tries to get help in avoiding responsibility for getting a girl pregnant. The broadcast was barred from the airwaves by the program's producers specifically for that comment. (Later, Roger Mudd effectively short-circuited Kennedy's presidential ambitions by giving him a TV grilling on Chappaquiddick.)
It is also relevant to remember that while President Reagan was trying to bring down the Soviet Union, Kennedy tried to undermine the president by going behind his back and entreating the Soviets to collaborate in a scheme to embarrass Reagan in a PR campaign to bring about the Gipper's defeat in the 1984 election. Kennedy also tried to enlist Soviet help to undermine President Carter's anti-Soviet rhetoric following the Kremlin's attack on Afghanistan. (For details, see this column "The Ted Kennedy/Jimmy Carter KGB connections" — Feb. 19, 2007). Dare one use "the T word" to describe this stab in the back?
Last — but by no means least — there was Senator Kennedy's 1987 "Robert Bork's America" diatribe on the Senate floor wherein he accused the then Supreme Court nominee of favoring policies leading to back-alley abortions, police breaking down citizens' doors in midnight raids, and censorship "at the whim of the government."
That rant was a new low for senatorial discourse, and an all-time record of senatorial abuse of that body's immunity from the laws of libel and slander.
Photos of the Bozeman Tea Party protest of Obama's visit to Montana, Aug. 14, 2009
© Wes Vernon
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
"Revolution" coming to the USA?
Socialized medicine--Part 8; also: the true Kennedy legacy
By Wes Vernon
"We're seeing the beginning of a peaceful — and I emphasize peaceful — revolt in America."
Thus spoke Senator John McCain at a townhall meeting in Arizona this past week.
Two days later — before his constituents in Chickasha, Oklahoma — Senator James Inhofe declared, "We're almost reaching a revolution in this country. People are not buying these concepts that are completely foreign to America."The centerpiece of both townhalls, as throughout the nation, was the socialized medicine schemes embodied in bills before Congress and backed to the hilt by the White House. One man at the McCain meeting shouted out, "No more compromise. We're losing our country."
America protests
Successful politicians have a good sense of the mood of their constituents, and right now, they know there is uneasiness across the land. Gradually, Americans perceive that the proverbial "powers that be" are preparing to go beyond the "political correctness" that presumed to instruct them on what they can wear, what they can eat, what they can drive, what kind of washing machine they can have, what kind of controls are mandated for their showers, and — most pointedly — what they can say. And it is well to remember that any time you have to be soooo careful about what you say, the society in which you live is — at the very least — flirting with a police state.
As if the above were not personal enough, we are now threatened with government interference in the relationship between you and your doctor, and (vehement denials to the contrary notwithstanding) government bureaucrats deciding who shall live and who shall die. As soon as the establishmentarians thought they had successfully shouted down Sarah Palin on that issue, up pops a VA booklet advising the same thing.
On top of all that, Mark Lloyd — an Obama "diversity czar" at the FCC who wants to punish conservative radio talkshow hosts — kick them off the air through the back door, actually — was caught on tape approving of Communist dictator Hugo Chavez's takeover of the media in Venezuela and silencing of the opposition after he came to power.
Van Jones — the green-jobs czar — has been exposed for his having been a self-proclaimed communist, and for having said the day after 9/11 that the hit was prompted by "victims of worldwide U.S. imperialism." For that information, we are indebted to blogger Trevor Loudon, Accuracy in Media Editor Cliff Kincaid, and on the front burner this past week by Glenn Beck on FoxNews. (I have stopped patronizing the wimp sponsors who have been cowed by an angry left into pulling their ads from Beck's show.)
In his own words
All of that is scary enough, but then in a frightening way, it appears to add some context to Barack Obama's comment during last year's campaign that — and we quote — "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve national security objectives we have set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, and just as well-funded" (italics added).
Hmmmm. What do you suppose a civilian military-equivalent would be used to enforce? What edicts from the White House? Would local police be displaced? Who would be targeted by a "strong, well-funded" national security force?Let us explore some possibilities:
Case in point
For the past few days, this column has been looking into a case where well-organized thuggery attempted to intimidate citizens standing on their First Amendment rights to petition their leaders against the "health care" bill as President Obama visited Bozeman, Montana, August 14.
After the visit, an e-mail made the rounds of the internet in an anonymous statement by a woman pen-named "Kathy" who noted the president spoke at the airport near Belgrade, a small town (a bedroom community for Bozeman) in the most remotely located hangar "totally secluded from the public."
Not wanting to go with the story until I could talk to witnesses willing to put their names to it, I found two participants — and through them, quotes from others. Henry Kriegel — a consultant and radio talkshow host at KMMS-AM — and Ken Champion, a painting and dry-wall contractor in the area. Both were able to confirm the substance of "Kathy's" e-mail, though some minor details could not be affirmed one way or the other. Don Hart of Bozeman was also helpful in steering me to these interviewees. What follows is what we were able to ascertain:
The back-story
About a week prior to the Obama Townhall meeting, local Democrats — well-aware of rising sentiment in the community, and acutely aware of the anger and outrage that had erupted at other such meetings around the country — proposed "a joint civility pledge" for their Gallatin County Republican counterparts to sign.
Kriegel says the GOP saw right through this as an attempt to put them on the defensive, and declared that "people have the right to voice dissent." As soon as word got out of the Republican turndown, their operatives were "targeted with obscenity-laced phone calls," all in the name of "civility," of course.
When Kathy and her husband arrived at the airport that morning, they found that an area that had previously been roped off for the Bozeman Tea Party locals had been occupied by (mostly out-of-town) pro-Obama thugs.
What Kriegel affirmed in our interview — and as he told his listeners and wrote in a bylined article — a busload of thugs — "paid," and some affiliated with the SEIU and ACORN, according to the radio talker — had arrived in the middle of the night, and "claimed our permitted area." Champion told us Planned Parenthood placards were also spotted amongst the group. The resulting conflict, he said, "bordered on getting physically violent" and "was in stark contrast to the tightly orchestrated event" inside the meeting itself.Once the Obama supporters — only a few of whom Kriegel could identify as being from the local area — "illegally" occupied an area that had not been set aside for them, there was no dislodging them. The police and airport security couldn't get them to move, explaining they lacked the manpower (although a few of the disrupters were ultimately arrested) and besides, the law enforcement officers were there to protect the president. The illegal squatters tried to goad "us into a fight and refused to honor the rule of law," the radio host added.
Brown shirts?
The way the event is described, it smacks of something right out of the Marxist playbook. The ACORN/SEIU bunch had hoped to start a riot. Goad the opposition into throwing the first punch. That was the precise tactic used in the Kristallnacht and Reichstag fire incidents in early National Socialist (Nazi) Germany. In that sense, Kriegel's labeling the paid "hacks" as "modern-day brownshirts" is not a far cry from reality. In Montana, the good guys didn't take the bait
Tickets, tickets — whose got the tickets
There is serious question as to whether the meeting itself was a sincere effort to give the president a chance to hear grassroots Montana opinion. One report says of the 1500 tickets that were printed for the event, only 700 (another report says 600) tickets were handed out to the public. The rest just "disappeared," apparently to ensure a stacked, fawning audience. Looked nice and smooth on television, didn't it? A head-of-state who is afraid of his own people is in trouble.
Discipline was enforced inside the hangar as the president spoke. Ken Champion tells me as he tried to approach the mike to ask Mr. Obama a question, a member of the pro-Obama group — the "Gay Loggers" — accused him of being "one of those tea party people" and therefore "one of those people who cause civil unrest, disobedient to the law." This kind of slander was intended to keep protesters who managed to make it inside from asking embarrassing questions. If you hog most of the available tickets, you're going to control the meeting.
Not just health care, either
As Kriegel puts it, "We, like most Montanans, have a high level of distrust, concern, and outrage over government control over private industries and in this case the health care industry, which comprises 17 percent of our total economy. We are tired of bank bailouts, massive unsustainable spending, and government takeover of private industries such as the auto industry, the banking industry, and the insurance industry started under the Bush administration and dramatically escalated under Obama."
There is discontent in the Treasure State. One Montana friend writes this column saying, why "we don't secede from the Union I can't understand."
Paid "hacks"
Kriegel says he and his fellow Obamacare opponents are volunteers. Champion cites a thuggery marching-orders e-mail (that mistakenly fell into the hands of one of the anti-Obamacare people) that "made reference to the fact that they were to meet in Missoula at a certain time prior to coming [to Bozeman], and they'd be paid at a certain rate to show up at the protest."
One pro-Obama community organizing entity, the Fund for the Public Interest — with a chapter in Montana (based in Missoula, says Kriegel) — apparently pays $10 to $15 an hour or up to $600 per week "for campaign workers to go into communities around the country to make change happen."
"Make change happen?" With what? Bullying tactics? If you're the bully on the block, you can make any "change happen" that you want to "happen."Champion likens the tactics of "intimidating and bullying" to those recommended by Saul Alinsky (one of several shadowy Marxist figures influential in Obama's life) who wrote Rules for Radicals, which includes the tribute to "the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer."
Is the bused-in turnout in Montana a hint of what President Obama envisions when he calls for a "national civilian security force, just as powerful, just as strong, and just as well-funded" as the military? Americans deserve a straight answer to that question. That a group prone to bullying lawful citizens would have the backing (tacit or otherwise) of the incumbent government is frightening.
Connecting more dots
As this column was being written, there appeared on the Drudge Report a story that "Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill [by Senator Jay Rockefeller-D-W.Va.] proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector companies from the Internet." The alarm is not assuaged by the word "companies," bad as that is in and of itself. Give the Big Brothers of the world that kind of power, and they will be out to control your own personal computer.
And even more dots?
Here is a recently-written book review:
"A charismatic Democratic senator who speaks in 'noble but slippery abstractions' is elected president, in a groundswell of cultish adoration, by a nation on the brink of economic disaster. Promising to restore America's greatness, he promptly announces a government seizure of the big banks and insurance companies. He strong-arms the Congress into amending the Constitution to give him unlimited emergency powers. He throws his enemies into concentration camps. With scarcely any resistance, the country has become a fascist dictatorship."
The hallucinations of some present-day wild-eyed paranoid "right-winger?" Hardly. It is a recounting of the novel It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis — written in 1935, resurrected by Joseph Finder in the Wall Street Journal for August 29-30, 2009.
Edward Kennedy — the legacy
It is one thing to pray for the just-departed Senator Edward Kennedy and for his family who have suffered a great personal loss. It is quite another matter to go along with the hero worship that has pervaded much of the media coverage of his passing.
It is reasonable to put the senator's life in perspective — he used family influence to gain acceptance to Harvard; was expelled from Harvard for hiring a fellow student to take his Spanish exam; used his father's clout to avoid combat duty in the army; used Kennedy money/influence to avoid a manslaughter charge for the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne; etc.This writer witnessed firsthand the inclination of some in the media to protect Kennedy in the Chappaquiddick drowning of Ms. Kopechne: In a recorded radio interview I did with author Richard Reeves — no conservative by any means — he described the senator's failure to report the drowning to authorities for ten hours as something akin to the spoiled rich kid who goes to his dad and tries to get help in avoiding responsibility for getting a girl pregnant. The broadcast was barred from the airwaves by the program's producers specifically for that comment. (Later, Roger Mudd effectively short-circuited Kennedy's presidential ambitions by giving him a TV grilling on Chappaquiddick.)
It is also relevant to remember that while President Reagan was trying to bring down the Soviet Union, Kennedy tried to undermine the president by going behind his back and entreating the Soviets to collaborate in a scheme to embarrass Reagan in a PR campaign to bring about the Gipper's defeat in the 1984 election. Kennedy also tried to enlist Soviet help to undermine President Carter's anti-Soviet rhetoric following the Kremlin's attack on Afghanistan. (For details, see this column "The Ted Kennedy/Jimmy Carter KGB connections" — Feb. 19, 2007). Dare one use "the T word" to describe this stab in the back?
Last — but by no means least — there was Senator Kennedy's 1987 "Robert Bork's America" diatribe on the Senate floor wherein he accused the then Supreme Court nominee of favoring policies leading to back-alley abortions, police breaking down citizens' doors in midnight raids, and censorship "at the whim of the government."
That rant was a new low for senatorial discourse, and an all-time record of senatorial abuse of that body's immunity from the laws of libel and slander.
Photos of the Bozeman Tea Party protest of Obama's visit to Montana, Aug. 14, 2009
© Wes Vernon
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.