The Conservative Edge

Leonard Pitts, a columnist for the Miami Herald, recently commented on the driving forces behind the Tea Party movement. He referred to MSNBC hack Keith Olbermann, who insinuated that the Tea Party members “haven’t made peace with the fact that their president is black.” Spoken like a true demagogue—the Sharptons, Jacksons, and Olbermanns of this country continually stir up racial strife so they can remain in the news.

Pitts, however, doubts that Tea Partiers hate Barack Obama just because he is black. Indeed, Obama’s race is a minor issue. It wouldn’t matter which prominent Democrat held the office of President. The results would be the same, whether Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, or any other liberal occupied the White House. As proof, one only needs to recall Bill Clinton’s first year in office. Among his top priorities were health care reform and the issue of gays in the military. In Barack Obama’s first year, he too has pressed for health care reform, addressed gay rights in the military, and has beat up on car companies and fat cat bankers to boot.

Instead, Pitts asserts that the Tea Partiers are upset about the changes in American society. He writes, “We are witness to the birth cries of a new America,” and that everyone like him “embraces and celebrates that,” and “looks forward to the opportunity and inclusiveness it promises.” Pitts might do well to check his eyesight. It is hard to see opportunity with a real unemployment rate of about 16 percent. It is hard to celebrate a government that keeps getting bigger, with government workers earning twice the salary of the average blue collar employee. It’s also hard to fault people who see their individual rights subordinated to the power of government, and, like the Whos living on the clover in “Horton Hears a Who,” are screaming “We are Here!”

Perhaps the Tea Party members can be faulted for not being vocal enough in recent years. I have a feeling that many of them thought that just believing in a set of morals or principals was good enough, and that there would always be sufficient numbers of like-minded people who would vote against the liberal candidate. They are now realizing that they might be doing too little too late.

Let us hope that there is still enough time to keep America from sinking into the quicksand of collectivist ideology. It’s going to take more than the Tea Partiers to make it happen. Every conservative in America needs to band together to resist the liberal juggernaut that threatens to turn America into a socialist has-been of a country.

There are a couple of words that have become more prominent in my vocabulary, and I would like to introduce them to readers of this blog. The words are statists and collectivists. Both words actually refer to the same group of people. You might otherwise know them as socialists, Marxists, and liberals. Not coincidentally, most of these people belong to the Democratic Party.

Statists and collectivists believe that the individual is only a part of a greater whole, that is, national or global society. You might view statists as people who think that the State (the Federal government) is all-powerful, capable of directing and controlling all individuals for the benefit of society. The collectivists hold a similar view; they believe that goods and wealth should be collected and redistributed, so that no individual should be more prosperous than another. In either case, the individual essentially has no rights, especially those that pertain to the attainment of wealth, and the procurement of self-defense.

John Holden, science adviser to President Obama, has been quoted as saying that America “must design a stable, low-consumption economy…redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential.” This is why the government has been most active in time of economic crisis. The Obama administration, with cooperation from the liberals, has swiftly implemented laws and regulations that will bring about the desired redistribution. For instance, there is now a cap on the earnings of doctors and corporate executives. The salary of Bank of America’s president is now zero. Furthermore, the government has also displayed its ability to fire private-sector executives, such as Rick Wagoner of GM. It is interesting, too, that GM had at least 8 separate divisions before Obama was elected; but soon, GM will be reduced to only four, as Pontiac, Hummer, Saab, and Saturn will likely be shut down.

Apparently (and unfortunately), the message that capitalism has caused our economic problems is being accepted by American society. In a Rasmussen Reports survey conducted in April 2009, only 53 percent of Americans believed that capitalism was better than socialism; another survey of adults under 30 showed that 37 percent favored capitalism, while 33 percent preferred socialism (30 percent was undecided). The federal government would no doubt like to improve on that 33 percent figure. That’s why President Obama continues to demonize the financial institutions, referring to bankers as “fat cats.” The more that capitalism and free enterprise ideals are discredited, the more likely it is that American citizens will accept a socialist, totalitarian dictatorship implemented by the statists and collectivists of the Democratic party.

It is almost unimaginable that a third of young American adults would prefer a socialist government. Even the mighty Soviet Union collapsed under its totalitarian communist/socialist regime. The American economic system of free enterprise has resulted in a high standard of living for its people that has far surpassed that of any other nation. The men who framed our system of government realized that it was individual rights, not state rights, that would ensure a free and prosperous nation. We should support the economic engine that has secured the rights we do have, secured the country against foreign powers of evil, and virtually saved the world twice in the twentieth century. Long live capitalism!

Not too long ago, I wrote a commentary titled “Why Liberals Hate Us.” I referred to a column written by Brock Yates, published years ago in Car and Driver magazine. In his column, Yates cited some other writers, who said that the automobile represented one of the last bastions of unregulated freedom. And that’s why liberals have always hated cars. They resent ordinary Americans who derive such pleasure from driving, collecting, restoring, and hot-rodding their favorite cars. Since the late ’60s and through the ’70s, the car haters sought to regulate the automobile and anything connected with the industry.

So, they made seat belts, air bags, ignition interlock switches and 5-MPH bumpers mandatory equipment on all autos sold in America. While countries such as Germany had brilliantly engineered autobahns, superior driver training, and high driving speeds, the liberals here decided we should crawl down the road at 55 miles per hour. We have also been taxed like the colonists were under King George. We pay more in gasoline taxes than the actual cost of the fuel. We have to pay sales tax every time we buy a used car, much less a new one. Every year, it seems like we pay more and more for our car registration fees and driving license fees. All of this is done because liberals hate us and our cars.

Now, in 2009, we have a President who is just as eager to dump on the auto industry as the rest of the liberals in Congress. With the perfect storm of high oil prices in 2008, a collapse of domestic car sales, and an economic crisis, the Obama administration gets what other Democrats before him could only dream of. He now has the opportunity to dictate to the car companies exactly what kind of cars they can make, and how to make them.

This is confirmed by a recent report made public by the Environmental Protection Agency. As reported by Yahoo!, the EPA has concluded that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases are a major hazard to Americans’ health. “In both magnitude and probability, climate change is an enormous problem (and) the greenhouse gases that are responsible for it endanger public health and welfare,” said the EPA. It was the first time the federal government had said it was ready to use the Clean Air Act to require power plants, cars and trucks to curtail their release of climate-changing pollution, especially carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

This opens the door very wide for Congress, especially the car-hating liberals, to regulate the automobile right out of our lives. Pay attention to the following quotes: It’s “a wake-up call for Congress” — deal with it directly through legislation or let the EPA regulate, said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who chairs the Senate committee dealing with climate legislation. If Congress doesn’t move, Boxer said she would press EPA to take swift action. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., whose House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hopes to craft legislation in the coming weeks, called the EPA action “a game changer.” “It now changes the playing field with respect to legislation. It’s now no longer doing a bill or doing nothing. It is now a choice between regulation and legislation,” said Markey.

For years, the liberals have been trying to convince us how bad the automobile has been, and how we are guilty for loving such terrible contraptions. Never mind that cars sold in California, for example, have been practically emission-free for years. The liberals have been trying to stigmatize the automobile for a long time, the same way they demonize tobacco and firearms. They are getting set to take it all away.

The Investor’s Business Daily recently quoted Czech President Vaclav Klaus in an editorial piece. Klaus said “As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not communism.” Klaus told the Cato Institute that “environmentalism is a religion” that accepts global warming on faith and seeks to exploit it to reshape the world and economic social order.

I couldn’t agree more.