It's A Different World

Some sneak previews of Planet Hopeandchange.

How respect for citizenship and law & order will be regarded under President Obama:

These are pro-illegal alien activists burning an effigy of famous Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Perhaps a year or two from now they'll be dismembering and immolating Sheriff Arpaio himself. And why wouldn't they when BO himself refers to enforcement of immigration laws as "terrorism"? They'd cast it as their "patriotic duty".

The heights of academic and First Amendment freedom to which President Obama will inspire the nation:

Behold the ne plus ultra of campus tolerance, in which the act of reading scholarly material now constitutes an actionable offense. Our culprit? A student-janitor named Keith Sampson. His weapon? Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. The charge? "Racial harassment," for thoughtlessly brandishing this anti-Klan book with an image of Klansmen on the cover where others might see it. The AP story describes what happens next, but to get the full Orwellian flavor you need to read Dorothy Rabinowitz’s op-ed. Quote:

Mr. Sampson stood accused of “openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black co-workers.” The statement, signed by chief affirmative action officer Lillian Charleston, asserted that her office had completed its investigation of the charges brought by Ms. Nakea William, his co-worker - that Mr. Sampson had continued, despite complaints, to read a book on this “inflammatory topic.”…

Ludicrous harassment cases are not rare at our institutions of higher learning. But there was undeniably something special - something pure, and glorious - in the clarity of this picture. A university had brought a case against a student on grounds of a book he had been reading.

The charge of, ahem, “openly reading” was dropped after FIRE made a stink — but the accusation of “conduct” amounting to racial harassment wasn’t. What was that conduct? Back to Rabinowitz:

What that conduct was, the affirmative action officer did not reveal - but she had delivered the message rewriting the history of the case. Absolutely and for certain there had been no problem about any book he had been reading…

This means, I asked one [school official], that Mr. Sampson could have been reading about the adventures of Jack and Jill and he still would have been charged? Yes. What, then, was the offense? “Harassing behavior.” While reading the book? The question led to careful explanations hopeless in tone - for good reason - and well removed from all semblance of reason. What the behavior was, one learned, could never be revealed.

There was, of course, no other offensive behavior; had there been any it would surely have appeared in the first letter’s gusher of accusation. Like those prosecutors who invent new charges when the first ones fail in court, the administrators threw in the mysterious harassment count.

"Chief affirmative action officer"? Criminalization of reading, even of a book that has (presumeably) a politically correct orientation? And upon realization that the political culture hasn't quite gotten that Naziesque yet, the university withdraws that charge but lodges another in its place that it doesn't bother to define or clarify? Can they say, "due process"? It's obvious they're not overly familiar with the concept. Maybe if Mr. Sampson converts to Islam and joins al Qaeda, he can get a fairer shake.

The lengths to which President Obama will go to defend America's national sovereignty:

The U.N.’s highest court ordered U.S. authorities today to do everything possible to halt the executions of five Mexicans in Texas until their cases are reviewed…

The World Court told U.S. authorities in 2004 to review the cases of 51 Mexicans sentenced to death by state courts after finding they had been denied the right to seek help from consular officials.

The World Court has no enforcement powers but President Bush issued a directive to the Texas courts to abide by the 2004 ruling.

AP adds:

The Supreme Court found the memorandum unconstitutional earlier this year in Medellin v. Texas — not because state courts can’t be made to follow rulings by international tribunals but because Congress hasn’t yet passed any specific federal statute to make the Vienna Convention binding on them. Once they do, then per the Constitution’s treaty and supremacy clauses, presumably everything’s jake. Worth noting: It was the five conservatives who stopped Bush in this case, with Stevens concurring in the judgment. Breyer, Ginsburg, and Souter not only would have read the Vienna Convention to be “self-executing,” i.e. applicable to the states without any action needed from Congress, they hinted that Bush should have more leeway to intervene at the state level in foreign affairs matters so long as he’s not acting against Congress’s will.

Actually, the SCOTUS only has four conservatives, not five. Dunno why Stevens got this right beyond stopped clock syndrome. But how many Olympic appointment opportunities will Our Mr. Hussein have in the next four years? And once Congress is "bluer" than a priest's cajones are supposed to be, will he even have to bother to subordinate the authority of U.S. law at all levels to the diktats of international "judges" as totalitarian as Barry O aspires to be?

Lastly, international affairs under President Obama (aka filling America's vacuum):

Maybe Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans and Africans don’t like a world of too much American power — “Mr. Big” got a little too big for them. But how would they like a world of too little American power? With America’s overextended military and overextended banks, that is the world into which we may be heading.

Welcome to a world of too much Russian and Chinese power.

I am neither a Russia-basher nor a China-basher. But there was something truly filthy about Russia’s and China’s vetoes of the American-led U.N. Security Council effort to impose targeted sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s ruling clique in Zimbabwe.

That's center-left columnist Thomas Friedman, folks. In the New York f'ing Times. Only thing he gets wrong is that it won't be an "overextended" U.S. military or banks that shrink American power, but deliberate policy edicts of the Obama administration.

Ensign Ed extrapolates further:

Without an American counterbalance, Russia and China would dominate world trade and global politics. What course would both take? Their repeated vetoes and undermining of sanctions against rogue states such as Iran and murderous thugs such as Mugabe make that plain. Tyrannies would prosper, and self-determination would recede. Without American military, diplomatic, and economic power, tyrants would rule the world, and eventually bring us to heel as well through control of energy supplies and simple overwhelming numbers.

In the Star Trek Mirror Universe novella Sorrows of Empire, the mirror Spock, inspired by the knowledge that in a parallel reality a Federation exists in the place of the Terran Empire in his own, embarks upon a life's mission of gaining control over the latter with the intent of gutting it from within and allowing it to be destroyed from without by its enemies, believing that that act of treachery and treason against his own nation and his own people of Vulcan, and the mass murder and century of anticipated subjugation will ultimately lead to the moral salvation of his own civilization and that of its conquerers. The book jacket puts it succinctly:

Is this a form of Vulcan madness, or is it the coolly logical plan of a man who knows the price his universe must pay for its freedom?

Having read the tale several times, I tend to lean toward the former. But at least his culture really was a bloody, ruthless, brutal totalitarian empire in desperate need of reform. One can argue about whether he took it waaaaay too far, or at least waaaaay too fast, but the moral imperative was a given.

Barack Hussein Obama strikes me as being like Spock, only without a brain or a bloody, ruthless, brutal totalitarin empire to reform. Believing America to be the moral antithesis of what it actually is, he's intent upon following the same Spockian path of gutting the country from within while stripping away its military capabilities to leave it defenseless from without. And not just America, but the rest of the free world along with it.

Without the United States as a global superpower over the past century, the world would be a much poorer, much less free, and much more depopulated place. If Barack Hussein Obama weren't one seriously disturbed fruit loop, one could almost believe that he's trying to make up for that hundred years of lost time.