COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Friday, April 06, 2007

"Sleight of Hand"


Many unexpected and unforeseen things have happened under the cover of darkness and in the smoke and fog of war. I'm not saying that the GWOT is a smokescreen for implementing a North American union but Frank Gaffney says that while our attention is diverted by the GWOT, America is being forever changed are a more "insidious threat."
Assault of the 'Transies'
By Frank J Gaffney Jr.
The Washington Times | April 5, 2007
ht: Doug (but it caught my eye yesterday)

...the assault on our sovereignty by the "transnational progressives."

This term was coined by one of the most thoughtful defenders of American sovereignty -- that somewhat intangible, yet indispensable ingredient in a nation of the people, by the people and for the people -- Hudson Institute scholar John Fonte. In October 2002, he wrote a seminal essay in Orbis titled, "Liberal democracy vs. transnational progressivism: The future of the ideological civil war within the West." In it, he warned of the emergence of "a new challenge to liberal democracy and its traditional home, the liberal democratic nation-state."

Mr. Fonte depicts the latter as a form of government Americans take for granted: "self-governing representative systems comprised of individual citizens who enjoy freedom and equality under law and together form a people within a democratic nation-state." In our case, constitutional arrangements provide inherent "individual rights, democratic representation [with some form of majority rule] and national citizenship."

As Mr. Fonte trenchantly observed, the challenge is coming "in the form of a new transnational hybrid regime that is post-liberal democratic, and in the context of the American republic, post-Constitutional and post-American." He notes that "this alternative ideology [of] 'transnational progressivism' ... constitutes a universal and modern worldview that challenges in theory and practice both the liberal democratic nation-state in general and the American regime in particular."

Three examples of the agenda being pursued at the moment by what John O'Sullivan deprecatingly calls the "Transies" illustrate the progress of their assault on American sovereignty:

The Bush administration has launched some two-dozen "working groups" to develop a Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) with Canada and Mexico. Loosely modeled after the Transies' favorite supranational organization -- the European Union -- and evolving in much the same way (namely, under the rubric of an economic common market agreement, in this case North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement [NAFT]), the SPP's architects are busily crafting sweeping new rules to develop a North American Union (NAU).

Such rules are intended to govern trinational trade, transportation, immigration, social security, education and virtually every other aspect of life in North America. There are new institutions being proposed, too, such as a North American Tribunal with authority to trump rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court.

If Congress persists in paying no attention to the emerging SPP/NAU -- which seems likely, given that most in the Democratic leadership are sympathetic to transnational progressivism, if not rabid Transies themselves -- it will soon find itself effectively out of a job.

Think that unimaginable? Consider this fact: By some estimates, as much as 85 percent of the rules, regulations and laws that govern everyday life in the U.K. have never been considered, let alone enacted, by the British Parliament. Instead, they have been handed down as edicts by the unelected, unaccountable Transies who run the European Union from Brussels.

According to the respected on-line service STRATFOR, a longstanding objective of the transnational progressives, U.S. ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), is now just a matter of time. Already, parochial business interests, U.S. Navy lawyers and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have embraced the Transies' bid to compel the United States to submit to a treaty Ronald Reagan rightly rejected, one that would make decisions affecting use of the international sea-beds and the waters above them the exclusive purview of an international organization. Apparently, the decisive argument will be that only transnational bureaucrats will be able to contend with the implications of the melting Arctic ice caps induced by global warming.

Al Gore's hobby horse is also breathing new life into the ultimate Transie project: the imposition of international taxation ("globotaxes") to finance the various causes and institutions favored by transnational progressives.

Under the rubric of taxing carbon emissions (and/or airline travel, energy flows, international commerce, arms sales and currency transactions) untold billions -- perhaps even trillions -- of dollars can be raised to pay for U.N. agencies and their activities. Though the Bush administration has professed opposition to such ideas, it has done nothing to discourage them. Such passivity may permit the final nail to be applied to the coffin of a nation-state founded on the proposition of "no taxation without representation."

At a splendid retreat held over the weekend in Santa Barbara by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, one of the Transies' nemeses, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, shed helpful light on why even Republican politicians seem so unfazed by the sacrifice of our sovereignty. He observed that, under our Constitution, it is we the people who are the sovereigns, not our government. Unless we are insistent that the latter not surrender the powers we voluntarily confer on it to the Transies' unrepresentative supranational bureaucracies, however, we will inexorably find ourselves neither sovereign, secure nor free.
Not saying it's all true, just something to be aware of. whit

20 comments:

  1. "(but it caught my eye yesterday)"
    but, but,
    Oh, sure, Whatever!

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  2. We of EB should start the Transmutational Insurgency.
    ...I'll "head up" the "genetic" end of it.

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  3. "WASHINGTON (AP) - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, deflecting White House criticism of her trip to Syria, said Friday she thinks the mission helped President Bush because it showed the United States is unified against terrorism despite being divided over the Iraq war.
    Pelosi, D-Calif., met with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus earlier this week, against the president's wishes.
    "
    ---
    The Morons Vs the Transies.
    What a Deal!

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  4. Pelosi is vicious, but she has the IQ of a light bulb.

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. The risks would be enormous but I don't think even Democratic pols would give up control.

    There is another even bigger threat caused by the trillions of dollars more we spend overseas than foreigners spent here. Massive amounts of our money (and jobs) are going to enemies like China and some unfriendly oil countries. Those countries use the money to buy US assets like treasury bonds and stocks, which has resulted in foreigners owning double digit percentages of US stocks, corporate bonds, and government bonds. In some cases those could be used for control of corporations. An enemy like China could put us in a deep recession by selling some of their hundreds of billions of $ of US Treasury bonds, which would make interest rates rise.

    We are basically selling our country to our enemies, along with some allies and neutrals.

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  7. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  8. Oh, some of it is true, wu.

    Depends upon where you are looking from, as to whether it's a serious problem, or not.

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  9. Pelosi is vicious, but she has the IQ of a light bulb.

    You are confusing her IQ with her American Conservative Union rating, which is 3 out of 100. Besides, I automatically deduct 40 points from the IQ of anyone who thinks IQ means anything. It is mental age divided by chronological age times 100, and assumes that intelligence rises linearly with age.

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  10. Big Sky Country, the report is in:

    A surprise spring snowstorm cancelled those farming plans. But the bigger surprise appears to be that Tester's vote for an Iraqi drawdown, and against the president, seems to have generated none of the political fallout that the administration had hoped for and spent the week trying to generate. Bush's attempts to portray Democrats as political hacks who want to micromanage the Iraq war and play political games with American troops while they are "in harm's way" is falling on deaf ears, and if people are not mad at the timeline vote here in Big Sky Country, it hard to know where you could find people who are. Consequently, Bush may face an even more determined, and confrontational, Congress when lawmakers return next week than the one that went home for spring break. You see hints of this in Majority Leader Harry Reid's declaration that Democrats may be willing to cut off war funding if Bush vetoes the supplemental. (And you thought the vertebrate species of Democrat was extinct!)

    On Tuesday, Tester left his farm and drove four hours south and east here to Billings, in Yellowstone County -- solid Republican territory -- for a "listening session" with veterans. The Clark Room (as in Lewis and Clark) on the lower level of the student union building at Montana State University at Billings was not packed, but it was a fair enough crowd -- about 30 people. Tester took questions for an hour. Not a single one challenged his supplemental vote or his position on the war.

    One Korean vet wanted to know if the senator could intervene with the Veterans Administration to get him a set of teeth, his original ones having been removed by the Army in 1954. Another wanted to know the extent of the problems at Walter Reed and if and how far they extended to VA facilities throughout the country. An Iraq veteran complained that he was not eligible for the G.I. Bill and did not understand the bureaucratic reasons why. Even the ones who agreed with the president did not bring up the question of withdrawal deadlines.


    The Senators and Congressmen went home and felt the pulse of the Nation, best poll there is. Right up there with November elections, we'll see the whose forces are laid out in phalanx after the break.

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  11. The Beltway boys expect Edwards to keep going further and further toward the out now position.

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  12. Scary thought is Richardson as VP on Hillary Ticket:
    Sew up the women and Hispanic votes tighter than frozen poop in a donut.
    (I'm trying to learn by listening to Dennis Miller,
    ...wish me luck)

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  13. The go between for Gonzo and the White House resigned tonite, the one that's takin' the Fifth. Ms Goodling.
    The Congress can offer her immunity from prosecution, then there'd she be. Outside lookin in, right there standin' with Scooter.

    But on another note of legal prosecutions, or the lack there of:

    Ninety-eight percent of those arrested between Oct. 1, 2000, and Sept. 30, 2005, were never prosecuted for illegally entering the country, according to an Associated Press analysis of federal data. Nearly 5.3 million immigrants were simply escorted back across the Rio Grande and turned loose. Many presumably tried to slip into the U.S. again.

    The number of immigrants prosecuted annually tripled during that five-year period, to 30,848 in fiscal year 2005, the most recent figures available. But that still represented less than 3 percent of the 1.17 million people arrested that year. The prosecution rate was just under 1 percent in 2001.
    ....
    T.J. Bonner, the union chief for Border Patrol agents, said the most effective solution would be to dry up job opportunities in the U.S. by cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants.

    "The employers are the ones breaking the law," he said, suggesting the creation of an "idiot-proof" system to check the immigration status of workers and the prosecution of any employers who knowingly hire those in this country illegally.


    While in Iraq there are two incidents of note

    BAGHDAD (Associated Press) -- A suspected al-Qaida in Iraq suicide bomber smashed a truck loaded with TNT and toxic chlorine gas into a police checkpoint in Ramadi on Friday, killing at least 27 people _ the ninth such attack since the group's first known use of a chemical weapon in January.

    Al-Qaida in Iraq, which asserts fealty to Osama bin Laden, was believed to be hitting back at Sunni tribesmen who are banding together to expel foreign fighters from their territory.
    ...

    ... the Basra police commander said the type of roadside bomb used in an attack that killed four British soldiers on Thursday had not been seen in the region previously. Maj. Gen. Mohammed al-Moussawi's description of the deadly weapon indicated it was a feared Iranian-designed explosively formed penetrator.

    Two more of the bombs were discovered planted along routes heavily traveled by U.S. and British diplomats in Basra. Weeks earlier, the American military had claimed Iran was supplying Shiite militia fighters in Iraq with the powerful weapons, known as EFPs. The bombs hurl a molten, fist-sized copper slug capable of piercing armored vehicles.

    Al-Moussawi said two similar bombs were discovered Friday morning; one was found on the road leading to Basra Palace, the compound that houses a British base and the British and U.S. consulates. A second was uncovered in the western Hayaniyah district where Thursday's attack occurred. The area is known as a stronghold of the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
    ...

    The British were killed the same day Iran released a captured British navy crew that was held for nearly two weeks for allegedly straying into Iranian waters.

    Reflecting on that incident and the deaths of the British soldiers, Bruce Riedel, a scholar at the Brookings Institution Saban Center, said Tehran was flexing its muscle to show both Britain and America that it could strike at will.

    "They have identified the British forces in Iraq and in the Gulf as a prime vulnerability," Riedel said. "I don't think I can prove it, but I think it's very interesting that in the last 100 hours six British soldiers have been killed by Shiites in Basra."


    Basra was touted a Success, a few weeks ago.
    Viva Basra!

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  14. Hewitt guest said Anti-Americanism in Britain is off the charts.

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  15. Mrs. Pelosi does not fall under the Logan Act because she is NOT a regular citizen; rather, she is the Speaker of the House, third in line in ascendancy. If we wish to exclude Mrs. Pelosi, we must first change the Constitution - .a small detail, to be sure, but one that sticks in the craw. Of course, we could make things up as is the way of DR, but that would not be Constitutional.

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  16. >Relax, Wu; ain't none of it true.

    It's definitely true, so if your reply is humor I missed it.

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