Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
This is a story you are not likely to hear about from the mainstream media. As previously reported on this site the Obama administration, led by Hillary Clinton, came down hard on the sovereign country of Honduras for upholding their constitution and fighting against a Chavez style, “leader for life” power grab by their president Manuel Zelaya.
You have probably seen a lot of comparisons in the main stream media trying to compare President Barack Obama to President Ronald Reagan. Try to make this comparison to a conservative and they will look at you rather oddly. Tell it to a progressive and they lap it up, because they know that President Reagan was a leader and by comparing the two men, perhaps some of that leadership will rub off on the incumbent.
Back on the campaign trail where he feels comfortable that he knows what he is doing, Barack Obama traveled to Las Vegas to stump for Harry Reid. Harry Reid used to be a boxer and when he told Barack Obama this he said, “Barack, I wasn’t the fastest. I wasn’t the hardest-hitting, but I knew how to take a punch.” Based on all the legislation that has been passed since 2008 that an overwhelming majority of the American people have opposed, makes one wonder if Harry Reid took a few punches too many.
Shortly after taking office and settling into his “bash business” mode Obama blasted businesses for their extravagant meetings held in places like Las Vegas. Someone then whispered in the president’s ear that extravagant business meetings in Las Vegas were good for Las Vegas and Harry Reid. Oops. And there you have the crux of the problem.
What, exactly, is government’s role to tell private companies how to spend their money? What is the role of governments to say to a BP, “Give us the $20 billion, or we’ll take it from you,” as was attributed to Joe Biden, without first going to court? What is the role of government to say to its citizens, you must buy this health care product or pay a fine? Well in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, it is probably all fine and dandy, but in America?
Barack, the standup comic, used the analogy that he and Harry Reid had mud on their shoes, were pushing hard to get the car back on the road, and were making progress little-by-little and when they finally got one wheel on the pavement the Republicans want to throw the car into reverse. Really? I would compare it more to conservatives telling everyone to get out of the car and help push, instead of waiting for Nancy Pelosi to come back from Dunkin Donuts with free food for all the overweight union bosses jammed in the car squawking that they didn’t do manual labor. Their contract didn’t call for pushing cars out of ditches.
So, while this car should have been out of this ditch and well down the road by now, Harry and Barry will try to convince us that what they’re doing is absolutely brilliant; it’s just that we are too stupid to see it. After all, it took the greatest president in history, FDR, over eight years and a World War to get us out of the Great Depression, so relax we have another 6 ½ years to go.
Imagine what would have happened if the ever resilient American economy was allowed to work on its own without all the government intervention in the 1930s. Perhaps the Depression would have been shorter like the recession of 1920-1921, and perhaps we would not have had World War II, and Fannie Mae, and a bankrupt Social Security, and a couple of generations later all of us swimming in debt. It’s time the tow truck of the most powerful economy on the face of the earth to come along and be allowed to do its job. Tell Harry and Barry to go sit down on that stump over there, and watch how it is really done. “You’re making a mess of yourselves and embarrassing the rest us.”
I was watching Mike Huckabee’s show this weekend when a curious exchange took place. Governor Huckabee tried to be fair to President Obama by saying “I believe in his heart that President Obama believes he is doing what is best for the country.” The governor is not alone among those who oppose President Obama who graciously say this. Perhaps it is a preemptive strike to avoid being tarred as a racist. At the same time, however, they will say they think President Obama is a smart man. How do you reconcile those two positions?
Either the man is an idiot and he is stumbling toward socialism without realizing it, or he is an intelligent man who is taking the country to socialism by design. I don’t see a middle ground. The only possibility is that he is a man with an arrogance so breathtaking in scope, that he ignores the will of the people and is implementing programs and policies that he believes is better for the unintelligent masses, and mistakenly thinks it is still capitalism. I can’t square the man’s intelligence, which I believe he has, with him not knowing the difference between capitalism and socialism/Marxism.
Okay, so what prompted this train of thought? It was prompted by some little know activity south of the border and I don’t mean Mexico. Earlier in his term, President Obama, Secretary Clinton and others tried to help return a Hugo Chavez puppet to the presidency in Honduras. Manuel Zalaya was following tactics of Chavez and Castro, to remain in office beyond his term which is limited. By doing so, he was immediately in violation of Honduran law and their constitution. He was removed by order of the Honduran Supreme Court with the backing of the Honduran legislature. The only step they might have taken which was too far was they put him on a plane out of the country.
Chavez, Castro, et al, were outraged. Did the Obama administration come down on the side of democracy and democratic institutions? No, they tried to strong arm Honduras to put Zalaya back in office, by cancelling visas, affecting trade and other measures. Honduras proceeded, ignoring these threats, to hold a general election to peacefully choose a new president which they did. The United States has reluctantly agreed to recognize the new president, but it was not easy for small Honduras to stand up to the United States and based on what they were fighting for and they shouldn’t have had to.
What other signs do I find troubling? After going against the will of the American people in forcing through ObamaCare, Fidel Castro heaped praise upon Obama for the law’s passage only criticizing him for taking so long. In April of 2009, President Obama embraced Hugh Chavez. Today Hugo Chavez is in the process of shutting down the last television outlet that is critical of him while forming closer ties to Ahmadinejad of Iran.
In Ecuador, President Rafael Correa is following the Chavez model. He is also chummy with Iran, is constantly threatening the free press, and the economy is in shambles. He fired congressmen who disagreed with him and replaced them with others who saw things his way. When the constitutional court said the fired congressmen had to be reinstated, Correa took to the airwaves to declare he was ignoring the court’s decision. Shortly thereafter an angry mob marched on the court, the police who are supposed to protect them stood aside. Do we have a statement of concern from the White House regarding this trampling of democracy? No, we have the State Department’s Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Arturo Valenzuela, calling on President Correa. According to the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady:
During Tuesday’s meeting before television cameras, Mr. Valenzuela expressed concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its budding relationship with Ecuador. According to Reuters, Mr. Correa told him: “We don’t want to get involved in that discussion. But what does it have to do with selling bananas to Iran or with Iran financing our hydroelectric plants?” Translation: Ahmadinejad is my friend. You butt out.
The U.S. response? Mr. Valenzuela would not rule out a meeting between Mr. Correa and Barack Obama. If that happens, prepare for a redux of the Obama embrace of Hugo Chávez in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in April 2009—more humiliation for Americans who used to think of their government as a noble defender of liberty against despots.
Creeping Socialism
Obama has given government control over one-sixth of the U.S. economy with the implementation of ObamaCare. He has nationalized two automobile companies. He has nationalized the student loan program. Unions, for the first time, have more members in the government than the private sector, but President Obama wants to increase their numbers in the private sector as well with Card Check. Who are the unions beholding to and vice versa? The Democratic Party. With more union members to do his bidding where does the average citizen stand? In a July speech President Obama said the following:
”We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.” (emphasis added)
If this doesn’t send chills up your spine conjuring up dark images from the 1930s, you need to put down the Playstation and pick up a newspaper or a book. Consider that when he graduated from Columbia he became a follower of Saul Alinsky, a Marxist community organizer. Barack Obama did not cut his teeth by starting a small business. He cut his teeth learning how to take down capitalism using Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. As he gets chummy with America’s enemies, he gives the back of his hand to our allies: Israel, Great Britain, Poland,and the Czech Republic. Do you still believe this is a coincidence Governor Huckabee?
With Ahmadinejad and the mullahs taking maximum advantage of Obama’s apology tour, it was time to make a bold statement regarding a second nuclear installation in Iran. What better place and what better time than at the U.N. Security Council meeting especially with President Obama holding the gavel as the current chairman. At least that was what French President Nicholas Sarkozy thought, as well British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
The problem was that President Obama was basking in the glow of his makeover of America. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, after all, told the General Assembly that he no longer smelled the sulfurous odor of El Diablo, President Bush. It was another Obama global love fest. Why spoil it by talking about global security in the Security Council of all places? It would be far better to talk about global security the following day at an economic summit of the G-20. Don’t you think?
French Fried
Sarkozy apparently had his U.N. speech prepared to take a strong stance against Iran in the Security Council Meeting, but was forced to remove that part of the speech.
President Sarkozy in particular pushed hard. He had been “frustrated” for months about Mr. Obama’s reluctance to confront Iran, a senior French government official told us, and saw an opportunity to change momentum. But the Administration told the French that it didn’t want to “spoil the image of success” for Mr. Obama’s debut at the U.N. and his homily calling for a world without nuclear weapons, according to the Paris daily Le Monde. So the Iran bombshell was pushed back a day to Pittsburgh, where the G-20 were meeting to discuss economic policy. — WSJ, September 29, 2009
Welcome as it is, at the same time somewhat embarrassing that the French are frustrated that the United States isn’t taking a harder line. President Obama has certainly come full circle from President Bush in just nine months. As for me, I slept better with an American cowboy in the White House.
When given an opportunity to speak in Pittsburgh, President Sarkozy could hardly contain himself:
“We are right to talk about the future,” Mr. Sarkozy said, referring to the U.S. resolution on strengthening arms control treaties. “But the present comes before the future, and the present includes two major nuclear crises,” i.e., Iran and North Korea. “We live in the real world, not in a virtual one.” No prize for guessing into which world the Frenchman puts Mr. Obama.
Sarkozy continued,
“I support America’s ‘extended hand.’ But what have these proposals for dialogue produced for the international community? Nothing but more enriched uranium and more centrifuges. And last but not least, it has resulted in a statement by Iranian leaders calling for wiping off the map a Member of the United Nations. What are we to do? What conclusions are we to draw? At a certain moment hard facts will force us to make decisions.”
Vive la France. I hope we make it to 2012.
Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan was an aviator in the 1930s. In 1938 he mistakenly flew from New York to Ireland when he was supposed to fly from New York to California, because he claims he misread his compass. It later turned out that he really intended to fly to Ireland but couldn’t get permission.
What’s Hillary’s excuse? As the Obama Administration has called the removal of Honduran President Manuel Zalaya a coup d’etat, more attention is being focused on what the law in Honduras really says. The Congressional Research Service looked into it and had this to say:
“The Supreme Court of Honduras has constitutional and statutory authority to hear cases against the President of the Republic and many other high officers of the State, to adjudicate and enforce judgments, and to request the assistance of the public forces to enforce its rulings.”
—Congressional Research Service, August 2009
So why is Hillary Clinton now attacking the Honduran Supreme Court by pulling the visas of all fifteen members of the court? The U.S. sided with Hugo Chavez and Costa Rica to reach a “negotiated” settlement that would put Zalaya back in the presidency. Honduras said, sorry, that would violate our constitution. He broke the law, we dealt with it according to our constitution, and that’s that.
Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes in the Wall Street Journal:
The upshot is that the U.S. is trying to force Honduras to violate its own constitution and is also using its international political heft to try to interfere with the country’s independent judiciary.
Hondurans are worried about what this pressure is doing to their country. Mr. Zelaya’s violent supporters are emboldened by the U.S. position. They deface some homes and shops with graffiti and throw stones and home-made bombs into others, and whenever the police try to stop them, they howl about their “human rights.”
When will the apology tour end and we start standing up for liberty and democracy? Is it more important that Hillary have an accomplishment she can brag about than following the rule of law? This administration has so much, so backwards it is hard to keep track of it. They focus all their time and energy doing things they are not constitutionally authorized to do (health care, taking over car companies and banks, funding ACORN), and ignoring their fundamental constitutional duties of foreign policy and national defense. Let’s hope some pressure can be brought to bear on the Obama Administration to back off before Chavez puts a puppet in place.
Chavez, Castro, et al, were cheering on their protege, Manuel Zalaya to make himself president for life and impose their same style of dictatorship on the people of Honduras. Zalaya is term limited, but tried to push through a referendum to amend the constitution to lift that restriction. That is against the law in Honduras.
Zalaya had his minions break into a facility that held the confiscated referendum ballots. The Honduran Supreme Court declared that he had broken the law, the military captured Zalaya and sent him out of the country. The cry throughout the region was that this was a coup removing Zalaya, but no one is saying where the Honduran Congress or Supreme Court did not follow their own laws, and show that Zalaya was not violating the same.
To Meddle or Not To Meddle?
The Obama administration was oddly silent when democracy was trying to break out in Iran, but spoke out against the laws being followed in Honduras. Now as Zalaya plays provocative games on the border, it appears the Obama administration is negotiating with the Honduran military for the return of Zalaya to power:
The communiqué was drafted in Washington after days of talks between mid-level Honduran officers and American Congressional aides. — NY Times, July 26, 2009
The communique it appears, indicates that the military would not stand in the way of Zalaya’s return. Is this not meddling? Left wing forces in the regions are trying to create another dictatorship like Venezuela and Cuba, the laws in Honduras are followed that prevent this, and the Obama administration weighs in on the side of the leftists.
There may not be a coup in Honduras, but we may be backing a socialist revolution. We have come a long way from Ronald Reagan winning the Cold War and freeing Eastern Europe.
The press is sleepwalking. As I have been reading the press reports concerning the crisis in Honduras, I have been struck by the lack of interest by the press in the full picture. Other than Mary Anastasia O’Grady at the Wall Street Journal, no journalist seems to care about the facts in Honduras and whether this is truly a coup or following the rule of law and thwarting a dictatorial takeover of the government.
It seems like Honduras is lined up on one side and all the world on the other, and the uncontested facts on the ground tilt in Honduras’ favor. Castro, Chavez, and their leftist brethren, the OAS, and the Obama administration all seem to be backing the dictator wannabe Zalaya. It is quite a contrast to how the Obama administration dragged it’s feet in supporting Iran and now it is standing shoulder to shoulder with Hugo Chavez. And the main stream media lazily goes along.
With Fidel Castro at the end of his life perhaps some thought the leftest threat to the hemisphere coming to a close. However there is a new threat in Hugo Chavez. The difference is that Castro’s Cuba was a ward of the Soviet Union and once they could no longer afford to support him, Castro’s relevance began to wane. But Chavez has oil and does not need handouts and so is much more dangerous.
“This is a moment when the U.S. ought to be on the side of the rule of law, which the Honduran court and Congress upheld. If Washington does not reverse course, it will be one more act of appeasement toward an ambitious and increasingly dangerous dictator.” – O’Grady, WSJ, 07/06/2009
The World is Watching
The world is watching and taking the measure of Obama, and when push comes to shove they will choose where their best interests lie. If we will not stand behind democracy in our hemisphere, then other countries will try to cut the best deal they can with Chavez. North Korea gets bolder by the day. Iran kills its citizens and Obama wants to keep the door open to dialog. Weakness abounds and everyone can see it.
Brothers in Arms
When I first heard the news of a “coup d’etat” in Honduras I thought, “This isn’t good.” America cannot be a champion of democracy if we only support democracies where we like the outcome. Recall the coup in Venezuela that ousted Hugo Chavez for a couple of days, and we got behind it. But he was elected and to avoid being hypocrites we have to support the process.
Not So Fast
As more news came out about exactly what happened in Honduras, it became clearer that the military was following the democratic process not subverting it. The bad news is that while President Obama kept silent or tepid at best regarding Iran, he came out forcefully on the side of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez condemning the military’s action in Honduras.
Here is a rundown on what is going on in Honduras as reported in the Wall Street Journal on June 29 and June 30:
A Disturbing Pattern
Maybe it’s just me, but I see a disturbing pattern here. In Iran where democracy is being clearly trashed, President Obama was extraordinarily restrained in criticizing the mullahs, while they shot their people in cold blood for exercising free speech and free assembly. In Honduras, the government is carefully following the rule of law and its constitution while its president tries turn it into a dictatorship along the lines of Venezuela, and they are roundly condemned by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. President Obama lines up with Ahminedinjad, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, and against democracy.
Here at home he is orchestrating a massive expansion of government power and intrusion into every last detail of our lives. Our liberty to live our lives as we choose is draining away. I’m concerned. Are you?
I’ll see you at the Tea Party tonight in New York.
Can liberty be saved? Is there a chance that we can rescue our country from the federal juggernaut that wants to reach down into the deepest recesses of your life and take control? They spend your money with reckless abandon and say, “What Me Worry?” Those in power would have indulged in the trappings of office, sated on money and power, and be long gone with their spoils while the crumpled bill lies on the floor for you and your children and your children’s children to pick up and pay.
They have invited many to the party, to eat, drink, and be merry with promises of “middle class” tax cuts that are the greatest April Fools joke of all time. Don’t worry we’ll get the rich to pay for it all. You know, those evil fat cats on Wall Street. But the Republicans on Wall Street have long be replaced by Democrats. That’s right, Gordon Gecko is a Democrat. 60% of Wall Street contributions went to Democrats vs. Republicans. How long will the top 2% of earners keep shouldering the burden before they slow down, stop, or emigrate. Who will pick up the pieces then? Who will support the drunken revelers that Obama piled on the public dole?
AIG Outrage
All of the outrage by Congressional and Administration leadership over the AIG bonuses is the epitome of hubris. AIG contributed $104,000 to each Barack Obama and Christopher Dodd, during the recent election cycle. Do you remember the brouhaha over language in the stimulus bill that had a loophole that allowed the AIG bonuses to be paid? Dodd said he didn’t include the loophole. Later he said he did include it but at the insistence of the Obama administration. Now is it just me or does anyone else see a quid pro quo here? Then they come out red-faced professing that the bonuses are an outrage. Senator Schumer, who is threatening to unconstitutionally tax the bonuses into oblivion, took $112,000 in contributions from AIG.
Lessons from Hugo Chavez?
More recently President Obama effectively fired the CEO of General Motors and now speaks of bankruptcy. I, among many others, said they should have filed for bankruptcy long before taxpayers bailed them out. So now after we have sunk taxpayer money into GM and Chrysler, Obama steps in and effectively runs the company on “our behalf” as owners of 80% of the company and now says bankruptcy is a good idea! When will the amateur hour come to an end? But watch carefully, because Obama will assiduously avoid offending the auto workers union, despite the fact that the union contracts put US auto makers at a $2000 per car disadvantage against the competition. GM (Government Motors) will now be forced to make cars that satisfy Obama’s left wing supporters but that Americans don’t want to buy. It will be interesting to see how the government forces us to buy them.
What Do the Europeans Think?
For years we have been told by the left that we must listen to what the Europeans are saying. They say we have to consider foreign laws in weighing Supreme Court cases. They decried Bush’s policies as alienating our European friends. So what do the Europeans think of Obama now?
The president of the European Union on Wednesday ripped the Obama administration’s economic policies, calling its deficit spending and bank bailouts “a road to hell.” — Washington Post, March 25
A Very Dangerous Path
In March of 1933 Adolf Hitler, proclaiming a national emergency of a potential communist revolution asked the German legislature, the Reichstag, to grant him emergency powers to deal with the situation. Such a proposal required two-thirds approval by that body. The final vote was 441 in favor, 84 opposed. From that point on, Hitler was dictator.
Rahm Emmanuel likes to say, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” President Obama is taking the current financial crisis to ram through a massive power grab. The legislation is being rammed through with such force and urgency that no one has a chance to read it. What ticking time bomb could be tucked in those pages that get voted on and passed without scrutiny? Just look at the AIG fiasco for the answer. No one seemed to know or admit it was in there. If we allow this to continue, we may find some other provision included in the dead of night that will destroy our country forever.
Be on your guard.
