When You Look At The Whole Picture, It’s Scary

On Saturday, The American Thinker posted an article titled,”Stop pretending this is normal.” What a great title. I agree.

The article notes:

The Constitution says we will have a national election in a bit more than a year. That is one of the more certain things and even that is being questioned.

Pundits are pretending that the coming election will happen and that it will happen with all the normal ups and downs. Polls are questionable in normal times. Prognosticating the future can be done with some accuracy in normal times. This is not a normal time.

This is a roller coaster in a freezing tornado: Not normal. It is like the weather, a coupled, nonlinear chaotic not normal system. No prediction beyond the next sunrise is certain. We are in a “hold tight and ride” mode and we do not know when this ride will end. Maybe it will never end. No one can know. Knowing things with certainty is part of normal.

I do machinery vibration analysis. Just before a machine crashes into useless scrap metal, the vibration is said to go nonlinear. A bad military engagement might go sideways. Some say we are going full-Alinsky. We are nonlinear, sideways, full-Alinsky, on steroids and it is nothing like normal.

How not normal is it?

The article reminds us of all things that have happened in the past five years that have no precedent, such as a President who seems to have many age-related problems, a Vice-President whose ability to put a coherent thought together is often in question, corruption at the highest levels that is being ignored both by the Justice Department and the media, energy policies that are hurting Americans, and a totally political prosecution of a leading candidate for President who is not a member of the ruling class. These things are not normal.

The article concludes:

We have mostly-peaceful riots, parents locked out of their children’s medical decisions, and school boards that develop and implement secret curricula out of sight of objecting parents.

We have more than a thousand political prisoners held for years under minor charges for which they were not allowed access to exculpatory evidence. They are accused of an insurrection without weapons or organization.

Target has become a target, and Bud Light has become Bud Not.

The hottest song in America is a conservative protest song. Definitely not normal.

Accurate predictions require normal, and this is anything but normal. Prediction is impossible. It is a full random future. When people say President Trump cannot win or only Ron DeSantis can, or Biden will beat either, they are wild guessing because their guesses are based on normal, and this is anything but normal.

Almost anything is possible, and almost nothing is impossible. If there is something you want to happen, work toward it and hope it happens. It just might happen. No one knows.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. When you see all of what is happening listed together, it is chilling.

Laying The Foundation

In evaluating President Biden’s speech last night, there are a few things to consider when trying to put the speech in context.

Consider the impact of Saul Alinsky on the Democrat party since the 1990’s. If you are not familiar with Saul Alinsky, he was a Chicago community activist who worked through in the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago. He was an inspiration for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (and, I am sure, a number of other Democrats). In 1971, Saul Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals as a guide for political activism and mobilization of politically unrepresented communities. One of the guiding principles in his book was Rule 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Another, Rule 4, states, “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” Both of these principles were illustrated last night.

The New York Times posted the transcript of President Biden’s speech.

The President stated:

But as I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault. We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise.

So, tonight, I’ve come to this place where it all began to speak as plainly as I can to the nation about the threats we face, about the power we have in our own hands to meet these threats and about the incredible future that lies in front of us, if only we choose it.

We must never forget, we, the people, are the true heirs of the American experiment that began more than two centuries ago.

First of all–we are a representative republic–we are not a democracy. Secondly, equality is not under assault except by those pushing Critical Race Theory, reparations, etc.

The President stated:

Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.

Now, I want to be very clear, very clear up front. Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know, because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans.

But there’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country.

Rule 13 in action–pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

The President continued:

And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election, and they’re working right now as I speak in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.

Note the term ‘election deniers.’ That term is used as a pre-emptive attack against any evidence that may come out about election fraud. Remember that the man who just unconstitutionally granted student loan forgiveness is complaining that the MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. Also note that he is only attacking the MAGA Republicans. The ‘Club’ Republicans are his friends.

The President continues:

MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards, backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love. They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fanned the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.

Obviously these accusations are false, but there will be people who will believe them. I don’t believe it was the Republicans who bailed out the rioters of the summer of 2020.

The President stated:

But while the threat to American democracy is real, I want to say as clearly as we can, we are not powerless in the face of these threats. We are not bystanders in this ongoing attack on democracy. There are far more Americans, far more Americans from every background and belief, who reject the extreme MAGA ideology than those that accept it. And folks, it’s within our power, it’s in our hands, yours and mine, to stop the assault on American democracy.

Unfortunately, this is the rhetoric that will be used to justify the limiting of free speech and the attack on political conservatives. Since these people are a threat to American democracy (it’s a republic!), they need to be taken out. We have already seen swatting attacks on Marjorie Taylor Greene and Steve Bannon and a planned assassination of Judge Kavanaugh. This rhetoric will encourage more of that.

The President stated:

MAGA Republicans have made their choice. They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live, not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies. But together, together, we can choose a different path. We can choose a better path forward to the future, a future of possibility, a future to build a dream and hope, and we’re on that path moving ahead.

Please follow the link above if you want to read the entire speech. Frankly I see the speech as the building of a platform from which to attack any American who does not fall in lockstep with President Biden and those who are controlling him. The attack on MAGA Republicans will only be the beginning. We are heading into a dangerous time.

You Really Can’t Make This Up

Yesterday The Conservative Treehouse reported that Jen Psaki is claiming that the crisis at our southern border began with President Trump and that President Biden is simply trying to clean it up. I wonder if even those who only watch mainstream media believe that.

The article reports:

A remarkable display of Alinsky-inspired hubris today from the White House Press Secretary.

“I wanted to provide an update on the situation at our southern border. After four years of an immigration system rooted in destructive and chaotic policies, President Biden is taking the challenge head-on and is building a fair, orderly and humane immigration system; that’s our objective.  After coming into office, uh, our administration immediately jumped into action to address the influx of migrants at the border, something that began during -and was exacerbated by- the Trump administration; er, and wanted to provide data, pieces of data, you may have seen but they’ve come out since the last time we’ve had a briefing in here”…

The article notes the possible explanation for this bit of fiction:

What this tells me is…. in the background political operatives (and polling) are telling the JoeBama administration the border crisis is a toxic issue that will likely hurt the Democrats in the next mid-term election cycle. The White House response to deploy the Alinsky gaslighting is a very familiar tactic when there is urgency amid the liars to get out in front of a politically damaging position.

Unfortunately for Psaki, the reality, facts and a poor decision to give Biden T-shirts to the illegal alien horde, begs to differ.

I suspect that there are a lot of farmers and ranchers in border states who will be voting Republican first chance they get. They are living with the consequences of the insane border policies of the Biden administration.

Wisdom From The Mayor Of Livermore California

The article I am referring to is from June 2018, but it is still totally relevant. Linked in posted an article on June 16, 2018, about the success and popularity of President Trump. Obviously that popularity does not extend to the media, but it does extend to the thousands of people who attend his rallies. The article is written by Marshall Kamena, a registered Democrat who is the Mayor of Livermore, California.

The article notes:

My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.”

Here’s my answer: We Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency.

We tried statesmanship.

Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain?

We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney?

And the results were always the same. This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.

I don’t find anything “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper” about Barack Obama’s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party.

I don’t see anything “dignified” in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks.

I don’t see anything “statesman-like” in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent.

Yes, Obama was “articulate” and “polished” but in no way was he in the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”

The article continues:

The problem is that, through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war. While the Left has been taking a knife to anyone who stands in their way, the Right has continued to act with dignity, collegiality and propriety.

With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America ’s first wartime president in the Culture War.

…Trump’s tweets may seem rash and unconsidered but, in reality, he is doing exactly what Alinsky suggested his followers do. First, instead of going after “the fake media” — and they are so fake that they have literally gotten every single significant story of the past 60 years not just wrong, but diametrically opposed to the truth, from the Tet Offensive to Benghazi, to what really happened on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri — Trump isolated CNN.. He made it personal.

Then, just as Alinsky suggests, he employs ridicule which Alinsky described as “the most powerful weapon of all.”… Most importantly, Trump’s tweets have put CNN in an untenable and unwinnable position. … They need to respond.

This leaves them with only two choices. They can either “go high” (as Hillary would disingenuously declare of herself and the fake news would disingenuously report as the truth) and begin to honestly and accurately report the news or they can double-down on their usual tactics and hope to defeat Trump with twice their usual hysteria and demagoguery. The problem for CNN (et al.) with the former is that, if they were to start honestly reporting the news, that would be the end of the Democratic Party they serve. It is nothing but the incessant use of fake news (read: propaganda) that keeps the Left alive.

Imagine, for example, if CNN had honestly and accurately reported then-candidate Barack Obama’s close ties to foreign terrorists (Rashid Khalidi), domestic terrorists (William Ayers & Bernardine Dohrn), the mafia (Tony Rezko) or the true evils of his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright’s church.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It is extremely insightful!

Games The Media Is Playing

The media’s job is to report events, investigate questionable actions by those in power, and inform Americans about what their government is doing. It is not to follow Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals number 13. That rule states, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” That rule is currently controlling the American media, and their target is Donald Trump. If you want to know what is actually causing the division in this country, look no further than the media. They have the power to bring us together. They have chosen not to do that.

Yesterday Newsbusters posted an article about how The Washington Post has put its finger on the scale in the way it fact checks the President.

The article names five ways The Washington Post skews the results of its fact checking:

1. Bias by target selection. Did the Post have a database of President Obama’s false or misleading claims? No. Would the Post have a database of President Hillary’s false or misleading claims if she had won? Don’t be ridiculous. These people parse every sentence in Trump speeches, interviews, and tweets. They’re not doing that for anyone else, especially the Democratic candidates now running for president.

2. Nitpicking. Are they checking facts, or spin? Kessler & Co. fuss that Trump can’t say they’re building a wall at the border. Trump tweeted a picture of a wall being built. It’s clearly a border wall under construction. But Kessler says the money (and the plans) came before Trump, so it’s not “his” wall.  Kessler also cried False when Trump said he had “nothing to hide” from the Russia probe “but refused to testify under oath.” Kessler is spinning, not fact-checking.

3. Bias by multiplying nitpicking times 100. Once the Post throws a Pinocchio rating like the border-wall squabble, every time Trump says “we’re building the wall,” it’s counted as a false statement (160 times). Kessler repeatedly threw the False flag when Trump said there was “no collusion” with Russia. Which side was False on that one?

4. Lack of transparency. The Posties have dramatically increased the rate of the “false claims” they are finding. In announcing their 10,000 number, they claimed the president “racked up 171 false or misleading claims in just three days,” April 25 to 27.  They admit that’s a bigger number than they used to find in a month.

They claimed it was literally a falsehood a minute. They counted 45 in a 45-minute Sean Hannity interview, 17 falsehoods in a 19-minute Mark Levin interview, and 61 false claims in the president’s Saturday night rally in Green Bay.  But they don’t list them individually, so you can check their work.

5. Pinocchio forgiveness. Kessler also has a weird habit of skipping Pinocchios for Democrats when they call him on the phone and admit they fudged it. They just found Kamala Harris wrongly stated in a CNN town hall that a majority of women earn the minimum wage. Kessler concluded “Regular readers know that we generally do not award Pinocchios when politicians admit error, and we certainly give an allowance for a slip of the tongue during a live event. We don’t play gotcha at The Fact Checker.”

Unless you’re Trump. Then you get 10,000 Gotchas.

Where were these people when President Obama told us that if we liked our doctor we could keep him and that the cost of health insurance would go down under ObamaCare?

Rules For Radicals In Action

Rule number 13 of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” That is currently what the mainstream media is doing to the students of Covington High School in Kentucky. The students are being targeted because they are pro-life, Catholic, go to private school, and support President Trump. A full viewing of the video shows that they were simply waiting for a bus while being harassed by a racist group and rudely treated by an elderly native American. I can pretty much guarantee that if Nathan Phillips had done what he did to the Covington High School students to a group of New York City students, the invasion of their personal space might have been handled very differently.

Yesterday Breitbart posted an article illustrating how this works.

The article cites the media’s bringing up a previous story that has already been proven false:

Nevertheless, the media jihad continues, and that includes NBC shamelessly running a debunked and deceptive smear story that had been reported on and debunked all the way back in May.

NBC’s deliberately misleading headline reads: “Gay valedictorian banned from speaking at Covington graduation ‘not surprised’ by D.C. controversy.” The story accuses “Covington” (I’ll explain the quote marks in a bit) of “banning” a speech that was to be given by an openly gay student.

The article then explains the problem with the story about the graduation speech:

  1. NBC News does not concede the fact that Bales submitted the speech late, instead framing it only as an allegation — an excuse from the diocese.
  2. Nowhere does NBC News reveal that Bales’ speech was a Parkland-inspired diatribe about gun control.
  3. Christian Bales was not a student at Covington High School.
  4. Christian Bales graduated from Holy Cross High School, a completely different high school.
  5. If his speech had been approved, he would have given it at Holy Cross High School, not at Covington High School.
  6. Holy Cross High is run by the same Catholic diocese as Covington High, but they are two completely different schools.
  7. NBC News bombards the story with more than a dozen references to “Covington” but goes out of its way to obscure the fact Bales attended a completely different school…

Since Covington High School is the target of the current media attack, the fact that the incident happened at a different high school is not relevant to the media. This is how fake news works, and this is how Rules for Radicals are implemented.

 

The Dangers Of Not Closely Monitoring Immigration

On Tuesday The Daily Wire posted an article about some recent information from the Department of Homeland Security.

The article reports:

The Department of Homeland Security revealed Tuesday that the threat of “fake families” declaring asylum together at the United States’ southern border is no joke; more than 150 illegal immigrant “families” have used non-familial children or adults to attempt to convince border patrol agents to allow them to remain in the country.

The Daily Caller reports that “there has been a 110 percent increase in male adults showing up at the border with children. Further, DHS separated 507 illegal immigrants between April 19 and September 30 because they fraudulently claimed they were part of a family unit.”

The thing to remember here is that there are people in various countries in South American coaching people on how to break into America. If that is a harsh word, I’m sorry–it is what is happening. I will admit that our immigration system needs serious reform, but that is no excuse for people thinking they can simply come here illegally and stay. Right now America is severely in debt. We have neglected our veterans and are not doing a good job of taking care of anyone. We cannot afford to be overrun with non-citizens who want to be taken care of.

When evaluating what is happening at our border, it might be wise to consider the Cloward-Piven strategy from the 1960’s. Cloward-Piven was a strategy to convert America to a socialist state (taken from Discover the Networks):

Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called “crisis strategy” or “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands. 

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one. 

This may well be what the caravans are actually about. If this theory is too wild for you, step back and look at the movement toward socialism in the recent election.

The Government Envisioned by Carroll Quigley Has Come To Pass

We are here:

“The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy” (Georgetown University Professor Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966.)

The dream of Carroll Quigley has come true. We have reached the point where it does no good to simply ‘throw the rascals out.’ We tried that in 2016, and nothing has changed. On Sunday night, Republicans and Democrats in Congress put together a spending bill that would fund the government through September. It is truly a bad bill that does not respect the wishes of the voters in the 2016 election.

Fox News reported today:

The proposed legislation has no funding for Trump’s oft-promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, but does set aside $1.5 billion for border security measures such as additional detention beds. It does give Trump a $12.5 billion down payment on his request to strengthen the military, a figure which could rise to $15 billion should Trump present Congress with a plan for fighting the Islamic State terror group. The proposed $15 billion amounts to half of Trump’s original $30 billion request.

…The House and Senate have until 11:59 p.m. Friday to approve the bill, which would avert a government shutdown. If passed, the catchall spending bill would be the first major piece of bipartisan legislation to advance during Trump’s short tenure in the White House. The measure is assured of winning bipartisan support in votes this week, but it’s unclear how much support the measure will receive from GOP conservatives and how warmly it will be received by the White House.

Democratic votes will be needed to pass the measure even though Republicans control both the White House and Congress. The minority party has been actively involved in the talks, which appear headed to produce a lowest common denominator measure that won’t look too much different than the deal that could have been struck on Obama’s watch last year.

Breitbart posted an article today quoting Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the vice chairman of the House Freedom Caucus:

Jordan argued the entire point of doing a short-term spending bill last year was to get the government through until the next administration took office. Then, he explained Republicans in a GOP-controlled federal government would have the opportunity to fight for their priorities.

“Why did we last fall do a short-term spending bill if we weren’t going to actually fight for the things we told the voters we were going to fight for?” he said. “So we’d have been, I mean if this is the deal we’re going to get it seems to me we should have just did the bill for the whole year. But we specifically held the vote for; we did a short-term spending bill for this time so that when Republicans controlled the government, we could actually do the things we campaigned on. This bill doesn’t seem to do that. Plus it maintains Chris this idea that for every new dollar you spend in defense money you’ve got to give the Democrats more money in non-defense. That’s again not what we campaigned on. So I’m disappointed. We’ll see how it plays out this week. But I think you’re going to see conservatives have some real concerns with this legislation.

We might want to remember that the first rule of Saul Alinsky‘s Rules for Radicals is:

“Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.

Part of the problem here is that the Democrats have convinced the Republicans that if the Democrats shut down the government, the Republicans will somehow be blamed for the shutdown. Because of the mainstream media’s support of the Democrats, that is the way it will be spun, but many Americans are looking past the spin.

This budget bill is a major mistake for Congressional Republicans. They need to look at the votes lost by the Democratic Party in elections over the past decade and understand that if the Republican Party continues in the direction they seem to be currently going, they will also lose voters. If the Republicans ignore the results of the 2016 election and the popularity of Donald Trump because he stood for change, there will be a successful third party within a decade.

 

Smile, You Are Being Manipulated

Right now there is a lot of discussion as to whether of not American should allow Syrian refugees into America. There are a lot of aspects to this problem, but one that may not have been fully explored is the political left’s use of Saul Alinsky‘s Rules for Radicals.

Rule No. 4 states:

The left is using the refugees as a wedge issue. They are following Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals #4, which states: RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. (This is a serious rule. The besieged entity’s very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.).

America has had problems with Muslim refugees in the past. Here are links to two articles dealing with past problems: one from The Clarion Project and one from World Net Daily. In June of this year, The Center for Security Policy posted the following:

According to the just-released survey of Muslims, a majority (51%) agreed that “Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to shariah.”  When that question was put to the broader U.S. population, the overwhelming majority held that shariah should not displace the U.S. Constitution (86% to 2%).

More than half (51%) of U.S. Muslims polled also believe either that they should have the choice of American or shariah courts, or that they should have their own tribunals to apply shariah. Only 39% of those polled said that Muslims in the U.S. should be subject to American courts.

…Even more troubling, is the fact that nearly a quarter of the Muslims polled believed that, “It is legitimate to use violence to punish those who give offense to Islam by, for example, portraying the prophet Mohammed.”

Understand that Sharia Law and the U.S. Constitution are not compatible. The Muslim definition of free speech is not compatible with the American First Amendment. Under Sharia Law, the definition of slander includes saying anything negative about Islam whether or not it is true. Slander can be punishable by death.

Many of the Somali refugees in the midwest have left America to join Islamic terrorists. The Boston bombers were refugees. The refugee issue is not as simple as letting anyone into America who is fleeing violence. It is something that needs to be handled cautiously and without politics. I am not sure our present leaders are capable of either.

A Scapegoat Speaks Out

RULE 12 of Saul Alinsky‘s Rules for Radicals states: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

The latest example of the use of this rule is the political left’s attack on the Koch Brothers.

As I reported on February 14th (rightwinggranny.com):

Open Secrets has posted a list of the top donors to Republicans and Democrats from 1989 to 2014. It is not really a surprise to me that you have to go down to number 17 to find a donor who donated more to the Republicans than Democrats. Koch Industries, the organization liberals love to cite as the buyer of elections, is number 59 on the list.

Well, the Koch Brothers are speaking out, and John Hinderaker Power Line posted  the story yesterday.

John Hinderaker states:

I asked Koch Industries’ general counsel, Mark Holden, who sometimes acts as a spokesman for the company, whether he would like to comment on the Times’ account of the Democrats’ new strategy. He responded with these observations:

It is disappointing, but not surprising, to see the NY Times become the launch pad for Senator Reid’s and his allied group Patriot Majority USA’s most recent dishonest and desperate attack campaign against Charles Koch and David Koch. It was very surprising, however, to see the Times’ headline that this was a “new strategy” by the Democratic leadership. For the past several years, the Times has been reporting and opining, and sometimes joining in, the attacks against us.

This is a living example of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Rule No. 12.

John Hinderaker compares the New York Times with Koch Industries:

Indeed. It is revealing to compare Charles and David Koch with the owners and managers of the New York Times Company. The Koch brothers employ a growing, highly-paid work force of 60,000 in the United States, around one-third of whom are unionized. Koch Industries enjoys excellent relationships with its unions. The New York Times Company, on the other hand, employs a shrinking, largely ill-paid work force, and is embroiled in a long-running feud with its unions.

Koch Industries and its subsidiaries produce tangible products that enrich the lives of Americans–among other things, Koch transports and refines oil, makes products that are used in construction, and manufactures a wide array of consumer products that are staples in most American homes. The New York Times Company produces nothing but shoddy left-wing journalism that is of questionable benefit to anyone.

This is not a Republican or Democrat issue. The issue here is what Americans want from their politicians and media. We can have a media that is objective and tells voters what they need to know to make informed choices, or we can have a media that lies to us and attacks people in a partisan way. The destruction of an honest man running a successful business does not do anyone any good. It is harmful to our representative republic. If Americans want honest news sources, they need to stop buying newspapers from sources that are not helpful to the political debate. We all need to support the sources telling the truth, and let the sources not telling the truth deal with a pile of unsold newspapers.

 

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Why I Don’t Believe Everything I Read

In his book Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution, The Alinsky Model, David Horowitz relates an incident that tells us all we need to know about how underhanded the game of politics can be.

The book states:

College student activists in the 1960’s and 1970’s sought out Alinksy for advice about tactics and strategy. On one such occasion in the spring of 1972 at Tulane University’s annual week-long series of events featuring leading public figures, students asked Alinsky to help plan a protest of a scheduled speech by George Bush, then U.S. representative to the United Nations, a speech likely to be a defense of the Nixon Administration‘s Vietnam War policies [Note: the Nixon Administration was then negotiating with the North Vietnamese Communists to arrive at a peace agreement- DH] The students told Alinsky that they were thinking about picketing or disrupting Bush’s address. That’s the wrong approach, he rejoined – not very creative and besides, causing a disruption might get them thrown out of school. [Not very likely-DH] He told them, instead, to go hear the speech dressed up as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and whenever Bush said something in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and wave placards, reading, ‘The K.K.K. supports Bush.’ And that is what the students did with very successful, attention-getting results. (This story is taken from a Saul Alinksy book, Let Them Call Me Rebel)

So why am I telling this story? The tactics really have not changed. A website called redflagnews is reporting that Renee Vaughan, who was holding a sign at a Trayvon Martin rally, was not who she appeared to be. Ms. Vaughan held a sign that stated, “We’re racist & proud,” and stood with the group supporting George Zimmerman.

The article at Red Flag News reports:

Austin resident Renee Vaughan echoed the sign’s ugly sentiments by yelling, “We’re racist. We’re proud. We’re better because we’re white,” at the Martin group as they passed, according to the Chronicle.

Brandon Darby interviewed Renee Vaughan at the rally. She told him her sign means that “there are people here who are racist and apparently think that’s OK. I’m not one of them. I’m being sarcastic.”

It looks as if Saul Alinsky’s tactics are alive and well among those who want to divide this nation along racial lines.

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Some Random Thoughts On ‘Occupy Wall Street’

There are some interesting facts behind the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest. Bill Ayers (a man not known for his love of America or his patriotism) has a blog on Word Press (I’m sorry to hear that, but I believe in free speech). Bill is an aging 60’s radical who admits to being responsible for killing people. There is a long statement on his blog explaining what the protest is about.

The first line of that statement:

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

Think about this for a minute. When a homeowner takes out a mortgage, he signs a contract that requires him to pay back that mortgage. It is understood that if he cannot pay the mortgage, he will lose the house. The subprime mortgage market was the result of government pressure to issue mortgages to people who could not pay them back. The banks then had to find a way to share the risk of these mortgages. The problem was partially the banks, but the root of the problem was the government. Why are the protesters protesting the banks and not the government?

While we are on the subject. The handbook used by Bill Ayers and Barack Obama during their organizing days in Chicago was Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. As you watch the demonstrations on Wall Street, you need to keep the principles of this book in mind.

11.  Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.  Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies.  Identify a responsible individual.  Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

They have not yet picked a person to demonize, they are simply demonizing banks and big corporations. Another thing to remember is that union leaders are supporting this protest. What is the difference between the union leaders who get rich off the dues of their members and the so-called corporate ‘fat cats’ who are actually responsible for producing a product?

Listening to the comments of the protesters, I am convinced that what they want is to get everyone else’s money without actually having to work for it. Many of the protesters are spoiled children who do not want to pay back their school loans or accept the responsibilities of adulthood. I suspect they will be gone as soon as the weather gets cold–they are not thinking for themselves–they simply are buying a story someone is selling them. Until they find their own purpose, they will lack the direction to accomplish anything meaningful.

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