Daniel Greenfield is a New York City writer and columnist. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and his articles appears at its Front Page Magazine site.
The key question is not whether America will recover from the current managed economic decline, but whether America will be allowed to recover.
And the key factors that will determine are whether we will have a free market economy, or a socialist economy dominated by vastly expanded and empowered unions, cap and trade, and a great deal of new taxes and regulations.
The Obama Administration's release of the torture memos, Senator Dodd's obscene comparison of the US interrogations of terrorists and the Holocaust and the media's ongoing demonization and exposure of personnel involved in forcefully interrogating captured Al Queda terrorists brings to mind McCarthyism. The real and original McCarthyism.
"That brought us to our essential difference, the difference of the Evolutionary Collectivist and Marxist, the question whether the social revolution is, in its extremity, necessary, whether it is necessary to over throw one economic system completely before the new one can begin. I believe that through a vast sustained educational campaign the existing Capitalist system can be civilised into a Collectivist world system;" - H.G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows
The Deficits keep rising, unemployment figures are out sight, the talking heads keep smirking and the thuggery continues. After the Obamamessiah Hope and Change Express threw the Fifth Amendment and billions in taxpayer money out the window, so his UAW union backers could take over a major American automaker and insure their cushy featherbedded jobs will took anything from Serta and Sleepys...
"Our political problem now is “Can we, as a nation, continue together permanently—forever—half slave, and half free?" Abraham Lincoln, 1855
When Lincoln first asked this question, America was slowly coming to grips with the knowledge that as a nation it could not continue to exist, half-slave and half free. This was not only because slavery was immoral or unconstitutional... but on a purely practical level, slave states and free states had significantly different and incompatible interests.
We are Americans, we don't torture. To torture would lower our moral standing, knock us down from the moral high ground into the muck of sordid violence. Our enemies may torture us, mutilate us and behead us-- but to pour water on one of their terrorists makes us no better than them.
And why else are we fighting them in the first place, in order to protect our own citizens... or to be better than them?
How neatly the pieces seem to fall into place. Specter announces his party switch, strengthening the Democrats in the Senate, just as liberal Republican Supreme Court Justice prepares to retire from the court. Coincidence? Sure.
What does an independence day mean anyway? As a culture grows softer, it simply comes to mean another holiday, festive foods, fireworks and a day off from work. In the purely hedonistic misinterpretation, independence means a chance to celebrate your own creature comforts without thinking about the sacrifices they cost and the sacrifices needed to perpetuate that personal independence, made possible by a greater national independence.
Yom HaShoah has come and gone again. A day for looking back at what has happened and a day for looking away from what will happen.
In Skokie, millions of dollars have been spent to build a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, even as Iran is spending its millions on building another kind of memorial to the Holocaust, in the form of nuclear technology that will be used to finish that piece of history that Ahmadinejad claims never took place.