Park Service Paramilitaries

The government has King John’s idea of public lands.

By Mark Steyn

If a government shuts down in the forest and nobody hears it, that’s the sound of liberty dying. The so-called shutdown is, as noted last week, mostly baloney: Eighty-three percent of the supposedly defunded government is carrying on as usual, impervious to whatever restraints the people’s representatives might wish to impose, and the 800,000 soi-disant “non-essential” workers have been assured that, as soon as the government is once again lawfully funded, they will be paid in full for all the days they’ve had at home.

But the one place where a full-scale shutdown is being enforced is in America’s alleged “National Park Service,” a term of art that covers everything from canyons and glaciers to war memorials and historic taverns. The NPS has spent the last two weeks behaving as the paramilitary wing of the DNC, expending more resources in trying to close down open-air, unfenced areas than it would normally do in keeping them open. It began with the war memorials on the National Mall — that’s to say, stone monuments on pieces of grass under blue sky. It’s the equivalent of my New Hampshire town government shutting down and deciding therefore to ring the Civil War statue on the village common with yellow police tape and barricades. 

Still, the NPS could at least argue that these monuments were within their jurisdiction — although they shouldn’t be. Not content with that, the NPS shock troops then moved on to insisting that privately run sites such as the Claude Moore Colonial Farm and privately owned sites such as Mount Vernon were also required to shut. When the Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway declined to comply with the government’s order to close (an entirely illegal order, by the way), the “shut down” Park Service sent armed agents and vehicles to blockade the hotel’s driveway.

Even then, the problem with a lot of America’s scenic wonders is that, although they sit on National Park Service land, they’re visible from some distance. So, in South Dakota, having closed Mount Rushmore the NPS storm troopers additionally attempted to close the view of Mount Rushmore — that’s to say a stretch of the highway, where the shoulder widens and you can pull over and admire the stony visages of America’s presidents. Maybe it’s time to blow up Washington, Jefferson & Co. and replace them with a giant, granite sign rising into the heavens bearing the chiseled inscription “DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING DOWN THERE.”

But perhaps the most extraordinary story to emerge from the NPS is that of the tour group of foreign seniors whose bus was trapped in Yellowstone Park on the day the shutdown began. They were pulled over photographing a herd of bison when an armed ranger informed them, with the insouciant ad-hoc unilateral lawmaking to which the armed bureaucrat is distressingly prone, that taking photographs counts as illegal “recreation.” “Sir, you are recreating,” the ranger informed the tour guide.

And we can’t have that, can we? They were ordered back to the Old Faithful Inn, next to the geyser of the same name, but forbidden to leave said inn to look at said geyser.

Armed rangers were posted at the doors, and, just in case one of the wily Japanese or Aussies managed to outwit his captors by escaping through one of the inn’s air ducts and down to the geyser, a fleet of NPS SUVs showed up every hour and a half throughout the day, ten minutes before Old Faithful was due to blow, to surround the geyser and additionally ensure that any of America’s foreign visitors trying to photograph the impressive natural phenomenon from a second-floor hotel window would still wind up with a picture full of government officials. The following morning the bus made the two-and-a-half-hour journey to the park boundary but was prevented from using any of the bathrooms en route, including at a private dude ranch whose owner was threatened with the loss of his license if he allowed any tourist to use the facilities.

At the same time as the National Park Service was holding legal foreign visitors under house arrest, it was also allowing illegal immigrants to hold a rally on the supposedly closed National Mall. At this bipartisan amnesty bash, the Democrat House minority leader Nancy Pelosi said she wanted to “thank the president for enabling us to gather here” and Republican congressman Mario Diaz-Balart also expressed his gratitude to the administration for “allowing us to be here.”

Is this for real? It’s not King Barack’s land; it’s supposed to be the people’s land, and his most groveling and unworthy subjects shouldn’t require a dispensation by His Benign Majesty to set foot on it. It is disturbing how easily large numbers of Americans lapse into a neo-monarchical prostration that few subjects of actual monarchies would be comfortable with these days. But then in actual monarchies the king takes a more generous view of “public lands.” Two years after Magna Carta, in 1217, King Henry II signed the Charter of the Forest, which despite various amendments and replacement statutes remained in force in Britain for some three-quarters of a millennium, until the early Seventies. If Magna Carta is a landmark in its concept of individual rights, the Forest Charter played an equivalent role in advancing the concept of the commons, the public space. Repealing various restrictions by his predecessors, Henry II opened the royal forests to the freemen of England, granted extensive grazing and hunting rights, and eliminated the somewhat severe penalty of death for taking the king’s venison. The NPS have not yet fried anyone for taking King Barack’s deer, but it is somewhat sobering to reflect that an English peasant enjoyed more freedom on the sovereign’s land in the 13th century than a freeborn American does on “the people’s land” in the 21st century. 

And we’re talking about a lot more acreage: Forty percent of the state of California is supposedly federal land, and thus officially closed to the people of the state. The geyser stasi of the National Park Service have in effect repealed the Charter of the Forest. President Obama and his enforcers have the same concept of the royal forest that King John did. The government does not own this land; the Park Service are merely the janitorial staff of “we the people” (to revive an obsolescent concept). No harm will befall the rocks and rivers by posting a sign at the entrance saying “No park ranger on duty during government shutdown. Proceed beyond this point at your own risk.” And, at the urban monuments, you don’t even need that: It is disturbing that minor state officials even presume to have the right to prevent the citizenry walking past the Vietnam Wall.

I wonder what those Japanese and Australian tourists prevented from photographing bison or admiring a geyser make of U.S. claims to be “the land of the free.” When a government shutdown falls in the forest, Americans should listen very carefully. The government is telling you something profound and important about how it understands the power relationship between them and you.

The National Park Service should be out of the business of urban landmarks, and the vast majority of our “national” parks should be returned to the states. After the usurpation of the people’s sovereignty this month, the next president might usefully propose a new Charter of the Forest.

'Toons of the Day: Clueless

Obama Refuses To Sign Bill To Pay Survivors' Benefits...Even Though It Passed Congress. Unanimously.

The Constitution does not permit the President to borrow money on the credit of the United States without authorisation from Congress.

But, isn’t that what it just did with Fisher House?

It has agreed to reimburse Fisher House, which is, essentially, loaning the Federal government money...and pay interest on this money.

Don’t get me wrong. I think this is an outrage and there should never have been any hesitation to pay the families of the fallen, but the process is wrong and, arguably, unconstitutional.

Both houses of Congress have voted unanimously for POMA and to pay the death benefits.

Update:  Well, that was quick!  Notwithstanding what Jay Carney and Harry Reid said this afternoon:

Obama signs bill to pay military death benefits

The French Revolution & 'Economic Treason'

By Ace of Spades

I was thinking about this earlier today, or last night. Before the "Economic Traitor" bomb got dropped.

During the French Revolution, the leftist (they were leftists) totalitarian government attempted to inflate away its problems by just printing up a crapton of paper money. This was a very early example of paper money. Technically, it wasn't money per se, but rather each bill represented a share of the government's eventual "profits," if you can call them that, from the sale of property they had confiscated from the Catholic Church and from aristocrats declared traitors.

One of their cute moves was to declare someone a traitor, and then, when he fled to England or Austria to escape the lynch mob, to confiscate his lands as he had "abandoned" them.

So this paper money, called assignats, actually had, or was supposed to have, a fixed value -- each of the (say) ten million "bills" printed was supposed to represent one ten millionth of the eventual "profits" from selling off confiscated land. I guess rather like a bond? I don't know.

Now even though France had these assignats, they were by no means the standard currency; the standard currency of trade was still gold and silver coins.

The leftist government -- which was busily turning the plazas red by guillotining citizens by the thousand -- soon found itself getting into, get this, cashflow problems,* so they began just printing up more assignats to pay their bills.

Now you can see the first problem here: the total sum of wealth devoted to satisfying the facial value of each assignat remained more or less constant (oh, some new estates were added to the pile as more Traitors were discovered, the biggest pile of loot was stolen from the Catholic Church in the early days; for all intents and purposes, the value of the stolen property remained constant). And yet a lot more assignats were being printed up.

And the government insisted that assignats -- now thoroughly inflated so that they had but a fraction of their Official value -- still retained their official value. As regards, importantly, the exchange rate for gold and silver.

And now we come near to my point: Breadmakers in Paris sold bread for assignats, which is a currency the urban poor had (as the government was pumping it out in their hands), but had to pay for wheat in gold.

And wheat's price in gold did not go down. (In fact, it went up, as this was a tumultuous time with lots of blood and fire.)

So breadmakers were being forced to pay in gold for wheat, and then were required to sell the bread at maximum prices in assignats set by the state. 

For a loss. For a drop-dead loss.

Well, many breadmakers realized they sort of would go bankrupt if they were required to sell a week's worth of bread for, say, the equivalent of twenty silver livres and yet also had to pay farmers thirty silver livres for the wheat required to make that bread.

So what they did was to begin storing wheat, in hopes that the price of bread would one day be high enough to make a profit on. And they made less bread, seeking to only sell to those who could pay in coin.

And so what then happened is that the government declared this Illegal Hoarding and trooped off a bunch of bakers to the guillotines for their appointment with the National Razor.

The charge? Economic Treason.

...

We've come an awfully long way from "Dissent is the ultimate patriotism," haven't we?

A government and its sycophants branding its critics "traitors."

This should work out well. There's nothing at all here to be alarmed about, except for Everything.

Continue.

 
Related:

The JFK Assassination & The Roots of Punitive Liberalism

John F Kennedy and Madness of the American Left

MJ Rosenberg Calls for Public Execution of Republicans and Matt Drudge

Mr & Ms Progressive, I Think That You Already Know Monsieur Petard, But Please Allow Me To Introduce You To Your Hoist

John F Kennedy and Madness of the American Left

Tying into my earlier post of George Will's column, from Jeffrey Lord on 01.18.11:

'And so my fellow Americans; Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.' 

— President John F. Kennedy in his Inaugural Address on 20 January 1961 


'I have to tell you, Rush Limbaugh is looking more and more like Mr. Big, and at some point somebody’s going to jam a CO2 pellet into his head and he’s going to explode like a giant blimp. That day may come. Not yet. But we’ll be there to watch. I think he’s Mr. Big, I think Yaphet Kotto. Are you watching, Rush?'

— MSNBC Host Chris Matthews on Rush Limbaugh


It was to be the beginning of a new American golden age.

Instead, it ended in a horrifying display of left-on-left violence that set the tone for what can effectively be described as the moment the stage was set for today’s liberal media obsession with what amounts to ideological pornography.

The inauguration of John F. Kennedy as the 35th President of the United States took place on a crisp, cold New England-style day fifty years ago this week. So long ago — yet so memorable to any alive in the moment. 

There had been a snow storm the night before, blanketing not only Washington but a considerable portion of the East Coast. The storm had created chaos of a sort in Washington, but by the designated morning of the ceremonial day the Capital was sparkling under a bright blue sky.

American televisions were still broadcasting mostly in black and white. The television series Bonanza, a Western saga about widowed Virginia City rancher Ben Cartwright and his three sons, was one of the audacious new programs broadcast in color for those lucky few who had color TV sets. But most of America tuned into one of the three television networks of the day — veterans CBS and NBC along with the newer, less viewed ABC — to see the new president sworn-in in black and white.

Even in black and white the images dazzled. The old president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the hero general of a war still barely fifteen years distant, looked like Norman Rockwell’s ideal of the kindly grandfather. The famous big grin that reminded Americans of why they had always liked Ike was still in place. But of a sudden there was a consciousness that, well, he did seem old at that.

That feeling, universal at the time, was accentuated for reasons well beyond the fact that the old president was giving way to the new. What made the event so riveting — the first of its kind in the television age — was the inescapable visual of the old man’s successor.

John F. Kennedy this January inauguration day was a mere 43 years old. The last time — the only time — America had had a president of such visible youth and energy was a full sixty years earlier. Theodore Roosevelt, age 42 when he received word that William McKinley’s death at the hands of the left-wing anarchist Leon Czolgosz had elevated him from the vice-presidency to the White House, was now a distant if fond memory. Indeed, TR’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth was still a Washington celebrity — and a Kennedy favorite.

To look back at the images of JFK, hatless and coatless as he took the presidential oath that day, the trademark thatch of chestnut hair to become the model for a generation of politicians, is to be reminded that his youth was — and is — very much a part of America’s self-image. “I say this country must move again,” he had exhorted during the campaign, and this day gave the exhilarating sense the forward motion had begun.

Remembered now for the famous phrase that summoned a generation to “ask what you can do for your country” — in fact the speech was also significant for what it said about the state of American liberalism of the day.

Kennedy was celebrated by his admirers for his cool, calm rationality. And that very rationality had made of John F. Kennedy a member in good standing of those who were unafraid to look unblinkingly into the eye of the Communist Soviet Union and see, as Ronald Reagan would later say, “an evil empire.”

Kennedy had run to the right of the celebrated anti-Communist Richard Nixon in 1960.

In the very first line of his opening statement in the first Kennedy-Nixon debate, Kennedy had made it abundantly clear where he stood. 

'In the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln said the question was whether this Nation could exist half slave or half free.

In the election of 1960, and with the world around us, the question is whether the world will exist half slave or half free, whether it will move in the direction of freedom, in the direction of the road that we are taking, or whether it will move in the direction of slavery.'


Twenty years before Ronald Reagan would succeed him, it was Kennedy the liberal Democrat who threw down the gauntlet, saying in crystal clear language that he viewed the Soviets as a slave state, Communism as the modern, operational philosophy of slavery. For good measure he had brought the name of Lincoln — the Republican president who ended slavery in America — into the debate. As president, when challenged by the famous British leftist Lord Bertrand Russell over his tough response to the secret placement of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, JFK rebuked him with a tart telegram:

I think your attention might well be directed to the burglars rather than to those who caught the burglars.

The fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s inaugural this week was already certain to draw considerable attention. But the tragedy of the shootings in Tucson has brought the nation up short with a vivid reminder of just how far from JFK the American Left has traveled since that January day of 1961.

PERHAPS TWO OF THE MORE vivid pieces of this ideological pornography written in the last few days was the “Climate of Hate” column by the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, in which Krugman blamed everyone from Sarah Palin to Fox News stars for the Arizona shooting done by a clearly mentally ill shooter. And the attempt by Kennedy nephew Robert Kennedy, Jr. to do the same added Sean Hannity as a “hate merchant.”

Meanwhile, unnoticed, the son of Bobby Jr.’s brother ex-Congressman Joseph Kennedy II — that would be 30-year old Joseph Kennedy III — gave a speech to the Massachusetts legislature celebrating JFK’s “City on a Hill” speech delivered days before he left for his swearing-in as president. Mr. Kennedy, a prosecutor on Cape Cod and viewed by some as the next Kennedy in politics, had the courage to take on the American left for its rhetoric while predictably doing the same with the American right. But sadly, like his uncle RFK, Jr., he repeated something that is a flat-out untruth: that John F. Kennedy was killed because, as the Boston Globe pretended, “of President Kennedy’s opposition to racial discrimination and violence.” To say that JFK was killed “for what he represented” is to gloss over a very hard fact. 

John F. Kennedy was murdered. By a Marxist. A leftist. Someone who so admired both the Communist Soviet Union and Communist Cuba — the nations JFK was calling slave states and had threatened with nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis — that he tried to defect to both. Failing, he murdered John F. Kennedy. After almost killing the right-wing retired General Edwin Walker with a just-missed shot through Walker’s Dallas living room window.

Looking back decades later it is no small point that the unraveling of the modern American Left can be traced to the day JFK’s left-wing killer was let off the hook by the aborning liberal media of the day — which tried instantly to put the blame on the American and Dallas right. Anywhere but where it squarely belonged — at the feet of a determined Marxist who in fact was acting in the violent traditions of his decidedly leftist political faith.

John F. Kennedy’s murder, the third time a president of the United States had been shot to death by a leftist — and not counting the two leftist attempts to kill FDR and Truman — was an eye-opening example in the day and right now of what can only be called left-on-left violence. The seating of Democrats and Republicans together at the next State of the Union Address will not — cannot — cure this.

In fact, JFK’s assassination turned out to be the curtain raiser on a cascade of left-on-left violence through the 1960’s and beyond. The once seemingly stable Big Government American left represented by JFK and before him FDR and Harry Truman slid into a cesspool of violence and violent rhetoric typified today by the Matthews remarks on Rush Limbaugh or the Robert Kennedy Jr. smear of Sean Hannity , Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and Fox News. And of course, Matthews again, attempting to link Mark Levin to the Tucson violence. A bizarre, scurrilous slur which has drawn a $100,000 challenge from Levin to Matthews to prove it in court.

Several years after JFK’s murder, with the country in the grip of leftist race riots in leftist-run cities and leftist violence on leftist-run college campuses, a presidential commission on “Campus Unrest” tried its best to understand what was going on with all this murderously violent left-wing rioting, shying from the obvious fact that leftists were rioting against leftists.

 

The other day, perhaps attempting to recover from a reprimand of sorts from President Obama for his “Climate of Hate” column that picked up where the liberal media of 1963 began, columnist Krugman tried to explain.

But the truth is that we are a deeply divided nation and are likely to remain one for a long time. By all means, let’s listen to each other more carefully; but what we’ll discover, I fear, is how far apart we are. For the great divide in our politics isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best; it’s about differences in those very moral imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs over what constitutes justice.

What constitutes justice, alas, for the American Left is repeatedly passing extensive entitlement programs or materializing them by executive fiat or a ruling from an unelected judge. All done, but of course, in the name of some imagined virtue. No one is allowed to disagree or protest without being suitably — preferably publicly — shamed for a lack of conscience that indicates they oppose what Krugman or some other liberal defines as “justice.” Which means in turn that as the entitlement inevitably keeps growing endlessly, it becomes politically impossible to deal with the inevitable constituency created by the entitlement. Example? In 1956, Congress passed an amendment to Social Security on disability insurance. Estimated cost by 1980? $860 million. Actual cost the year Ronald Reagan was elected? More than $15 billion a year.

And of course, step three in all this is that “reform” of X translates into a hardened bureaucracy, a bureaucracy quickly unionized, highly paid and declared off-limits from taxpayers across the country who are being bled dry financially by the same philosophy with their state and local governments. American states are now headed to bankruptcy precisely because they have followed the thinking Krugman advocates. And, in turn, this has birthed the Tea Party.

Krugman also says of the differences between conservatives and the Left:

'One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.

The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.'

This is bizarre. Do conservatives believe in freedom and liberty? Absolutely. But conservatives also believe that the left deeply opposes economic growth out of a desire to control, a greed for power and money to be secured by the creation of a massive class of economic dependents. It is, as the late Jack Kemp often said, natural for human beings to desire to better their condition. A tendency liberals are determined to fight because this implies the obvious — independence from the government. Krugman and his fellow liberals exhibit not compassion but an insatiable lust “red in tooth and claw” for raw political power and the money that comes from that control — control over people’s lives that is won by pitting race against race, rich against poor, producer against consumer and so on and so on. It is a bitterly zero-sum, cold-hearted and cynical view of the world, built on a platform of arrogance, elitist condescension, racial manipulation and topped off by the threat of violence if the rest of us refuse to cooperate.

To oppose any of this effectively, or, to oppose the Left’s agenda in the field of national security and foreign policy, is to directly risk summoning that violence — which is why at this minute former Governor Sarah Palin is being swamped with death threats. It is why European capitals from London to Athens are engulfed in violence or murderous riots. 

A young man named David Keene, who would later become a respected conservative leader as head of the American Conservative Union and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), had the audacity to say something in his testimony to the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest in 1970 that surely made the liberal members of the commission squirm:

This tendency to justify violence by pointing to policies one disagrees with symbolizes more than anything else the rejection of the democratic process by a significant number of students on the Left. They, and many who listen to them, seem to have developed an essentially Latin American conception of what the democratic process is all about. They think democracy is fine so long as it works, which of course means so long as the policies they favor are adopted, but reject it when they don’t like the results.

John F. Kennedy’s great friend, the Pulitzer Prize winner (and JFK liberal) Theodore White, author of the classic The Making of the President series, gradually, to his evident shock, came to this conclusion himself. In his later years White, who died in 1986, would recall talking to a black, leftist reporter for an unidentified New York paper (hmmm) in 1964. The subject: the news that leftist demonstrators were considering blocking physical access to the opening of the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow, New York. The story was much in the news, the World’s Fair set to become a considerable tourist attraction. President Lyndon Johnson would be attending along with a parade of dignitaries. Said the leftist reporter to White of the chaos that could ensue, endangering lives:

You don’t understand. If a thousand innocent people have to be killed…if that’s the way it has to be, well, that’s the way it has to be.

It was a snapshot of the Left’s attitude towards political violence, just as Keene would note several years later in his testimony on the Left’s political violence on what were, after all, college campuses run by left-wing academics. Whether it was the left excusing the 1965 Watts riots by leftist blacks in Los Angeles or Krugman’s own New York Times excusing the 1992 riots in Los Angeles as being brought about by “decades of rage” or the repeated excuses for campus violence or anti-war violence — if there was leftist violence to be had it was always because policy or politician X was at fault. The perpetrators themselves were blameless. 

This attitude, refreshed these last several days by the New York Times and Times columnist Krugman and the MSNBC cast among others, is what political professionals eventually realized was turning “Kennedy Democrats” into “Reagan Democrats.”

It should not be forgotten that just three years after JFK’s murder, California Democrats helped Ronald Reagan to a landslide as governor in 1966. In 1968 they swarmed to Bobby Kennedy in the California Democratic presidential primary — for the same reason. It is forgotten that RFK was perceived in the day as was Reagan and JFK — the champion of working class Americans. 

This perceived Kennedy strength brought Reagan Democrats back into the fold to help him to his last presidential primary victory — a victory that came just moments before Kennedy was himself slain by — yes — another violent leftist, this time the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel Sirhan Sirhan. Not long afterwards, at a gathering of the leftist Weathermen at a “National War Council” the group chanted “Sirhan Sirhan power” in hall decorated with a cardboard machine gun. Further down the political road, in 2008, Sean Hannity obtained a rare copy of a 1974 book by Obama friend Bill Ayers — he of the terrorist Weather Underground — dedicated to: Sirhan Sirhan. Robert Kennedy’s assassin.  

There is a direct line running straight from Marxist Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle scope in the Dallas of 1963 to the 1960’s leftist black riots in Watts (Los Angeles), Newark and Detroit, the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy; and the leftist student violence at institutions like Columbia University and Harvard. And beyond to the ACORN intimidation tactics of recent vintage. And the excuse-making for that violence and intimidation exhibited then and now. 

In answer to Krugman’s astonishingly misleading line that “violence and eliminationist rhetoric encouraging violence has become all too common these past two years” columnist Michelle Malkin has put together a thorough recalling of how this leftist mind set has functioned for the first decade of the 21st century. The targets for what Krugman calls “violence and eliminationist rhetoric” were — no surprise — George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin. 

It’s ugly.

But it’s a serious mistake to think it new.

AS JOHN F. KENNEDY IS REMEMBERED this week, it is worth noting that the American Left’s descent into madness began when a leftist — a Marxist who had tried to defect to both the Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba — pulled the trigger that killed the anti-Communist JFK. JFK was not martyred because of his views on civil rights (views of a color blind society that today would make him, along with Dr. King, yes, right-wing Republicans) or heated political rhetoric.

Rather, the assassination of John F. Kennedy became the spectacularly horrific example of “left-on-left” violence, with the rest of the country looking on horrified. Becoming a nation appalled, deeply hurt and furious. And, it must be noted, all of this doing real damage to the real life family that was and is still “The Kennedys,” with various family members plunged into ordeals with alcohol and drugs.

Left-on-left violence became the dirty little secret of the left-tilting national media. It is never mentioned, still ignored as an unpleasant truth by such as Paul Krugman and the purveyors of left-wing ideological pornography at MSNBC. It is also, most embarrassingly, never honestly discussed by JFK’s descendants when the surely still-painful subject of the assassination arises. Today, were he alive, Lee Harvey Oswald would surely be treated by the left as is Robert Kennedy’s killer — a celebrated “political prisoner” honored, as was Sirhan by Obama friend Bill Ayers, for his murderous deed. 

Make no mistake.

The poisoning of the public debate that has taken place this last week since the Giffords’ shooting, led by Mr. Krugman, is a reminder of the violent tendencies of the American Left. Mr. Krugman’s idea of what “constitutes justice” for the Left is a reminder in spades. A sharp reminder of just when and how America was dragged in the first place from the stirring JFK call to “ask what you can do for your country” to violent, angry leftist fantasies featuring Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin or George Bush or Dick Cheney. 

Krugman’s column, Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s piece and the slurs out of Matthews and the rest at MSNBC are a reminder of a very alarming reality, a reality that JFK himself mentioned the very last day of his life.

 “We’re heading into nut country today,” President Kennedy said to his wife on the morning of November 22.

As it turned out, President Kennedy had no idea how right he was.

America entered nut country that November 22. The nut country of left-wing violence and its left-wing media enablers from the New York Times to MSNBC to commentators Matthews, Krugman, Kennedy, Frank Rich and the violence celebrated by such as the poster “Blueboy” at the Daily Kos (the latter of whom posted of Gabrielle Giffords before the shooting: “My CongressWOMAN voted against Nancy Pelosi! And is now DEAD to me!”). 

The door to nut country was opened barely three years after John F. Kennedy was inaugurated with such glittering hope. That door was opened by Lee Harvey Oswald. A Marxist. A man of the Left. The American Left in this instance. Waiting in the shadows of the immutable trademark violent tradition of leftists in America and around the globe.

An American leftist targeting the most famous American liberal of the day pulled the trigger that killed John F. Kennedy. Murderously ending a presidency that began with such golden promise fifty years ago this week.

The American Left’s descent into madness had begun.

Disturbingly, as Paul Krugman, Chris Matthews, Frank Rich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others in the liberal media have so vividly and recently illustrated, many who should know better have gone along for the ride.

SoRo:  Here's a post that I wrote not too many months after the Giffords' shooting and following the release of Tea Party Zombies, which encouraged people to shoot Sarah Palin:

Mr & Ms Progressive, I Think That You Already Know Monsieur Petard, But Please Allow Me To Introduce You To Your Hoist

And, this is the column that Krugman wrote a mere 3 months after writing his 'Climate of Hate' column:   Civility is the Last Refuge of Scoundrels.

Yeah, he's consistent. /

Fed Chair Nominee, Janet Yellin: Why Kids Have Kids

From 1996

By George A. Akerlof and Janet L. Yellen 

 

Does welfare spawn out-of-wedlock babies? The architects of the recently passed welfare reform believe it does. They hope that curbing payments for additional children and enforcing parental work requirements will reverse the 25-year trend that has brought large numbers of unmarried mothers onto the welfare rolls. 

 

In 1965, 24 percent of black infants and 3.1 percent of white infants were born to single mothers. By 1990, the rates had risen to 64 percent for black infants and 18 percent for whites. Every year, about 1 million more children are born into fatherless families, at an enormously increased risk of growing up in poverty. 

 

Efforts by social scientists to explain the rise in out-of-wedlock births have been unconvincing. Conservative Charles Murray, for example, blames overly generous federal welfare benefits. But as David Ellwood and Lawrence Summers have shown, cash welfare benefits rose sharply in the 1960s and fell in the 1970s and 1980s, when out-of-wedlock births rose most. 

 

Liberals have tended to favor the explanation offered by William Julius Wilson, who, in a 1987 study, attributed the increase in out-of-wedlock births to a decline in the marriageability of black men, due to a shortage of jobs. But Robert D. Mare and Christopher Winship have estimated that at most 20 percent of the decline in marriage rates of blacks between 1960 and 1980 can be explained by decreasing employment. 

 

A better theory might be called "Reproductive Technology Shock." In the late 1960s and very early 1970s (well before Roe vs. Wade in January 1973), the availability of both abortion and contraception increased dramatically. Many states, including New York and California, liberalized their abortion laws. In July 1970, the Massachusetts law prohibiting the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried people was declared unconstitutional. Many observers expected liberalized abortion and contraception to lead to fewer out-of-wedlock births. But the opposite happened, because of the decline in the custom of "shotgun weddings." 

 

Before 1970, the stigma of unwed motherhood was so great that most women would only engage in sexual activity if it came with a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. Men were willing to make (and keep) that promise, for they knew that even if they left one woman, they would be unlikely to find another who would not make the same demand. In the 1970s, women who were willing to get an abortion, or who used contraception reliably, no longer found it necessary to condition sexual relations on a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. But women who found abortion unacceptable, or who were unreliable in their contraceptive use, found themselves pressured to participate in premarital sexual relations as well. These women feared, correctly, that if they refused sexual relations, they would risk losing their partners. 

 

By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father. And while only a few unmarried mothers once kept their babies, only a few put them up for adoption today, because the stigma of unwed motherhood has declined. Once shunned by their peers and whisked out of town, pregnant teen-agers now receive both encouragement and support to keep their babies, stay in school, and participate in other social activities. 

 

Although doubt will always remain about what causes a change in social custom, the technology-shock theory does fit the facts. The new reproductive technology was adopted quickly, and on a massive scale. Marital and fertility patterns changed with similar drama, at about the same time. 

 

The use of birth-control pills at first intercourse by all unmarried women jumped from 6 percent to 15 percent in just a few years, and probably much more among sexually active unmarried women. The number of abortions among unmarried women grew from roughly 100,000 a year in the late 1960s (compared with some 322,000 out-of-wedlock births) to more than 1.2 million a year (compared with 715,000 out-of-wedlock births) in the early 1980s. During the same period, births per unmarried woman roughly doubled for whites, while the fraction of white unmarried women rose about 30 percent. For black unmarried women, the birth rate actually fell by between 5 percent and 10 percent, but this was offset by an increase of about 40 percent in the number of unmarried black women. Meanwhile, fertility rates for married women of both races declined rapidly, making the out-of-wedlock birth ratio even larger. 

 

The shotgun-marriage rate itself declined only gradually, but that is not surprising. Social conventions change slowly. It took time for men to recognize that they did not have to promise marriage in the event of a pregnancy in exchange for sexual relations. It may also have taken time for women to perceive the increased willingness of men to leave them if they demanded marriage. 

 

One final puzzle, however, requires explanation. The black shotgun-marriage ratio began to fall earlier than the white ratio and shows no significant change in trend around 1970. Here, federal welfare benefits may play a role. Because blacks, on average, have lower incomes than whites, they are more affected by changes in welfare benefits. As a result, the rise in welfare benefits in the 1960s may have resulted in a decline in the black shotgun-marriage rate, and thus, in an increase in out-of-wedlock births. 

 

What should be done? Even if possible, attempts to turn back the technological clock by restricting abortion and contraception would now be counterproductive. Besides denying reproductive freedom to women, such efforts would increase the number of children born and reared in impoverished single-parent families. Most children born out of wedlock are reported by their mothers to have been "wanted," but "not at that time." Some are reported as not having been wanted at all. Easier access to birth-control information and devices and to abortion could reduce the number of unwanted children and improve the timing of those whose mothers would have preferred to wait.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The JFK Assassination & The Roots of Punitive Liberalism

By George Will

'Ex-Marine Asks Soviet Citizenship'

— Washington Post headline, 1 November 1959

'He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It’s — it had to be some silly little Communist.'

 

— Jacqueline Kennedy,  22 November 1963

She thought it robbed his death of any meaning. But a meaning would be quickly manufactured to serve a new politics. First, however, an inconvenient fact — Oswald — had to be expunged from the story. So, just 24 months after the assassination, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Kennedys’ kept historian, published a thousand-page history of the thousand-day presidency without mentioning the assassin.

The transformation of a murder by a marginal man into a killing by a sick culture began instantly — before Kennedy was buried. The afternoon of the assassination, Chief Justice Earl Warren ascribed Kennedy’s “martyrdom” to “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.” The next day, James Reston, the New York Times luminary, wrote in a front-page story that Kennedy was a victim of a “streak of violence in the American character,” noting especially “the violence of the extremists on the right.”

Never mind that adjacent to Reston’s article was a Times report on Oswald’s Communist convictions and associations. A Soviet spokesman, too, assigned “moral responsibility” for Kennedy’s death to “Barry Goldwater and other extremists on the right.”

Three days after the assassination, a Times editorial, “Spiral of Hate,” identified Kennedy’s killer as a “spirit”: The Times deplored “the shame all America must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down” Kennedy. The editorialists were, presumably, immune to this spirit. The new liberalism-as-paternalism would be about correcting other people’s defects.

Hitherto a doctrine of American celebration and optimism, liberalism would now become a scowling indictment: Kennedy was killed by America’s social climate, whose sickness required “punitive liberalism.” That phrase is from James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute, whose 2007 book “Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism” is a profound meditation on the reverberations of the rifle shots in Dealey Plaza.

The bullets of Nov. 22, 1963, altered the nation’s trajectory less by killing a president than by giving birth to a destructive narrative about America. Fittingly, the narrative was most injurious to the narrators. Their recasting of the tragedy in order to validate their curdled conception of the nation marked a ruinous turn for liberalism, beginning its decline from political dominance.

Punitive liberalism preached the necessity of national repentance for a history of crimes and misdeeds that had produced a present so poisonous that it murdered a president. To be a liberal would mean being a scold. Liberalism would become the doctrine of grievance groups owed redress for cumulative inherited injuries inflicted by the nation’s tawdry history, toxic present and ominous future.

Kennedy’s posthumous reputation — Americans often place him, absurdly, atop the presidential rankings — reflects regrets about might-have-beens. To reread Robert Frost’s banal poem written for Kennedy’s inauguration (“A golden age of poetry and power of which this noonday’s the beginning hour”) is to wince at its clunky attempt to conjure an Augustan age from the melding of politics and celebrity that the Kennedys used to pioneer the presidency-as-entertainment.

Under Kennedy, liberalism began to become more stylistic than programmatic. After him — especially after his successor, Lyndon Johnson, a child of the New Deal, drove to enactment the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid — liberalism became less concerned with material well-being than with lifestyle and cultural issues such as feminism, abortion and sexual freedom.

The bullets fired on Nov. 22, 1963, could shatter the social consensus that characterized the 1950s only because powerful new forces of an adversarial culture were about to erupt through society’s crust. Foremost among these forces was the college-bound population bulge — baby boomers with their sense of entitlement and moral superiority, vanities encouraged by an intelligentsia bored by peace and prosperity and hungry for heroic politics.

Liberalism’s disarray during the late 1960s, combined with Americans’ recoil from liberal hectoring, catalyzed the revival of conservatism in the 1970s. As Piereson writes, the retreat of liberalism from a doctrine of American affirmation left a void that would be filled by Ronald Reagan 17 years after the assassination.

The moral of liberalism’s explanation of Kennedy’s murder is that there is a human instinct to reject the fact that large events can have small, squalid causes; there is an intellectual itch to discern large hidden meanings in events. And political opportunism is perennial.

If you doubt Will, read Robert F Kennedy's article at the Huffington Post from after the Gabby Giffords shooting: Tucson: Time for Another Examination of Conscience.  Be sure to read the comments for some first-class revisionist history.

Related: John F Kennedy and Madness of the American Left

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