The Totalitarian Minority

Totalitarian Leftby Lance Fairchok –

“On top are the Haves with power, money, food, security, and luxury. They suffocate in their surpluses while the Have-Nots starve. Numerically the Haves have always been the fewest. The Haves want to keep things as they are and are opposed to change.” Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

It is ironic that the people described as Haves in Saul Alinsky’s community organizing primer Rules for Radicals mirror public sector unions so closely. Alinsky had a cluttered view of the world, full of contradictions and conspiracies and moral convolutions to justify his tactics. His wretched little book will probably vex us for a dozen more generations, as it is easy to read and requires little effort to memorize the self-justifying rules. His confused disciples in Wisconsin envisioned themselves as the freedom fighters of old, using words like “justice” and “freedom” and “democracy” as they contradict each of those concepts to protect their right to steal from the taxpayer. [Read more…]

What’s so appealing about Orthodoxy?

St Sophia Orthodox Churchby Rod Dreher –

I came to Orthodoxy in 2006, a broken man. I had been a devoutly observant and convinced Roman Catholic for years, but had my faith shattered in large part by what I had learned as a reporter covering the sex abuse scandal. It had been my assumption that my theological convictions would protect the core of my faith through any trial, but the knowledge I struggled with wore down my ability to believe in the ecclesial truth claims of the Roman church (I wrote in detail about that drama here). For my wife and me, Protestantism was not an option, given what we knew about church history, and given our convictions about sacramental theology. That left Orthodoxy as the only safe harbor from the tempest that threatened to capsize our Christianity.

In truth, I had longed for Orthodoxy for some time, for the same reasons I, as a young man, found my way into the Catholic Church. It seemed to me a rock of stability in a turbulent sea of relativism and modernism overtaking Western Christianity. [Read more…]

Distant Recall

by Ken Myers –
In his 1983 Templeton address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn began by recounting a memory from his childhood. “I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why this has happened.’”

As a telegraphic summary of the source of Russian ills under communism, it would be hard to improve on those four initial words. Since Solzhenitsyn spoke them, they have served many Christian pundits in the West as a description of the disorders within liberal democratic regimes. But while this slogan boasts a certain scrappy punchiness, it doesn’t offer us much help in figuring out how the memory lapse in question was provoked. [Read more…]

Social Leveling: Socialism and Secularism

Acton Instituteby Hunter Baker –

Social leveling is something that we typically associate with the destruction of material differences between human beings. It is the socialist dream of a classless society in which distinctions, usually the result of economic variation, are made irrelevant. The state, empowered by the political action of the masses (or at least a group claiming to speak for the masses), works to gain control of the wealth and property of a society and then to redistribute it in such a way as to make people equal. It should be obvious that this type of action vastly increases the power of the state because it becomes the effective owner of all property.

Although socialism aims to wipe out material inequality, it may merely present a new opportunity for sin. James Madison noted that taking control of the property in a state will not make people equal for more than a very short time. They have different talents, abilities, and levels of energy. A new elite will assert itself, just as it has in every nation with a communist revolution.[Read more…]

Leave Jesus Out of the Budget Battle

Gary Bauer
Gary Bauer
by Gary Bauer –

We have an obligation to help the poor. But nowhere does the Bible state that the power of government should be used to take one man’s money by force of law and give it to another man. Jesus’ admonition was a personal command to share, not a command for Caesar to “spread the wealth around.” …

Jim Wallis, a self-identified “Christian leader for social change,” has embarked on a crusade against Republican budget cuts he believes are “unbiblical.” But Wallis and others on the evangelical Left are on dangerous ground when they claim to know exactly which budget items God would approve and which he would cut.

Wallis has launched the “What Would Jesus Cut?” campaign to fight against Republican cuts in the 2011 and 2012 budgets—cuts to welfare programs, college grants, and international aid—and against Republicans’ proposed 2% increase in defense spending.

The campaign’s premise, as the group declared in a recent Politico ad, is that “cutting programs that help those who need them most is morally wrong.” [Read more…]

Time for War Against Democrats’ Fiscal Sabotage

David Limbaugh
David Limbaugh
by David Limbaugh –

It is amazing that the American people would continue to elect Democratic politicians to national office, considering Democrats’ cynical disregard for the federal budget crisis. They aren’t even slightly serious about becoming part of the solution.

Consider the Senate Democrats’ most recent proposal for budget cuts to avert a government shutdown. Senate Republicans, following the House plan, proposed $61 billion in cuts for the current year, while Senate Democrats proposed a paltry $6.5 billion. (The Congressional Budget Office says it’s actually only $4.7 billion.) Though Obama seems to be hiding in the bushes on this one, he is said to support the Democratic plan.

Did you hear that: $6.5/$4.7 billion? This is nothing. It’s an outrage. This from the clowns who say the Republican cuts, which themselves wouldn’t be enough, are “Draconian.” No, it’s their attitude that is Draconian — to the republic. [Read more…]

We Should Not Despair, Even If We Sin Many Times

St Peter of Damascus by St. Peter of Damascus –
Even if you are not what you should be, you should not despair. It is bad enough that you have sinned; why in addition do you wrong God by regarding Him in your ignorance as powerless? Is He, who for your sake created the great universe that you behold, incapable of saving your soul? And if you say that this fact, as well as His incarnation, only makes your condemnation worse, then repent; and He will receive your repentance, as He accepted that of the prodigal son (cf. Luke 15:20) and the prostitute (cf. Luke 7:37-50).

But if repentance is too much for you, and you sin out of habit even when you do not want to, show humility like the publican (cf. Luke 18:13): this is enough to ensure your salvation. For he who sins without repenting, yet does not despair, must of necessity regard himself as the lowest of creatures, and will not dare to judge or censure anyone. Rather, he will marvel at God’s compassion, and will be full of gratitude towards his Benefactor, and so receive many other blessings as well. [Read more…]

The Soft Evil of Barack Obama

Obama is Evil Hates America by Stuart Schwartz –
Evil. It has always been there, pushed back in the United States by American exceptionalism and the Judeo Christian traditions of what Ronald Reagan famously called — borrowing from the Bible — a “shining City on a hill.” “God bless America,” Reagan would say, emphatically and often. But God is not in fashion among our political and media elites and, with the presidency of Barack Obama, the lights of the city are dimming and evil has been drawn from the shadows.

Now we have a leader in the vanguard of a malevolence pushing into the mainstream through a thousand barely perceptible actions and words. It is tiptoeing into our culture, permeating our homes and institutions, shaping lives and expectations and quietly remaking our worldview in the radical, leftist image favored by our educated elites. Such is the evil of Barack Obama, an incredibly soft evil that threatens the future of a nation that, for all of its existence, has led the world in freedom and opportunity.

Take that, Jews. Shut up, Christians. Move over, strivers. Give it up, tradition. Individual choice, responsibility, honor — simply words in a dictionary. All are relative, says the professor in the White House, as are your rights. We know best how to do your lives, comes the voice from a thousand of his appointees in hundreds of federal agencies. American exceptionalism? Fugedaboutit! [Read more…]

The Put-Off, Postpone and Procrastinate Generation

Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson
by Victor Davis Hanson –

The Obama administration figures that it has read the national mood well. This therapeutic generation of Americans loves to talk and worry about problems and then assumes that either someone else will solve them or they will go away on their own. And why not, since we have had periodic “energy crises” since 1974, have run budget deficits in most years since World War II, and have been warned about a looming Social Security meltdown for the last decade — and yet remain wealthy and affluent.

But now gasoline costs more than $4 a gallon in many places in California, and averages more than $3.50 nationwide. In response, the Obama administration is reportedly considering tapping into the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to increase supplies and drive down high prices brought on by a recovering world economy and unrest in the oil-rich Middle East.

Yet the reserve depot was not designed to alleviate periodic gas-price spikes, but to ensure our very survival during a global catastrophe that might result in a cutoff of most petroleum imports from overseas. [Read more…]

Confiscate Americans’ Wealth to Pay Government Workers?

Michael Moore Communist Marxist by Steve McCann –
Michael Moore and his fellow-travelers in the American version of the Socialist/Marxist cabal have picked up the mantle of defending public unionism in their demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin and other state capitals. They are vocally calling for more confiscation of the wealth of the rich to pay for the bloated incomes of government workers and openly stating that all wealth belongs to the state while their true motives are deliberately obfuscated.

The age old premise and threadbare exhortation of class warfare has long found fertile ground among the lower classes but now they are being mouthed in support of one of the most advantaged groups in America today: public sector workers and their unions.

Even the most jaded of true-believers on the Left knows that confiscating the wealth and taxing what they consider to be unjust income would be self-defeating. What could be done one time can never be repeated and there would be no one to create jobs or a higher standard of living for the overall citizenry, particularly those on the left side of the ruling class. A cursory study of the experiences in the Soviet Union, Mao’s Red China and Cuba among others reveals that government control of the means of production and wealth creation is a massive failure. [Read more…]