If nothing else, the union crowd can really put up some fiery political stagecraft worthy of praises from 1915 American Communist “labor organizer” Joe Hill. Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me to witness on the evening news, the Wisconsin assemblage of these public- and private-sector workers, and bussed-in “supporters,” shoulder to shoulder, emotively singing the 1930 workers’ movement hymnal, “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill Last Night”

. . . standing there as big as life
and smiling with his eyes.
Says Joe “What they can never kill”
went on to organize . . .

From San Diego up to Maine,
in every mine and mill,
Where working men defend their rights,
It’s there you’ll find Joe Hill! . . .

But the shrill song of today’s unionists for “the right” of collective bargaining doesn’t quite resonate with a majority of Americans (excluding, of course, my teacher-relatives). The nation was wary of the advent of unions back in Hill’s day; we’re disenchanted with unions today for demonstrable reasons involving their abuses. What particularly angers many of us is the egregious, paradoxical demand for collective bargaining for millions of civil servants—the public-sector workers whom we “hire” to work for us, from Obama on down to the mail carrier bringing our tax forms.

Federal, state, and city worker “salaries and benefits,” “expense accounts,” food, mortgages . . . are paid for with our money, tax-money taken from the accrued earned wealth of families who create, produce something, and directly contribute to keeping the American national engine going. The people should no more allow federal file clerks and form-processors to unionize than allow all military branches to coalesce into the “United Combat Workers of America.”

If anybody should be “collectively bargaining,” it should be us, the workaday American, who’s about had it with our employee-government’s confiscatory taxes we and our children’s children are ordered to fork over throughout a lifetime, and shortly beyond.

No, there’s no resonance. Not when we have innumerable federal, state, and city labor laws in place, as well as regulatory agencies, such as the Department of Labor and OSHA. Indeed, the walls of American businesses large and small are awash in posters, jammed full of union and non-union worker rights, the regulations protecting them, and instructions—often, all detailed in English and in several foreign languages—on where to file “complaints” or “grievance charges”—“charges” real, imagined, trumped up, or just plain over the top:

“My boss discriminated against me. He told me my work day begins at 9 A.M.,
not when I’m done with breakfast at my desk. I’m entitled to have a morning
coffee like everyone else around here. . . .”

“The union rep says we’re off the job; let the planes land on their own. . . .”

“Let Boston itself see to the rioting and looting while we strike. We cops mean to
have a union for more pay, boy-o, and less hours and better working conditions. . . .”

Alas, for the worker-rights folks, now out politically grazing in the Dairy State, looking to continue milking the system and chewing up our pocketbooks: 2011 is not 1919.

The curdling of representative government is not peculiar to the Dairy State. What we’re witnessing in Wisconsin is symptomatic of the alarming decline in conduct and job performance of the stewards whom we “hire” to work for us at the local, state, and federal levels.

Which should beg the question, Who helps create the environment that permits such brazen malfeasance to root and behave like a political cancer? Well, we’ll share in the blame, unless we selectively “can” our elected civil servants at the voting booth. But the principal engine and pace-setter of this decline, the nexus to this growing crisis, sits and stands imperiously in the White House.

We have only to assess Mr. Obama two years into his failing presidency to see the most striking national implications Wisconsin’s governmental breakdown has on us all. Obama’s intractable, he-can-do-no-wrong supporters will explode red hot telling us otherwise, but our demonstrably extemporizing president has been tirelessly engaged in a cloaked agenda to recast us into a de facto Socialist state.

You need no degree in Political Science, no endless engagements in intellectualizing it. We’re living Obama’s agenda and influence in real-time. Our pockets show the wear its nascent toll is taking on us. In progressing costs, for example, of a supermarket shopping trip. Any doubts about what’s in store? Ask, say, a retired, “senior-citizen” shopper how he or she is doing with the rocketing prices of food and goods, fueled by Congress’s contemptible elimination of COLAs because “there is no inflation.” Congress. The people we select to work for us, in our youth and old age. Perhaps, too, pinpoint just where earned wealth is going, and will go, in taxes, “surcharges,” “fees,” open and craftily hidden, of every description imaginable, on virtually everything tangible and intangible in our workaday American lives.

Raiding and depleting the U.S. Treasury from Day One; spending unimaginable trillions we, and future generations, do not, and will not, have; printing backless, fiat money unabated; forays into tripping up, controlling, federalizing our nation-sustaining private sector.

These are just some of the strong directional signals on where Obama’s dangerous, leftward political Sea Change is taking us, and, for added impact, thoroughly insulting us and our way of life along the way. Under the umbrella of Obama’s political agenda and influence, we’re being hammered politically, economically, and socially by the likes of such Wisconsin politicians. And, most importantly to us ordinary folks, we’re footing the bill for everything. Everything. Even the money for the dairy industry subsidies ladled into Wisconsin.

Very sad, this tragedy. That it is fast becoming hotly politicized is not unexpected these days. If only it would be otherwise, but there it is.

What is becoming most apparent are the leftists among the ranks of politicians, civil servants, media, et al, who’ve shifted into “nexus mode”–feverishly looking for political grist, to find and/or manufacture some connection between this killer and “The Right”; “Talk Radio”; Republicans; Conservatives; and the nascent “Tea Party.” Assigning blame to George Bush directly, of course, has lost much of its currency, but such hyperbole, lies, innuendos, and packaged news forever remain a mainstay in the left’s political arsenal. And why not? All manage to achieve degrees of enduring traction in the minds of certain citizens.

Which is why many still recite that George Bush, a U.S. president, “knew” 9/11 was coming, or that he was actually a principal among the unknowns who actually “blew up” the Towers from within (notwithstanding the terrorists outside, piloting the missile-passenger jets into the Towers), or that he “caused” hurricane Katrina, or was behind ordering the dike along New Orleans’ Ninth Ward to be “blown up,” thus flooding and devastating our Black countrymen on the Gulf. . . .

And so the political stagecraft went, and so it will go with the Arizona murders. Come this week, we’ll see just how much more the left will ramp up the event, spin it, and exploit it for all it’s worth.

Over forty years ago, a Pacific-WW II Marine, himself gay, once attempted to disabuse a young, pre-Army me of the traditional view of combat Marines. He said, “Listen, buddy boy, I can tell you about the Marines . . .” The subtext was clear and unsettling, although he never elaborated. Historian and WW II Pacific-combat Marine William Manchester recalled in Goodbye, Darkness the Marine caught in flagrante delicto with a fellow Marine, found guilty, and sentenced to a very long stretch in military prison.

There’s been homosexual behavior in the military since the American Revolution, largely exceptions to the rule and hidden. Modern-day vets know this, more or less, but never until now had to deal with it “up close and personal.” We’re beset with what to make of it all. For the Old Breed among us, there’s nothing to talk about, nothing to consider—period. It’s something “unheard of” back in the day.

It’s difficult to find reconciliation against the backdrop of a sibilant Barack Obama arguably “sissyfying” our once powerful and proud nation. There are no Hollywood Moments in combat, but this reality: Any team member engaged with an enemy won’t care whether the guy beside you, or the CO himself, cross-dresses while on weekend pass. You want the guy with you to cover your back, to fire his weapon for effect, to close with the enemy and kill him by whatever means. You want the gunship pilot to do the same with his missiles and Gatling gun. You expect the guy flying a Fast Mover to drop ordnance when and where it’s needed; you want the artillery guy to pull the lanyard and put those rounds exactly when and where they’re needed . . . . And so it would go.

In all the armed services and special groups, the gay soldier who decides to be “open” won’t have an easy time of it—particularly if he volunteers for, say, the SEALs, a scenario hard to envision. Many would feel his joining a heavy-duty combat team creates disparate, enormously conflicting images. Others might cite the gay individual’s very volunteering for such military service, which, in itself, should give pause. Why ever would a gay individual, with so-called “gay sensibilities,” volunteer for a job that can require stealthy killing? Clearly, only the gay individual can answer the question; but his volunteering signals he wants the job, knows what it will entail, and feels he’s up to doing it. It cannot be that he’s joining a combat unit to socialize with the boys.

If the gay soldier performs as well or better than his peers getting through the searing hell of SEAL training, or through Airborne training, advanced infantry training, aviation training, and he performs equally as well in combat, what can peers say? Indeed, who around this guy would step up and “get in his face” over his homosexuality?

Many of us, I suspect, are on the fence over the issue. If nothing else, it will all out in combat We may not like the order-of-the-day for any number of reasons, but now we’ll just have to wait and see how or whether gays “openly serving” compromises or reduces military effectiveness in the field, morale, and security throughout forward combat units and the support branches, in US Government agencies, and in the military’s “rear echelons”—where, my generation used to say, softly sit the REMFs (Rear Echelon Mother-F*****s).

So what else is new? The oxymoronic label, “Arab Allies” should more accurately read, “Arab ‘Allies.’” Notwithstanding the reality that Saudi Arabia is no friend and “ally,” America has effectively continued to fund the very enemies who continue to kill our countrymen. The Saudi’s derive a goodly portion of their money from the oil they sell us, money not to supply cooking oil to Mid East mothers, but money to buy horrific amounts and arrays of armaments now used by Islamic terrorists worldwide.

The same political-economic nexus persisted throughout the Vietnam War years. Back then, American companies and banks casually continued doing business with the Soviet Union, the peace-loving Communist nation that provided Hanoi the largest share of aid in missiles and missile air defense systems, arms, oil, tractors, trucks, generators, advisers . . . Death-dealing aid totaling about $600 million a year–$600 million in Rubles and Yankee Dollars.

Could Karl Marx have been on to something when he said, “We will hang the capitalists, and they will sell us the rope to do it”?

In virtually every facet of presidential stewardship of our republic, Obama continues to shove us headlong into utter failure, driving our republic deeper into an abyss of national calamity. Never in our history have we had a president so antithetical to American values and way of life.

Apart from the intractable adherents whose fealty to Obama remains unshakable, can anyone expect our current condition to be otherwise? After all, an effectively Socialist-Marxist now “presides” over a capitalist society. You’d think the consequences would be axiomatic. The fox and fellow foxes, if you will, have been put in charge of the hen house.

So it’s no wonder Obama immediately comprised his administration with select individuals who’ll abet his political agenda to reconstitute America; no wonder he’s sucked our national Treasury dry; ordered the printing of hundreds of millions of fiat American dollars; diminished America’s image here and abroad, and roundly insulted the American people along the way: sought to hobble the nation to establish total government control of our sources of energy, food, medical care, not to mention control of virtually all areas of our daily lives. He’s immobilized us, our children, and their children, under a crushing national debt that won’t ever be met. And that’s just for starters.

The Obama “Deficit Panel,” indeed. The cost to this nation of Obama’s failure as president will be incalculable. Let us hope the wake-up call hits home when the first wave of his tax increases sends everyone reeling beyond measure.

That saucy Obama. Here, now, is a clear view into our American life under this Socialist-Marxist president and equally spurious administration. No matter the circumstances, the underlying end-goal remains: utter control of our lives.

For all these many years, the government has continually moved subtly, openly, and in a myriad of other ways, to achieve effective centralization and authority. But unlike any past president, Obama is today’s most potent political accelerant toward this end. The government’s looking over our collective shoulder at the sauces we cook is symptomatic of the kind of America Obama is cooking up on his front burner. So it’s no surprise we can’t freely have sauces of any sort sailing high across the American skies, can we? After all, our safety and well being are of utmost importance to this putative leader of the free world. Still, I wonder: Is there a proscription about flying with plastic packages of fresh cranberries this holiday season? Or must we consider the artsy Islamic terrorist who spent some time up in Cape Cod, Mass, who, during a moment of divine inspiration, can fashion “cranberries” from little balls of C4 or Semtex–painted in realistic “cranberry red”?

Laughable, were it not all so deadly serious what our great republic has come to, and what this destructive president is doing to hasten its decline.

Barack Obama’s support of the building of a mosque in lower Manhattan, near Ground Zero, is yet another cogent reason why he and his administration must be removed from office.

Let us not say Barack Obama is “unAmerican,” since the appellation can lead to byzantine arguments on definition. But with every passing day, this unabashed, Socialist president clearly demonstrates in words and in action how slippery and antithetical he is to our republic. How harmful he is now—to our polity, to all of us ordinary citizens, to our children, and to our children’s children.

In all of American history, this is the first president to have about him an aura of a foreigner, someone alien to, and detached from, the American way of life.

A packaged politician. “Things American” and Obama are at once oxymoronic. The left media may present him shooting basketball hoops at some inner city locale—Obama, “neighborhood guy,” smiling broadly and in touch with the people at the street level. We may see him as the iconic “celebrity” of the naïve and intractable supporters, strutting onto the stage on a popular evening TV talk show. We may see him presented as the concerned, folksy president, meeting with a hunted-up small business owner who just happens to be “able to hire workers now” (the tacit message that our economy is improving under Obama’s stewardship). And Obama may continue to appear in the traditional, presidential blue suit with prominent American flag lapel pin, the latter no doubt encouraged by his advisers.

But in the end, he remains the inexperienced, politically driven, second-rate Chicago politician who ascended into the White House on the wave of the perfect political storm. Watch for more political stagecraft and blatant lies while he acts the role of president. Do not be taken in by the imagery created by Obama’s handlers and shills, who will continue to ensure that plentiful American flags and bunting surround him during staged appearances. Nor should you be persuaded by his contrived photo ops that are no more than 2009-2012 campaigning interludes. Expect no truthful reports from him on current national and international crises. Certainly nothing about the losses he and certain House and Senate Democrats will suffer in November, 2010 and 2012.

* * *

All Americans in general, and New Yorkers in particular, need to hear British entertainer Pat Condell’s discourse on the issue. Listen to what this British entertainer incisively says about the proposed, in-your-face-we-won mosque in lower Manhattan. Then pass the video along to everyone you know. Get Condell’s brilliant message and warning out across America now.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/06/pat-condell-on-ground-zero-mosque-is-it-possible-to-be-astonished-but-not-surprised.html

Nothing new in New Hampshire State Representative Timothy Horrigan’s “Death Wish” for Sara Palin. Time and again, I’ve seen it, experienced it. For decades, the left and today’s left-Democrats have always used the “emotive” ploy from their large political playbook. Those among us who are now on to their trickery, notice it on the evening news. We see it made manifest right now, when this president and certain House and Senate representatives speak.

When you reject a leftist’s dogma, disagree with them over an issue, ask pointed questions based on irrefutable facts disproving a position on their political agenda . . . they generally dissemble, become increasingly indignant, (sometimes, while rolling their eyes, as if something is wrong with you), and counter with a response that soon escalates into pure vitriol.

Ah, but if at some point you “come around,” and agree on an issue, concede this or that, “see the liberal light” in some politically-dark Conservative corner, why, then, your liberal friend’s face and behavior suddenly undergo a Sea Change of smiling benevolence. Tirade? What tirade?

Who sought out whom? The View, Obama? Or Obama, The View? No matter. The hard left, and the innumerable liberal/left organizations and people thereunder, never miss an opportunity to shill for this Socialist President. Like no other American President, Obama purposely avoids news conferences–as if he discovered early on, “I’m the President; I do not have to answer questions or provide explanations for what I do, or do not do. . .” But a national daytime TV show? An evening TV talk show? A High School with screaming, adoring teenagers? Roll the cameras on the telegenic Obama.

In every curious and infrequent appearance of him on TV, we hear not a President, but the South Chicago community organizer-campaigner theatrically repeating the same deceiving rhetoric and promises he hoodwinked millions of Americans into believing. But come this November begins a nation-wide movement to remove this administration, certain venal and antithetical-America members of the House and Senate, and the most politically destructive president in American history.