You're not the killer. Somebody else made that happen.

By Charles C. W. Cooke

July 20, 2012 12:00 P.M.

What happened in Colorado in the early hours of this morning was not a “tragedy” but a willful act of mass murder. Beyond his age, name, and ethnicity, nobody yet knows who the shooter is, or why he chose to do what he did. In my view, this is a blessing, albeit a temporary one; for, as has been the way in recent years, once his party registration, television-viewing habits, and random scribblings become known to the public, all sorts of hysterical speculation and unlettered accusations will burst forth.

Whole groups will be vilified, blame will be apportioned to those many times removed, and the shooter will be partially absolved of blame by those who prefer to see fault in video games or talk radio or political rhetoric or anything else that can be conscripted to explain why terrible things happen to good people. Few will point out that unless someone commits an atrocity in the name of an ideology — Timothy McVeigh, for example — their political beliefs are wholly irrelevant. Even in cases where a killer is motivated by something specific, to draw general conclusions is most often folly. America is not the land of collective guilt, and mass shootings should carve out no exception. Those few people who have already jumped on the crime to hit out at their boogeyman of choice are fools.
Alas, this welcome early absence of opportunity for partisan political blame has created a vacuum that has been filled by another form of folly: Calls for “gun control.” Upon hearing the news, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence immediately changed the front page of its website to aver that, “This is yet another horrific reminder that guns enable mass killings.”
In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg lost no time in exploiting the crime to advance his agenda. From CBS:

In the wake of a mass shooting in a suburban Denver movie theater, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is calling on President Obama and Mitt Romney to offer up more than “soothing words” and talk about how they will address gun-related violence.
“Maybe it’s time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it, because this is obviously a problem across the country.” Bloomberg said in an interview on WOR News Talk Radio 710 in New York City.
“I mean, there are so many murders with guns every day, it’s just got to stop,” he continued. “And instead of the two people — President Obama and Governor Romney — talking in broad things about they want to make the world a better place, okay, tell us how. And this is a real problem. No matter where you stand on the Second Amendment, no matter where you stand on guns, we have a right to hear from both of them concretely, not just in generalities — specifically what are they going to do about guns?”

On Twitter, CNN’s Piers Morgan wrote:

Horrendous details from this Colorado cinema shooting. America has got to do something about its gun laws. Now is the time.
More Americans will buy guns after this, to defend themselves, and so the dangerous spiral descends. When/how does it stop?
Lunatics like this will always try and get guns. It should be 100,000 times harder than it is for them to do so. That’s my point. #Colorado

Others pitched in. Actor John Leguizame tweeted:

My heart goes 2 all the victims families in colorado. No one should have to go thru that. When r we gonna get guns removed in this country?!

The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch wrote:

Unless politicians push aggressive relentless gun control they’re accepting these shootings & complicit in the slaughter.

Jose Antonio Vargas tweeted:

To @barackobama, @mittromney, journalists: can we please have an honest and constructive dialogue about gun control? #theatershooting

This is predictable, but deeply misguided. As usual, this is not an issue of gun control. As Cesare Beccaria wrote in 1764 in Crimes and Punishments:

The laws of this nature are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? And does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons.

As Beccaria implies, this crime was ultimately about people. It was about the shooter, the victims, and their families — and very little else besides — and we would do well to avoid breathlessly proposing radical changes to our constitutional order because a man abused his liberty. Those with evil in their hearts are prone to do evil things, and those willing to violate strict prohibitions against murder do not care much about regulation of firearms or much else. As such, unless the shooter was part of a bigger conspiracy or was systematically failed by an institution, our attentions might be better focused on Aurora, Colo., and not on any particular group, or — even worse — the whole citizenry of the United States.

You're not the killer. Somebody else made that happen.

Co-sponsoring YOUR Success

By Jonah Goldberg

July 20, 2012 12:00 A.M.

“If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. . . . If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

— Barack Obama, Roanoke, Va., July 13
The president’s defenders have claimed he either misspoke last week at a Roanoke, Va., campaign event or that what he said is true. Both defenses have merit. Obama surely didn’t mean to say something that politically idiotic so plainly. And it’s true that no man’s accomplishments are entirely his own. We’re all indebted to others, and we all rely on government to provide some basic things. Only the straw-men conservatives of Obama’s imagination yearn for an America with no roads and bridges.
At best, Obama’s “gaffe” is a banal truism, and if the president’s praetorians want to defend him on grounds of platitudinous banality, fine. But even they have to know in their hearts that this is a pathetic maneuver, given that the reason they’re rushing to defend Obama in the first place is his commitment to the very philosophy they deny he’s espousing.
This is the great irony of Obama and his defenders. He is a progressive ideologue and a passionate believer in “social justice,” and that’s a large reason why his fans love him so. But if you ever say that he is what he is — if you take his words seriously — they ridicule you for believing he’s anything other than a pragmatist and a moderate.
Meanwhile, what many conservatives don’t appreciate is that Obama is not some otherworldly radical, importing foreign ideas, but that he in fact fits within an old American intellectual tradition. Indeed, you might even call him a reactionary progressive; he seeks to restore the assumptions and priorities of the Progressive Era.
Herbert Croly, the godfather of American progressivism, spoke for a generation of progressive intellectuals when he wrote that the “individual has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality has been formed.” For the progressives, society and government were almost interchangeable terms. John Dewey, the seminal progressive philosopher, believed that “organized social control” via a “socialized economy” was the only means to create “free” individuals. For the progressives, freedom wasn’t the absence of government coercion, it was a pile of gifts from the state.
Progressives invented the idea of the “moral equivalent of war” as a means of inciting citizens to drop their personal priorities and rally around the state for a government-defined “cause larger than themselves.” Obama came into office under the motto “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste” and has been looking for “Sputnik moments” ever since in a search for a way to rationalize his agenda.
To the extent Obama ever speaks the language of religion, it is to justify, even sanctify, the works of government. He often invokes the Hallmark-ized biblical teaching that “I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper” as a means to rationalize not personal action but government action. (Obama’s own half-siblings have received little attention from their very wealthy and famous relative.)
Progressive minister Walter Rauschenbusch famously declared that only the “God that answereth by low food prices” should be God. You might say that under the Obamacare vision, only the God that answereth with free birth control should be God.
In the slideshow “The Life of Julia,” the Obama campaign celebrates a progressive vision of citizenship where all of a hypothetical young woman’s accomplishments are co-produced by the state: “Under President Obama, Julia decides to have a child.”
It’s all of a piece with Obama’s conviction that “a problem facing any American is a problem facing all Americans.”
The problem facing Obama is that there’s a reason the American people never fully embraced the progressive vision. The idea driving America is the individual pursuit of happiness. Just because the word “individual” appears in there doesn’t make it a selfish ideal; it means it’s a vision of liberty. We each find our happiness where we seek it. For some that’s in business, for others the arts, or religion or family or a mix of them all. And very often our happiness depends upon the satisfaction we feel at having conquered problems on our own.
Under President Obama, that sense of happiness is a mirage, because everything is a co-production of the state.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of  National Review Online , a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of The Tyranny of Clichés. You can write to him by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

The Marxist Heart of Darkness

By Bruce Walker

Those who doubted Obama's immersion in Marxism now have a perfect window into his soul -- namely, in the form of the stunning class warfare remarks he recently made in Roanoke, Virginia.
We must grasp, however, what Marxism is and what it is not.  Marxism is not a political philosophy to help the poor at the expense of the rich, and it is not a design for a utopian future.  Marxism is simply a Heart of Darkness, a Siamese twin of Nazism, a curse on all humanity committed to three themes: (1) hatred, (2) misery, and (3) lying.    
Marxism is neither a science nor a system of belief.  It is a rationale for seizing power and terrorizing all those who are not its cadres.  Marxism -- English Socialism, or "Ingsoc" -- was the secular religion of George Orwell's Oceania.  In Orwell's masterpiece, 1984, the interrogator of Winston Smith explains the goals of Ingsoc: "Power is not a mean, it is an end.  One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.  The object of persecution is persecution.  The object of torture is torture.  The object of power is power."
Stefan Possony in 1953 noted: "Kinetic communism often is termed an 'ideology,' as if the communist movement were held together by a bond of idealism, with individuals succumbing to communism because of its ideological attraction[.]"  He further explains that "communists are the heirs of the Mongols who conquered, not because they had an attractive ideology, but because they outperformed opponent in the fields of strategy and tactics" (A Century of Conflict, Possony).
Lunacharsky, the first Soviet commissar for education, proclaimed: "We hate Christianity and Christians; even the best of them must be looked upon as our worst enemies.  They preach love of our neighbors and mercy, which is contrary to our principles.  Down with the love of our neighbor; what we want is hatred"  (emphasis added). 
Hatred is helped when people are in pain, so creating gratuitous misery is a goal of Marxism.  A key maxim of Marxism is "The worse, the better."  The Soviets were not bashful about announcing what they wanted: "The misery and oppression of the masses must be intensified to an extraordinary degree" (Sixth Party Congress of the International at Moscow).  Knickbocker, in his 1941 book about totalitarianism in Europe, observed: "Even before the war, in both Germany and Russia, the omnipotent, omnivorous State had devoured all but a vestige of happiness.  As the two regimes of hatred went forward along their respective paths each lost gradually even the desire to promote the happiness of anyone, even of its own people" (Is Tomorrow Hitler's?, Knickerbocker).
Lenin in 1918 showed that he did not even have a plan for a happy world: "Our party has not written a new program and the old one is worthless.  Socialism has ceased to be a dogma just as it has ceased to be a program" (Proceedings of the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets).  Such hatred naturally led to an embrace of state terrorism against ordinary people, and the Soviets boasted that "[t]error is the basis of Soviet power.  Terror is not an incidental act, nor an accidental expression of government displeasure, however frequently repeated.  Terror is a system of violence, ever ready to punish from above.  It is a system of instilling fear, of compulsion, of mass destruction elevated to the status of law" (Our Chameleon Comrades, Gilbert).
Along with deliberate and almost indiscriminant infliction of pain on mankind, Marxists think almost exclusively in terms of lies.  Orwell's "doublethink" and "Newspeak" well illustrate this delusion and self-delusion.  Marxists boasted of their mendacity.  Lenin wrote: "The scientific concept, dictatorship, means nothing more nor less than power which directly rests on violence, which is not limited by any laws or restricted by any absolute rules."  Angela Balabanoff, general secretary of the Third Socialist International, confirmed the dishonesty of Bolsheviks: "The Bolshevik leaders were capable of anything to achieve their political and factional ends" (emphasis in the original) (My Life as a Rebel, Balabannoff).
This, then, is the enemy we face, whose present mask is Obama.  This enemy does not want people to love each other, it does not want mankind happier, and it loathes truth as a mortal enemy.  There is a reason why Marxism has failed everywhere and utterly, and yet some still embrace it wholeheartedly.  The Marxist Heart of Darkness has no noble motives at all.  It is jealous of joy and honor and immune to any argument.  Our only hope is in its defeat.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/07/the_marxist_heart_of_darkness.html at July 19, 2012 - 03:43:08 PM CDT

Obama Continues to Despise American Energy

By Eileen F. Toplansky

The recent Supreme Court decision on ObamaCare gave sufficient cover to the administration to release a five-year plan for offshore drilling which will continue to depress the economy and eliminate energy independence in this country.
This new plan "resinstitutes a 30-year moratorium on offshore energy exploration" in the United States.  Thus, the 44^th president has now denied "access to nearly 98% of America's vast energy potential on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS)."
Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research explains that the "Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act or OCSLA of 1953 provided the interior secretary with the authority to administer mineral exploration and development off our nation's coastlines."  In effect, this Act allows the interior secretary to "provide oil and gas leases to the highest-qualified bidder while establishing guidelines for implementing an oil and gas exploration-and-development program for the Outer Continental Shelf."
In 1978, the Act was amended to require a series of five-year plans that would provide a schedule for the sale of oil and gas leases in order to better meet America's national energy needs.
Since 2008, President Obama and former U.S. Sen. Kenneth L. Salazar of Colorado, the current interior secretary, have restricted access to American offshore oil and gas resources.  These restrictions include:

• Canceling lease sales
• Delaying lease sales
• Creating an uncertainty about offshore development that has caused job-creators to look for other countries' waters to transport their offshore rigs
• Restricting Alaska's development of its 24 billion barrels of oil reserves
• Prohibiting Virginians from unlocking their offshore resources of 130 million barrels of offshore oil and 1.14 trillion cubic feet of natural gas

In addition, shale oil development is being blocked by this administration.  In effect, Obama has "embargoed nearly 200 years of domestic oil supply."
As a result of these draconian restrictions, the government has lost considerable revenue from offshore lease sales in the last three years.  In 2008, during the last year of George W. Bush's administration, the revenue was $9.48 billion.  In 2011 it was down to $36 million.  Oil production on federal lands has also dropped as has the number of annual leases.
This latest assault on American energy reserves will only worsen the current economic situation, since the "2012-2017 plan leaves out the entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts and the vast majority of OCS areas off Alaska."  But since 2009, the U.S. government has loaned more than $2 billion to support the Mexican state oil company in support of oil drilling in the southern Gulf of Mexico¹.  And American tax dollars are being used to support drilling off the coast of Brazil².
According to Michelle Malkin, in the aftermath of the BP oil spill in 2010, "the cost of the original Obama-Salazar edict [was] an estimated 19,000 jobs and $1.1 billion in lost wages."  Amazingly, "this new ban takes both coasts off the table and throws Alaskan oil and gas sales into uncertain delay."  The deliberate "drilling obstructionism"³ "could cost the United States more than $24 billion in lost oil and natural gas investment in the next several years"⁴.
U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman of New Orleans found that the Obama administration "acted 'in contempt' by continuing its deepwater-drilling moratorium after the policy was struck down."  Federal judge Martin Feldman rebuked the Obama Interior Department for its "determined disregard" for the law  and maintained that "[s]uch dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the re-imposition of a second blanket and substantively identical moratorium, and in light of the national importance of this case, provide this court with clear and convincing evidence of the government's contempt."
In light of the administration's total disregard concerning the moratorium, the question has arisen if "a second Obama cabinet member [will] be found in contempt" of Congress.  The possibility exists, since the House has escalated its efforts to make Interior Secretary Ken Salazar comply with a subpoena pertaining to the drilling moratorium that he imposed after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
In essence, the Obama administration ignores a judicial ruling, acts in contempt, and lies to the American public. Mr. Obama claimed that he had lifted the Gulf moratorium even though not a single deepwater permit was issued in nine months.  Obama obfuscates and maintains that U.S. oil production is higher than it's been in eight years.  This is a false claim, since "any increase in domestic drilling during his tenure has been almost entirely in areas over which the Obama administration exercises no authority"⁵.  Furthermore, economy-stifling, complex new federal drilling regulations most certainly guarantee a continuing inability for companies to begin any drilling -- ergo, a moratorium.  This latest massive assault against offshore drilling is costing jobs, depressing economic growth, hindering our national security, pushing up gas prices, and depressing government revenues which could balance the budget.
In a reasonable manner, Thomas J. Pyle writes that "[w]ith oil hovering around $85 a barrel and nationwide gas prices nearly double what they were when Mr. Obama took office, you'd think the administration might implement a sensible plan to promote robust job creation and safe offshore energy development." 
It is sensible to think such a thing only if you think that Obama cares about America and its inhabitants.  On the other hand, if, as many are concluding, Obama has a deep-seated destructive impulse against this country, this ongoing assault is perfectly in line with the 44^th president's desires.
Eileen can be reached at middlemarch18@gmail.com.

Why Obama's College Records Matter

By Monte Kuligowski

In context of the "mounting pressure" for Mitt Romney to provide more tax and employment records, a reporter recently asked White House Press Secretary Jay Carney whether President Obama would set an example in transparency and release some of his records that critics have asked for.
That question was fingernails on the chalkboard to Carney.  "Is that from Donald Trump?" Carey sneered, and laughed -- this time conspicuously alone.
This time it was Carney's own boss who had recently opened the door by demanding that Romney be an "open book" on personal finances.
Carney responded with the audacious claim that Obama is an "open book" and has a record of "unprecedented transparency."  And the sky is green, and the grass is blue.  Carney also suggested that the question wasn't specific.
When the reporter got specific and asked if Obama would release his college records, Carney replied: "Right, this is the Donald Trump question.  It is preposterous.  This is from the guy who insisted he didn't believe the president was born in the United States."
Asking for college records is preposterous?
Writing for the TheBlaze.com, Jason Howerton suggests:

Carney was obviously trying to lump those who are interested to see what types of college courses Obama took in college into the same category as 'birthers.' However, many who want to see the president's college transcripts say wanting to see the president's transcripts has nothing to do with his citizenship. Rather they argue it could help provide insight into the types of courses Obama sought out while in college, which some believe promoted radical ideologies.

Yes, many want to see Obama's college records for grades and courses (as with G.W. Bush and others).  But in Obama's case, the primary reason to see his college applications is to learn whether the president applied for college in the U.S. as a foreign student.
Why should the public want to confirm that Obama did not register as a foreigner while not having the same concern for other candidates?  Read on.
Most of the basic records of Barack Obama's past -- vital, hospital, medical, education, passport, draft registration, et al. -- are guarded as securely as the gold at Fort Knox.  Notably, two documents -- elementary school and Selective Service registrations -- were obtained by independent citizens.  And Breitbart.com independently obtained an interesting biographical brochure produced in 1991 by Obama's literary publicist.
The Associated Press (AP) was able to obtain a copy of Obama's elementary school registration from the Fransiskus Assisi School in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2007.
And Stephen Coffman, a retired Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, obtained a copy of Obama's Selective Service registration form via a FOIA request just days prior to the 2008 election.
From the 2012 Breitbart discovery we learned that Mr. Obama presented himself in 1991 as "born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii."  From the AP discovery we learned that Barack Obama was registered for school in Jakarta as a citizen of Indonesia named Barry Soetoro.  And from the Selective Service registration form we learned that the same form had been forged.
Barack Obama lived in Islamic Indonesia as Barry Soetoro with his mother and stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, and attended school in Jakarta from ages 6 to 10.  It's beyond amazing that the general public is not aware of that fact.  Last Thanksgiving I was with my in-laws and was surprised to learn that they had never heard that Obama lived in Indonesia as Barry Soetoro.  And they are not uneducated people.
The "mainstream" media do not want to touch those facts.
The big question is whether little Barry was adopted by his stepfather, who was a citizen of Indonesia.  There is reason to believe that he was and that in order to have been enrolled in public school in Indonesia, Barry had to be a citizen.  Aaron Klein of WND.com notes that "[a]fter attending the Assisi Primary School, Obama later was enrolled at SDN Menteng 1, an Indonesian public school."
That Obama might have been a citizen of Indonesia and later presented himself as a foreign student in the U.S. is no "birther" conspiracy theory.  It's the gravamen of the college records question.
Let's stop right here and stipulate for the sake of argument that Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii.
But even with the stipulation, we nevertheless have a major problem with Obama's records and staunch secrecy.
Of the few records that we have seen relating to Obama's past all are problematic and they point to a potential citizenship problem for Barack Hussein Obama II aka Barry Soetoro.
Mr. Obama's Arizona nemesis, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, is readily dismissed by the establishment press as a man with an ax to grind -- but his control-test findings have not been disproven.
Once again, the general public remains in the dark because the national one-voice media will not touch the story.
Sherriff Joe's law enforcement "posse" confirmed what a multitude of nonpartisan computer graphic experts have already known.  The image Mr. Obama "released" on April 27, 2011 is a computer-generated forgery.  Irrespective of Mr. Obama's Hawaii birth, for some reason Obama did not upload a certified copy of his birth certificate to the internet; neither is he allowing Hawaii to send certified paper copies to interested state election officials.
Since Obama was born in Hawaii, the question is: why the forgery?  And why the continued secrecy?
Something is not right.  I have speculated that Obama's secrecy over the birth certificate may have been a calculated diversion from the important constitutional requirement for presidential candidates to have been born with a natural, sole allegiance to the United States.
That could be partially correct.  Additionally, Obama might be hiding an amendment to his birth certificate, reflecting his adoption by Lolo Soetoro.
Others have suggested that the reason for the forgery could be over a petty issue, such as his mother having signed the certificate with her maiden name.  In other words, but for the secrecy and forgery, the birth certificate may be completely irrelevant.
Nevertheless, if Obama has a citizenship problem because of Indonesia, the rest of the oddities and secrecies begin to make sense.
Sheriff Joe's team found probable cause to conclude that Obama also forged his Selective Service registration form.  The mismatched date stamp "80" instead of "1980" is evidence not only of forgery, but of a crude forgery.
Then there is the question of why is Obama using a Social Security number issued on application from Connecticut, a state in which he never lived.
If that's not a news story, what is? Romney's tax records?
In light of the few biographical documents we have seen so far, coupled with the bizarre secrecy of Obama, it might be a good idea for "pressure to mount" for Obama to produce his college records.
And while we're at it, what passport did Obama use for his college break to Islamic Pakistan in 1981?
Since Obama is an "open book," producing informative records shouldn't be a problem for him.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/07/why_obamas_college_records_matter.html at July 17, 2012 - 10:45:36 AM CDT