My Usual Charming Self | Bernie Reeves

World Gone Mad

By Bernie Reeves

Will we look back in amazement at world events today and wonder how nations are capable of entering into delusional behavior - as we now regard the lunacy that launched World War I? The alliances and attitudes that colluded to kill 15 million servicemen are considered so bizarre historians draw a line in history from 1914-1918, as if to say it’s too difficult to explain to the modern mind what happened to plunge the Western world into homicidal chaos.

I fear we too will be pondering years hence how we abandoned sanity in 2009 when the consequences of our actions today trigger nuclear events and economic chaos. Led by America’s president in a speech to the UN Security Council, the strongest nations voted unanimously to terminate nuclear deterrence – even if they don’t really mean it. But this sort of malarkey leaves the field wide open for extremist Muslim states to build their arsenals, laughing at us all the way to paradise.

Not 24 hours after Obama’s UN speech, new data indicate Iran has yet another nuclear facility churning away to produce weapons of mass destruction intended for use against the infidel, a revelation that arrived days after Obama canceled the missile screen we planned in Eastern Europe to deter Persian nuclear threats. To add to the insanity, the Attorney General is undertaking to impanel war tribunals against our very own American intelligence operatives who have succeeded in keeping us safe from terrorism since 9-11.

Trying to “jaw-jaw rather than war-war” as Churchill put it, contradicts the very real war in Afghanistan. I enjoy seeing our military at work when needed as much as anyone, but nowhere can I find a good reason to remain in this ungovernable and inhospitable land. The Taliban did not strike the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and we beat the main forces of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Could it be Obama clings to Afghanistan because the Democrat party line dismissed the successful surge in Iraq during the past election as a non-event because - as they parroted in unison - Iraq “is not our war”? Taken aback, I asked what was “our” war, and the answer came back Afghanistan. So Obama is risking our fighting men and women to maintain a political charade?

The madness continues. The global economic crash has continued to erode the core of small business capitalism, the very essence of productivity that produces the jobs and tax collections that make the engine of state run. Obama, listening to advice from macro-economists, has placed his trust in the national and international banking system to rebuild the economy, the very same miscreants who got us in this mess to start with. At least George W. Bush and his team understood the urgency to stimulate the consumer segment – accounting for 80% of the GDP in the US – with tax cuts to beef up retail spending.

But Obama is not only retarding recovery, he is assuring it will never happen by loading up the federal deficit with trillions of dollars of red ink while ignoring the dicey state of the economy. The main priorities emanating from the White House are drastically increasing public spending on health care reform and forcing the US to capitulate to zany schemes to curtail productive output to save the planet.

Granted, working to create order out of the health care maze is an admirable goal, but the Obama cadre chooses to depict Americans as cruel and heartless by refusing to communicate that all citizens can receive free care at any hospital anywhere. This thin edge of the axe is calculated to humiliate the United States on a false premise, causing other nations to think our citizens are lying prostrate on streets and back alleys from lack of medical care. To sell this new health care scheme, the left-liberal phalanx bellows that 40 million Americans are without health insurance, but that does not mean they are left to languish and die. High premiums help provide this care, yet the people who pay them are ignored in the march to establish the government to run health care in a nation with the most advanced medical outcomes imaginable.

The global warming scam, the Mother of all dangerous doctrines (pace the infamous Saddam Hussein) is diverting policy-making attention away from bolstering the economy to bludgeoning free market capitalism with more big lies. The deep environmental movement has been infiltrated by utopian socialists seeking a home after the collapse of the USSR, the last great hope for world socialism. The forces behind saving the planet are dedicated to destroying individual initiative and enterprise for idealistic, unattainable and undesirable goals: to halt productivity and implant one-world governance. Like their Bolshevik forbears, the green activists peddle junk science and saccharine platitudes to lure the well-meaning into a doctrinaire trap. What do you say to people who desire “equal rights for the atmosphere”?

Replacing a strong nuclear and conventional defense with cheap talk of the goodness of man; not making the economy strong again with sensible policies; bankrupting the government with socialistic spending schemes on health care; and assuring the demise of capitalism with loony policies on global warming, Obama has set the stage for unintended consequences that can spell disaster for national and global tranquility. And if you don’t agree, you’re a racist according to Democrat has-beens Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, culprits in an organized propaganda program to legislate and rule by guilt.

Notes From La-La Land
As Artie would say in the old Larry Sanders Show, “I thought I killed her in the war”. I am speaking of CNBC’s Rachel Maddow whom I endured for the first time trying to find news on the news channels – a fruitless task I soon discovered. She reminded me of Agnes Smedley, the American communist who taught Mao ballroom dancing. Maddow, who thinks Americans are “simply having a tantrum” as they become accustomed to the raptures of socialism, trotted out documentary filmmaker Ken Burns to plug his latest PBS offering on the National Park system. Says Burns: “the role of government is building human happiness”, like FDR and Obama. I’d say government today is piling on human misery. Happiness is a possibility if government leaves us alone as the founders intended.

•••
I have no dog in the fight over whether or not Durham novelist Michael Peterson killed his wife as the jury decided. But the evidence presented was dramatically underwhelming, which brought into play the theory that Kathleen Peterson was killed by an owl, a supposition that had everyone howling – until Metro presented convincing photographs that indeed it could have happened. (go to www.metronc.com and enter “owl theory in the search box). Since our article, people aren’t laughing anymore. It has been proved that owls do indeed attack people; the murder weapon, a fireplace blow poke hypothesized by the prosecution, has not been produced; and the wounds don’t match the instrument anyway. The latest news is the filing of a Motion of Appropriate Relief by Peterson’s lawyer pointing to “new and compelling evidence” – the presence of bird feathers in Kathleen’s hands.