“It is a known fact that the policies of the government today, whether Republican or Democrat are closer to the 1932 platform of the Communist Party than they are to either of their own party platforms in that critical year.” —Walter Trohan (1903-2003) Chicago Tribune reporter (1929-1972) and bureau chief in Washington, D.C. Source: CHICAGO TRIBUNE, October 5, 1970, (Look at us 81 years later!) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Source: An article I almost didn’t read.
Those who will scream the loudest about this are those on the right who paved the way for it with their endless trust in his predecessor, Duh-bya.
For eight years, I tried to tell these people that their president was a reckless spender, a socialist and a tyrant who had nothing but contempt for our liberty. And I did so until I was blue in the face.
These people looked the other way while Duh-bya, along with a Republican House and Senate majority, outspent Klinton by $1 trillion per year and added $5 trillion to the debt. And now they complain about Obama’s fiscal recklessness … even though every dollar he has spent since January 2011 has been spent with the blessing of a Republican House..
They were in total denial when Duh-bya and the Dumbos passed the Medicare prescription drug benefit. This was a massive lurch in the direction of the Obamacare plan they hate so much. Comes now the revelation of the AP wiretapping scandal, and guess who has their whitey-tighties in a wad: the Obama-hating Right.
In the fall of 2001, immediately after 9/11, it was these same people who gladly accepted the Patriot Act. They told us that we had to disregard the Fourth Amendment in order to “go after the terrorists.” And they implicitly trusted that Duh-bya would not abuse these powers.
Again, I warned them that these powers would one day be inherited by another president. Very likely this new president would be someone they hated and who would only augment these abuses of power.
The moral of the story is one of my maxims: It is always easy to say that the government should “do something” as long as they do it to somebody else.
By Doug Newman Please follow me on Facebook. Slight revision of something I originally wrote on May 12, 2008.
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“Radical Islam” is not at war with America. It can’t be.
Radical Islam has no command center. As a religion it has no pope or Vatican. Politically, it has no Berlin, Tokyo or Moscow from which to dispatch terrorists on missions of death.
Can you name the last time a Muslim country conquered a non-Muslim country? If not, don’t feel bad. I can’t either. It has been centuries.
Take two minutes and watch this video on the history of the Middle East. Ever since Old Testament times, empires have come and gone. None have been permanent.
Terrorism is a means of venting political grievances. It is not a philosophy of government. Terrorists don’t even control the government of Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries on earth. So this idea that they are going to come to America, take over, and force us all to speak Arabic, submit to shari’a law and pray to Mecca five times a day is indescribably absurd.
The Islamic world is militarily irrelevant. Consider Iraq. It had no navy or air force. American planes flew thousands of missions over Iraq between 1991 and 2003, and not a single one was shot down. In 2003, Iraq had a military budget of $1.3 billion – enough to build two stadiums here in America.
I hear the train a-coming … But isn’t Iran about to get a nuke? Even if they do, Israel has hundreds of nukes and America has thousands. Pakistan, with a far larger Muslim population, has nukes and no one has their skivvies in a wad about them. Besides, when was the last time Iran invaded another country?
And as bad as the hostage crisis of 1979-81 was, it did not result in the death of a single American.
Terrorists do not “hate us for our freedom and democracy.” While America is not as free as most people think, we still have a measure of freedom. Many other countries have a similar measure of freedom, as well as democratically elected governments. And they have no terror problem.
When you have a military presence in 130 countries and you insist on throwing your weight around to the extent that America does, you will inevitably have a few folks hating on you. The Bible teaches that you reap what you sow and that if you live by the sword you die by the sword.
It is a lie that “if we don’t fight them over there, we will fight them over here.” I don’t worship at the altar of Ronald Reagan, but I will give him this: after 240 Marines were killed in a suicide bombing in Lebanon in 1983, he pulled the Marines out of Lebanon. Lebanese terrorists didn’t “follow us here.” Britain once had a terror problem in Kenya. And when they granted independence to Kenya, the problem of Kenyan terrorism went away. France, likewise, once had a problem with terrorism in Algeria. And then, when they granted independence to Algeria – budda bing budda boom – the Algerian terror problem went away. As Pat Buchanan has said, terrorism is the price a nation pays for having an empire.
9/11 was an attack, not an invasion. This is not just a matter of semantics. There was no invading Army. There was no naval battle group in New York Harbor or Chesapeake Bay. There were no aerial bombing raids by the terrorist Luftwaffe. There were no amphibious raids in by jihad jarheads in Battery Park and along the Jersey Shore.
Moreover, the 19 hijackers are DEAD!!! You cannot take over a country and establish an Islamofascist dictatorship and do all kinds of horrible things WHEN YOU ARE DEAD!!!
There is a Constitutional provision for dealing with things like terrorism. Article I, Section 8 authorizes Congress to “grant Letters of Marque & Reprisal.” Wikipedia defines this as “an official warrant or commission from a government authorizing the designated agent to search, seize, or destroy specified assets or personnel belonging to a foreign party which has committed some offense under the laws of nations against the assets or citizens of the issuing nation”.
The response must be in proportion to the offense. 9/11 was not an act of war by a foreign nation, but an act of gang violence against American people and property. Let Congress authorize the pursuit and apprehension of the specific perpetrators, but don’t launch an endless, ruinously expensive, unwinnable war against a tactic.
Oh how I wish this thought were mine: if 19 Americans went overseas and committed some horrendous crime, would that justify a decades-long war against America?
Shortly after 9/11, the Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001 was introduced by – surprise! – Congressman Ron Paul.
I hear another train a-coming: But aren’t American judges now ruling based on shari’a law? Isn’t shari’a coming to America? Under Article 6, Paragraph 2 of the Constitution, “judges in every state” are bound to uphold the Constitution as the “supreme Law of the Land.” Let’s impeach those judges who rule based on shari’a. Let’s stand firm in defense of our Constitution and stop using Islamophobia was a reason to wage war all over the globe.
The Boston Marathon bombings were a horrible crime and I don’t want to minimize the grief of those affected. However, on an average day in America there are 40 murders and 80 automotive fatalities. This makes for 2280 deaths from just these causes in the last 19 days, or 760 times the death toll. You have a far greater chance of dying from many causes other than terrorism. (Please click here, here and here for my thoughts on the aftermath.)
The Nazis didn’t do it. The Communists didn’t do it. But the American people tolerate it in the name of “security.”
Over the last several decades, the American people have tolerated innumerable intrusions on their liberty in the name of “security”. The greatest threat to our liberty comes not from the Muslim world, or even from Washington, D.C. Rather, it comes from a populace that willingly surrenders its freedom, while all the while believing it can remain free.
H.L. Mencken once stated that “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and thus clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.“
The left wants us to freak out and to give up all our freedom in the name of fighting global warming. The right wants us to freak out and to give up all our freedom in the name of fighting terrorism. As LewRockwell.com’s Butler Shaffer has put it: left and right are actually two wings of the same bird of prey. The war on terror is a war on you and me.
By Doug Newman
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Published in the Denver Post.
If you would like to post this elsewhere, please email me and include a link to this URL. Thanks!
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Editor:
If Denver and the surrounding area were ever subject to a Boston-stylelockdown, I would not feel safe or secure. That is because I would not be safe or secure. None of us would be.
Imagine if a terrorist armed with explosives were holed up in the house next to yours. Would you want to be forced to remain in your house? Or would you like the option of being able to leave your house – and your neighborhood altogether – for your own safety without asking permission or risking arrest? I don’t know about you, but I would certainly choose the latter.
If you cannot freely flee from danger, what rights do you truly have?
Locking people down and forcing them to remain in dangerous situations does not protect them. This is not just a philosophical matter of rights. It is a profoundly practical matter of personal safety as well.
Douglas F. Newman
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The 238th anniversary of the “shot heard ’round the world.”
By Doug Newman
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“Sometimes Martial Law Is Necessary”
Thus read a response to my Friday column about the lockdown of 1 million people during the manhunt for one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. I didn’t “write” that so much as I slapped together a bunch of random thoughts.
I just want to say that I am honored by the response that this received by viral “sharing” of it on Facebook. Thank you, everyone.
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Here are some more random bullet points.
1.On April 19, 1995, a few hours after the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, a coworker commented on how easy it was for people to just “drive up anywhere”. I asked her if she would prefer to live an alternative kind of society where moving around freely was not an option. Boston on April 19, 2013 was just such a place. The inability to travel freely is a common feature of all totalitarian societies.
The Berlin Wall.
2. If a million people in and around Boston can be put on lockdown for one day, why can’t a million people elsewhere be put on lockdown for 3 or 4 or even more days sometime in the not-too-distant future?
3. And why were just Boston and some surrounding towns on lockdown? I mean, like, the suspect could have fled to Cape Cod, Worcester, Springfield or Williamstown. Or, he could have crossed state lines. Why not put all of New England and New York on lockdown?
4. “But what if the terrorist was on the loose in your neighborhood?” you ask. “Wouldn’t you feel safer being on lockdown?” No, actually I wouldn’t feel safer at all. And while I would certainly appreciate notice that an intensive manhunt was underway, I would also like the opportunity to get the hell out of my neighborhood for my own safety. And you can’t very well do that when you are on lockdown.
5.5. If you are a “conservative” who approves of the Beantown Lockdown, DON’T EVER complain to me again about nationalized health care, the IRS, gun control or any other big government program. None of these ever resulted in a million people not being able to leave their homes. You deserve every ounce of big government you get.
They hate us for our freedom.
6. 6. What is the next step after a lockdown? Drone strikes? All of America is now a battlefield in the war on terror. And there could be a “suspected militant” right in your neighborhood – a scary looking guy with a name you can’t pronounce from a country you can’t find on a map where the military budget is less than the payroll for the Red Sox infield. So what if 100 innocent people are killed by a Hellfire missile “if it gets the bad guy.”
7.7. Why not also internment camps for Chechens, Muslims, etc.? I mean, like, desperate times call for desperate measures.
8.8. “Sometimes you have to give up liberty to have security.” They sang the exact same song in Germany in 1933 as they gave up their liberty for 12 years of sicherheit.
9.9. And if you don’t think Uncle Sam would kill innocent Americans en masse, think again. And consider the Branch Davidians, the Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek Massacre, Wounded Knee and the War of Northern Aggression from 1861-1865.
10. About 40 people are murdered every day in America. About 280 have been murdered in the last week. Why do the 4 Boston killings – 3 at the Marathon and the cop at MIT – get all the attention? (And this is not to minimize the grief of those affected by these killings.) Fourteen people perished in the plant explosion in West, Texas, and that has not been nearly as much of a showstopper as the Boston bombing.
11. If you think the warrantless searches during the lockdown were “reasonable” because there was a manhunt for a terrorist, do you likewise believe that it is “reasonable” for TSA to molest children at airports?
12.If you tolerate locking down schools for the safety of the students, why wouldn’t they take the next step and put whole cities on lockdown?
Aurora, June 2, 2012
13.If you approve of the police in Aurora, Colorado – where I live – detaining 40 innocent people for 2 hours in order to apprehend one bank robbery suspect, why wouldn’t police restrict the liberty of 1 million people for a whole day?
14.If you cheered on the police authorities in Southern California as they shot at innocent people as they hunted down and killed Christopher Dorner with no due process, why wouldn’t cops put entire cities on lockdown to catch a fugitive?
16. You will note that I have not mentioned the names of any politicians here. It does not matter at all whom we elect anymore. When you grant unconstitutional power to a president that you like and trust, please know that the next president will inherit and, inevitably, augment these unconstitutional powers.
17.“The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism.”– U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Davis,Ex Parte Milligan(1866)
18.At the “4/20” marijuana rally in Denver on Saturday, 2 people were shot and a third was grazed by a bullet. As this column goes to bed, the suspect remains at large. Should metro Denver – including Aurora, where I live – be put on lockdown for everyone’s “safety”?
19.If you profess a belief in Jesus, who would He subject to martial law?
20.Do you believe everything the government and their media lapdogs tell you?
”The welfare of humanity is the alibi of tyrants.” – Albert Camus
Here are 30 thoughts about the martial law which was imposed on Boston in the name of apprehending one bombing suspect.
1.The Marathon bombings constituted a horrible crime. Likewise for the killing of the MIT police officer. Thoughts, prayers and condolences need to be offered to all affected.
2.The suspects could be totally guilty.
3. The suspects could be totally innocent.
4.The suspects were at large for over 3 days, but Boston was not on lockdown. Then, all of a sudden, it was deemed necessary to put Boston and several surrounding towns on lockdown.
5. Is this the way it is going to be now in the aftermath of high profile crimes?
6. Will the American people continue to tolerate it?
7. If the answer to #6 is “yes”, this is ought to frighten you more than any terrorist. The cops are the business end of the government. And when they can put whole cities on lockdown, what can’t they – or any government entity – do? What is the next step after this?
Just what kind of America awaits this young girl?
8. I am all good with cops pursuing violent criminals. This does not justify martial law.
9. Why am I concerned about rights at a time when suspected terrorists are on the loose? Because it is in times like this when governments want to take away liberty and people are more than willing to give up their liberty – in the name of “security”.
10. There wasn’t a lot of street crime in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. The cops could do as they pleased. Would you want to live in either place? How “safe” would you feel?
11. The most dangerous criminals have always been in governments. They have always sent police to do their dirty work. They always dress things up in the name of some higher good.
12.238 years ago today, near Boston, “the shot heard ’round the world” was fired. King George III did a lot of bad things. Did he ever put an entire city on lockdown?
Lexington Green. 13 miles from Boston. 238 years ago today.
13.The lockdown of Boston in pursuit of one accused terrorist came on the 20th anniversary of the torching by the feds of 80 innocent citizens near Waco. This was a trial balloon that was floated before a brainwashed nation to see just how much Uncle Sam could get away with. As it turns out, he can get away with just about anything.
14. The lockdown of Boston came on the 18th anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. Several witnesses claim to have seen a suspect known only as John Doe #2. A fugitive suspect in a bombing that killed 168 people did not cause the area around OKC to be put on lockdown. Why, then, was it necessary to put Boston and several suburbs under martial law after the killing of four people?
15.“But these were local police”, you say. Police have become more and more militarized and federalized in recent years, especially since 9/11.
Can anyone here say “occupying army”?
16.The media parrot everything the authorities say.
17.Millions of Americans believe everything the mainstream media says.
18.Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, etc. etc. are part of this mainstream media.
19.The 5th Amendment demands due process regardless of the severity of the charges or the weight of public opinion against the defendant.
20.The 6th Amendment spells out the details of due process.
22.If you will cheer on the authorities in this instance, you had just better hope and pray that you are never falsely accused of anything.
23.Most criminals are not Muslim.
24.99-plus percent of Muslims are not violent criminals.
25.The most violent demographic in America is unmarried men. Let’s go after THEM! Oh, wait. Let’s not. I am an unmarried man.
26.It is always easy to say that your government should “do something” as long as they do it to somebody else.
From the Boston Globe – April 19, 2013
27. NEVER GIVE UP YOUR GUNS! They are your last line of defense against any kind of crazies – be they terrorists or rogue police.
28. How many military veterans who “fought for our freedom” were on the receiving end of Friday’s lockdown?
29. You will note that I have not said anything about conspiracies, “false flags”, etc. Even if everything the authorities are saying is entirely true, their reaction to the Boston Marathon bombings is totally grotesque and tyrannical.
30.Dear God, why did You task me with being a “watchman on the wall”? (Ezekiel 33:6) Why do I have to be the bearer of this kind of news? Why couldn’t You give me a “nicer” ministry?
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In the end, it was not martial law that caught Tsarneav, but a common citizen defying martial law by leaving his house in defiance of orders. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to post this elsewhere, please email me and include a link to this URL. Thanks!
By Doug Newman Follow me on Facebook.
Published in the Rocky Mountain News on September 23, 1999.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ NOTE: The murder of 80 innocent people at the Branch Davidian compound 20 years ago today was a test run to see just how much the feds could get away with. As it turns out, they can get away with just about anything with the blessing of the majority of the American people.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editor:
One need not be a psychopath in a cave in Montana to be indignant about the atrocities committed at Waco in the spring of 1993. The incineration of 80 people, without any due process, was one of the most horrifying events in recent memory.
In his September 5 column, Mike Littwin speaks of the recent revelations about FBI actions in the Waco tragedy. He writes, “The sound you’re hearing is the full-throated roar of vindication from conspiracy theorists everywhere.” It is as if only lunatic fringe types would attribute this massacre to a government run amok. Over the last six years, I have talked with plenty of people of all political stripes who express horror at the Waco massacre.
David Koresh was a wacko, as was anyone who would follow him. There is a difference, however, between being a kook and being a criminal. The Branch Davidians lived for years on the outskirts of Waco, and did nothing to harm those in the area. If the feds felt Koresh violated any laws, they could have served him a warrant on one of his very frequent trips into town. There was no justification whatsoever for the amount of firepower with which the feds surrounded the Davidian compound.
Oh sure, Waco made for sensational television. This could only happen in an intellectually and morally bankrupt nation. The nonchalant response of so many Americans shows how far we have drifted from our dual moorings of constitutionalism and limited government. Time and again we hear that, because the Davidians were so weird, their rights were just not that important. (The silence about Waco from mainstream Christian pulpits has been particularly appalling. What if the feds had torched a community of traditional Christians similar to those described in the biblical book of Acts?)
The government’s quest for truth and justice concerning Waco has been about as vigorous as O.J. Simpson’s search for Ron and Nicole’s real killers. Bill Clinton is not Hitler, and Janet Reno is not Himmler. However, Waco happened on their watch. Freedom lovers everywhere should be highly indignant about this tragedy. That Clinton and Reno could carry out such an atrocity with impunity suggests that America is heading in a dangerous direction.
Food for the Thinkers
