A Democratic presidency and Congress would turn America into a European-style welfare state in which millions are dependent on the government. It will be a different sort of government from that which the Founding Fathers intended. Government as the agent of forced redistribution becomes all-powerful. The principle of liberty is abandoned when economic equality is imposed. Such equality cannot co-exist with liberty; they are mutually exclusive. To choose dependence is to choose an equality of misery and bondage. 

 From an article in Townhall:

Ponder the words of the Scottish jurist and historian, Sir Alexander Fraser Tytler. Over 200 years ago, he provided a chilling observation on the fall of the Athenian Republic. America has been a beacon of liberty and hope for our citizens and the world for over 230 years. But Tytler warned of the natural rise and fall of every democracy:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence; from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependency back again into bondage."

 

 Expect a big rise in crime under an Obama presidency.    

Obama, who would as president have the power to pardon criminals, isn’t a big fan of U.S. laws in general, at least not as currently written. He thinks they are racist, along with the courts.

"We have certain sentences that are based less on the kind of crime you commit than on what you look like," he told Howard University students last year. "It’s time to seek a new dawn of justice."

"Laws are sometimes malleable," he wrote two years ago, and he plans to "fix" what he sees as a "broken" criminal justice system. And he favors judges with the "empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American."

That worries some legal analysts. "If Obama wins," warns Northwestern University law professor Steven Calabresi, "we could possibly see the abolition of capital punishment and mass freeing of criminal defendants."

In fact, Obama in the 1996 questionnaire responded "no" to supporting capital punishment. His website now calls for unspecified "reform" of the death penalty, which he contended in his book "does little to deter crime."

Obama will, however, get tough on "hate crimes." He plans to pack the criminal section of Justice’s Civil Rights Division with African-American prosecutors, and make "hate crime a priority." …

 Suburban employers won’t be safe from Obama’s race cops, either.

"Anyone who thinks that such enforcement is no longer needed should pay a visit to one of the suburban office parks in their area and count the number of blacks employed there," Obama complained in his 2006 autobiography. …

It’s plain where Obama’s priorities lie.

"Jesus has a soft spot for thugs," preaches Rev. Otis Moss, the "wonderful young pastor," as Obama described him, who took over the pulpit from retired Rev. Jeremiah Wright at Obama’s longtime church in Chicago.

Apparently so does Obama.

Read more in the Front Page Magazine article here.

 From the Telegraph:

The United States is apparently about to choose as president the most inexperienced, untried and virtually unknowable (because there is so little to know) candidate who has ever run for that office at a time of unquantifiable international risk and unprecedented economic instability: a candidate who, as Bill Clinton revealed in a wonderfully back-handed "tribute", responded to the banking collapse by ringing every expert he could find (including Bill) to ask them what he should be saying.

 Mona Charen writes:

If Barack Obama is elected president and Democrats control large majorities in the House and Senate, the Obama/Pelosi/Reid triumvirate will move the country decisively in the direction of dying Europe – low productivity, high joblessness, low birth rates, high taxes, and limp foreign policies. The triumvirate will do this at a time when a vibrant America is more necessary than ever – with Iran seeking nuclear weapons, Pakistan teetering, al-Qaida regrouping, China and Russia telegraphing hostility, and Iraq just barely emerging into the sunshine. This election has become about far more than John McCain versus Barack Obama; it has become about whether the United States will remain the champion of freedom – economic and political – or whether we will join the queue of formerly great nations now struggling to pay for all the social welfare "benefits" their aging and lazy populations demand.

We concur.

IS AMERICA ABOUT TO SELL ITS BIRTHRIGHT - FREEDOM - FOR A POTTED MESSAGE - ‘Hope & Change’?

As a refugee from socialist Europe seeking asylum in up-until-now free America, I find the prospect of America transforming itself into a European-like welfare state - which is what will happen if Obama is elected - dreadful to contemplate.  

The choice in this election is stark;  the stakes could not be higher. It’s a choice between freedom, prosperity, continued greatness OR slow decline into a European-type second-rate power. 

Daniel Henninger confirms what I fear, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

 The real "change" being put to a vote for the American people in 2008 is not simply a break from the economic policies of "the past eight years" but with the American economic philosophy of the past 200 years. This election is about a long-term change in America’s idea of itself.

I don’t agree with the argument that an Obama-Pelosi-Reid government is a one-off, that good old nonideological American pragmatism will temper their ambitions. Not true. With this election, the U.S. is at a philosophical tipping point.

The goal of Sen. Obama and the modern, "progressive" Democratic Party is to move the U.S. in the direction of Western Europe, the so-called German model and its "social market economy." Under this notion, business is highly regulated, as it would be in the next Congress under Democratic House committee chairmen Markey, Frank and Waxman. Business is allowed to create "wealth" so long as its utility is not primarily to create new jobs or economic growth but to support a deep welfare system.

 

The political planets are aligned to make this achievable. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, prominent Democrats, European leaders in France and Germany and more U.S. newspaper articles than one can count have said that the crisis proves the need to permanently tame the American "free-market" model. P.O.W. Alan Greenspan is broadcasting confessions. The question is: Are the American people of a mind to throw in the towel on the system that got them here?

This would be a historic shift, one post-Vietnam Democrats have been trying to achieve since their failed fight with Ronald Reagan’s "Cowboy Capitalism."

Of course Cowboy Capitalism built the country. More than any previous nation in history, the United States made its way forward on a 200-year wave of upwardly mobile, profit-seeking merchants, tradesmen, craftsmen and workers. They blew out of New England and New York, rolled across the wildernesses of the Central States, pushed across a tough Western frontier and banged into San Francisco and Los Angeles, leaving in their path city after city of vast wealth.

The U.S. emerged a superpower, and the tool of that ascent was simple – the pursuit of economic growth. Now China, India and Brazil, embracing high-growth Cowboy Capitalism, are doing what we did, only their cities are bigger.

Now comes Barack Obama, standing at the head of a progressive Democratic Party, his right hand rising to say, "Mothers, don’t let your babies grow up to be for-profit cowboys. It’s time to spread the wealth around."

What this implies, undeniably, is that the United States would move away from running with the high GDP, high-growth nations rising today as economic and political powers and move over to retire with the low-growth economies we displaced – old Europe.

As noted in a 2006 World Bank report, spending in Europe on social-protection programs averages 19% of GDP (85% of it on social insurance programs), compared to 9% of GDP in the U.S. The Obama proposals send the U.S. inexorably and permanently toward European levels of social protection. This isn’t an "agenda." It’s a final temptation.

In partial detail:

Obama’s federalized medical insurance system starts the transition away from private medical care and toward Obama’s endlessly promised "universal health care." This has always been the sine qua non of planting a true, managed-market economy in the U.S.

Obama’s refundable tax credits are direct cash transfers from the federal government. This would place some 48% of Americans, nearly half, out of the income tax system. More than a tax proposal, this is a deep philosophical shift, an American version of being "on the dole."

His stated intent to renegotiate free-trade agreements such as Nafta is a philosophical shift. It abandons the tradition of a hyper-competitive America dating back to the Industrial Revolution, toward a protected, domestic workforce, as in Western Europe. The Democratic proposal to eliminate private union votes – "card check" – ensures the spread of a static, Euro-style workforce.

Eliminating the ceiling on payroll taxes changes Social Security from an insurance to a welfare program. Obama’s tax credits requires performing government-identified activities, the essence of a "directed economy."

All this would transform the animating American idea – away from creation and toward protection.

Many voters – progressive Democrats, the asset-safe rich, academics and college students – regard this as where America should go. They explicitly want America’s great natural energies transferred away from unwieldy economic competition and toward social construction. They want the U.S. to reduce its "footprint" in the world. Monies saved by stepping down from superpower status can be reprogrammed into "investments" (a favorite Obama word) in a vast Euro-style hammock of social protection programs.

One wishes John McCain had been better able to make clear what the truly "historic" meaning of Tuesday’s vote is. Once it’s done, it’s done. 

 David Limbaugh lists his reasons not to vote for Obama. His list partly overlaps ours, but adds some we mistakenly omitted. He asks:

Would Obama win if people believed he might well nationalize health care, unilaterally disarm our nuclear weapons, push the Global Poverty Act, appoint judges to the left of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, pass legislation banning handguns, greatly increase federal spending by euphemistically disguising it as a stimulus package, increase taxes on producers and expand "redistribution," impose limitations on private executive salaries, empower labor unions, further nationalize public education with the leftist indoctrination agenda of the National Education Association, further open our borders, ratify the Kyoto climate change treaty, abandon Israel, retreat and surrender in Iraq, dramatically reduce the defense budget, possibly reinstate the draft in the name of racial equity, nationalize our private 401(k) funds, abuse governmental power to target and investigate dissent from ordinary "Joes," and implement the Fairness Doctrine to shut down political dissent from his talk radio critics?

Phyllis Schlafly writes about another:

The issue of illegal aliens was censored out of the presidential debates and other coverage. The voters were kept oblivious to the fact that Obama favors giving driver’s licenses to illegal aliens and John McCain does not. This issue is so powerful with the voters that it played a major role in the dumping of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and the unprecedented recall of California Gov. Gray Davis. It could have done likewise to Obama.  

      1.  UNQUALIFIED. He’s had no experience of running anything – no  town, no state, no business,  not even his own campaign, and now he is asking voters to trust him with running the United States of America:  defense, foreign affairs, domestic policy, the economy – and this at a time of economic crisis and international threat.

               2.     FAR LEFT.  He’s designated the most ‘liberal’ Senator, but in fact he’s even more to the left than that. He’s been closely associated with communists, terrorists, America-haters and Islamists all his life, not because he has ‘poor judgment’ (as McCain and Palin politely cluck), but because he shares their political opinions and aims, their prejudices and hatreds.  Eg:  Frank Marshall Davis, Saul Alinsky, the New Party, Mike Klonsky of the ‘The Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)’, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn of the Weather Underground communist terrorist organization, Reverend Jeremiah Wright a friend and benefactor of Hamas, Rashid al-Khalidi an aider and abettor of Arafat and the PLO.  

              3.     SHADY DEALINGS. Eg. He has made sweetheart deals with the convicted criminal Tony Rezko.

             4.     DRUGS. He has been a drug user by his own admission.

             5.     ARROGANCE. Eg. ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for, to heal the planet, to slow the rising of the seas.’

             6.     APPEASING & DISARMING. He’d cut US defense spending, reduce or even abandon American nuclear arms, while the sworn enemies of the US, notably North Korea and Iran, are building nuclear arsenals; Russia is showing renewed expansionist ambitions; and Islamists are pursuing jihad against the non-Muslim world. He seems to believe that a word from him will stop the likes of Kim Jong Il and Ahmadinejad in their tracks and make them purr like pussycats.

             7.     REDISTRIBUTION. He’d ‘spread the wealth around’.  So just when the West European states are suffering the devastating effects of socialist welfare policies, Obama plans to take America down the same road to economic ruin.

             8.     PROTECTIONISM. Eg. He’d renegotiate NAFTA. US trade with the rest of the world will shrink.   

             9.     SPECIAL INTEREST FIXING. He’s a Big Labor supporter and would deprive trade unionists of their secret ballot.

            10. STATISM. He believes in enlarging government, and expanding government control over all private lives. How, when, where - and even if - people are treated when they are sick, how much or how little people may warm or cool their homes, even what and how much they eat, could be decided, overseen and regulated by an Obama government.  With a likely Democrat-controlled Congress - and compliant mainstream media - there’d be no brakes on him.

            11. AND YES, ANTI-AMERICAN. He has channeled funds to ‘education programs’ that in reality were indoctrination courses for the young in political radicalism, misusing charitable trusts. Eg. Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Woods Fund.

            12.  ANTI-LIFE. He is a supporter of extreme pro-abortion policies that include the killing by neglect of babies born alive.

            13.  IGNORANCE. Eg. ‘Interpreters of Arabic are needed in Afghanistan.’ ‘I’ve campaigned in 57 states and I think there’s one more to go.’ And a speech in Berlin that showed he had no idea of the actual history of the twentieth century, the why and wherefore and evil cruelty of the Berlin Wall, and what it took on the part of Western leaders Reagan and Thatcher to get it knocked down.  

            14.  LIES. Eg. ‘I never said kindergarten children should have sex education.’ 

            15. FLIP-FLOPPING. Eg. ‘The surge has not worked.’ ‘The surge has worked beyond our wildest dreams.’ ‘I’m against the surge.’ ‘I want to send more troops to Afghanistan.’ ’A surge in Afghanistan will not work.’

            16. DEFEATISM. He wanted America to surrender in Iraq.

            17.  HYPOCRISY. Eg. He’s against lobbyists and Wall Street ‘fat cats’, but appointed disgraced Fannie Mae executives as his advisors, and accepted huge sums of money in donations from Fannie Mae and other Wall Street institutions.

            18. ABSURD DOCTRINAIRE OBSTINACY. Eg.  ‘Inflate your tyres and America need not drill for its own oil.’  

            19.  INTIMIDATION AND ANTI FREE SPEECH. Citizens who criticize him have been threatened with criminal prosecution.  TV and radio stations that ask him or his vice-presidential candidate questions he doesn’t like are boycotted. 

            20.  YOUTH EXPLOITATION. He encourages children to propagandize their parents in his favor. Groups of schoolchildren and college students are formed as his support groups, taught ‘Obama songs’, and drilled in a manner chillingly reminiscent of the Hitler Youth and the Young Communists.

           21. VOTER FRAUD. He has funded Citizens Services Inc. which is ACORN’s campaign services entity. He has represented ACORN as a lawyer, and as a ‘community organizer’ he trained its personnel in techniques of intimidation and extortion. ACORN has been, and is continuing to be, investigated for voter-registration fraud, and numbers of its operatives have been convicted of criminal offences in the course of carrying out ACORN’s agenda.  

           22.  UNDERHAND POLITICAL MANEUVERING. He won elections in Illinois by challenging the signatures of petitioners, and discrediting opponents.     

           23. CORRUPTION. As a member of the Illinois legislature, he directed funds to corrupt slum-property developers.

            24. ILLICIT AND IMMORAL FOREIGN ADVENTURISM.  In Kenya he campaigned for Raila Odinga the mass-murderer. In Iraq he tried to undercut President Bush’s foreign policy by persuading Iraqi leaders to accept his timetable for US troop withdrawal rather than the President’s. 

            25.  ANTI-CONSTITUTIONALISM. He would appoint judges willing and eager to legislate from the bench rather than strictly interpret the Constitution. This could mean decades of change for the worse. 

 Kenneth R Timmerman writes:

The story of how Obama stole the Democratic Party caucuses - and consequently, the Democratic Party nomination - is important not just because it prefigures potential voter fraud in the November 4 presidential election, which is already under way. It’s important because it fits a pattern that Chicago journalists and a few national and international commentators have noticed in all of the elections Obama has won in his career. NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher described Obama’s first election victory - for Illinois state senate – in a recent commentary that appeared in the London Telegraph. “Mr. Obama won a seat in the state senate in 1996 by the unorthodox means of having surrogates successfully challenge the hundreds of nomination signatures that candidates submit. His Democratic rivals, including Alice Palmer, the incumbent, were all disqualified,” Fletcher wrote. Obama’s election to the U.S. Senate “was even more curious,” conservative columnist Tony Blankley writes in The Washington Times. Citing an account that appeared in The Times of London, Blankley described how Obama managed to squeeze out his main Democratic rival, Blair Hull, after divorce papers revealed allegations that Hull had allegedly made a death threat to his former wife. Then in the general election, “lightning struck again,” Blankley writes, when his Republican opponent, wealthy businessman Jack Ryan, was forced to withdraw in extremis after his divorce papers revealed details of his sexual life with his former wife. Just weeks before the election, the Illinois Republican party called on Alan Keyes of Maryland to challenge Obama in the general election. Obama won a landslide victory.

 “Mr. Obama’s elections are pregnant with the implications that he has so far gamed every office he has sought by underhanded and sordid means,” Blankley writes, while “the American media has let these extraordinary events simply pass without significant comment.” 

 Caroline Glick writes in the Jerusalem Post:

Iran will likely be the first US adversary to test Obama. And Obama will have no idea what to do. While Obama has stated repeatedly that a nuclear-armed Iran is a "game-changer," Obama’s own rule book for international relations has no relevance for dealing with Iran’s game.

Obama views international relations as a creature of American will. If America is nice to others, they will be nice to America. But the fact of the matter is that regimes like Iran hate the US regardless of how it behaves. The only question with strategic relevance for Washington is whether the Iranians also fear the US. And Obama has given them no reason to fear him. To the contrary, he has given them reason to believe that under his leadership, the mullahs can defeat America.

AMERICA STANDS to elect its new president in times of nearly unprecedented dangers. Iran is on the threshold of nuclear weapons. Thanks to the Bush administration, North Korea now feels free to vastly expand its nuclear proliferation activities. Oil rich states like Venezuela, Russia and Iran recognize that with global oil prices decreasing, now is the time to strike before they are impoverished. And the international economic turmoil will cause Western nations to recoil from international confrontations and so embolden rogue states to attack their interests.

 Mark Steyn, fun to read and right as always, comments in part:

McCain vs. Obama is not the choice many of us would have liked in an ideal world. But then it’s not an "ideal world," and the belief that it can be made so is one of the things that separates those who think Obama will "heal the planet" and those of us who support McCainfaute de mieux. I agree with Thomas Sowell that an Obama-Pelosi supermajority will mark what he calls "a point of no return."

It would not be, as some naysayers scoff, "Jimmy Carter’s second term," but something far more transformative. The new president would front the fourth great wave of liberal annexation – the first being FDR’s New Deal, the second LBJ’s Great Society, and the third the incremental but remorseless cultural advance when Reagan conservatives began winning victories at the ballot box and liberals turned their attention to the other levers of the society, from grade school up. The terrorist educator William Ayers, Obama’s patron in Chicago, is an exemplar of that most-recent model: 40 years ago, he was in favor of blowing up public buildings; then he figured out it was easier to get inside and undermine them from within.

All three liberal waves have transformed American expectations of the state. The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it. Why can’t the government sort out my health care? Why can’t they pick up my mortgage?

In his first inaugural address, Calvin Coolidge said: "I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people." That’s true in a more profound sense than he could have foreseen. In Europe, lavish social-democratic government has transformed citizens into eternal wards of the Nanny State: the bureaucracy’s assumption of every adult responsibility has severed Continentals from the most basic survival impulse, to the point where unaffordable entitlements on shriveled birth rates have put a question mark over some of the oldest nation states on Earth. A vote for an Obama-Pelosi-Barney Frank-ACORN supermajority is a vote for a Europeanized domestic policy that is, as the eco-types like to say, "unsustainable."

More to the point, the only reason why Belgium has gotten away this long with being Belgium and Sweden Sweden and Germany Germany is because America’s America. The soft comfortable cocoon in which Western Europe has dozed this past half-century is girded by cold hard American power. What happens when the last serious Western nation votes for the same soothing beguiling siren song as its enervated allies?

"People of the world," Sen. Obama declared sonorously at his self-worship service in Germany, "look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one."

No, sorry. History proved no such thing. In the Cold War, the world did not stand as one. One half of Europe was a prison, and in the other half far too many people – the Barack Obamas of the day – were happy to go along with that division in perpetuity.

And the wall came down not because "the world stood as one," but because a few courageous people stood against the conventional wisdom of the day. Had Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan been like Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterrand and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter, the Soviet empire (notwithstanding its own incompetence) would have survived, and the wall would still be standing. Sen. Obama’s feeble passivity will get you a big round of applause precisely because it’s the easy option: Do nothing but hold hands and sing the easy-listening anthems of one-worldism, and the planet will heal.

To govern is to choose. And sometimes the choices are tough ones. When has Barack Obama chosen to take a stand? When he got along to get along with the Chicago machine? When he sat for 20 years in the pews of an ugly neo-segregationist race-baiting grievance-monger? When he voted to deny the surviving "fetuses" of botched abortions medical treatment? When in his short time in national politics he racked up the most liberal – i.e., the most doctrinaire, the most orthodox, the most reflex – voting record in the Senate? Or when, on those many occasions the questions got complex and required a choice, he dodged it and voted merely "present"?

The world rarely stands as one. You can, as Reagan and Thatcher did, stand up. Or, like Obama voting "present," you can stand down.

Nobody denies that, in promoting himself from "community organizer" to the world’s president-designate in nothing flat, he has shown an amazing and impressively ruthless single-mindedness. But the path of personal glory has been, in terms of policy and philosophy, the path of least resistance.

Peggy Noonan thinks a President Obama will be like the dog who chases the car and finally catches it: Now what? I think Obama will be content to be King Barack the Benign, Spreader of Wealth and Healer of Planets. His rise is, in many ways, testament to the persistence of the monarchical urge even in a two-century old republic. So the "Now what?" questions will be answered by others, beginning with the liberal supermajority in Congress. And as he has done all his life he will take the path of least resistance. An Obama administration will pitch America toward EU domestic policy and U.N. foreign policy.

Thomas Sowell is right: It would be a "point of no return," the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America. For a vigilant republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens, it would be a Declaration of Dependence.