My Beauty Best Teacher

There is no debate with the left- there is submission or opposition which must be submitted. This fact is not just in evidence when our leftist President speaks- Obama in his infamous health care speech said that there is no debate and that he will not tolerate any discussion on the issues. But it isn't just the President- I think this is an inherent feature of a leftist liberal Democrat- that there is no debate with them, and this reminded me of a recent run in I had with another teacher.

As you are aware, I'm a teacher at a secondary school near Detroit. In my social studies department, which is quite large, we have many teachers, most of them liberals and one or two conservative. Last week I was talking to another teacher, who considers himself to be the guru of history and who's style of teaching is to let students bathe in his brilliance, and we were talking about methods of teaching history.

So I said to this liberal teacher- "So what method of history do you focus on when you teach? Do you subscribe to the regressive model, where the past was a romantic perfect world and we have fallen? Or do you subscribe to the progressive model, where in the past man was less evolved and intelligent but as we progress in the future man gets better? Or are you perhaps a fan of the Great Man Theory, where history is shaped by great individuals?"

To be perfectly honest, I already knew what sort of method Mr. Liberal History Teacher taught in his classroom- he believed that history was a conflict, and out of these conflicts man moves forward. Typically in his class he would present a conflict, talk about the response to the conflict, and then teach about how the tension between the two was resolved. The key conflicts that he focused on was the conflict between classes. He also likes to focus in his classes on how the minority groups dominate or exploit the working class and the importance of revolution. In a nutshell, he is a Marxist. I already knew this, but he answer as to what sort of method he taught in surprised me.

"There are no different methods of teaching history," the liberal teacher said, "There is no politics in history- the only possible way that history can be taught is as the progress of the workers against capitalism. You can not teach about wars. Do not teach about religion. You are not to teach about free market economics. There can be no debate on this if you are to teach history."

This surprised me, so I said "That sounds to me like a method of teaching history, one that is kind of political in nature."

"It is not political in any way- it is the way that history is to be taught. There is to be no debate on this, and no discussion on this. The only way that history can really be taught is this way- if you do teach about wars, religion, economics, freedom, liberty, property rights, or other concepts like that, you are politicizing the issue. Don't make history a political game- teach it like I do," he said- which meant teach it like a Marxist.

It was the way he said this that bothered me. I switched the subject and moved past it, but it took him a while to let go of his belief that there was only one way to teach history, the Marxist way, and that any debate or discussion about methods was wrong and a game that I was playing to score political points. Then when I watched Obama's speech on healthcare and heard him accuse Republicans of playing games and say that there was to be no debate on the issue, and it hit me- for liberals there can be no discussion or debate on issues, only submission to them.

Liberals want you to submit to their authority. Sadly, liberal teachers believe this is their job- to stop debate and discussion and use their classrooms to make you submit to their authority and buy their version of events in the world. In my classroom, there is intelligent discussion, lively debate, questions posed and asked, and different views and methods presented. It is a lively room, where a conservative teacher teaches students how to think, read, write, and do well in life and on tests. In his classroom, there is one view presented, and students are driven to subscribe to that view by a liberal teacher who teaches students to submit and grovel before his brilliance.

This is what is happening in schools today, in little ways and big ways, and although it might scare you, it is important for you to hear stories like this from a teacher like me, who battles every day in the trenches to advance the principles of liberty and freedom.

Okay, so over at Hot Air they posted a link to an article that disputs the idea that Obama is a Marxist. I'm willing to agree with that- he isn't a commited socialist, in spite of his membership in the New Party. But, there are other similar ideologies out there, and I think that one that best describes Obama is fascist.

I read the description of fascism on wikipedia. You can quibble with wikipedia, but the overall description of fascism is curiously close to Obama policies. I loosely quote "Fascism is primarily concerned with perceived problems associated with cultural, economic, political, and social decline or decadence, and seeks to solve such problems by achieving a historic national rebirth, many times by promoting cultish ideas of unity and purity."

Huh. Is there anyone out there talking about how America has fallen? How after 8 years of decadence and decline, America needs change? Historic change? A rebirth in many ways? And the best way to do it is through unity, togetherness, bipartisanship- in fact, the way to do it is through the election of one who is above politics, above race, above us. Sound like Obama to you?

Still quoting from wikipedia- Other elements of fascism include national socialism, national syndicalism, or economic nationalism (check), class collaboration, economic planning, mixed economy, and third position (check), dictatorship, holism, major social interventionism, and statism (check again), and militarism (Obama is awfully warlike towards everything but Iraq).

Wow. Apparently fascism also promotes political violence against opponents (check), welfare (check), is fiercly anti-religion (check), and promotes cults of personality (check). This started as just a crackpot theory of mine, but even I am surprised at how closely it fits. Now, I'd start getting scared if Obama was pushing a policy of having our government rise up a psudo-military arm of community organizers loyal to him- wait, he is pushing that? At least he is pro-gun ownership- wait, that's wrong too? Well, at least he doesn't have resentment due to a mixed parentage- he's 100% black, right, just like Hitler was 100% non-Jew- opps, wrong again... darn, are we in for some trouble or what?

UPDATE: I'm not that far off base with this line of thought- others agree with me. Read this story about how a Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

Have you all seen this billboard that was put up by a tea party group in Iowa? The billboard was making two points- first, that radical leaders prey on the fearful and naive, and the second, that national socialism (German fascism), Marxist socialism (Leninism), and liberal socialism (liberal fascism) are all similar. Those are very bold points to make, and the billboard was accompanied by images that were bold- images that compared Obama to Hitler and Marx.

Of course, controversy erupted, and the billboard was removed. The Democrats were upset that Obama was compared to Hitler, because Hitler killed all the Jews. Democrats were not upset that Obama was compared to Marx, or that Obama was compared to Hitler in other ways- nope, it was just the Jewish issue that bothered Democrats. Even that is interesting- just how friendly is Obama to Jews and if he were given total power (ie, not blocked by conservatives and Republicans) what might he do to the Jews? I'm not saying Obama is Hitler, I'm just saying this- the poster makes good points, and it is a shame that it was pulled down, because it is provoking and the not that far from the truth.

Let's examine the main point- is Obama and his vision of government a version of socialism or fascism?

In Fascism Healthcare, I wrote:

Under fascism, the government does not overtly take over an industry ("seizing the means of production," in Marxist terms). Rather it leaves ostensibly private institutions in place, at least for the time being, and then subjects those "private" institutions to top-down regulation that turns them into agents of state power. No meaningful competition will be permitted. The federal government runs the system, but will do so behind a facade of private enterprise.

In The Third Way: Obama and Fascism I wrote:

There is a blog out there called "Third Way." It is staffed by Obama supporters and three of its former chairs now serve in the senior ranks of the Obama administration. This is the sort of blog that Obama reads and the sort of blog that Obama takes his marching orders from. This blog is a fascist blog that preaches a fascist ideology.

In State Capitalism, Crony Capitalism, Corrupt Capitalism, Syndicalism, Corporatism... Obamaism I wrote:

...the Obama administration is putting place a version of fascism that you can nicely called Crony Capitalism or State Capitalism, whereby the government subverts the free market for the good of the 'state' and makes alliances with Big Business to crush smaller companies through regulation and taxation.

In Wikipedia Description of Fascist Sounds Like Someone I Know I wrote:

...the overall description of fascism is curiously close to Obama policies. I loosely quote "Fascism is primarily concerned with perceived problems associated with cultural, economic, political, and social decline or decadence, and seeks to solve such problems by achieving a historic national rebirth, many times by promoting cultish ideas of unity and purity." Other elements of fascism include national socialism, national syndicalism, or economic nationalism (check), class collaboration, economic planning, mixed economy, and third position (check), dictatorship, holism, major social interventionism, and statism (check again), and militarism (Obama is awfully warlike towards everything but Iraq). Apparently fascism also promotes political violence against opponents (check), welfare (check), is fiercely anti-religion (check), and promotes cults of personality (check).

So, is the billboard 100% wrong, or are there are a lot of similarities between Obama, Hitler, and Marx? I think the evidence is clear on this.

There have been a couple situations in my school over the last month about having pictures of various politicians in school. What prompted this was the sudden appearance of several large Obama pictures in teachers classrooms, days after the election. Students and parents were concerned about having their children gaze on images of our great leader every day, to which those teachers replied that there were pictures of Bush in other teachers classrooms.

The pictures of Obama are meant to be gazed at in worship. The picture of Bush usually serves as a focal point for 2 minutes of hate. In this spirit, I direct you to Bruce Walker's piece over at the American Thinker. It is really good. Here is it in a somewhat edited form:

It has been sixty years since George Orwell wrote his chilling dystopian classic, 1984.

(It is possible for) Americans like you and I, (to) become so decoupled from reality and morality that they could be led to surrender everything, even their lives, intoxicated only with the venom of modern Leftism, (and become) Orwell's Children.

We are drifting into the sort of horrific future he described. Too many of us for comfort or solace have become just like the denizens of Jonestown: Orwell's children -- a new generation of creature enraged into constant militancy against eternal enemies, oblivious to the notion of a Blessed Creator, melded into the consciousness of the party hive, divorced from history, hypnotized by images, inoculated against reason, stripped of family, and existing only to serve the cause.

Orwell did not write his book in a vacuum. 1984 describes the Soviet Union (the book describes Stalinist Russia so well so that subjects of that evil empire wondered when Orwell had lived there, though he had just described what he saw from the outside.) 1984 also describes Nazism and every other odious totalitarianism, which its secret police and propaganda machine and atomized subjects. But Orwell was very much also writing about the democratic western nations. His book was a warning of what could happen here. Oceania, the only totalitarian superstate actually descried in 1984, was largely America and the British Empire.

There were specific elements necessary for nations with a heritage of freedom to slide into the most absolute and abject slavery. These elements existed in Nazi Germany, they existed in Soviet Russia, and they exist in our free democracies today. What are the characteristics of the Orwellian state?

Start with God. He must go. The great Russian novelists knew this: "Without God, everything is permitted." In Oceania, God simply does not exist. The Nazis bragged that they would raise a generation "...without ever having heard of the Sermon on the Mount or the Golden Rule, to say nothing of the Ten Commandments." The Soviet persecuted anyone who followed the God of Jews and Christians. God is hounded in our world today. A generation of Orwell's Children are growing up without thinking about God at all or thinking that God is a silly idea cherished by sillier old fogies.

Truth must go too. Nazis embraced the "Big Lie." Soviets denied that honesty, per se, mattered. In Orwell's Oceania, the Inner Party members learn to even lie to themselves and to hold utterly contradictory beliefs at the same time. Truth and honesty have little meaning to Orwell's Children in our world. All truth is relative, all honesty a sham.

Language must be brought to heel. The Nazis did this by inventing meaningless words like "Aryan science." Marxism foisted upon us words like "capitalism," which means nothing at all but which has so infected our minds that we reflexively use this silly nonsense word instead of freedom. Politically correct language is rampant. We come to view words like "discriminate" as inherently evil, and other words like "viable fetal mass" have replaced the reality of murdered babies.

Image and symbols replace words. Hitler, whose disciples seldom recalled what Hitler said, always recalled the raw imagery of their leader. Stalin's portrait was as inescapable in the Soviet Union as the portrait of Big Brother in Oceania. We live in a word of symbols and images. Conservatives succeed in books and talk radio, media that deal in words. Orwell's Children live in the realm of symbols and images.

The books of the Nazis and Soviets were unreadable tomes like Mein Kampf, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (the two Nazi "masterpieces") or vast empty volumes of Marxist-Leninism. Is it an accident that the giant who most resisted this evil, Solzhenitsyn, was a devout Christian who mastered the written word better than any stooge of Hitler or the Politburo ever could?

Immutable oppressors are the final nasty element in dystopia. Hitler blamed Jews for everything. Stalin blamed kulaks and his enemies in the party for everything. Subjects of Orwell's Oceania saw Emmanuel Goldstein as the eternal, immutable enemy of the party. Today there is a drearily predictable list of oppressors. Christians, men, white people, the "rich" (whatever that is supposed to mean), America, and Israel are oppressors and nothing can ever change that.

Orwell even told us, by name, the professionals who would lead us into the nightmare of 1984: "sociologists," "teachers," "bureaucrats," "journalists," "professional politicians," "scientists," "trade union organizers," "publicity experts," and "technicians." (The term "community organizer" was unknown to him.) Those who enslave were those who taught students, who created the news, who sat in the halls of government power, and who defined official "truth" (at least truth de jour.)

Orwell's Children live among us now, not in tiny numbers in weird Marxist cults like Jim Jones' People Temple, but as leaders of Congress, as the establishment of academia, as the producers of news and entertainment, as the administrators of public schools, as the "experts" in a thousand myriad and odd fields of putative "expertise." They infatuate our bored children with the only reality and the only diversion that many can find. They wait for the rest of us to grow older and to die.

Will these children inherit the earth? History, not theology, has shown a single defense against the spreading contagion of Orwell's Children. Solzhenitsyn found God in the godless Gulag. Michael Power in early 1939 wrote: "In the Christianity of the German people, the National Socialist has found the one enemy it could not vanquish" - and Christians in Germany, alone, chose to voluntarily seek death before selling their souls to Nazism.

The Jewish refusniks proved indigestible to the brutal Soviet police state. When all else failed the Jewish people under the Nazis, devout Jews like my wife's mother clung to the Blessed Creator and survived the Holocaust. God can touch us all. God can protect us all from evil (not from harm - we all suffer and we all die - but from the much greater danger of the sort of evil Orwell described.)

Education, science, technological gadgetry, good medical care - all of this can not stop us from sliding into a massive Jonestown, a realized Oceania, a place marked by Dante's grim caution "Abandon hope, all you who enter here." We are all anchored in belief, but it is what we believe that matters. We can believe in the lies of Big Brother, which change each day with the needs of the party or we can believe in the truth of a living God. We can become the children of Orwell or the special creatures of God. Everything -- our nation, our world, our families, our communities -- flows from that choice.

I'm so glad I read 1984 recently- I actually hadn't read it until a couple years ago- in high school, the advanced students didn't read Animal Farm and 1984, and instead read highly intelligent liberal drivel. But my brother and I often talk about these books nowdays, as America sadly descends into the fascism and socialism that was described in them.

UPDATE: One of my brother's disagree's with me- he says it won't be 1984 that we see, but rather a Brave New World- happy, fluffy, smiley-faced fascism. This actually fits with an earlier post of mine called "Happy-Nicing Ourselves into Dictatorship."- Maybe there is something here- doped up kids, random sex, mindless entertainment, no morality or religion. Just gnostic overlords ruling over us stupid masses- a heartless, ghastly prison, with walls painted up with bright murals of MLK and Mother Earth singing kumbya. Kind of like the school I teach at right now!

The Guardian comments on the rising pragmatism of the Communist West Bengal goverment in India,a shift that has relevance for the 'peoples' regime of Ethiopia and other communist/socialist movements elsewhere in the continent:
"...Calcutta, the first capital of the British Raj, is a bastion of Indian communism. The left has run this Indian state for almost three decades, a period which has seen West Bengal become a byword for labour unrest. But in recent years, like its ideological cousin in China, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), has been busy rebranding itself - bearhugging foreign investors and Indian businessmen...West Bengal's increasingly warm embrace of foreign capital has paid off. The state has just sold 2,000 hectares (5,000 acres) of agricultural land to an Indonesian group in a $10bn deal for a software park and industrial zone building motorbikes, across the river from Calcutta. The state says investors from Singapore are keen to fund and build a new airport. Last year West Bengal signed a $235m contract with P&O to build India's first private port..."

Democrats and liberals have uniformly come out against Paul Ryan's budget proposals and have responded by playing the Marxist class-warfare card and demanding higher taxes on the rich. Whenever questioned about what to do with the current budget and debt, they reply 'increase taxes on the rich'. Over at blogs like Balloon Juice, a typical liberal blog that I occasionally troll on to, they cry out 'raise taxes on the rich' and anyone who says otherwise is 'brainwashed by Glen Beck'. It's the sort of nonsense that demands a serious look and some mathematics, and thankfully, someone who is good at math did that.

In Why we can't tax ourselves out of the deficit problem, Steve McCann crunches some numbers:

The tax year of 2008 was the last to date that the IRS has done this kind of analysis. In 2008 the highest marginal tax rate of 35% applied to all AGI above $357,700.00. In that year the total amount of AGI subject to the highest rate was $622.8 Billion. The government collected in taxes $218.0 Billion (35%).

In 2011 the annual budget deficit will be nearly $1,665.0 Billion and in 2012: $1,100.0 Billion. If the Liberal Democrats in league with the Socialists, the Unions and the Communists, succeed in raising the highest marginal rate, how much more would Washington D.C. receive, assuming no change in behavior and a general eagerness to pay more?

If the highest rate of 35% were raised by a factor of 20% to 42%, then the additional tax revenue would be $43.5 Billion, not much of a dent in $1,665.0 Billion. So, let's raise the rate by a factor of 50% to 52.5%; the additional revenue would be $108.9 Billion. Still nowhere near enough, so let's just tax it at a rate of 100%, bringing in an additional $404.8 Billion. Unfortunately the country is still $1,260.0 Billion in the hole for the year.

Obviously by confiscating at 100% of all the income of the so-called rich above a predetermined level, there would never again be an incentive to earn above the highest tax rate threshold.

So, in summary, if the federal government takes all of the wealth of the evil rich people in our nation who have innovated or invested or taken risks or worked hard for their wealth, then the federal government will only be stealing an average of 1 trillion dollars a year from my kids and grandkids (ie, debt).

We can not tax ourselves to prosperity. We need to cut, and not just cut a little bit, but cut a lot. Liberals and Democrats refuse to do that, and so next election, they and any Republicans who agree with them, must go.

Originally I was going to put together a post about how the Occupy Wall Street movement has been endorsed by the American Nazi Party. It was news-worthy- the ANP said in a statement that

The fact that its these “lefties” as you call them, who are picking up the ball and running with it – only shows how much more in tune THEY are with the fed up masses of White Workers, than the fossilized, reactionary “right-wing”. WHO holds the WEALTH and POWER in this country – the JUDEO-CAPITALISTS. WHO is therefore the #1 ENEMY who makes all this filth happen – the JUDEO-CAPITALISTS. WHO therefore do WN need to FIGHT? My heart is right there with these people, perhaps someday the “movement” will SHOW the same COURAGE and DEDICATION that these people OUT THERE FIGHTING are SHOWING!

Yeah, so there is that out there, the fact that the fascists in the Nazi party clearly recognize that this movement fits into their goals and agenda. But really this isn't so much what I want to post about today, because when I was doing research for this post, I came across something more stunning, something that I had written about before after Obama's election as President and something that I think is relevant today.

In December 2008, I linked over to a piece at the American Thinker from Bruce Walker called Orwell's Children, and I think we should all take a minute to re-read it today, because it describes this Occupy Wall Street movement very well. Picture the people at these protests and rallies as you read the following (edited for brevity)...

It has been sixty years since George Orwell wrote his chilling dystopian classic, 1984....

...We are drifting into the sort of horrific future he described. Too many of us for comfort or solace have become just like the denizens of Jonestown: Orwell's children -- a new generation of creature enraged into constant militancy against eternal enemies, oblivious to the notion of a Blessed Creator, melded into the consciousness of the party hive, divorced from history, hypnotized by images, inoculated against reason, stripped of family, and existing only to serve the cause...

...There were specific elements necessary for nations with a heritage of freedom to slide into the most absolute and abject slavery. These elements existed in Nazi Germany, they existed in Soviet Russia, and they exist in our free democracies today. What are the characteristics of the Orwellian state?

Start with God. He must go.... A generation of Orwell's Children are growing up without thinking about God at all or thinking that God is a silly idea cherished by sillier old fogies.

Truth must go too. Nazis embraced the "Big Lie." Soviets denied that honesty, per se, mattered. In Orwell's Oceania, the Inner Party members learn to even lie to themselves and to hold utterly contradictory beliefs at the same time. Truth and honesty have little meaning to Orwell's Children in our world. All truth is relative, all honesty a sham.
Language must be brought to heel... Politically correct language is rampant.

Image and symbols replace words... We live in a word of symbols and images. Conservatives succeed in books and talk radio, media that deal in words- but Orwell's Children live in the realm of symbols and images...

..Immutable oppressors are the final nasty element in dystopia. Hitler blamed Jews for everything. Stalin blamed kulaks and his enemies in the party for everything. Subjects of Orwell's Oceania saw Emmanuel Goldstein as the eternal, immutable enemy of the party. Today there is a drearily predictable list of oppressors. Christians, men, white people, the "rich" (whatever that is supposed to mean), America, and Israel are oppressors and nothing can ever change that.

Orwell even told us, by name, the professionals who would lead us into the nightmare of 1984: "sociologists," "teachers," "bureaucrats," "journalists," "professional politicians," "scientists," "trade union organizers," "publicity experts," and "technicians." (The term "community organizer" was unknown to him.) Those who enslave were those who taught students, who created the news, who sat in the halls of government power, and who defined official "truth" (at least truth de jour.)

Orwell's Children live among us now, not in tiny numbers in weird Marxist cults like Jim Jones' People Temple, but as leaders of Congress, as the establishment of academia, as the producers of news and entertainment, as the administrators of public schools, as the "experts" in a thousand myriad and odd fields of putative "expertise." They infatuate our bored children with the only reality and the only diversion that many can find. They wait for the rest of us to grow older and to die....

Education, science, technological gadgetry, good medical care - all of this can not stop us from sliding into a massive Jonestown, a realized Oceania, a place marked by Dante's grim caution "Abandon hope, all you who enter here." We are all anchored in belief, but it is what we believe that matters. We can believe in the lies of Big Brother, which change each day with the needs of the party or we can believe in the truth of a living God. We can become the children of Orwell or the special creatures of God. Everything -- our nation, our world, our families, our communities -- flows from that choice.

Go back and look at the Occupy Wall Street movement with this lens- listen to the interviews from these people, look at the signs they hold up, and have conversations with them. They are inarticulate slogan-shouting, God-hating, lying children who endlessly talk about 'oppressors' that need to be overthrown by empowering an all powerful government to take property from those who they do not like, attack and kill those who they hate (like Jews), and control all of our choices through regulations and taxes. The people who go to these Occupy Wall Street rallies and support them and talk favorably of them are Orwell's Children, and are the enemies of the protection of life, liberty, and property, and deserve nothing but the full and complete opposition of all true patriots.

The Economist writes:

Ethiopia likes to do things differently. In September it started celebrating the new millennium, more than seven years after everybody else. The country has been out of step in this respect since 1582: while the rest of the Christian world changed to the revised Gregorian calendar, Ethiopia stuck to the Julian. It also still keeps its own time, measured in 12-hour cycles rather than 24-hour ones.

Referring to its comatose private sector:

The reasons for this economic crawl are not hard to find. Beyond the government-directed state, funded substantially by foreign aid, there is—almost uniquely in Africa—virtually no private-sector business at all. The IMF estimates that in 2005-06 the share of private investment in the country was just 11%, nearly unchanged since Mr Zenawi took over in the early 1990s. That is partly a reflection of the fact that, despite some privatisation since the centralised Marxist days of the Derg, large areas of the economy remain government monopolies, closed off to private business.

And its debilitating state-run syndrome

This is where Ethiopia misses out badly. Take telecoms. While the rest of Africa has been virtually transformed in just a few years by a revolution in mobile telephony, Ethiopia stumbles along with its inept and useless government-run services. Everywhere else, a plethora of South African, home-grown and European providers has leapt into the market to provide Africans with an extraordinary array of cheaper and more efficient services, now used even by the poorest of farmers, for instance, to check spot prices for agricultural goods in markets miles away. And the mobile-phone revolution has created thousands of new livelihoods; at times it seems as if every boy on a street corner is hawking a top-up card. Not in Ethiopia.
It is the same story in financial services, where, despite the growth of some smaller private banks, no foreign banks are allowed. Micro-finance schemes have expanded exponentially, but it remains almost impossible to find start-up loans for small or medium businesses.

According to Obama himself, we are only days away from fundamentally transforming our country. Watch him say it by clicking on this link.

Okay, so if Obama thinks electing him will fundamentally transform America, let's see what that means. First, electing him is a personal event- either he personally as dictator will transform America, or he personally will be at the center of policies that transform our country. Either way, the way that he talks again reminds me of fascism, as I wrote about here.

Next, America is a free-market democracy based on a Constitution of laws. Electing him will change that? To what? A socialist dictatorship based on personal political power? Like Kenya? And people want that? People cheer about that? Scary.

At "He's Not my President", this blogger thinks that what Obama is saying is that as President, he will abandon the US Constitution and create a new Living Constitution. That's one take, and consistent with Obama's statements on the Constitution.

Over at Sword at the Ready, the blogger reaches the conclusion that Obama is going to fundamentally transform American into "a Marxist state tyranny where Whites, Jews and Christians will be purged and misery is applied equally among the “little people” while the Elites running a politburo are enriched off of our substance." I hope that's not the case!

The conclusion that the blogger Combs reaches is a good one- "if you value the Constitution, if you value the founding (fundamental) principles of this country, if you value liberty — hold your nose and go vote for McCain."

Under fascism, the government does not overtly take over an industry ("seizing the means of production," in Marxist terms). Rather it leaves ostensibly private institutions in place, at least for the time being, and then subjects those "private" institutions to top-down regulation that turns them into agents of state power. No meaningful competition will be permitted. The federal government runs the system, but will do so behind a facade of private enterprise.

This is exactly what the Democrats plan is for health care.