Thou Hast Eyes, But See Not.

Political Cartoons by Lisa Benson

It's been an interesting couple of weeks, speaking and debating with some of my liberal friends. I have come to an epiphany however, or more precisely, the very same epiphany that I've come to several times over the last five years. America's view of the current Presidential Administration is totally disconnected from reality, and 50.61% of those who vote, prefer it that way.

It's maddening as all heck to arrive in the arena of ideas, and discover that not only will the other side of our national discussion refuse to accept basic facts as being part of reality, they are not in any way interested in seeing reality. So, when our President states during the State of the Union Address that he has increased our deficit at the slowest rate of any President in our history, while our jaws dropped in speechless disbelief at the brazen absurdity of the statement, 50.61% of American voters have accepted this lunacy as fact.

Here's a video from way back in 2009, that ancient date that served as Barack Obama's first year as our President. It should serve as an ample device to illustrate the sheer idiocy of this statement:

While having a similar discussion on one of my favorite topics, Catastrophic Global Warming, I brought up the Henrik Svensmark experiment at the Hardin Super Collider and explained how that piece of actual science discredited the notion that our current climate patterns were caused by human activity, my liberal friend looked at me and said, "I choose not to accept that,"

That statement right there, should be on the gate of every entrance into the hall of fame of childish positions. Just like the little brat who's fingers find the ears and pretend that a valid point of view which opposes the childish desire can never be uttered if never heard, "I choose not to accept that," cuts immediately to the heart of the matter. When presented with actual provable facts that challenge their belief system, be it Catastrophic Global Warming, or Barack Obama's frugality, Liberals would simply like to pretend that reality does not exist and their world view is true after all.

The problem with that of course is two fold. First, even if you accept every word uttered by an obviously treasonous biased media machine, that operates more as a propaganda arm of the Democrat Party than as an objective group of truth tellers who might find use in holding our political leaders accountable, it is difficult to escape the fact that we still have these three pound organs sitting atop our shoulders which given normal usage, are capable of performing the task of critical thought. Just like any part of the human body, discard its usage at your own peril. Organs that are not used have a tendency towards atrophy. As human beings, animals capable of abstract thought, discerning for ourselves fact from fiction, right from wrong, objective news reporting from propaganda, the excuse of a biased media should not substituted for actually paying attention.

Secondly, ignoring reality has its very own danger, for instance the little reported fact that we now owe about $16.5 Trillion and are no longer considered the safest debt to hold. This means that our great great grandchildren will likely be dealing with our irresponsible lifestyle of expecting a bag full of free goodies to tend to our every need and whim. We can demagogue the Chinese all we wish and label them as predatory lenders, (sounds familiar I know,) but the fact of the matter is that China merely did what we asked of them in the first place. Ignoring reality hides the fact that elections have consequences, and we've paid a packet for refusing to accept that little fact.

Some will say that we get the government that we deserve, and I agree with that sentiment. Unfortunately the story does not stop there. Our great great grandchildren do not deserve the future we've seen fit to inflict upon them. Consequences do not necessarily stop with us, that packet we've paid for disconnecting our current President from reality, accountability, or even the slightest hint of responsible behavior pales in comparison to the price which will be exacted from future generations.

In order to illustrate the point further, here are some of the more egregious gems uttered by President Obama during his speech this past Tuesday.

During the last five years, our businesses have created over 6 Million new jobs.
The Affordable Care Act is helping to slow the growth of health care costs.

We've cut the deficit by $2.5 Trillion, mostly through cuts in spending.

As each of these statements caused a spray of coffee to be shot through my nose and necessitated a thorough cleaning of a 48 inch television, which mostly is used for watching Hockey games, I could not help but notice that not a single one of those statements was challenged in the slightest sense of the word by a single member of the supposedly objective media.

Marco Rubio took a sip of water, and his political career was labeled as being over by a main stream press that seems intent upon reaching a state I've read as being known as, "peak moron," (Allahpundit at Hotair.)

Give this a think, whether you agree with me or not that the substance of Rubio's speech was top notch, MSNBC replayed the sip of water well over 200 times, and CNN finished in second place with just under 200 times. Not one moment's worth of analysis was spent discussing the content of either speech.

The title of the article quotes Shakespeare's Othello, but another literary work also comes to mind. While Shakespeare may have nailed the danger of willful blindness, it was Jonathan Swift who predicted another angle in his classic, Gulliver's Travels. The Lilliputians chose their political leaders by judging circus acts, which explains how we got landed with a President Obama as well as any other phenomenon. He you see, is able to tell his whoppers without needing a drink of water, at least not while reporters were paying attention, which admittedly, is not all that common anyhow.

Cross Posted from Musings of a Mad Conservative.

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Comment by David Farrar on February 18, 2013 at 11:08pm: Of course the present day generation has already shortened: "I choose not to accept that," to, "Whatever."

ex animo

davidfarrar

Comment by Dwight M. Schmitz on February 18, 2013 at 3:32pm: We believe what we WANT to believe, especially if the truth isn't what we want to hear.

We deliberately insist on being blind to history. It always comes back to bite us.

Comment by John Mainhart on February 16, 2013 at 4:29pm: Good post Rita.

God love you

Comment by Rita Miller on February 16, 2013 at 1:16pm: In ancient Israel, the Chosen People had made a covenant to worship Jehovah, and Him alone. But they felt it was easier and better to worship the gods of the pagans around them. One of the main gods eventually worshipped by the Israelites was Moloch (or King), a god of fertility and power. His idol was a giant, hollow, seated figure, made of iron overlaid with gold. A furnace in the base heated the idol until it glowed red-hot. The priests would make sacrifices to it, in the presence of their parents, by laying infants on its outstretched arms, where they were instantly roasted. This "offering" of their children to their god was intended to ensure abundant crops, an orderly society and peace in the land.

Several ancient mass graves have been found in the Middle East containing the bodies of children and young women who had been sacrificed to the various gods over the centuries.

How different are we now? Our leaders and people worship at the feet of Moloch as surely as those ancient people did. We have sacrificed 55 million of our children, still within their mothers, in a quest for "personal choice" and prosperity. We have sacrificed our principles and covenants to one another and to God on the altar of Ba'al (the generic term for all these idols). Our gods are just as shiny as the ancient idols, and we bow to them just as reverently. Our whole society is based on excess consumption of worldly goods, self-worship and hedonism. It's only proper, then, that we have as our President a man who is eager to destroy our country and reform it in the image of his gods. He wouldn't be in this position if the people weren't already wicked. There was a clear choice last November between good and evil, between an honest man and a liar, and between God and Satan. And the people chose the leader they wanted. We are in the last days.

Comment by John Wiseman on February 16, 2013 at 11:11am: Dear Comrade Bankhead,

While you are undoubtedly my very favorite liberal troll, please don't try to impress me with your graphs so slickly published by the central committee of the Unicorn Capitol City. That graph is only half true, and what's more, you know it, or at least should. That graph includes new supposed positions, but does not show the number of jobs lost in those same periods. That's precisely how we get to the glowing jobs created number, while at the same time achieving historic lows for things like labor force participation rate, an unemployment number in terms of real unemployment, (U-6,) that remains at the very same 15% as it was in June of 2009.

Now, also please realize that the posted graph is itself a farce, since it reflects the politically driven agenda of those who read the statistics provided not from hard data, like payroll information reported to the BLS or IRS, but upon answers to the two surveys taken by our census bureau on a monthly basis. That's how we get anomalies such as the one in September of 2012 where American businesses supposedly added 70,000 jobs and American companies hired 600,000 people to fill those jobs.

So, don't paw at me with your idiotic meaningless and obviously flawed statistical analysis. P.S. I know a little more than most about statistics and analysis.

Comment by Debrajoe Smith-Beatty on February 16, 2013 at 10:47am: Obama's Secret Court for Killing

by Andrew P. Napolitano

Recently by Andrew P. Napolitano: Obama Gives Himself Permission To Kill

President Obama willingly admits he dispatched CIA agents to kill an American and his teenage son and the son's American friend while they were in a desert in Yemen in 2011. He says he did so because the adult had encouraged folks to wage war on the United States and the children were just "collateral damage." He says further that he'll do this again when he is convinced that killing Americans will keep America safe. He says he knows the adult encouraged evil, and his encouragement caused the deaths of innocents. The adult was never charged with a crime or indicted by a grand jury; he was just targeted for death by the president himself and executed by a CIA drone.

International law and the law of war, to both of which the U.S. is bound by treaty, as well as federal law and the Judeo-Christian values that underlie the Declaration of Independence (which guarantees the right to live) and the Constitution (which permits governmental interference with that right only after a congressional declaration of war or individual due process) all provide that the certainty of the identity of a human target, the sincerity of the wish for his death, the perception of his guilt and imminent danger are insufficient to justify the government's use of lethal force against him. The president may only lawfully kill after due process, in self-defense or under a declaration of war.

The reasons for the constitutional requirement of a congressional declaration of war are to provide a check on the president's lust for war by forcing him to obtain formal congressional approval, to isolate and identify the object of war so the president cannot kill whomever he pleases, to confine the warfare to the places where the object's military forces are located so the president cannot invade wherever he wishes, and to assure termination of the hostilities when the object of the war surrenders so the president cannot wage war without end.

But when war is waged, only belligerents may be targeted, and advocating violence against the U.S. is not an act of wartime violence and does not make one a belligerent. Were this not so, then nothing would lawfully prevent the U.S. from killing Americans who spoke out in favor of al-Qaida, and then killing Americans who spoke out against war and killing, and then killing Americans whose words became an obstacle to killing.

That's the reason the enabling federal legislation enacted in support of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force specifically exempts expressive conduct from the ambit of prohibited criminal or warlike behavior that can provide the basis for any government prosecution or military belligerence. So, the feds can shoot at a guy with a bomb in his hands when he is about to explode it, but not at a guy with a megaphone in his hands when he is about to speak through it.

Thus, if New Mexico-born Anwar al-Awlaki had been shooting at American troops at the time the government took aim at him, naturally, the troops can shoot back. But when he merely encourages others to shoot, his behavior is protected by the natural law, the First Amendment and numerous federal statutes. As well, he was 10,000 miles from the U.S., never known to have engaged in violent acts, and having a private conversation at a roadside cafe in a desert when he was killed. No law or legal principle justifies the U.S. government killing him then and there; in fact, numerous laws prohibit it.

The president's use of the CIA for offensive killing also violates federal law. Intelligence agents may only lawfully kill in self-defense, not offensively. Only the military may lawfully kill offensively. In the al-Awlaki case, intelligence sources have confirmed to Fox News that a team of American and Yemeni intelligence agents had followed al-Awlaki and had him under continuous observation at the time of his killing and for the preceding 48 hours. They easily could have arrested him – had he been charged with a civilian crime or a war crime, which he wasn't.

Of course, the murder of his Colorado-born son and the son's American friend are not even arguably defensible, and the president's spokesman who suggested that the young al-Awlaki should have "chosen a different father" shows a seriously defective thought process and an utter antipathy for the rule of law in places of power.

We now confront the truly unthinkable: a proposal to establish yet another secret court, this one with the authority to authorize the president and his designees to kill Americans. This proposal has come from Congress, which seems more interested in getting in on the killing than in upholding the Constitution. The federal government only has the lawful powers the states delegated to it. As the states cannot kill Americans without due process, neither can the feds. Congress cannot create this killing court, and no judge on such a Stalinesque court can authorize the president to kill.

The president has made a political calculation that it will be easier for him to justify killing folks he can demonize than it will be to afford them due process, by capturing, housing and trying them. Now, he has come to believe that it will be easier still if unnamed federal judges meeting in secret take the heat. Politically, the president may be correct. But he has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, and he lacks the moral and legal basis to reject that in favor of killing.

When he kills without due process, he disobeys the laws he has sworn to uphold, no matter who agrees with him. When we talk about killing as if it were golf, we debase ourselves. And when the government kills and we put our heads in the sand, woe to us when there is no place to hide.

Reprinted with the author's permission.

February 14, 2013

Andrew P. Napolitano [send him mail], a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constit.... To find out more about Judge Napolitano and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit creators.com.

Copyright © 2013 Andrew P. Napolitano

The Best of Andrew Napolitano

Comment by KYRobinbird on February 16, 2013 at 10:41am: @Delilah @Gene @John It infuriated me to hear this LIE from Obama!! Jobs "created" by the govt are not jobs which sustain!! We are in deep deep debt! How many of the "green" jobs (which have failed, due to bankruptcy) are in this 6 mil Obama claims? How many public works projects (remember the signs of the highways, re: Amer Reinv Act), more $$ to shore up indebted fed agencies (eg., Amtrak, where my nephew with a family works on "low pay," & I've tried to convince him to move them to ND, no easy task, indeed, but BIG MONEY can be made by oil frackers there,)(if wkg for a fed agency, with salaries pd by a govt in the RED, what are the prospects of advancing, promoting, raising one's income?! THINK about it!! 6 million jobs my arse!!!! Barck Hussein Obama is a LIAR!

Comment by Wilafret on February 16, 2013 at 7:00am: You seem to think that this left wing zealots will actually admit they are mistaken, They won't and the cover up is worse. They complain about Global warming, do this mentally disturbed left wingers realize that if they all would shup-up a listen for once that, that would solve global warming.

Comment by Ranchman on February 16, 2013 at 5:56am: The media concentrates on drivel, telling the average low information voter that this is what's important and the people eat it up. Nothing important is ever discussed so nothing ever changes. The country is left chasing its tail. This is what Obama thinks of the people of this country, drivel. We're just pawns in a game to him, to be used as he sees fit. What a pathetic and despicable small person he is. A man who couldn't pass a security check to be able to clean the White House toilets is now running this nation with his finger on the nuclear trigger. Only in America. That's equal opportunity for ya.

Comment by JOHN DELASAUX on February 16, 2013 at 1:17am: Delilah: Unfortunately, we need to create 3 million jobs EACH YEAR, to provide jobs for all the new citizens which are born and grow up into the job age bracket.

So, 6 million new jobs in 3 years just doesn't cut it.