The Foundation

“There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate upon real favours from Nation to Nation.” –George Washington

Re: The Left

“Ever since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2012, the Obama White House has sought to lay blame for deadly and destructive anti-American attacks in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and more than two dozen other countries on someone else. The O-Team – and the perpetrators – have had a lot of help from the ‘useful idiots’ in the mainstream media. … From the perspective of many ‘covering this story,’ the global jihad we’re witnessing is mostly the fault of an incompetent ‘filmmaker,’ and the ‘spontaneous outrage’ is over a ‘provocative video.’ … The Obama administration continues to tell us that the Muslim Brotherhood and a host of other Islamic radical groups in 30 countries just happened to come across the ‘offensive videos’ on the 11th anniversary of the devastating 9/11 al-Qaida attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 of our countrymen. That alone requires a willful suspension of disbelief by anyone at all familiar with reality. … Yet major networks and print outlets continue to parrot the administration’s propaganda. If a Republican were in the Oval Office, the press would be calling it a cover-up. … We were told that the Arab Spring was going to make things better. The Obama Nobel Prize said as much. But for all of what has transpired since Sept. 11, 2012, there is one overriding question that needs to be asked and answered: How could this happen? Even useful idiots should want to know.” –columnist Oliver North

Opinion in Brief

“One of the more piquant details in the tale of Mitt Romney’s damning ‘47 percent’ video is that it was unearthed online by James Earl Carter IV, a grandson and namesake of the 39th president. … According to NBC, he wanted to retaliate against Romney’s ‘frequent attacks on the presidency of his grandfather’ – particularly the suggestion that Barack Obama’s faltering foreign policy is Carteresque in its irresolution. … Is it fair to compare Obama’s foreign policy to Carter’s? The similarities were especially vivid after the murder of four US diplomats at the American consulate in Benghazi. Even more so when the administration insisted that the outbreak of anti-American violence by rampaging Islamists in nearly 30 countries was due solely to a YouTube video mocking Islam – a video the White House bent over backward to condemn. … Obama was still a presidential hopeful when liberal historian Sean Wilentz observed in 2008 that he ‘resembles Jimmy Carter more than he does any other Democratic president in living memory.’ Within weeks of Obama’s inauguration, troubling parallels could already be detected. In January 2010, Foreign Policy magazine’s cover story, ‘The Carter Syndrome,’ wondered whether the 44th president’s foreign policy was beginning to collapse ‘into the incoherence and reversals’ that had characterized No. 39’s. The Carter years are a warning of what can happen when the ‘Leader of the Free World’ won’t lead. It may irk his grandson to hear it, but Jimmy Carter’s legacy is still too timely to ignore.” –columnist Jeff Jacoby

The Gipper

“[E]very lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face – that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand – the ultimatum. And what then?” –Ronald Reagan

Political Futures

“‘The most important lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t change Washington from the inside,’ Barack Obama said in an interview Thursday on the Spanish-language Univision network. ‘You can only change it from the outside.’ A better way to put it is that Barack Obama has proved he can’t change Washington from the inside. … Obama has spent about half of his career in public office running for other office. A couple of years after his election to the state Senate, he ran for Congress. He lost, and a couple of years later ran for the U.S. Senate. Two years after taking office, he started running for president. And he’s spent a lot of time this last two years – all those fundraisers! – running again. In the meantime, he has skipped more than half of his daily intelligence briefings, including those several days before the attacks on our embassies and consulates that started on Sept. 11, 2012. … What we see in all this is a president who is much more comfortable campaigning than governing. What we also see is disarray – an economy that is foundering, a world where America is on the defensive and under attack. A president who can’t change Washington and whose election did not magically change the world.” –political analyst Michael Barone

For the Record

“On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office confirmed what we’ve been saying for years now: President Obama has broken his pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class. During his 2008 campaign, Obama promised Americans that he wouldn’t raise taxes on anybody making less than $250,000 a year. … [T]he CBO has released updated estimates showing that Obamacare’s insurance mandate – which the Supreme Court ruled to be a tax – will hit millions of middle-class Americans. In its report, the CBO determined the mandate tax would cost 6 million Americans a total of $7 billion in 2016, with a minimum payment of $695 apiece. The annual cost will then average about $8 billion from 2017 through 2022. … Among those who will have to pay a mandate penalty, 4.7 million will have incomes below 500 percent of the federal poverty level, according to the CBO, which is projected to be $60,000 for individuals and $123,000 for families of four by 2016. … Lest some of his defenders argue that Obama’s campaign pledge merely pertained to income tax rates, here’s what he actually said as a candidate in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12, 2008: ‘I can make a firm pledge: Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase – not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.’ As with many of Obama’s ‘firm pledges,’ this one was a bit flimsy.” –The Washington Examiner

Government

“At 47.4 percent of federal revenue, the federal income tax is by far the single largest source of revenue for the federal government. … [T]he individual income tax funds the bulk of operations of the federal government, including such core things as national defense, homeland security, and the judicial system. Shouldn’t all Americans have some stake, even if just a nominal one, in funding these government programs? Should nearly 50 percent of Americans really be exempt from funding the most basic constitutional functions of government – along with education, food stamps, energy, welfare, foreign aid, veterans’ benefits, housing, and so forth? … Nearly half of all taxpayers pay no income tax, while nearly half of all Americans receive direct government support for income, food, housing, medical care, school lunches, etc. This makes strong incentives for those who pay no income taxes to press for more and higher benefits. But government programs are rife with poor outcomes. … Government should be smaller. Taxes should be flatter and should not penalize ordinary and low-income Americans for saving – whether for a car, a condo, or retirement. Federal dependency programs should be redesigned to not just assist low-income individuals, but also move them out of dependency. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid should be overhauled. The goal is to strengthen the safety net, not destroy it.” –Heritage Foundation’s Alison Acosta Fraser

Essential Liberty

“Government dependency is jumping for the fourth year in a row. … [T]he economy is so weak that people are going to the government for help. This is a stark repudiation of President Obama’s big-spending, ‘spread the wealth around’ approach, because ‘giving everyone a shot’ does not work unless the ‘shot’ comes at the expense of the taxpayers. … We are spending more on dependency-creating programs while an ever-shrinking number of taxpayers are paying for them. … The American Dream is about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, through independence – not dependence on government. Government dependency erodes human dignity and civil society. These programs were originally designed to help those who fall on hard times and need a safety net. Public policy should head back in that direction. The welfare reform of 1996 helped lift recipients out of poverty and back into jobs by requiring, among other things, that they work. President Obama has undone that requirement. And there are dozens more anti-poverty programs that should be revamped to help those who are able toward self-sufficiency. … We cannot continue on a course of unlimited government spending when fewer and fewer taxpayers are paying for that spending. That is the financial fact. But we also cannot sustain the American Dream on this course – and that is a fact that is intensely personal for every American.” –Heritage Foundation’s Amy Payne

Culture

“The most poisonous aspect of this race is the Democratic Party political tactic of racial slander. … To the Democrats and the mainstream media, this is war. They now have the political power to advance their leftist ideology and they will stop at nothing to keep it. The progressives aren’t merely playing the race card. They are deploying the entire deck in a scorched-earth policy. If you oppose the Democrats, then you are a racist. … Americans will pay the price for the racial hatred being incited by the Democrats and their media shills. … In playing the race card, the Democrats show that they have no moral scruples whatsoever. To the progressive, the end always justifies the means. It is a dishonor and a sin to bear false witness against your neighbor. But this is the political party that booed God out of the DNC party platform three times before the chair ignored the majority and allowed the Almighty to return. And this was done cynically to avert political fallout and a possible loss of votes in November. Even God is a political calculation for Democrats.” –columnist J. T. Hatter

Reader Comments

“Obviously the Romney campaign needs to get in touch with the grassroots perspective in The Patriot Post if they are going to win this election. Mark Alexander, in ‘The ObamaNation Plantation – Outing Obama’s Socialist Political Agenda’ prescribed exactly what Romney, et al., should be shouting from the mountaintops, in response to Romney’s so-called ‘gaffe’ about government dependence. Alexander wrote: ‘Though Romney’s assertion that most Obama supporters are government dependents has generated a flood of faux-outrage on the Left, their underlying indignation is more accurately rooted in the fact that Romney did not declare that ALL Americans are dependent on government. That is precisely what Obama himself recently proclaimed in his now-infamous assertion, "You didn’t build that. Somebody else [read: 'government’] made that happen.”‘ Somebody needs to get this rebuttal in front of Mitt Romney and tell his campaign strategists to start reading The Patriot!“ –Semper Fi (Virginia)

"Five years ago, when Mark Alexander referred to then-candidate Barack Obama as an 'ideological socialist,’ I thought that was too strident. Four years ago when Alexander took Obama to task for declaring his intent to ‘fundamentally transform the United States of America,’ I thought that was a stretch. Three years ago when Alexander outlined Obama’s economic strategy to ‘break the back of free enterprise,’ I thought for sure any such plan would have already been exposed by conservative think tanks. Two years ago when Alexander asserted that Obama was ‘the most dangerous threat to Liberty of any president in the history of our Republic,’ I thought that was too discordant and disrespectful of the office of president. Last year, when Alexander wrote about the Left’s agenda to completely undermine our Constitution, I thought that could never happen. This week, in his essay ‘The ObamaNation Plantation,’ Alexander concluded, ‘The good news is that if Obama’s re-election serves as the tipping point for that plunge [into tyranny], there is always the option of restoring Liberty by bullets when ballots fail – the notion that the ballot box is not the only path to restoring Liberty may make some in our Patriot ranks uncomfortable. But that must be all the more motivation for every one of us to contribute the utmost of our time, talent and treasure toward ensuring an electoral outcome that restores our heritage of God-given Essential Liberty.’ Well, I finally figured out, better late than never, that Mark Alexander has been right all along!” –National Federation of Republican Women (California)

“Regarding the Fast and Furious Report Card, if a Navy ship is run aground, the ship’s captain, regardless of whether he was at the wheel at the time, is responsible. Somehow, though, the Department of Justice’s Inspector General found a way to absolve its captain, the wretchedly incompetent Eric Holder, of any responsibility for the treachery that occurred on his watch.” –Dennis in Gulf Breeze, Florida

“As The Patriot Post correctly noted, Fast and Furious was NOT a ‘botched op’ as the lying scum in the DOJ, ATF or their complicit media, including Fox, want you to believe. The purpose was and remains a direct and intentional attempt to undermine and subvert your constitutional rights by intentionally creating false statistics and using the complicit media to sway public opinion and allow passage of more laws restricting gun rights or outright illegal suspension of rights by executive order.” –Yank lll in NeverLand

The Last Word

“This week amid the theatrics at the United Nations, let us hope that President Obama and his lieutenants do not persist with the ongoing administration de facto apologies for the views of a crude American filmmaker, and instead try to explain to the world the singular American commitment to free expression, which always eventually proves to be a commitment to unpopular and often repelling expression. … Apparently leaders of the Islamic world present a non-negotiable demand to the West that they be given a blank check for their governments to defame Jews, Christians, and Americans, but the United States must condemn any private individual who, quite apart from the knowledge of the U.S. government, does the same to Muslims. That is the issue, and anything less than an unapologetic defense of free speech is not only a betrayal of our Constitution, but a very dangerous concession that will only incite more violence in the near future.” –historian Victor Davis Hanson

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team