"The era of apologizing for Republican mistakes of the past is now officially over. It is done. The time for trying to fix or focus on the past has ended. The era of Republican navel-gazing is over. We have turned the corner on regret, recrimination, self-pity and self-doubt. Now is the hour to focus all of our energies on winning the future."
Michael Steele
Republican National Committee Chairperson
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I've had a lot of people tell me about the evils of "European-style socialism." Most have never been to Europe and don't know anybody who lives in Europe. I've never been to Europe, but have good friends who live there. Since they have lived in the US, they can speak credibly when comparing the US to European countries. I ran across an article in the April 29, 2009 NY Times Sunday magazine comparing living in the US to living in Holland. It provides some interesting insights for us to ponder...
"Picture me, if you will, as I settle at my desk to begin my workday, and feel free to use a Vermeer image as your template. The pale-yellow light that gives Dutch paintings their special glow suffuses the room. The interior is simple, with high walls and beams across the ceiling. The view through the windows of the 17th-century house in which I have my apartment is of similarly gabled buildings lining the other side of one of Amsterdam’s oldest canals. Only instead of a plump maid or a raffish soldier at the center of the canvas, you should substitute a sleep-rumpled writer squinting at a laptop.
For 18 months now I’ve been playing the part of the American in Holland, alternately settling into or bristling against the European way of life. Many of the features of that life are enriching. History echoes from every edifice as you move through your day. The bicycle is not a means of recreation but a genuine form of transportation. A nearby movie house sells not popcorn but demitasses of espresso and glasses of Dutch gin from behind a wood-paneled bar, which somehow makes you feel sane and adult and enfolded in civilization.
Then there are the features of European life that grate on an American sensibility, like the three-inch leeway that drivers deign to grant you on the highway, or the cling film you get from the supermarket, which clings only to itself. But such annoyances pale in comparison to one other. For the first few months I was haunted by a number: 52. It reverberated in my head; I felt myself a prisoner trying to escape its bars. For it represents the rate at which the income I earn, as a writer and as the director of an institute, is to be taxed. To be plain: more than half of my modest haul, I learned on arrival, was to be swallowed by the Dutch welfare state. Nothing in my time here has made me feel so much like an American as my reaction to this number. I am politically left of center in most ways, but from the time 52 entered my brain, I felt a chorus of voices rise up within my soul, none of which I knew I had internalized, each a ghostly simulacrum of a right-wing, supply-side icon: Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Rush Limbaugh. The grim words this chorus chanted in defense of my hard-earned income I recognized as copied from Charlton Heston’s N.R.A. rallying cry about prying his gun from his cold, dead hands.
And yet as the months rolled along, I found the defiant anger softening by intervals, thanks to a succession of little events and awarenesses..."
Russell Shorto
Read more of "Going Dutch"
NY Times
Shaun Hannity puckers up to Jesse Ventura and takes a lickin' but keeps on babbling.
"I've never had a fire burning inside me like I do for that mongrel thug."
Stormfront posting
April 29, 2009
WASHINGTON — While the inauguration of the first black president has lessened racial tensions for most Americans, it has set off a wave of violence on the white supremacist fringe, with anti-hate groups attributing six recent killings — including the ambush in April of three Pittsburgh police officers and the fatal shootings in April of two Florida sheriff's deputies — in part to anger over President Barack Obama's election.
Coming to a neighborhood near you...racially tinged, anti-Obama demonstrations...conservative politicians and pundits for employing talking points that supremacists rally around...reports of government-sponsored "re-education camps"...claims that Obama is a socialist...
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"These groups have an out-sized effect based on the way they have been able to mainstream their propaganda and conspiracy theories...The reality is, there is an underworld of people who really believe that armed revolution is absolutely and vitally necessary. To the extent that that sector grows and is energized, they will be more dangerous."
Mark Potok
Southern Poverty Law Center
"I was looking on their website (Southern Poverty Law Center), and noted that their are some 900+ "hate" groups in the US. I was wondering if labeling all these different organizations as HATE groups was a defamation of character? Or on the other hand if all this snooping and investigating was an invasion of privacy by posting all this nonsense about all the groups, in the Hate group catagory, it puts forth a stigmata about all of the groups and steriotypes them into a general view of them all. Now alot of these groups are christian or catholic or islamic orginizations, but not one is Jewish, are jews not racist for proclaming to be the chosen one publicly? Can another race not claim to be Gods children without them being pursecuted and charged with a hate crime? I am serious and I think we at Stormfront should hire lawyers for all the "hate" groups and go together in a class action suit against the SPLC for defamation of these great organizations and the people that make them up. Thanks and I want some good feedback. I think the fact that the JDL is not on the list is proof of the double standards set by the SPLC and the ADL. In pursueing their financial interests in these organizations."
Orion
Stormfront posting
May 4, 2009
"God help you if you're a proud, white, male. That's the true axis of evil. In fact, every time you refuse to let a black man rob your house, rape your wife, and murder your family, you're just not being sensitive to his cultural needs."
Aslag
Stormfront posting
May 4, 2009
"Today, populism is a kind of sentiment that bursts into view in times like these, but there is no real movement behind it. The public just doesn't mobilize around issues in the way it once did."
Alan Brinkley
Historian
"What both the 1890s and 1930s had in common was an intense class anger, a stark division of the nation into 'bosses' and 'workers.' I don't think this perspective applies to our present crisis."
Jerald Podair
History Professor
