Firing the First Shot

Liberty and no Union

Secession is in the air.  I’ve been keeping an eye on the rapidly evolving situation in the States.  The latest information I have is that the Texas petition now has well over 110,000 signatures, almost four times over the threshold for an official response on the White House’s We the People website. 

The 25,000 signature threshold has also been exceeded in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee, with some other states not far behind.  Nationally the petitions lodged in all fifty states have collected close on a million signatures.  America wants to leave America! 

This is all great fun.  I don’t take it seriously and I’m certain that the vast majority of signatories do not take it seriously either.  But it’s most certainly boosted spirits on the American right, deflated by Romney’s defeat.  It shows how agile Americans are at bouncing back.  The people are using We the People in a way that Obama could never have anticipated when the site was set up.  The comment in the Washington Post was spot on; there is indeed something empowering about putting your name on a document that sticks it to the establishment.

I’m a secessionist.  Oh, not so far as the United States is concerned.  That’s a Union best preserved.  It’s the European Union I want my country to leave.  I have little doubt that a secession petition here would gather hundreds of thousands of signatures in a very short time.  But it Americans have some form of empowerment, even if only in online petitions, we have none at all.  All of the main parties are committed to membership of Europe.  David Cameron, the Prime Minister, may blow a little anti-European wind from time to time, but that’s all it is – wind. 

Day by day the European monster eats away at English freedom, imposing upon us foreign laws and foreign customs.  It’s taking liberties, liberties that were once ours.  What I resent most of all is that we have become the victims of France’s fear of Germany and Germany’s fear of itself.  We have become the victims of a history that is not ours, of a political and dictatorial style that is most assuredly not ours.  Secession is the only way of rediscovering ourselves, of reclaiming our own past and our own traditions. 

I call to mind Edmund Ruffin.  If you’ve never heard the name he was a political activist in the Old South, a Virginian and a strong believer in states' rights and secession.  He was in South Carolina when it became the first state to leave the Union in December, 1860.  He is also reputed to have fired the first shot on the Federal garrison at Fort Sumter, thereby beginning the Civil War. 

Well, now, I hate the European Union as much as Ruffin hated the Federal Union.  I hope in my lifetime to see my country take the road to secession.  If we ever have a referendum on membership I would be delighted to fire the first shot.  

Follow the Politics

In a recent discussion on the resignation of David Petraeus as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) I made the following observation;

Honestly, in this day and age, I’m surprised at such big fuss over something as minor as sexual indiscretion. But always, always follow the politics. I have a hunch that there is more to this story; that Caesar, not just Caesar’s wife, should be above suspicion. 

Well, then, there is indeed more to the story, and yes, it touches more on politics than personal morality.  The story of Petraeus, his biographer and inamorata and the third woman would be difficult to make up, even in the most farcical sex farce.  The toing and froing between the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also looks ridiculous, intelligence work that might have been conceived in the mind of Inspector Clouseau.  The whole thing would be risible in the extreme if it was not for the tragedy; if it was not the horror of Benghazi.

During the recent presidential campaign not enough was made of the murder of the American ambassador and three others in Libya; not enough was made of the present administration’s intelligence failures.  There are those who still wish to hide the inconvenient truths.  The suggestion – one I find wholly convincing -  is that Petraeus was effectively forced out of office because of potentially damaging revelations he might have made before today’s Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. 

What happened in Benghazi in September must count as one of the most serious breaches of security in recent American history.  The mother of Sean Smith, one of the diplomats killed alongside Ambassador Chris Stevens, said recently that that President Obama had effectively “murdered her son.”  And so he did, by simple negligence.  Obama’s reaction was ‘not very optimal’, to use his own peculiar and tortured English.

Consider the facts.  First the fuss over The Innocence of Muslims was no more than a silly smokescreen.  There was evidence that the attack on the embassy was planned well in advance by Al Qaeda, a 9/11 celebratory bash.  The administration had received hundreds of warnings but did nothing to improve security.  Contrast that with the British, who closed their own consulate after the failed assassination of Ambassador Dominic Asquith earlier in the summer. 

Quite apart from anything that Petraeus might have revealed about the Benghazi fiasco, as a political animal he was suspect, a horse of a Republican colour.  Con Coughlin says in the Telegraph that the general’s friends suspect that his political enemies in the administration simply used his sexual indiscretions as a convenient way of ejecting him from the CIA.  It certainly looks like it, the speed of the whole thing adding to the suspicion. 

Do you believe, does anyone believe, that if Petraeus had been an ‘insider’, if he had been ‘one of us’ these inconvenient facts would ever have come to light?  Even if they had, some kind of effort would have been made to stop the ship sinking.  After all, the Democrats are used to sexual scandals; they know how to manage sexual scandals, even so far as the Oval Office.

There are indeed serious questions as to why Petraeus gave a brief to the House Intelligence Committee that contradicted those of the agency he headed over the events in Libya.  Victoria Toensing of Fox News has written;

For some reason DCI Petraeus backed the Obama unsupported theory that the video made the attackers do it rather than his own Chief of Station’s assessment that it was a planned military attack. Why do the shifting stories and misplaced theory of cause matter?  Because if an administration pushes a political agenda that applauds the killing of Bin Laden as the ultimate act for eradicating the radical Islamic threat, then that same administration ignores its Ambassador’s urgent pleas for more security for fear it will appear Bin Laden’s demise was not the answer to that threat.  Our country’s chief spy is supposed to know which theory is held up by the evidence.

Indeed.  But now he has been silenced.  The guilty may never be put on the spot.  The mystery remains and the questions, the real questions, may never be answered.  Forget the sex.  Follow the politics, always follow the politics.  

A House Divided

I was amused to discover on Blog Catalogue last night that secession petitions are flooding into the White House in the wake of Barack Obama’s re-election to the presidency.  What, are we really back in 1860, is American on the threshold of a new Civil War?  No and yes, is my answer, a point to be clarified a bit later.

There they are, pleas flooding in from some of the same offenders: from Texas, from Alabama, from Georgia, from Louisiana, from South Carolina, from North Carolina, from Tennessee, from Arkansas and from Florida, all former members of the old Confederacy.  There are also petitions from Missouri and from Kentucky, states that at least had a presence on the Stars and Bars.

But – my goodness – there are also petitioners from the blue North, from Indiana, from Oregon, from Michigan, from Montana, from New Jersey and – would you believe it? – from New York!  So the Civil War solved nothing.  Secession is alive and well in American political consciousness!  Actually, it’s one of the great ironies of American history that the original thirteen states in casting off one imperial union bound themselves to another, far less mutable in every sense.

Anyway, Obama has only himself to blame.  Oh, I don’t mean in being re-elected, though that is the clear cause of an autumn of discontent among some Americans.  I mean he is at fault in agreeing to the White House’s We the People website, set up last year with the aim of allowing “all Americans a way to engage their government on issues that matter to them.” 

The promise is that if a petition from any given state reaches 25,000 signatures within thirty days the White House has to respond.  When I drafted this article yesterday evening Texas had already exceeded this threshold with 34,000 signatures.  Now it stands at 77,000.  I await Obama’s reaction with interest. 

Most of the petitions make reference to the words of Declaration of Independence;

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

…Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and institute new Government…

That from Texas is more specific, taking us to the real heart of the matter;

Given that the state of Texas maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th largest economy in the world, it is practically feasible for Texas to withdraw from the union, and to do so would protect its citizens' standard of living and re-secure their rights and liberties in accordance with the original ideas and beliefs of our founding fathers which are no longer being reflected by the federal government.

I think this is superbly put.  On the news sites I’ve looked at a lot of the responders are saying that the whole thing is racist, that there are lots of people, especially in the South, who simply do not like a black man in the White House.  I’m not saying that’s not true; it probably is in some cases, but I can see no evidence on the point.  This kind of observation looks more to me like an unthinking reflex: that criticism of Obama, any criticism, is almost racist by definition.  It’s a way of sidetracking the real and substantive issues over his imperial presidency. 

With Obama back there are genuine concerns, as the Texans make clear, over the future direction of the country.  It’s as well that people have an opportunity to make their views known, even if it’s only to challenge the darker angels of Obama’s nature.  He is hoist, so to say, with his own petard! 

Anyway, the real issue is about consensus, the real issue is about democracy itself.  In any normal electoral process the minority, small or large, bows out with reasonable grace, agreeing to abide by the outcome, recognising the government as their government, even if they did not vote for it.  In essence this is governing by consensus, a civil society bound together by a common understanding, a common set of values.  

The alternative, a highly dangerous state of affairs, is governing without consensus, where the minority feels alienated from the whole political process.  This was the state of affairs in Northern Ireland for decades. Now I'm not suggesting that the United States is any way similar to Northern Ireland, but fissures are appearing in the body politic which may very well have serious future consequences.  Many people increasingly begin to feel that the federal government no longer represents their interests, no longer reflects the principles upon which the nation stands.   

No, we are not back in 1860 but over the next four years a new kind of civil war may very well be fought. Obama clearly presides over a house divided, more divided than it has been in decades.  If anything his victory has compounded his problems.  His constituency is younger, poorer, browner, more blue collar and less self-reliant.  John O' Sullivan rightly notes in the Spectator, that this will inevitably lead to pressures for more regulation, more welfare, great government spending, higher taxes and more unionisation; it will lead to expectations that Obama, faced with a precipitous fiscal cliff, cannot meet, at least not without ruining an older and wealthier America, no matter its race or ethnicity.  Meanwhile America's creditors, particularly China, are looking on.

So, yes, the house is divided against itself.  Will it stand?  I honestly can't say.  But one thing I am certain of - Obama is no Lincoln.  

America Defeats America

There are two speeches in American political history that I find wholly admirable.  The first is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  The second is Richard Nixon’s Great Silent Majority oration.

It was the latter I thought of in the wake of Barack Obama’s recent re-election to the White House, specifically the conclusion, where Nixon offered the following observation;

Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.

That’s it exactly: in voting for Obama Americans have defeated and humiliated themselves.  The country faces four more years of drift, uncertainty and decline.  The business of America is business, former President Calvin Coolidge once said.  It isn’t any longer: it’s big government and welfare.  The country is well on its way to becoming just another European social democracy, its standing in the world diminishing by the day.  How are the mighty fallen.

I speak as an outsider, of course, one who has a tremendous respect for the United States and the leadership it has traditionally offered the free world, a leadership, as Nick Gardiner noted recently in the Telegraph, which depended on a sound economy, limited government, free enterprise and a strong national defence.  I speak as an outsider living in a European present, knowing exactly what that entails, a present that is obviously destined to be America’s future.

Yes, I can understand the uncertainty.  I’m sure a lot of Americans voted for Obama less out of love and admiration than fear of the possible changes that a Republican presidency might bring.  Obama, perhaps, offered hope.  What kind of hope, one has to ask?  His record shows clearly enough that it is the greatest of the many misfortunes that escaped from Pandora’s Box.

What did you get?  Was it a new vibrancy, a new economic energy, a new horizon?  No, it was bailouts that bailed out nothing; it was crippling levels of debt that crippled the economy, which will cripple the economy far into the future.  More taxes, more poverty, are all part of the Obama legacy, the answer to which is the vicious cycle of welfare.

The facts are stunning.  America’s national debt now stands at $16 trillion.  Yes, trillion.  Can you picture even one trillion?  I can’t; it’s too big a figure for my limited imagination.  But in actual figures it’s this: 1, 000, 000, 000, 000, that’s a million million.  One trillion dollars laid end to end would reach from here to the sun. Even like this it seems to defy comprehension.  In more manageable terms the actual American debt per taxpayer amounts to $111,414 and rising. 

The position, astonishingly enough, is worse than Greece, Europe’s economic Achilles heel.  The Weekly Standard reported recently that

According to estimates from the International Monetary Fund, America’s total government debt will be $16.8 trillion by the end of the calendar year, compared to $441 billion for Greece…On a per person basis, that means U.S. debt is $53,400 for every man, woman, and child, compared to $39,400 for every man, woman, and child in Greece. The disparity between per capita debt in the U.S. and Greece has grown 40 percent (roughly $8,400) since 2011. Now, U.S. per person debt is 35 percent higher than that of Greece, and is also higher than per capita debt in Portugal, Italy, or Spain (which together with Greece make up the so-called PIGS countries).

With rising debt comes declining economic freedom.  The United States has now fallen to tenth place in the world rankings, with government spending exceeding one third of total domestic output. In other words, the US government now spends more than the entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of China, Australia and Spain combined.  To this burden has to be added the promised health care reforms, not a dream but a bureaucratic and financial nightmare.

The businessman challenged the lawyer and the lawyer won, that’s the verdict of last Tuesday.  Look for more of the same, look for ‘progressive’ policies that offer no progress, look for increasing forms of paternalism and liberal totalitarianism.  Look, above all, for a nation divided against itself.  

How Many Camels is Obama Worth?

Al-Shabaab, the Somali offshoot of al-Qaeda, has offered a bounty of ten camels to “whoever reveals the hideout of that idiot Obama.”  It’s their response to the US State Department's recent announcement of a reward of several million dollars for information on the whereabouts of the movement’s leadership. 

I wonder, perhaps, if the Somalis are being a little too generous in their assessment of the beleaguered President’s worth.  Ten camels seems excessive for a man who recently said that the American private sector was “doing fine”, an assessment, I would hazard, not quite in keeping with the experience of most people struggling with the economic realities of Obama World. 

I wonder also what ordinary Americans make of their president’s worth.  While pondering this deep question they may perhaps consider what they themselves are now worth after four less years.  Unfortunately I can’t give the depreciation in round camel figures but the dollar value is alarming enough.  The Federal Reserve report published at the end of last week shows that the net worth of a typical middle class American family has fallen from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 today.  I’m guessing that’s a heck of a lot of camels. 

The Dear Leader, struggling to turn attention away from the dire state of the debt-laden economy, says that America faces a straight choice between him and a return to the policies of George W Bush under Mitt Romney.  What would that involve exactly?  Why, spending trillions of dollars that the country does not have, open-ended, expensive and unwinnable foreign wars, an escalating economic downturn, slow job creation and ever more layoffs.  Wait a moment – I’ve just drawn a picture of the last four years.  Vote Obama and get Bush?  No, vote Obama and get Obama. 

The President’s negative campaigning calls to mind the concluding lines of Hilaire Belloc’s poem Jim.  Do you know it?  If not it goes like this – “And always keep a-hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse.”  Could things get any worse than they are at present?  It hardly seems possible. 

Just think about it, think about the last four years.  Obama’s attempts to stimulate the economy – more trillions in the black hole – stimulated next to nothing.  His health care reforms are of such prodigious complexity that they would even defy the intellect of Einstein.  He was awarded a peace prize for no peace.  His foreign policy initiatives have spluttered and died.  He has alienated Israel, America’s one true friend in a troubled region.  His Afghanistan campaign is creeping towards an ignoble end.  If that’s not bad enough I now understand that America has been covertly arming militants in Syria, seemingly blind to the fact that the Islamists among them have been involved in a murderous pogrom of local Christians. 

But it’s never Obama’s fault, oh no, it’s always somebody else.  His White House motto clearly has to be the buck stops anywhere but here.  Meanwhile on we go.  It’s never mind the economy, stupid - it’s legalising the residency of illegals; it’s gay marriage; it’s a kulturkampf with the Catholic Church; it’s all sorts of trendy liberal causes that are just so meaningful to Americans in the midst of their present presidential woes. 

Al-Shabaab should really devote those camels to better ends.  America, though, may feel it’s got the better of the deal.  

An Never Ending Story

Robert Caro, an American author, has not long published The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson.  It’s an exhaustive biography of the former president, but it’s also exhausting; for this is volume four and it’s not finished yet.  It may, in the end, take Caro longer to write the life than Johnson to live it.  For goodness sake, The Passage to Power just takes him over the threshold of the Whitehouse! 

I love biography, the more detailed the better but there seems to be a certain lack of authorial or editorial discipline here.  It’s now ten years since The Master of the Senate, the previous volume, was published and thirty since the project began.  According to an interview I read in Prospect, a political monthly, Caro “writes fast”; it’s the research that takes up the time.  He is to be commended for his thoroughness, but there are limits, even to the most meticulous research.  Is this, I ask myself, the real-life Book of Sand, a candidate for inclusion in Jorge Luis Borges Library of Babel? 

Writing in Prospect, Sam Tanenhaus says;

Caro is not prolific, but he is prodigious.  The books keep coming, heavy volumes, densely written and meticulously sourced.  The latest, at just over 700 pages, is of medium length for him.  It explores, or excavates, six years in Johnson’s life, 1958-1964 – covering his exit from the Senate, his miserable, deflating years as vice president, and his sudden elevation to the presidency, following the assassination of John F Kennedy.  During five of those years Johnson did, more or less, nothing.

What; does the author take 700 pages to tell us that his subject, more or less, did nothing?!  I’m beginning to feel a little guilty as I write.  I have no desire to talk down this work, a work that I have not read, a work that is unlikely ever to be surpassed, assuming its ever finished (my goodness, Vietnam, the Great Society, race, riots and rebellion are still to come!) but I simply could not resist passing comment on the observation about five years of, more or less, nothing! 

Even Tanenhaus, who clearly admires Caro for his industry, is aware of an inflationary tendency – “Had he written Waiting for Godot it would be longer than Wagner’s Ring, yet with its own idiosyncratic magnificence.”  Just imagine waiting for Godot for hour after hour after hour after hour.  There is only so much the human spirit can stand, even when there is idiosyncratic magnificence! 

Will I ever approach this monument?  Possibly not; there are too many other things to engage me and reading is for life, not life for reading.  Besides, I’m not sure I want to follow the Book of the Life of Johnson, at least in such detail, idiosyncratic magnificence or not.  There is a tragic quality to a man more controlled by events than controlling, a man who inherited a war and lost it; a man who launched massive welfare programmes which had a lasting and negative impact on American society.  But when it comes to tragedy I’m far more intrigued by Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon than Lyndon Johnson, the wheeler, dealer and failure from Texas.  

Obama’s Creeping Tyranny

I dedicate this article to Bob Mack and all other American patriots

I love America.  It’s like a second home to me.  We have close family friends in south-west Georgia, people I’ve been visiting on and off since I was a child.  They live in the old Georgia, semi-rural Georgia, a town surrounded by cotton fields, further from the chaos of Atlanta than mere distance would suggest.  It was in cotton fields in winter that I first learned to shoot.  Georgia and the Old South is all part of my romantic vision of the United States.

It's going with the wind.  Romance is shattered by reality, the reality of what is happening to America today, what is happening to American democracy and the American people.  On this side of the Pond we know all about creeping tyranny, as democracy is steadily eroded by the European Union, a bureaucratic monster that eats ever further into our individual lives.  We should have seen this coming.  Sadly we were betrayed by the lies and dissimulation of our politicians over many decades.  The betrayal of America has taken place over a far shorter period.  The betrayal of America is Obama.

Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote a classic study of American democracy in the nineteenth century, would no longer recognise the country.  I do not mean simply because so much has changed in two hundred years.  No, it’s at a more fundamental level.  His American Republic was based on overlapping communities, a plurality of interests, something which gave it meaning and strength, something that kept state and government at suitable distance.  Now the state, Obama state, is effectively crowding out the older forms of civil society, the older forms of liberty.  It’s the big battalions now, no longer Edmund Burke’s small platoons.

The whole process saddens me.  It saddens me that more Americans are not aware just how civil society and civil liberties have been eroded over the past four years by the most centralising government in the country’s history, a form of government that would once have been described as, well, un-American.  Even religious communities are threatened by the overweening power of the state.

My thoughts here were focused by a brilliant article by George Weigel in the latest issue of the political journal Prospect (Liberty, faith and Obama’s Leviathan).  Take the massive health care bill which Congress passed in 2010.  Did the senators and representatives actually read this document in its entirety?  Has anyone read its 2000 odd pages and lived?  No, probably not, but it’s a monster that has acquired a life of its own.  Its acquired a life in the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where, as Weigel says, one finds Obama’s statist tendencies at the most refined.  Here the sacred flame of creeping state socialism is guarded with care. 

This self-serving bureaucracy is set to acquire power over so many aspects of American life, of the life of ordinary Americans, set to be strangled in red tape.  It’s staffed by people who represent the hard left of American politics.  These are the refugees from The West Wing, now enjoying unprecedented and vicarious power, like the bureaucrats in Europe.  They have a bigger agenda.  Weigel puts it thus;

For the regulators at HHS are not simply dedicated to the nationalisation of healthcare in the United States; they are committed to the use of federal regulatory power to promote and enforce their understanding of “preventative healthcare”, a euphemism that masks their commitment to the sexual revolution in its most extreme forms and their devotion to a virtually unrestricted abortion licence…Thus it seemed self-evidently clear o those drawing up plans for implementation of Obamacare that all employers be required to buy insurance plans that covered, not only contraceptives, but sterilisation and abortifacient drugs – all of which, to the permanent bureaucracy at HHS, are components of “preventative healthcare.”

Contraception here is not the issue.  Contraception is widely available in the States.  No, we are dealing with something more crucial; we are dealing with matters of conscience, conviction and religious principle.  Obama, in his lack of wisdom, has taken on the Catholic Church and other religious communities in a manner I would never have believed possible in the United States. 

It’s not about birth control; the Church is not trying to impose itself on anyone.  It’s about the use of coercive state power. It’s the insistence that the Church carry out procedures which conflict directly with its own teachings.  In essence it’s about religious freedom and freedom of conscience, an issue over which Obama and his HHS minions have little or no comprehension.  In Stalin’s Russia, when the church was not being persecuted, it was turned into a department of state.  In Obama’s America the Church is similarly set to be turned into a department of state. 

An administration blind to religious freedom is also blind to other forms of freedom. The state is filling so many areas of discourse.  The bureaucratic nightmare of Obamacare is creating, as Weigel indicates, a new Leviathan, the anti-pluralist form of rule identified in the seventeenth century by Thomas Hobbes.  Power is being centralised, dissent marginalised.  This is not a disease in isolation.  America has been infected by a European virus.  Here the left is intolerant of dissent and debate.  In American the left is equally intolerant of dissent and debate.  Public space, in other words, is being filled with state power.  American democracy is being consumed.  Leviathan has a huge appetite.  

It seems to me, that in this electoral year, that America stands on a crossroads almost as critical as that in 1860.  I can’t predict the future but the auspices are not good.  I could only wish for a more effective and persuasive opponent to Obama than Mitt Romney.  So much depends on opening the eyes and minds of the people to the dangers they face.  If you want a possible view of the American future look to the European present - big government, big bureaucracy and massive waste all against the diminishing of personal freedom.  It’s not a happy prospect.  I feel sure that De Tocqueville would be horrified by the land of Obama, the land of creeping tyranny. 

No Sale

I said in discussion recently that Barack Obama’s slogan for the coming Presidential election should be “No, I can’t”, a more honest and apt statement about him as a man, a leader and a chief executive than “Yes, we can.”

There was something else I said, that if a play is ever written about his time in the White House it really should be called The Death of a Salesman. It’s such a pity that it’s already been done. But I wasn’t actually thinking of Obama in the guise of Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman. It’s another salesman I had in mind – Samuel Bick from the movie The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

This is a movie about personal drift and decline that I saw last year on DVD, with Bick drifting in ever faster eddies, a yacht without a compass or a rudder. Bick is a salesman in a furniture store, not a very good one, diffident and lacking in self-assurance. His boss tries to motivate him in various ways, pointing to the then President Richard Nixon as an example of the perfect salesman. Why? Because in the Presidential election of 1968 he sold America the idea of ending the war in Vietnam and then failed to deliver. Nothing deterred, he sold exactly the same idea in 1972. Bick, in an increasing mood of despair, then takes Nixon as the avatar for all that is wrong in his life.

Obama is far more like Bick than Nixon. He tries so hard to be a salesman, tried to sell the idea that all that mattered was positive thinking. Time and again he has shown that it doesn’t. As his abysmal presidency, in so many ways the worst in American history, drifts from one nadir to another, he flails around, looking for scapegoats and excuses, looking for his own personal Richard Nixon, if I can put it like that, as an explanation for his failure

I noted from an article by Andrew Roberts in the political journal Standpoint that he is now is blaming the “millionaires and the billionaires” for blocking the recovery – i.e. tax hikes - , the kind of scapegoating that small people always resort to when in difficulty. But it’s the millionaires and the billionaires who have been taking up the reins that the state has allowed to drop.

The Committee to Encourage Corporate Philanthropy, a research body which monitors corporate giving trends, reporting from a database of 184 companies that corporate giving has increased by 53% since 2007, not at all bad in the midst of one of the most serious recessions since the 1930s. The total contributions across all respondents in cash and products amounts to more than $15.5billion. The biggest increase of all has been among companies working in the healthcare sector.

There are individuals like Mark Zuckerberg, Mr Facebook himself, who has contributed $100 million to create a better grading system in public schools. And then there is the financier Toby Forstman, who responded to America’s failing education system by setting up the Children’s Scholarship Fund, a programme that so far has provided scholarships to the value of $483million for thousands of low-income children to get into private schools. In foreign aid programmes the state now provides a mere 15%, the balance coming from private capital.

As Roberts says in his article, this is the ‘can do’ attitude that built America in the first place. Get the state out of the way, and then see what happens. This is yes, we can, in sharp contrast to Obama’s no, I can’t, and I never could. All he sells is hot air, big, windy meaningless speeches.

In 2008 many greeted Obama as a new Lincoln, the same grand words, the same lofty vision. In reality he has turned out to be more in the image of Franklin Pierce or James Buchanan. Yes, the fact that many of you probably now have to pop over to Wikipedia is a measure of how little trace they have left, a measure of their mediocrity. In generations to come other people, I suspect, will have to do the same for Obama.

This is What Mitt Romney Actually Believes

I was once stopped in the street and asked if I would like a free personality test. “I don’t want to test my personality”, I responded “It might just test me back.” The proposed testers in question were scientologists, of course, and this is the bait with which they hook their little fish.

Frankly I did not know that much about scientology at the time, other than having a vague impression that it was a weird and cultish movement based on some dubious blend of religion and science fiction. I found out an awful lot more from watching South Park some time later, an episode called Trapped in the Closet, which featured Tom Cruise, an aficionado of the cult. The actual beliefs of scientologists were touched on, accompanied by an onscreen caption saying “This is what Scientologists actually believe”. And, my goodness, it’s weird. It’s beyond me how any normal and reasonably intelligent person could be taken in by this claptrap…even Tom Cruise.

Actually, it was while reading about what Mormons Actually Believe that I recalled the South Park satire; because, in some ways, as a belief system, it’s just as bizarre. To accept it would take a huge suspension of disbelief, or bottomless pits of gullibility.

My interest was spurred by the spluttering advance in the Republican primaries of Mitt Romney, who may end as the first Mormon in the White House. There I assume he will continue to wear the White Combinations that true believers don day and night, presumably changed now and again for the sake of hygiene!

I should say that there is much to admire in Mormons as people, generally respectable, clean-cut, decent-living and morally upright; in so many ways quintessentially American. But Mormonism as a religion seems to me like a parody of Christianity, more akin to a heretical cult than anything else. In some ways it’s also a parody of Islam, with Joseph Smith, the nineteenth century prophet and founder, as a latter day Mohammed, and the Book of Mormon a latter day Quran. Harold Bloom, a literary scholar, described the former as a “creative misreading of the early history of the Jews.”

The Book of Mormon is certainly creative in its tale of one Lehi, a patriarch who parted not the Red Sea like Moses but the Atlantic Ocean! Well, that is to say, so the story goes, he sailed across in 600BC.

Honestly it’s far too tiresome to go in to all the subsequent elaborations, including the appearance of Jesus in the New World. Let me just say that the old Israelite had two sons, Nephi and Laman, who, like Cain and Able, had a bit of a falling out, giving rise to two warring peoples, the Nephites and Lamanites. Mormon apparently was a general who led the Nephites. But since these light-skinned people were apparently all wiped out by the dark-skinned Lamanites I’m not quite sure where the modern Mormons come from. Oh, yes, I do, from a lot of self-deception and, dare I say it, a healthy interest in polygamy among the pioneers. Yes, I know; they no longer do that!

As I say, there is almost no relationship whatsoever between Mormonism and mainstream Christianity, beyond a bland message of salvation through repentance and faith. In some respects the theological mishmash it presents recalls the Arian Heresy, that concerning the separation of Christ and God, specifically condemned by the Council of Nicaea in 325AD. Really, in essence, Mormonism is a bargain basement faith, a sort of spiritual Wall Mart, with heaven resembling the Walton homestead! Oh, incidentally, the Garden of Eden was in Missouri.

As for dear old Mitt, I’m really of the 'anyone but Obama' school, though out of the uninspiring Republican pool I would far rather go with Rick Santorum. I’m not sure how much Romney’s beliefs (does he really believe all that tosh?) will go against him with the wider American public, though the Republican fundamentalists take a dim view. I would simply suggest, on matters of religion, that he would do well to keep his mouth shut, and, like Tom Cruise, stay firmly in the closet.

The Business of America is Bureaucracy

One of the respondents to Obama against the Deer Hunters, presumably taking exception to my claim that he is a socialist, simply posted a link to the Texan-based PolitiFact site, where a similar claim by Governor Rick Perry is dismissed as hyperbole. The economist Bruce Bartlett is quoted, saying that socialism means the public ownership of the means of production, something that Obama does not believe in; so it follows that he cannot possibly be a socialist.

It’s a stunningly naïve view, one that flows, I assume, from America’s lack of direct experience here. Yes, socialism can mean a belief in state ownership but that’s an increasingly old fashioned view, one abandoned by many European socialist parties, including the British Labour Party.

In 1995, on the initiative of Tony Blair, Labour revised Clause Four of its constitution, the original version of which committed it to common (i.e. state) ownership of the means of production and exchange. But it did not abandon socialism, oh no; for the new clause specifically mentioned, for the first time ever, that it was a “democratic socialist party.” Blair’s subsequent governments went on to prove just how ‘socialist’ they were by a massive intrusion of the state into so many areas of public and private life, most often in the form of one politically correct initiative after another.

You see, the modern version of socialism is not about production at all; it’s about control; it’s about the most abject forms of state worship. It literally strangles to death the lasses-faire spirit of free enterprise with ever greater levels of intrusion, ever greater levels of supervision by government or government-sponsored institutions. It owes less to Karl Marx and much more to the German sociologist Robert Michels, who in his book Political Parties introduced the world to the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

Now let’s turn to Obama’s America to see the Iron Law in operation, to see how state socialism is creeping through the system, a little like cancer. The country is being strangled in red tape and regulation. I was amused to read in the Economist that the Federal Railroad Administration insists all trains must be painted with a large “F” at the front. Why? That’s simple: so one can tell which end is which!

Far less amusing is the operation of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Law, a Gordian Knot that even Alexander the Great could not cut through. Adopted in the wake of the 2008 crash, it was designed to stop banks from taking excessive risks, allowing regulators to move in if required. At over eight hundred pages with added commentaries and ‘clarifications’ it’s a prodigiously complex piece of legislation which hardly anyone understands; but it’s there, blocking out the light, a mandate for further bureaucratic expansion.

This is just by way of example. It’s part of a wider trend of bureaucratisation that is such a marked feature of Obama World. Obama’s health care reforms make matters even worse, another jamboree for officialdom, regulation and complexity. It’s been estimated that for every hour treating a patient in the States another hour has to be spent on paperwork. It’s set to get far, far worse; for next year the number of federally mandated categories of illness and injury for which hospitals can claim reimbursement is set to increase from 18,000 to 140,000. Believe it or not this includes nine codes relating to injuries caused by parrots!

Here we live under the increasingly irksome diktats of the European Minotaur, living and regulating at the heart of the Brussels labyrinth. But America, at least hitherto, lived under a different political culture, one where people could generally breathe free. The air gets thinner by the day. A culture of free enterprise and initiative bit by bit is being replaced by an engorged state apparatus, by a belief that one can have a law, a regulation and a regulator for every eventuality. The Economist reports that regulations in general add an astonishing $10,585 in costs for every person in employment. As it says, it’s a wonder that the jobless total isn’t even higher.

So, yes, this is the practical application of a creeping form of socialism and oligarchy; this is why Obama stands at the top of an administration that goes against every principle on which the nation was built. The business of America is business, President Calvin Coolidge once said. Not any longer. Now the business of America is bureaucracy.

Obama against the Deer Hunters

This is a piece I wrote a year and a half ago. It has a topical relevance though some of the reference points are now slightly dated.

The United States is a nation built by rebels, built by those hostile to the state, those who sought freedom across the ocean and deep into the frontier. Looking over the country’s history one can see this principle, this hostility to state power asserted time and again, from the Bill of Rights onwards. Last century the House of Un-American Activities was set up specifically to examine those who embraced ideologies that challenged the basic principles on which the nation had been built. Senator Joseph McCarthy also set off in pursuit of those same elements.

How things have changed, how things are changing. The House and McCarthy would not have to look in hidden places for threats to the rebel nation; for the most un-American American is now lodged firmly in the White House. The most un-American American is now the President.

I’m not sure if Americans knew what they were getting when they voted for Barack Obama in November 2008. But what they are getting is arguably the biggest structural transformation in their country’s history, bigger than FDR’s New Deal, which was nothing more than smoke and mirrors in contrast. Obama’s socialism, expressed in the centralised health care system and a redistributive tax programme, comes, as all socialism comes, with an increase in the power of bureaucracy, an increase in state power and authority.

The irony here is that the Democrats are losing the support of the deer hunter vote. Who on earth are the deer hunters, you might wonder, and what have they got to do with American politics? My reference here is to The Deer Hunter, the 1978 movie about men from a blue collar community who went to Vietnam, inspired by now unfashionable ideas of patriotism and love of nation.

Blue collar and working class these people are; socialists they are not. They are people who gain no benefit from the Big State and Obamaism, people who resent their tax dollars being used for welfare programmes and administration; people who resent America being turned into just another ‘social democracy’, just another version of the European Union. Obama told Joe the Plumber, the archetypal deer hunter, that he intended to “spread the wealth around.” What he did not tell him was that it was his ‘wealth’ that would be spreading.

Janet Daley writing in The Sunday Telegraph said that it was unacceptable in bien-pensant circles to express concern over mass immigration or Obama’s heath care programme. They are educated people, sophisticated people, people with a bourgeois sense of morality. Those who do express concern over big government and mass migration are, of course, small-minded bigots, rednecks; just not the right sort.

The thing is ‘the right sort’, these refugees from The West Wing, did not build America. That was the achievement of small people, those who believed in self-reliance, those who had ambition and the drive to clear the wilderness, those who believed that they should benefit from the fruits of their own labour. It was the deer hunters who built America; it’s the liberals and the socialists who are destroying it.

A Lean and Hungry Look

One simply knows what a political thriller entitled The Ides of March is going to be about: treachery and assassination in one form or another; it’s the fate of Julius Caesar, it’s the soothsayer’s warning, continually given and continually ignored; it’s all in the game of politics, the world’s second oldest profession.

There are no secrets to this movie: it’s a good old-fashioned morality tale, reasonably well scripted and very well directed by George Clooney, who also plays Governor Mike Morris, a Democrat hoping to secure the presidential nomination by notching up an important primary victory in Ohio, a bleeding heart-liberal enough to make bleeding heart’s bleed! He also happens to be a moral hypocrite. Ah, there’s the rub!

The Ides of March is about back-stabbing, yes, but it is also about the loss of idealism, the discovery of self-interest, the discovery that there is politics in playing politics. In the place of the white hope comes calculating cynicism, all explored through the central character; no, not through Governor Morris, but one Stephen Myers, his second best aide, brilliantly played by Ryan Gosling. Keep your eye on his steady metamorphosis, a joy and a revelation.

Based on Farragut North, a 2008 play by Beau Willimon, who worked on Howard Dean’s frustrated presidential bid, The Ides of March could easily have descended into a cliché about crushed dreams. That it did not is a clear measure of Clooney’s skill as a film maker. As drama, as a piece of theatre, it’s very well constructed, though not flawless, something I’ll come too a bit later. But the casting could not have been better, the acting impossible to improve.

For me the highlight here was Philip Seymour Hoffman as Paul Zara, Morris’ campaign manager and Myers immediate superior. I’ve loved Hoffman ever since I saw him perform the lead in Capote, the 2005 biopic based on the life of one of my favourite writers. Here he is no starry-eyed idealist like Meyers. No, he’s a hard-bitten realist but one with a strong ethical sense, loyalty being for him the highest virtue. In the end he becomes a victim, falling, Roman-style, on his sword, a sacrifice to the unscrupulous ambition of his subordinate.

Some of the minor performances are also very good, particularly Marisa Tomei playing Ida Horowicz, a reporter from the New York Times, whose friendship with Myers is as strong as her next scoop! At the beginning it is she who introduces a note of realism, warning Meyers that his hero will “let you down. They always let you down.” A message, I think, for contemporary America, or at least for all the people who were fooled for some of the time by Barack Obama.

I say that Meyers is an idealist but, in the best tradition of tragic drama, he has a flaw in his character, one that helps move the action along. The degeneration starts when he accepts an invitation to meet with Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), the campaign manager working for Morris’ Democratic rival. Duffy wants to bring him over, though it all turns out simply to be a Machiavellian manoeuvre of a particularly clever kind. Meyers refuses but the meeting was sin enough, the details initially withheld from Zara. The serpent is now in the garden!

The weakness in the script, the artificiality, if you like, comes with Molly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood), an intern working on the campaign team. If we are in the garden she is Eve, she is the love interest and the temptress. Now if there is one person to stay clear of it surely has to be her. But Meyers does not and neither, for that matter, does Governor Morris. As a hook it was impossibly far-fetched. Wood’s character was completely unconvincing, oddly out of place in every sense. We are meant to believe that she is forward enough to proposition Meyers, though still naïve enough to be seduced into unprotected sex by Morris, with consequences to follow.

I suppose the part served a deeper purpose, though, exposing some of the priggish hypocrisy of American politics. In the end Meyers, now a thorough-going opportunist, even prepared to walk over the body of his lover, dead by her own hand, tells Morris in a key interview that the American electorate will tolerate lies, war and bankruptcy, but what they will not tolerate is “fucking the intern.”

In the end it’s Meyers who does all the fucking. You see, he wasn’t Brutus at all; he was Cassius, the man with a lean and hungry look. Now comes the big compromise and with that comes a deeper moral corruption. Morris in the White House will be Morris in a Whited Sepulchre.

The Ides of March is a serious film for serious people, a decent political thriller if a little lightweight at points, cerebral without being intellectual, engaging on a simple emotional level without being predictably trite. No, it’s not a great movie, but it is one that treats its audience with respect, refreshing enough in itself. Whether this was Clooney’s intention or not it’s story that should make us all a little distrustful of political purity, in whatever form it’s packaged and sold.

The Wicked Debt of the West

How quickly things are moving. It’s not that long since I wrote about the great euro rescue (A New Old Young Plan). There they were, our leaders, all beaming smiles and all self-congratulation. I’ll just remind you of part of what I said;

Be assured: the crisis is over. The smug smiles said it all, as the European leaders emerged from the end of last week’s summit on the euro debt disaster. They emerged bearing gifts to the Greeks, a second bail-out of the profligate nation worth over $130billion. The details are all a bit vague, though; who, exactly, is going to pay what? Never mind that. Rejoice; the crisis is over; the euro lives; the European ideal lives. The crisis is over…until the next time.

My goodness, not even I, as prescient as I am, foresaw that the ‘next time’ would be a fortnight later! The rolling show rolls. A little like the Black Death of the fourteenth century, the contagion has now entered Italy and Spain.

There is a crisis here alright, a crisis not of economics but of politics; of stupidity, mismanagement and hubris. It’s crisis that’s besetting much of the Western world; it’s besetting America, which has for the first time in its history lost its impeccable credit rating. Sometimes I feel as if I’m standing on the sidelines looking at some impossible drama; stop, look, learn, I want to shout but nobody is listening; it’s all pictures in a dream.

I’m dipping in to The Federalist Papers at the present, those brilliant political musings by a brilliant generation, people rich in an understanding of law, politics, philosophy and history, all helping to shape their vision for the constitutional future of the infant United States. Having escaped one perceived tyranny they were anxious to avoid another; of the majority, of unrestricted executive power, of irresponsible government. Checks and balances were built into the system, intending that no one element should dominate at the cost of the other, at the cost of the nation itself.

Now America is drowning in debt, a figure so large that it’s beyond the comprehension of most people. In ordinary terms, or understandable figures, it now stands at $40,000 for every man, woman and child in the land, and climbing by the second. It could not come at the worst time in the nation’s history, a time when Presidential authority is at the lowest point ever. I once wrote that one would have to go all the way back to James Buchanan to find a President less equal to the task than Barack Obama. I now think that there may be some virtue to Buchanan.

In Federalist Number Ten James Madison wrote that “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; they have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

But America has ignored Madison’s warning; America advanced towards a form of pork barrel democracy which has all but destroyed the securities built into the system by the Founders. Executive power, from Lincoln, to Wilson, to Roosevelt and beyond has increased beyond all measure, as has fiscal irresponsibility, the attack on property, the misuse of taxation, the appalling dependence of a great part of the population on government, something that would have horrified Madison and Jefferson.

It isn’t just the Democrats who are at fault here. The costs incurred by George W Bush’s ‘war on terror’, out of all proportion to the results, should have raised the alarm, should have led to an awareness that there was a serious need for fiscal retrenchment, But no, Obama built debt upon debt in attempting to turn the country into a European-style social democracy. It was as if the executive was gripped by a kind of madness.

Now it’s over. The state has bloated to the point where it represents a serious danger to the future well-being of the American economy and polity. The best comment I’ve seen on this dreadful situation was that of Janet Daley writing yesterday in the Sunday Telegraph. Contrary to what the Obama Democrats were claiming, the recent face-off with Congress did not show that the nation’s politics were ‘dysfunctional’; it showed, rather, that they were functioning precisely as the Founding Fathers intended, that the legislature was acting as a check on the executive;

The Tea Party faction within the Republican Party was demanding that, before any further steps were taken, there must be a debate about where all this was going. They had seen the future towards which they were being pushed, and it didn’t work. They were convinced that the entitlement culture and benefits programme which the Democrats were determined to preserve and extend with taxes could only lead to the diminution of that robust economic freedom that had created the American historical miracle.

It’s a kind of sport to scoff at the Tea party, the grass roots and populist movement, by the shallow East Coast literati, the chattering classes whose minds are filled with the nonsense purveyed by the likes of New York Times. But from my point of view, that of an outsider, though one who happens to love America and all that it has given the world, the Tea Party is far truer to the original spirit of the Founding Fathers and that original principle of liberty upon which the nation was built.

As Daly quite rightly says, the hardest obstacle to overcome will be the idea that anyone who challenges the prevailing consensus of the past 50 years is irrational and irresponsible. “That is being said about the Tea Partiers. In fact what is irresponsible is the assumption that we can go on as we are.”

By coincidence, besides the Federalist Papers, I’ve been reading Michael Newton’s The Path to Tyranny: A History of Free Society’s descent into Tyranny, which finishes with a chapter on the United States, written well before the present crisis. He concludes as follows;

The United States is repeating the mistakes of the past: redistributing wealth through a progressive tax system, expanding the size of government, creating fictional wars were none exist, enriching the political class, establishing an army of unelected bureaucrats to control the lives of the people, and promoting democracy at the expense of the republic. The United States government is approaching bankruptcy and there are two likely outcomes if the current direction is maintained.

The first outcome, he continues, is that wealth will simply be exported to places with less burdensome tax regimes. The second is even more alarming. As people become aware that the current political system cannot fix the problem the call will go up for a single individual or group to restructure the government and country. My guess is that he result will not be Solon, the Greek law giver, or Cincinnatus, the noblest Roman of them all, but something along the lines of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip. Yes, It Can Happen Here, it could happen here. The Constitution has been no guarantee against massive irresponsibility and the unscrupulous use of power. It is no longer a guarantee against tyranny.

In our Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.

No, we can't

This is a piece I wrote for a multi-author blog site earlier this year. I’m reviving it here, slightly adapted, in the light of the American mid-term elections.

The United States at the moment is a bit like a yacht drifting without a rudder, twisting this way and that in the wind. Casting an eye over American history one would have to go back a longish way to find a similar period where the country was so lacking in leadership, right back, in fact, to the time before the election of Abraham Lincoln and the outbreak of the Civil War.

In 2008 many greeted Barack Obama as a new Lincoln, the same grand words, the same lofty vision. In reality he has turned out to be more in the image of Franklin Pierce or James Buchanan. Yes, the fact that most of you probably now have to pop over to Wikipedia is a measure of how little trace they have left, a measure of their mediocrity! In generations to come other people, I suspect, will have to do the same for Obama.

I was never at any point seduced by Obama-mania, never seduced by those vacuous words and lofty promises. He’s a Democrat and I dislike the Democrats as much as I dislike the British Labour Party. I was convinced that his showmanship and lack of practical politics would eventually show him up for the shallow fraud that he is. But even I did not expect him to flounder so badly after such a short time. I thought demagoguery would at least carry him through to a second term. Now there has to be serious doubts over such a prospect. I absolutely hate to say this but Obama even makes the Wicked Witch of the State Department look good in contrast.

Quite simply Obama has absolutely no capacity at all for leadership. He is astonishingly weak, a real buck-passer in the one job where the buck cannot be passed. His dithering over troop reinforcements for Afghanistan handed the strategic initiative to the Taliban. His floundering, name-calling and scapegoating over the oil spill in the Gulf was not in the least edifying.

Look at his domestic programme, promise unfulfilled, failure ever present. The health care bill, his one triumph, a pyrrhic victory achieved by dividing the nation, just hangs around still waiting to be implemented after all this time. When it comes to dealing with the nation’s massive public debt he does not seem to have the first clue, other than to continue on a course that would shame the Greeks. Unemployment remains stubbornly high in spite of billions of dollars sucked into wasteful and inefficient local government initiatives.

On every front Obama is failing; on every front America has never looked weaker and less decisive. Not one of Obama’s foreign policy initiatives has come within a mile of success. His laughable appeal to the “Islamic republic of Iran” was effectively thrown back in his face, making him look extraordinarily naïve, a gesturing child on a dangerous world stage. He is turning out to be the worst friend that Israel ever had, though he has gained no advantage in the Arab world in consequence. Even his commander in Afghanistan could not hide his frustrations over presidential incompetence.

Now the brand is toxic. The Democrats are fearful that they may not just lose the House in the November mid-terms but the Senate too. Even if they do not the Republicans are likely to make sufficient advances to block any legislation they don’t like, a log-jammed legislature matching a log-jammed executive. Yes we can is set to become no we can’t.

Yes we can, that was Obama’s 2008 campaign leitmotiv. Perhaps he should have been mindful of other words; perhaps he should have been mindful that what is right and what is practicable are two different things. Who said that? It was President James Buchanan.

Watch Your Backs, Guys

I thought I might say a word or two more about the recent convention of the Tea Party that so upset the CPUSA. Well, it would, wouldn’t it, since we are actually dealing with a genuine people’s movement, a kind of grass-roots revolution. It’ really quite astonishing when one considers that this movement has arisen from nothing to becoming one of the most potent recent forces in American politics, a movement that owes nothing to organised politics or traditional elites.

The star of the show, as one might expect, was Sarah Plain, who is no longer reluctant to say that she may stand for the presidency in 2012. But that is not the most important thing; for the Tea Party is not just a threat to the Super Obama’s re-election prospects, it’s a warming to the Grand Old Party that there should be no compromises, no pork barrelling in Washington.

Ever since the victory of Scott Brown deprived him of a Senate Majority Obama has been droning on about the need for a ‘bipartisan’ approach to his health and cap and trade policies. Now is the time, he says, to rise above ‘petty politics.’ This sort of thing has worked in the past but the message coming from Nashville and America beyond is, no, now is not the time to compromise on Obama politics.

The Tea Party is determined to ‘take back America’. It’s not a challenge to Obamaland as such. It goes deeper. This is a reaction against the Behemoth of bloated central government, which has waxed fat over the years, no matter the political complexion of Washington. Tom Tancred, a former congressman and presidential candidate from Colorado, caught the mood in Nashville when he said that he thanked God that John McCain had been defeated in 2008. If he had won America would simply have continued the long drift to the left set in place by Franklin D Roosevelt. This is wonderful; it’s so long overdue!

The Tea Party grows and it learns as it grows. With something in the region of a million members, many of whom were not previously involved in politics, it’s moving beyond rallies and fund-raising events to focusing on elections. The movement is also computer savvy, making good use of networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to spread the message outwards in ever widening circles. Get the vote out, people are told; make sure that true conservatives challenge Democrats and RINOS (Republicans in name only).

According to the report in The Economist Tea Party organisers are intending to set up a political action committee to recruit and support candidates who would champion fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, smaller government and national security. So, if any Republicans in Washington are tempted by Obama’s offers of ‘bipartisanship’ they had better watch their backs. Yes, they had. :-)