13 Times Since 2012 Obama Has Lost Constitutional Cases Before The Supreme Court By Unanimous 0-9 Rulings

Anybody else remember when it was a huge selling point for Obama's supporters back in 2008 that he was a former Constitutional Law lecturer at the University of Chicago? Obama had such a small resume of actual accomplishments that Liberals took to waxing rhapsodic about his grasp of the Constitution.  

Got elected to the Senate! and Wrote two fantastic books about himself! might do it for Progressives, but the rest of the country needed some actual qualifications.  Obama was a 1st term Senator from Illinois who almost immediately began running for President.  Even when he was at the state level in the Illinois legislature it was hard to get a read on him because he voted 'Present' so often instead of casting a vote for or against something. 

So it was with relief that the Progressive Left was able to seize on this one, huge qualification that Obama had to hold the nation's highest office.  The qualification that would give Obama the ability to function in one of the most difficult, demanding jobs in the world was that....he spent several years lecturing on Constitutional law at the University of Chicago.  

After the reign of Evil Bush, who according to some missed no chance to shred the Constitution and trample it underfoot, who wouldn't welcome an Executive branch under the control of a man who would strictly adhere to the Constitutional limits on the Presidency? 

At least Bush, whatever excesses he performed in the course of his Presidential duties, was doing so in the prosecution of a War on Terror that was being fought to prevent further 9-11's and keep Americans safe.  

Obama's Constitutional overreaches have been almost totally in the interest of his domestic politics. In this latest slapdown by the Supreme Court, the Obama White House attempted to argue that it was the President's call as to whether Congress was in session or not.  

Short version: Obama was in a hurry to appoint three people to vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] in an attempt to block Boeing from opening up a manufacturing plant in South Carolina.  Obama was playing 100% union politics here.  He knew Congress was not going to approve his 3 appointees for that reason. So he declared Congress was in recess even though it wasn't, and made the appointments. This led to a lawsuit that the Supreme Court just made a ruling on. 

Team Obama's argument before the Supreme Court was - get this - that for over 226 years the President has had the power to declare Congress in session or not & Obama's just the first President to actually exercise it.

And the 0-9 ruling against Obama was: Nowhere in the Constitution does it say it's the President who decides if Congress is in session or not.  PS - go back to law school and pay attention this time.

Even justices appointed to the Court by Obama himself cannot find justification for the positions he's argued before them multiple times now.  When even the Court's most historically liberal justice - Ruth Bader Ginsburg - can't find a way to throw you a vote, you know your argument sucked.  

Why Ruth looks so uncomfortable: "Oh crap, here comes Obama with another lousy argument.

I hate my life."

While Liberals can find some comfort in advancing the claim most of the Obama administrations losses can be traced to 5-4 decisions where the Court's Conservative majority held sway, they have no such luxury for this plethora of 0-9 rulings. 

When he was running for President, if you actually studied what Obama had to say about the founding document of American government, a troubling picture emerged.  Time and again Obama would condescendingly pontificate about how the Founders got this or that wrong in setting up the American Constitutional system, about how that system was full of flaws.  He also stated repeatedly how frustrated he was that most of the flaws he saw had to do with the unfortunate LIMITATIONS ON GOVERNMENT POWERS.  

The more you studied him, the more a paradox emerged: A Constitutional scholar who seem fixated on what he saw as the Constitution's errors and mistakes. You rarely encountered him saying anything positive about it; instead he kept focusing on what needed 'changing'.  

So it didn't exactly take a genius to see where Obama would take the Presidency once he got ahold of it.  And so here we are, where for the 13th time in two years the Supreme Court has pretty much scoffed at this White House & said "Oh, really?!"

It's clear from the rhetoric he engaged in the day of this latest slapdown by the Court that Obama is fully planning to ignore Constitutional constraints.  He's now openly talking about 'borrowing' power from Congress to push amnesty through via executive order.  

It's pretty safe to assume that by the time he finally leaves the White House, Obama's unanimous rebukes from the Supreme Court will reach a high number at the rate he's going.

IRS That Spent $4.4 BILLION Of 

Taxpayer's Money On IT Claims 

To Have Suffered Over 

2,000 Hard Drive Crashes 

Just *This* Year Alone

"You can't prove anything. We've destroyed all the evidence!"

Sounds like something I made up?  Allow me to establish the facts: 

1.  The IRS got the $4.4 billion bucks in it's budget for IT spending: 

http://freebeacon.com/issues/irs-spent-4-4-billion-on-it/

That's just in the past 5 years under President Obama.  Under the years of George W. Bush's presidency, the agency spent $5.3 billion over 8 years.  If you're keeping score, that's $9.7 billion dollars spent on IT in a 13 year period from 2000 to 2013.

2. The IRS claimed to have suffered over 2,000 hard drive crashes in it's computers just this year alone: 

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-06-23/lois-lerner-s-hard-drive-takes-stage-as-issa-probes-irs


Yes, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen actually claimed to the Congressional committee that the IRS had suffered over 2,000 hard drive crashes just this year: 

Now I don't know about you, but if I took over a government agency, and it was brought to my attention that the agencies computers, on which important federal records are stored, were crashing at a rate of about 333 a month, I'd do something about that.  Like, say, make awful sure people were backing up and printing out those important federal records so as to follow the law regarding such things.  

This, apparently, was the only big IT decision made in the past six months at the IRS: 

IRS Cancels Contract With It's Email Backup Service

Absolutely, that's the first thing I'd do upon being made aware that my agency is beset with crashing computers: I'd cancel the contract of the firm that's backing up our emails n' stuff. 

Another fun fact from Koskinen's testimony this week: upon being asked who told him Lerner's emails were missing, he claimed not to remember.  Think of how unbelievable that is.  He got the job because the former head of the IRS had to step down when the scandal broke.  The investigation by Congress has been going on for over a year.  Now somebody comes into your office & tells you emails under subpoena have been destroyed in a hard drive crash.  I think I'd remember who dumped that huge problem into my lap.  Wouldn't you? 

Of course, the moment Koskinen 'remembers' who told him about the missing emails, that person is going to be subpoenaed to come testify.  Which explains why Koskinen is having memory problems.  

Whatever Problems The VA Had, Money Wasn't One Of Them:

VA Budget Nearly 

TRIPLED From 2000-2012

As usual when a scandal erupts involving a corrupt, incompetent government agency, the Lefty pushback is that the real problem is a lack of funding.  Everything would be just fine and dandy if only Agency X had gotten more taxpayers money to spend on it's services.  The answer is ALWAYS to make government bigger and more expensive and more powerful. Always.

This is certainly nothing new. Every single time it's pointed out how badly public schools are failing, Democrats dial up their tired excuse that things would be so much better if only we'd increase the funding for public education.  Like spending on public education hasn't tripled in this country since the 1970's.  And yes, that's adjusted for inflation.

When the Benghazi attack happened, the excuse ultimately proffered as to why a diplomatic post in a terrorist hot zone continued to have what little security it possessed stripped from it was that Congress cut the State Department's budget.  As if somehow it wouldn't have been up to the people running the State Department at the time to prioritize their now-reduced budget and eliminate things like $2.5 million to decorate embassies or a $16.5 million contract to buy Kindles [that was later scrapped only AFTER it became public and complaints were made].

Your State Dept. spent $1 million bucks to buy this rock. 

The fact is, as Sean Davis at the Federalist explains in the following chart, the VA's budget almost tripled from 2000 to 2012, going from $45 billion/yr to $124 billion. 

The real problem the VA has is the same problem that infects every government agency where public employee unions are allowed: full time workers devoting all their focus into how to get more of any new incoming money into the hands of their union members.

That's right. The VA had over 250 full time employees who spent all their days working on nothing but union business.

In total, the VA spent at least $13.77 million [in 2012] on 251 salaried employees performing full-time union work. Others, who were not included on the list provided by the VA, work part-time for unions at the taxpayer expense. In fiscal year 2011, the latest on record, the VA used 998,483 hours of this “official time,” costing taxpayers more than $42 million.

$13.77 million of your tax dollars went to pay for unionized gov't employees who devoted all their time to improving pay, benefits, bonuses, working conditions, & rules and regulations that favor union workers rather than doing anything to improve treatment of our sick veterans.

Unions exist to serve the needs of their union members. PERIOD. Full stop.  End of story.  Whether you're talking about a teacher's union, air traffic controllers or whatever, public employee unions exist to serve their members, NOT THE PUBLIC.  Teacher's unions don't exist to meet the needs of schoolchildren and the VA employee's union most manifestly DOES NOT do a single thing to meet the needs of our veterans.  Time and again I meet people engaging in confused thinking on this issue, as if teacher's unions are looking out for our kids in the public schools or the VA union spends some of it's time looking after veterans.  They don't.   

The VA scandal is really about career 'civil servants' gaming the system and mistreating our veterans with illegal secret waiting lists in order to protect their jobs and score bigger bonuses for themselves.  It's about MONEY, all right, just not in the way Democrats want the public to realize. 

Had the waiting lists remained accurate, it would have become evident how broken and backlogged the VA system was when getting medical treatment to the veterans who needed it.  So the VA employees decided to maintain two different lists: a public list that demonstrated how 'well' the VA system was working, and then a secret, accurate waiting list that reflected the real state of things. 

When the present system is broken, and yet your fortunes are tied to it, there will be a compulsion to cover up problems.  This is exactly what happened here. VA employees avoided all kinds of messy problems that would have forced changes by simply doing some deceptive bookkeeping.   If people got a true sense of how messed up things were at the VA, the present people in charge and working there might not get pay increases, promotions, advancement and so forth.  Better to sweep the sick veterans under the rug and keep the thing chugging along by putting up a facade that things were working splendidly.  

In fact, these corrupt bureaucrats did such a smashingly good job of faking how well the VA was working that Liberal pundits proffered the VA system as a sterling example of how awesomely awesome gov't run health care was going to be for the rest of us. 

The #1 job of any gov't employee union is: protecting it's members from any accountability.  America is about to get an infuriating education into just how well these unions have gamed the system over the past couple of decades.  

In NYC, the teacher's unions there created such a Byzantine system full of legal regulations and stalling tactics it's become a financial and time-consuming nightmare to fire a dangerous or incompetent teacher.  So the city's politicians have found it cheaper to continue to pay them to do....nothing while their cases drag on indefinitely.

That's right. NYC ends up paying hundreds of dangerous and incompetent teachers millions of dollars a year to sit around all day and play games and watch television.  Because the process of firing a teacher takes years and years to do.  Think I'm joking, that it couldn't possibly be that bad due to the way the teacher's unions have been allowed to set things up? 

I'm not.  

Many people expect heads to start rolling at the VA any minute now that Shinseki has resigned.  But they're in for a shock. Any VA employee found to have engaged in deception with these secret waiting lists who fights to keep their job is going to have a stunning array of legal and financial tools at their disposal, thanks to the union.  Anyone who's followed the long and frustrating stories of attempts to fire unionized government employees knows what's coming.  

Obama To America's Employers For The Past 3+ Years: Don't Worry About New Costs of ObamaCare; You'll Be Allowed To Put Your Workers Into The Exchanges! 

Obama Today: HA HA, YOU SUCKERS!

The I.R.S. today unveiled a new rule that bars employers from sending their employees into the exchanges to buy their own health insurance. 

I.R.S. Bars Employers From Dumping Employees Into Health Exchanges

WASHINGTON — Many employers had thought they could shift health costs to the government by sending their employees to a health insurance exchange with a tax-free contribution of cash to help pay premiums, but the Obama administration has squelched the idea in a new ruling. Such arrangements do not satisfy the health care law, the administration said, and employers may be subject to a tax penalty of $100 a day — or $36,500 a year — for each employee who goes into the individual marketplace.

The ruling this month, by the Internal Revenue Service, blocks any wholesale move by employers to dump employees into the exchanges.

Under a central provision of the health care law, larger employers are required to offer health coverage to full-time workers, or else the employers may be subject to penalties.

Well leave it to the NYT's to leave the REAL NEWS out of it's own story.  

"Many employers had thought they could shift health costs to the government by sending their employees to a health insurance exchange...." - note how the NYT's doesn't spend even one second on where America's employers might have gotten this idea from. 

How about...from the Obama Administration itself, which repeatedly claimed employers would be able to dump their workers into these exchanges for the past 3+ years?  For over 3 years this White House maintained an illusion that employers would have a choice.   Then they waited until the Memorial Day 3-Day weekend in May 2014 to drop this bombshell.  

The MSM has already shown how they are going to help this White House on this issue.  With the NYT's leading the way, they are just going to announce the bare facts & move on with no mention of over 3 years worth of broken promises.  

It's clear the Obama administration intended to do this all along if their argument is that allowing employers to shift workers into the exchanges doesn't 'satisfy the health care law'.  The brazen nerve of these people is infuriating.  They had THREE FREAKING YEARS to speak up about this.  They watched all the debate, the discussion, the numbers crunching, and never breathed a word about their intention to force employers to foot the entire bill. 

Let's see a show of hands. If this administration had told the TRUTH three years  ago and informed America's employers they wouldn't have any choice but to eat the new costs of the ACA themselves with no ability to move workers to the exchanges, who thinks the ACA passes? 

Obama, Sebelius, EVERYONE in this administration lied about EVERYTHING to do with this horrible law.  Can't keep your plan, can't keep your doctor, your new plan costs more, and now another lie bites the dust.  

This latest ObamaCare lie to be exposed will have far-reaching consequences.  Remember all those CBO figures on how many job losses the full ACA implementation would result in? All those figures presumed employers would be able to shift some of the new rising costs by moving workers into the exchanges.  Now that the IRS has barred them from doing that, all those CBO figures are going to have to be redone.  And the projected job losses will now be greatly increased over what was expected before. 

And remember: these pricks in the White House could have spoken up at any time over the past three years & informed the CBO & America's business class that, why, no, in fact they weren't going to allow businesses to send employees into the exchanges.  

It's becoming more clear than ever that EVERYTHING this White House ever said about the ACA is up for grabs.  You can't trust it on anything.  The ACA is whatever they say it is at any given moment.  This is not rule of law, this is exactly what Adam Baldwin said it is in a tweet today: 

"As the Secretary shall determine." - http://t.co/TIdLGSWXuM #ArbitraryRuleOfMen #Tyranny #ObamacareIsFascism
— Adam Baldwin (@AdamBaldwin) May 27, 2014

The *Real* Reason Hillary Clinton Didn't Designate Boko Haram As A Terrorist Group When She Had The Chance

When Boko Haram was killing hundreds of people in Nigeria the past few years, the mainstream media here in the West didn't really pay it much attention. You'd see a brief news article in the paper or some 200-300 word blurb on a news blog.

But now that this radical Islamic terrorist group has graduated from merely killing hundreds of people in their attacks to kidnapping hundreds of girls....the Western world is sitting up and taking real notice. When hashtags about something start trending on social media, you know that issue has hit the big time n' stuff.

Now I know how media works. I've been studying the media and it's biases for over 30 years. I'm not complaining about that. One white girl disappears on a Caribbean island = months of intense, non-stop media coverage. That's just the way things are. Dozens of black girls can disappear all across the fruited plain in America in that time & it doesn't create the slightest ripple in the national news. 

But it is important to understand the reasons as to why in the past few years Boko Haram slaughtering 100's of young boys in attacks on Christian schools didn't get this terrorist group the kind of attention it craved, but kidnapping & selling 100's of young girls into sex slavery did.

In more than a dozen countries worldwide radicalized Islamic terrorists have demonstrated a commitment to NOT living in peace with their neighbors. But attempting to discuss the world-wide issue of radicalized Islamist violence brings out the PC crowd in force with screams of "Islamophobia!", and so opportunity after opportunity to discuss the problem keeps being missed because people are afraid to broach the subject.

While there isn't a single country where a radicalized CHRISTIAN group is blowing up it's fellow citizens over their religion, in places like Yemen, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, Kenya and about 10 more I'm too lazy to list, radical Islamists are waging war on fellow citizens while repeatedly claiming they are engaged in a jihad of religious cleansing.

The smart Western PC thing to do, according to our Liberal so-called 'elite' class is to completely discount the stated reasons these terrorists give for their actions and instead understand the 'root causes' of all of this jihadic violence. Which they claim is usually poverty.

Perhaps the recent events of the past year shall lay to rest the false idea that groups like Boko Haram do what they do because of 'poverty', not their radical Islamist beliefs. When the Boko Haram leader tapes himself giving Islamic reasons for his sex slavery, good luck palming that off on poverty that you can fix with 'social justice'. There are plenty of poor regions in Africa where radicalized terror groups aren't kidnapping girls & selling them as sex slaves.

"I will sell them in the marketplace...!"

About the 50th time some Islamic terrorist radical screams out some religious justification for his violent acts and the local Liberal holds up a hand and confidently tells everyone "Ignore what he just claimed.....it's really just poverty, you know.", everyone's going to start realizing he's not 'explaining' anything - he's attempting to rationalize something away, which is a HUGE difference.

While the Left tries to process what Islamic terror groups like Boko Haram do based on convoluted ideas about 'poverty', the reality is radicalized Muslims in Nigeria are engaged in a religious war of eradication aimed at that country's Christian population.  These fanatics aren't burning down mosques or slaughtering young boys who are attending Islamic schools.  But don't hold your breath waiting for the MSM to point out the religious nature of this violence, how it's violent Muslims slaughtering peaceful Christians.  They haven't done that in Syria, Libya, Egypt or anywhere else, so why should they point it out in Nigeria? 

For the time she was in charge of our State Dept. Hillary deliberately refused to designate Boko Haram as a terrorist group despite being urged to do so several times. Why?

Her husband, Blow Job Bill, was forthright at the time about the true nature of the problem that Boko Haram presented:

Bill Clinton Insists Poverty Is The REAL Cause Of Boko Haram's Violent Terrorism

"Now an average person would look at Boko Haram & think religion is what motivates

all that slaughter.  Thank God you guys have me to tell you the *real* reason!"

For the same reason the Ft. Hood terrorist attack had to become 'workplace violence'. We have idiots in charge of our gov't determined to prove over and over again just how 'special' and 'sensitive' they are. And this is demonstrated by rejecting the common sense interpretation of events in favor of an interpretation that will manifest their awesome special insight.

Once you understand this, what motivates the way these people look at policy, a lot of the stupid, counterproductive crap they do will make sense. Policy pursued by Leftist ideologues like Obama & Clinton isn't about it 'working' or being 'practical'. It's all about THEM.

"I will demonstrate how special, elite and sensitive I am by implementing this policy that rejects hundreds of years worth of practical experience. Who cares if it WORKS or not?  I will have shown the world how SPECIAL I am!"

Thomas Sowell exposed this character trait of Liberals in his book "Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As Basis For Social Policy".

You think people like Obama, Hillary, Holder, etc. implement policy based on effectiveness, practical results, fixing problems? Nope. The only goal their policies really have is to confirm to them how special they are. That's it. It's about congratulating THEMSELVES.

This is why any NORMAL, practical, non-ideological person looking at Boko Haram goes 'Yep, that's a radical Islamic terror group' but.....a Hillary Clinton looks at that same group as an opportunity to implement policy that shows how SPECIAL she is.

"Why, this isn't a TERRORIST GROUP! This is obviously a result of poverty that social justice policy will fix! Only *I* could see that!"

"I'm so awesome, sometimes I even amaze myself!"

Yes folks, these are the kind of people running the country for the past 6 years. Every problem is reduced to just being a chance to show how special they are.

Conservatives, at their heart, are utilitarians. "Is it going to WORK?   Will it be BETTER or will it make the problem WORSE? Compared to WHAT? Who pays for this?"

Progressives don't think this way. Their lofty ideology DEMANDS only 1 course of action. How can they prove their specialness if they don't take it? And it's no accident that the course of action they take is often a direct rejection of what experience and practicality would demand. Because doing the practical thing that experience demands, why, that's how 'average, ordinary' people would solve that problem, you know. They're NOT average OR ordinary! Stand back, peasants....and watch them AMAZE you!

This leads to Progressives actually hiding from reality. They are so wrapped up in themselves they can't deal with real world problems. This is why on foreign policy the Obama administration is one long story of shocked surprise and missed opportunities when the world out there won't conform to their anointed vision.

This is also why ObamaCare turned out to be a flaming trainwreck. Just PASSING it proved they were special. The heavy lifting of crafting a new gargantuan centrally planned bureaucracy that would successfully implement something that freaking large and complicated? There's no fun in that!

ObamaCare was about Progressive self-congratulation. They proved they cared! They showed they were special! So WHAT if it never even comes close to achieving all the results they claimed that it would?!  Looking at the dismal results just gets in the way of basking in the glow of their own self-congratulation. 

How frightening is it to realize the people making the important policy decisions on the issues & dangers we face make them based on THIS?

"How is this policy issue going to help me demonstrate how special, out of the ordinary, and sensitive I am?"

 That's it. That's the basis.

On foreign policy, on domestic policy, the economy, jobs, you name it, this is the motivation these 'elites' are functioning under.

"How will this issue allow me to prove how racially sensitive I am? How much I care about the poor?" - Hillary looking at the Islamic TERRORIST GROUP Boko Haram just two years ago.

Hillary 2 years ago: Proving how special she was by spotting that poverty was root cause of Boko Haram, while all the people who weren't as smart or perceptive as she was were ignorantly demanding it be designated a terrorist group.

Hillary today: Proving how much more she cares & is special by standing up for 'our girls' and demanding Boko Haram 'bring them back'.

See how it works? Two years ago Hillary was special for not declaring Boko Haram a terror group. Today Hillary is special for caring about those poor kidnapped girls more than you do.

I actually feel kinda sorry for John Kerry right now. If Clinton had done the 'ordinary' thing 2 years ago instead of trying to prove how special she was, we'd be further along in stopping Boko Haram at this point.

"How come *I* had to play 'Captain Obvious' & declare these guys a terrorist group?"

Their compulsion to self-congratulation leads to incredibly bad policy and then attempts to cover over the results of those bad policies.  This might work for a year or two, especially with the help of a complicit mainstream media.  But history will take the long view, and it's going to be most unkind to an administration that was full of people determined to spend 8 long years proving how special they were at the expense of the country they were supposed to be leading.  

UPDATE:  OK, not sorry for John Kerry after all.  Just this Wednesday, our current Secretary of State trotted out the 'poverty' excuse for Boko Haram.  The 'smart power' set will apparently STILL go to any lengths necessary to say religion isn't the cause of this. 

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/patrick-goodenough/boko-haram-recruitment-kerry-blames-poverty

UPDATE II: And now Sen. David Vitter of the Senate Armed Services Committee is saying he has proof that Hillary's State Department broke the law and  deliberately mislead Congress about Boko Haram so they could avoid having to call it a terrorist group: 

http://freebeacon.com/national-security/senator-clinton-state-dept-broke-law-lied-about-boko-haram-terror-threat/

Sen. David Vitter (R., La.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, petitioned Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday to explain why Clinton’s State Department misrepresented and downplayed key informationabout Boko Haram’s terrorist activities in its annual reports to Congress.  

Former Secretary of State Clinton lied to Congress when she said that the State Department lacked the necessary information to designate Boko Haram as a terror group, according to Vitter’s letter, which presents new information about the State Department’s purported efforts to downplay the terror group’s impact.  

Clinton’s State Department fought against efforts to designate Boko Haram for nearly two years, a move that likely limited U.S. efforts to confront the group earlier and allowed it to grow in strength.

Vitter charges that officials working under Clinton intentionally manipulated words and mislead Congress in its annual reports to create the impression that Boko Haram posed little to no threat.

Clinton’s State Department “repeatedly stated in the year leading up to the designation that it did not have data available or the necessary understanding to make the determination,” Vitter wrote to Kerry, according to a copy of unreleased letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. 

However, “recent evidence suggests Secretary Hillary Clinton and the State Departments not only knew of the extent, but also deliberately attempted to obfuscate the issue in order to avoid having to make the designation of Boko Haram as a [Foreign Terrorist Organization], including downplaying the State Department’s own Country Reports on Terrorism (CRT),” Vitter writes.

It's more clear than ever why this woman must NEVER become President.  She doesn't possess the judgement for the job. 

Were The American Founding Fathers REALLY A Bunch Of Evil Hypocrites? 

Allow me to now discuss 1 of my biggest pet peeves with the Anti-American Left. "The Founding Fathers were hypocrites!"

I'm sure you've all heard this one: "Nice going, American Founding Fathers! Said all men were created equal & then DIDN'T LIVE UP TO IT!  These guys didn't really believe all men were created equal! They owned slaves! They didn't let women vote! Child labor!"

For a sterling example of this kind of accusation leveled at America's founders, take a look at this book review that appeared in the New York Times: 

THE founding fathers were paranoid hypocrites and ungrateful malcontents. What was their cherished Declaration of Independence but empty political posturing?......

The revolutionaries complained about a lack of representation in Parliament, but in this they were no different from the majority of Englishmen. What was more, the God-given or nature-given rights they claimed for themselves included the right to hold Africans in bondage. Edward Gibbon, who knew something about the ups and downs of history, opposed the rebels from the House of Commons. Samuel Johnson called them ''a race of convicts'' who ''ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.''

Observed from across the Atlantic, the story of the Revolution looks very different from the one every American child grows up with. To see that story through British eyes, as Stanley Weintraub's ''Iron Tears: America's Battle for Freedom, Britain's Quagmire: 1775-1783'' enables us to do, is to see an all-too-familiar tale reinvigorated. Weintraub reminds us that justice did not necessarily reside with the rebels, that the past can always be viewed from multiple perspectives. And he confronts us with the fact that an American triumph was anything but inevitable. History of course belongs to the victors. If Britain's generals had been more enterprising, if the French had failed to supply vital military and financial assistance, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and the rest would be known to us not as political and philosophical giants but as reckless (and hanged) losers, supporting players in a single act of Britain's imperial drama. We would all be Canadians now, with lower prescription drug costs and an inordinate fondness for winter sports.

In 1776, name ONE COUNTRY that declared all people were equal whether they fully lived up to it or not.

In fact, I'm gonna make this even easier for the anti-American critics: name just ONE  country in 1776 where all WHITE men were considered equal.  That's right; just the white men.

Look at the colonial powers of Europe at the time.  After all, the defects of America at it's founding that it's critics love to talk about, where did they come from? Is it not true that Americans weren't doing anything differently from the European cousins from whom they descended?  What is the idea here? That somehow American treatment of other races & women was somehow worse than what the British, the French, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Italians, the Dutch, and the Belgians were dishing out at home and in their colonies abroad?

Note how the author of the book the NYT's reviewer is writing about in that quote above brushes aside the main point of the Declaration of Independence, where he claims the American colonists shouldn't have gotten their panties in a bunch over being treated as inferiors by the English ruling nobility.  Why, even many Englishmen didn't have real representation in Parliament!  Do you see them complaining about their lower station? Why couldn't Americans have that kind of good breeding, eh wot?! 

In fact the entire impetus for the American Revolution was the belief of the British noble class that Americans were inferior to them just like all their other colonial subjects and had no rights unless their betters granted them some.  The English nobility may not have viewed white Americans as lower than their subjects in India, but their conduct made it abundantly clear they did not view Americans as their equals.  

So while the English peasant class in England may well have accepted their lot in life, those upstart Americans across the pond were no longer willing to be ruled over by people who made a false claim to being special and above others.  

The American Founding Fathers created a new form of government dedicated to the PROPOSITION that all men are created equal. Therefore, there IS no 'special ruling class', there is no 'special something' that a noble class has that other people don't that gives them a right to lord it over others.  The authority to govern should come from the consent of the governed, not because some class of arrogant elites made false claims about itself.  

And so the American founders made it crystal clear why the time had come to cast off their connections to the British monarchy.  All men are created equal, therefore the British king can't treat us like this, and so we can legitimately break our bonds with England and form our own government based on the proposition of this equality.  

And the Founder's  critics LOVE to point out that these same men didn't immediately live in total accordance with this proposition from the very beginning.

But this overlooks the crucial point that you have to start SOMEWHERE. And where they started was: equality between WHITE MEN.

There was no country in the world that had set up it's government where all the white men were considered equal under the law.  In Europe, a white peasant could no more sue a noble for redress in court than a black man could.  It is completely overlooked that nowhere in the world at the time were white men considered equal to one another. The divine right of kings, the noble class, these things separated the white  rulers from the white  ruled.

There are still PLENTY of places in the world where equality between people is a foreign concept.

Dedicating their new government to a radical proposition that all humans were equal, the founders threw away over 1000 yrs of social compact and began a process of slow change to live up to it.  There is only so much radical change you can make at the start & today, living in a system where it's a GIVEN that all whites are equal, the critics completely overlook the radical BEGINNINGS of the Great American Experiment in Freedom.

When you study America, you are studying a people who began with a radical proposition & slowly began attempting to live it out.

You can call the American founders hypocrites, but in doing so you underscore their point: just how radical the proposition of equality was.  Nobody in the ENTIRE WORLD could live up to this in 1776.  The changes this proposition demanded was so radical, the chances of your being able to live up to it was nil.

And yet the Founders went ahead and established this radical proposition about equality anyway, knowing full well slavery and the status of women made them hypocrites in the eyes of history.  Radical change in relations between whites would have to come FIRST & be worked out before other huge societal changes could be addressed.

Picture a whole world lost in a dark pit.  Suddenly, in one country, someone sees a light.  It's way up there, at a great distance.  The light reveals to these people just how evil they are, how far short they come, and how high they would have to climb to cease being evil.  

What, I ask you, should they do? Should they resolve among themselves to begin climbing upwards to the light, slowly, painfully, realizing the crushing burden of just how much about themselves they are going to have to change? Or should they snuff the light out and remain where they are, cursing the darkness?  

If such a people decided to climb upwards to the light, would you criticize them for it? Mock them? Ridicule them?  Make light of their struggle?  Call them hypocrites for not being able to leap mightily from that deep pit in a single bound? 

What is the argument of the critics? Unless you can completely live up to such a radical ideal from the very start, and almost instantly reorder your entire society from the top down, HOW DARE YOU MAKE SUCH A RADICAL PROPOSITION!? 

Who do you Founding Fathers think you are, you buncha rotten hypocrites!

Unable to radically alter their own society all at once from the start, should they have just abstained from making this proposition?  Dismissed the idea altogether? 

A proposition, let us remember, that NOBODY else in the world at the time was even thinking about living under, much less implementing?

Leave us remember, by dedicating their new government to this radical proposition, they were making a START.  People who claim the process of living up to the ideal should have reached  it's END at the same time the proposition was being introduced are speaking nonsense. 

Again: you have to START the process of radical implementation of your radical ideal somewhere. So the process of radical societal change/upheaval didn't happen all at once? How could it have?  What exactly are the critics demanding here? 

They BARELY got the Constitution passed as it was. It took years of argument and debate.  Just the START of the process, the fact they actually got it underway could be considered a miracle. 

B-b-but IRRELEVANT! They should have reformed their entire society perfectly from the start if they really believed it, say the critics.  

Even as they established & started working out equality under law between whites, the Founders weren't blind to the slavery issue. It's not like they didn't know the issue of slavery was going to have to be dealt with sooner or later, if 'created equal' was to last.

And there WERE founders who pressed on that issue for abolition from the very beginning. But the fact was, the Southern colonies rejected these overtures.  The choice was forgoing the new Constitutional government altogether or going forward while carving out an exception for slavery.  To move forward on the radical idea of total white equality, with the PROMISE of future expansion to include others groups,  they actually had to accept inaction on slavery at the start. This is the sort of compromise politics necessitates.  To accomplish some good, you have to accept some trade offs.  The alternative is to scrap the whole thing and get nothing. 

But let's engage in a thought experiment here, shall we?  What if the anti-American critics had gotten their way?  What if the Founders had purposed to radically transform their society right at the beginning in 1780's by not only having equality between whites but also going on to immediately ratify equality with blacks & women?  Would this not have torn the society apart? Yes or no?   Think carefully before you answer.  Is what the critics demand even possible for the Founders to have done?  Could the newly minted Federal Government from Washington have by passing immediate laws forced all the states to radically alter what their citizens believed, how they lived, and how they interacted with one another? 

And assuming the answer to that question is yes, what do you supposed the result would have been? 

I am here pointing out the fact that those who believe such fast transformation could have been achieved don't grasp what they're  demanding of these men.  A new Constitutional form of federal government that from it's infancy attempted to make such radical changes on slavery & women's sufferage  to American society from the top down by force would have failed.  Is that not self-evidently true? Does it even need to be argued?  

Watching 'Lincoln' the other day, it was brought home even more powerfully, how slowly such radical changes come to a society. It is easy to say, "This is our ideal, this is the proposition upon which we base our government' and our society here in America'.  Living that out however becomes a herculean task.

It took 70 years and a bloody Civil War for the great moral evil of slavery to be eradicated from the United States. When America finally had it out over slavery, whether this country ever would live up to it's claim about equality, it was a huge bloodbath.  But hey, who cares? The Founders totally should have taken care of all this back in the 1780's by passing a few laws, right? 

Over 7,000 Americans fell in 20 minutes at Cold Harbor on June 3rd, 1864

And when the time came to consider the status of women, that change wasn't overnight either. It took years of dedicated struggle.

Societies change slowly, if at all, when it comes to their basic makeup. A group of men in Washington can say whatever they want, pass whatever laws they want.  The country has to be READY to live up to any such laws for them to mean anything.  You have to prepare the ground and wait for the time to be right.
  
The Founders understood this. You have to prepare the ground for radical change, you just can't spring it on a people all at once by fiat.  People who constantly criticized Lincoln for moving too slowly against slavery also miss this fact.  The time was barely right for the passage of the 13th Amendment ending slavery in the United States, and as the film 'Lincoln' depicts, it took all kinds of shenanigans to pull it off.  

So people who berate Lincoln and others for not having accomplished this grand work years earlier are missing a vital point.  

Were the Founding Fathers hypocrites because they couldn't force all of America to live out this proposition on equality from the very beginning?   I say no.  Had our Founders demanded an end to slavery, and given women the vote in the 1780's, the country would have torn itself apart in a great societal upheaval. Any European country that had attempted such a feat would have likewise utterly failed.  There's an assumption here by the critics that such fast societal change was even possible. Was it really?  There is a good case to be made that it wasn't.

I hope I've given you some food for thought. America's history is one long, hard struggle to live out that great proposition, sharing it with the world.  

Better to dedicate yourself to the radical proposition, strive for it and fall short at first, than to never claim such a lofty ideal in the first place.  That's my view.

Learning To Counter The Progressive Left's Constant Use Of OUTRAGE STATEMENTS™

I should like now to discuss the constant use of OUTRAGE STATEMENTS™ by the Left in place of actual argument over public policy.

If you've debated political issues with Progressives for any amount of time, you've no doubt encountered the use of OUTRAGE STATEMENTS™

Take the issue of ObamaCare. Remember during the years ObamaCare was debated, how many times Progressives said the following:

OUTRAGE STATEMENT™ #1: "Why do you HATE sick people and want them to die??!!!"

OUTRAGE STATEMENT™ #2:  "Why don't you want to do anything to fix the health care problem? What's WRONG with you? Why don' t you CARE?!"

OUTRAGE STATEMENT™ #3: "How DARE you keep lying about what ObamaCare will do! No one will lose their health insurance plans or their doctors, you creepy lying liar!"

Starting to remember, aren't you? Probably because the Left is still making OUTRAGE STATEMENTS™ in defense of ObamaCare right now. 

Want another example of use of outrage statements in place of an actual argument? How about Texas rolling back it's abortion limit last year.

One one side, you had people making an actual ARGUMENT:

1) Roe vs. Wade established viability as litmus test for State acting on human life.  

2) Preemies born at 26 weeks were now being saved at a GREATER than 93% rate as of 2000. 

3) Decades ago when the 26 week legal abortion limit was set, 26 weeks was FAR from viable.  Today it's not.

4)  Therefore, it was time for the law to RECOGNIZE the change in viability and roll back the legal limit from 6 1/2 months to 5 months. That's changing the legal limit for an abortion from 26 weeks [6 1/2 months] to 20 weeks [5 months] for those of you in Rio Linda.

Now notice what I just did there. I made an actual argument.  I used 4 points to build a case for the state of Texas to act.  How did many on the Left respond to Governor Rick Perry and others who made that 4 point argument?

Do any of the following OUTRAGE STATEMENTS™ sound familiar?

OUTRAGE STATEMENT #1: Why do you HATE women?!

OUTRAGE STATEMENT #2:  How DARE you try to interfere with women's control of their bodies!

OUTRAGE STATEMENT #3: Admit it! You want women back in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant, don't you, you misogynist bastards!

Now, as my good friend Tom Doran just pointed out to me on Twitter, it's true there are people on the Right who use their own OUTRAGE STATEMENTS™.  This is true. Instead of making a good case for rolling back the legal limit, you CAN just scream "HOW DARE U KILL BABIES!" at people. 

But the problem I am addressing here is people knowing they have to make a difficult case like say, keeping abortion legal at 26 weeks. Or they have to try to defend a law where they made all kinds of BS promises to get it passed & now it's blown up in their faces. It's HARD to do. 

So many don't even try, opting instead to just go the OUTRAGE STATEMENT™ route. Because defense is hard. Especially when you know you're trying to defend the indefensible. 

All during that big controversy over the new Texas law last year, I saw precious few trying to build a true COUNTER-argument for 26 weeks. And right now, following Harry Reid's lead, the big strategy on defending ObamaCare seems to be a blanket denial of the bad results.

Charles C. W. Cooke  pointed out in recent column how Dem's strategy seems to be following Monty Python's 'Argument Clinic' skit.

This isn't making a counter argument, this is just contradicting and throwing out OUTRAGE STATEMENTS™. 

Another example of attempts to use OUTRAGE STATEMENTS™ to silence and misdirect important discussion on a public issue? How about this one.  Now that Paul Ryan is daring to address what 50 yrs of Progressive social welfare policy has done to the black family, what is the response?

OUTRAGE STATEMENT #1: "Hey Paul Ryan...why do you HATE black people?  

OUTRAGE STATEMENT #2: "You only talk about this due to your RACISM!"

Obviously social policies directed at black community that achieved these 'spectacular' results cannot be laid at the feet of Conservatives. There isn't much of a defense that can be made.  Like scalded puppies, the Progressive Left can only react with immediate, strong OUTRAGE STATEMENTS™ to try to shut Ryan up.

When following a debate on social issues and public policy, it helps to recognize which side builds a case & which one resorts to outrage. When your policies place you in position of having to defend the indefensible, the louder you yell out your OUTRAGE STATEMENTS the better.

I've just explained to you the true purpose of just about every host on MSNBC, BTW.  You're welcome.

Yep. Think about it.

You can be OUTRAGED all you want, folks. But when it's time to make a case for the actual policies you want to enact or defend, stop it. You can't build public policy or agitate for change just based on the outrage you feel. You have to have an actual argument. Running around all the time screaming about how outraged you are may make you FEEL good, but it's not an agenda for fixing problems and addressing important issues.

You want to keep abortion legal up to 26 weeks or even beyond? MAKE AN ACTUAL ARGUMENT then. Stop the constant misdirection & man up.

You want to defend ObamaCare? Quit issuing blanket denials & insisting 'nobody' has lost plans/Dr.'s due to the new law you passed.

Want to defend what 40 yrs of welfare policy did to the black family in America? Quit screaming 'Racist!' at people who address it.

Conservatives often advance an actual case for policies. In response they get a series of 'When are you gonna stop beating your wife?!' outrage.

How about this one? I want to stop over 1 million illegal immigrants from coming into America every year by closing the borders. WHY would I like to do that?  Simple:

I want unemployment to go down & I'd like wages to rise.

And every year we let in over a million low skilled illegal immigrants, we'll get a glut in the labor market, high unemployment, low wages.

But guess what? You AREN'T ALLOWED to discuss the actual impact of insane Open Borders immigration policies. If you try to discuss what Open Borders does to our employment rate & wages here in America, guess what that makes you?

OUTRAGE STATEMENT™ #1: Why do you HATE poor immigrants!

OUTRAGE STATEMENT #2: How DARE you want poor immigrants to die in the desert!

How about Global Warming? Question the science?
HOW DARE YOU! WHY DO YOU HATE THE FLUFFY POLAR BEARS & WANT THEM TO DIEEEEE!

'We shouldn't force Catholics to violate their 1st Amendment rights."
"WHY DO YOU HATE WOMEN? WTF IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?! "

How about one of the best examples in decades? How about the TrayVon Martin case? 

Remember how that case was introduced to the public, the false narrative that was relentlessly pushed in media? A hulking huge white racist jumped out of a car, ran down, tackled, beat the sh*t out of, then cold bloodedly executed a tiny black child?

Remember how the Left responded with scads of OUTRAGEOUS OUTRAGE!!!11!!! if you er....QUESTIONED that narrative? Even a little bit?

WHY DO YOU HATE BLACK PEOPLE??!!!

YOU'RE IN FAVOR OF WHITE RACISTS SHOOTING UNARMED BLACK KIDS,HUH?!

YOU'RE KKK, RIGHT? ADMIT IT!

And what do we know NOW that all the facts came out of the trial? A Hispanic guy was getting his ass beat for over 90 seconds.

At first they couldn't admit Trayvon was over 6 ft tall, which is why you only saw pics of him as a 12 yr old.

 Then they couldn't admit there had been an actual fight. They needed it to be Trayvon screaming, crying, wailing for help on the 911 audio. In fact, as was shown at trial, that's George Zimmerman wailing & screaming and crying for help for over a minute & 1/2 as Martin beats him up.

The TrayVon Martin case is THE best example of how the LEFT use OUTRAGE STATEMENTS™ to try to save a false & failing narrative. Every single step along the way as the facts started to come out they screamed and wailed and cried their outrage about it.

They wanted a racial narrative in which a white racist chased down then murdered a helpless black child as he screamed for help. The Left fought for over 2 years to save that narrative as the facts slowly came out.  They savagely attacked people who told the truth. And in the end.....THEY LOST.   

But don't worry, they'll do it again when the opportunity comes around once more. Some case where they can hide facts to make it 'fit' the story they want to tell. 

No matter what issue is - learn to spot the constant use of OUTRAGE STATEMENTS™ instead of argument. On abortion, global warming, immigration, ObamaCare, the latest media-driven false narrative, whatever the Progressive cause du jour of the month is.