One night last week, I read this piece by Ann Barnhardt aloud to my radio program listeners. Ann thoughtfully wrote me a thank you note after the show for doing so. (You’re welcome, Ann.) It needed to be shared. It still does. So tonight, I’m posting it here (because Ann doesn’t have a permalink capability at her website that I can point you to, and eventually it will roll off her page.)
There Must Be A Reckoning (Part 1)
Posted by Ann Barnhardt – September 21, AD 2011 10:13 AM MST
The Obama regime has brought the entire planet to critical mass. A triangular imploding collapse appears imminent on the financial front as Keynesian theory coupled with the Cloward-Piven strategy enter their final destructive phase; the military front as Obama’s reformed islamic Caliphate prepares to finish what Hitler started and undo the victories of Charles Martel at Tours and King Jan Sobieski at Vienna; and the cultural front as marriage has been all but destroyed, sodomy is celebrated, and pedophilia is fast-tracked for normalization and decriminalization.
In the midst of this, Obama the man-myth is also imploding. Democrats and the leftist media, including the editorial page of the Chicago Tribune, are now openly calling for Obama to NOT run for re-election in 2012. On the right there are calls for impeachment, but mostly for Obama’s sound defeat in November 2012. Most people are in total agreement that Obama should be retired to Hawaii, one way or another, no later than January 20, 2013. And that is a huge problem.
No society can survive without a firm foundation of justice upon which to anchor itself. Without a foundation of justice, there can be no law, or rule of law. Without the Rule of Law, power and freedom become pure functions of brute force, and morality, societal integrity, financial integrity and true charity, which is to say LOVE in all its forms and contexts, die swift deaths. As Obama’s Manufacturing Czar, Ron Bloom said:
“Generally speaking, we get the joke. We know that the free market is nonsense. We know that the whole point is to game the system, to beat the market, or at least find someone who will pay you a lot of money ‘cause they’re convinced that there is a free lunch. We know this is largely about power, that it’s an adults-only no-limit game. We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun. And we get it, that if you want a friend, you should get a dog.”– Ron Bloom, Keynote address at the 6th Annual Distressed Investing Forum, Union League Club, New York, February 27-28, 2008.
In light of Operation Fast & Furious, the Solyndra scam and the recently-exposed LightSquared attempted subornation of perjury, along with the seeming attempts to bait a full-blown race and class civil war by the Obama regime, I am hard-pressed to think of another collection of 96 words that contain the essence of an entire philosophy with such brutal succinctness and terrifying clarity.
We now see that Bloom meant every word literally. The Obama regime has done nothing but game the system in a quest for personal power and wealth. We now know that they view the entire world’s economy and stability as a no-limit game, wherein the chips are in denominations of billions and trillions of dollars and billions of human lives, that they view as theirs for the taking. The Obama regime is nothing if not power hungry, is ramping up rhetoric with an eye towards inciting widespread violence, and perhaps hot war both at home and abroad, and is seemingly devoid of human empathy. For a dog to befriend these people would be a massive condescension on the part of the dog.
In short, these people, with Barack Obama first among them, are arch-criminals. Obama himself is one of the greatest criminals in all of human history. He has illegally usurped the single most powerful office on the planet. He has illegally and fraudulently insinuated himself into the office of Chief Executive of the largest, most powerful economy in all of human history by orders of magnitude, an economy so large and so powerful that its inevitable collapse will affect nearly every person on the planet in a tangibly negative way. He has also criminally commandeered the most powerful military force the world has ever known – also by orders of magnitude. He has hijacked a military arsenal that has the capacity to kill most of the people on this planet. He has also used his criminally-acquired power to destabilize an entire region and culture and foment what will probably become the first truly nuclear world war, centered on Israel and Iran, in which the death toll will be ultimately counted in the hundreds of millions. The scope of this crime is so large that it is difficult for the human mind to grasp it.
We are now firmly in the domain of the Stalin Principle. Josef Stalin famously said, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” Obama, and the entire political class in Washington, and really, our entire culture collectively, now obviously determine the moral licitness of an activity solely by its scale. Once a crime surpasses a certain level in terms of scale, it ceases to be constrained by ANY moral matrix.
What’s that, you say? A non-state, non-uniformed enemy belligerent has overthrown the Executive branch and is systematically dismantling our Constitutional Republic? Well, there’s really nothing we can do about that until November of 2012. What, what? A cadre of Marxists is actively debasing the U.S. dollar and consciously imploding the economy via suicidal spending, money printing and outright looting of the United States Treasury? Well, we’ll just have to wait it out and hope that everything turns out for the best. How now? These same Marxists are actively facilitating the reforming of the Islamic Caliphate and setting up the destruction of Israel and the Muslim conquering of Europe? Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
This apathy and moral impotence is why our nation is crumbling before our very eyes. This is why Western Civilization is imploding. There is no justice, or even a THIRST for justice. In terms of Obama, the worst consequence anyone can bring themselves to discuss is impeachment. Impeachment would be a disaster, because it would unjustly confer legitimacy and Presidential status upon Obama when he is, in fact, NOT the President. Impeachment is the constitutional remedy for removing a legally seated, legitimate President. Obama is neither. But the impeachment proceeding itself, because it would be executed by the House, Senate and Supreme Court, would give Obama a legal “stamp of approval” that he MUST NEVER be given.
There Must Be A Reckoning (Part 2)
Further, the Senate would be charged with voting to convict, and we all know that the moral cowards and outright criminals that now populate the legislative branch would never, ever vote to convict – no matter what the evidence. But let’s assume just for a moment that the Senate DID vote to convict. What would be the consequence to Obama? He would retire either to Hawaii or somewhere in the Middle East to live a life of extravagant wealth, of lazy days filled with ESPN, hard drug use and homosexual sex. This is exactly the same result that would come from Obama’s defeat in the 2012 election, or Obama’s decision to not seek re-election, OR Obama’s decision to resign at noon tomorrow. We can no longer permit arch-criminals to evade justice. We MUST shatter the Stalin Principle if we expect our nation to survive. Barack Obama MUST be arrested, tried as a non-state, non-uniformed enemy belligerent, convicted and punished accordingly for his crime. The MINIMUM punishment possible is a life sentence at the super-max federal prison in Florence, Colorado. Again, this is the MINIMUM acceptable punishment for one of the greatest crimes in human history.
I am currently reading a book that should be read by every person now reading this essay. It is called “The Death of Christian Culture” by Dr. John Senior. Penned in 1978, it reads like an exegesis of current events. If you think that “Atlas Shrugged” is a prophetic read, you will be physically and emotionally shaken by “The Death of Christian Culture”. One of the key concepts covered by Dr. Senior is in chapter 7, “To Each His Own”. Beginning on page 108 comes one of the most pristine and refined discussions of the concept of justice that I have ever read. Please indulge me as I now blockquote Dr. Senior. The emphases are mine.
Justice is simply the social good, and it must therefore be done. It is defined as “giving each his due” – cuique sum, “to each his own.” A man is due his life because he is a living thing; it is his nature to have life; and, since it is also his nature to be moral, if a man commits a crime, he must be punished because punishment is retributive – punishment is the penalty due the criminal in justice to him. Proportioned punishment is due him, too, and you cannot deny him that right without yourself committing an injustice against him deserving punishment in turn. The judge who fails the criminal in punishment himself incurs a greater guilt.
Because we as a nation and as a culture have failed for over 50 years to properly apply justice to the criminals among us, we have committed crimes against the criminals themselves, our neighbors, ourselves and God. And for that, we are now being collectively punished. Justice will be done. When Ted Kennedy was permitted to murder Mary Jo Kopechne in 1969 with no punishment whatsoever, Kopechne’s blood was spread from the hands of Kennedy alone to the hands of the entire nation. The same can be said for the blood of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. The same can be said for the crimes of Bill Clinton. In failing to punish Clinton, the matter simply didn’t “go away”. The entire nation is now reaping the whirlwind of allowing Bill Clinton to lie under oath without consequence, and fifty solid years of similar failures in millions of cases, not the least of which are the trillions of dollars stolen by “banksters” and other white-collar criminals to date and the 45 million victims (and counting) of the American abortion holocaust. No justice, no society.
There is another justification for punishment besides retribution. Pain and deprivation are medicinal. They hurt so much that the criminal can learn that crime does not pay – or at least that the victims pay back. If you want to teach the prisoner a trade or put him to useful work, well and good; but those things are secondary and must never interfere with the first and proper use of punishment, which is the restoration of the equality of justice not only in society but in the person of the criminal. A person who commits a crime has indulged his will against reason; a disequilibrium has been established in his soul, as Plato says, which can only be righted by retributive exercise of reason against his will. The greatest evil in the world is to do wrong without being punished.
Let us make the assumption for a moment that Ted Kennedy is in hell. It is impossible to know as Christ’s Mercy is infinite and Kennedy MAY have repented of his life of grave sin before his death. If Kennedy is in fact in heaven, he will not mind us using him as an instructive hypothetical example. In fact, he will delight and rejoice in it. If Ted Kennedy is in hell, a massive contributive dynamic to his failure to repent will have been the fact that we, his neighbors, his brothers, failed to punish him and see justice done upon him. Because Kennedy was never made to feel any pain or retributive justice for murdering Mary Jo Kopechne, he was never deeply confronted with his sin, or the fear of what the consequences would be for his immortal soul in the next life – because there were zero consequences in THIS life. In fact, it made him bolder in his sin. If Ted Kennedy is in hell, we are partially complicit in his being there, and justice will be meted out upon US for our failure in charity towards him.
Exactly the same dynamic is in play for Barack Obama. If we surrender Obama to a life of ill-gotten luxury and continued depravity, we will not only be clearing the path and scattering the rose petals for the next arch-criminal, we will also be failing Obama PERSONALLY. This is the truth of Christian Charity, which has exactly nothing to do with being “nice”. Real Charity is ferocious, fecund and awesome in its vigor and persistence. Real Charity does not impotently shrug its shoulders and turn its back and walk away. Ever. Real Charity never says, “Ah, screw him.” Real Charity says, “Let justice be done upon him.”
They object to punishment itself; and that is because they deny the existence of justice; and that is because they deny that man is free, that man is responsible for his acts. Crime, they say, is sickness. It must be cured, or better, prevented by prophylaxis of the spirit, by the extermination of free will altogether so that men will react like Pavlov’s dogs to sensitivity training and even to psychosurgery and drugs . . . . They say crime is illness. Now if that were true, there could be no moral act whatsoever. If man is not free to choose evil, he is not free to choose good . . . . Everyone must remember the story of the murderer who said in court: “You can’t blame me, it was my heredity and environment that caused me to kill” and the judge who replied, “It is my heredity and environment that sentences you to hang by the neck until dead.”
Those words were written by John Senior in 1978. As we watch the arch-criminal, Barack Obama bait a race war, with himself as the poster child in order to retain and advance his own power, and to evade the justice that is due him, remember that the total absence of justice can only lead to the total absence of freedom.
Barack Obama and all of those those complicit in his myriad crimes against the United States and humanity must be arrested, tried and punished as criminals in proper proportion to the enormous scale of their crimes. This isn’t about vengeance. It is about justice.
It is a reckoning.