Headlining the Monday edition, two phenomenally fantastic commentaries from Red State‘s, Erick Erickson courtesy of Townhall.com, and George Weigel writing at NRO. First, Erickson suggests…
“…The War on Poverty in the United States has done vastly more damage than good. It has created a culture of entitlement and dependency. It has aided the collapse of the American family. It has been deeply destructive in black homes.We have spent trillions of dollars($22 trillion to be exact!) to subsidize the poor, not elevate people out of poverty.
Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you.” Well-meaning Americans have too often interpreted that to mean the same poor people will always be poor. Consequently, American policies have been shaped to take care of the same poor people, instead of creating policies to elevate poor people out of poverty and prepare to take care of the next group of poor people.
Baltimore does not need a government spending-spree.It needs a change of culture within families. It needs a sense of community. Government cannot provide that, but the Gospel can. Instead of ceding poverty programs to the government, churches should start taking back that work.”
We respectfully disagree with Erickson on one point; anyone who still backs the counter-productive plague that is America’s entitlement system is neither well-meaning, nor quite frankly, American…at least not as we understand the term.
Next, and this is truly a must-read in its entirety, George Weigel recounts why we’re witnessing…
“…Revelation, which some know as “The Apocalypse,” is often misunderstood as a kind of biblical movie trailer — a preview of coming distractions.And commentators of a certain cast of mind have spilled oceans of ink trying to fit the visionary John’s dramatic images to the affairs of the day, usually in aid of predictions of an impending, cataclysmic end to history. But there’s another, and I think better, way to read Revelation — and that is to read it as a panoramic view of all of history and of the great contest within history, which is the contest between God’s love and all that would deny God’s love.On that reading, Revelation’s “plagues” and the “bowls of God’s wrath” are not future examples of awfulness that presage The End; they’re the realities, here and now, that are death-dealing rather than life-giving and life-affirming.
I was born in Baltimore in 1951, when it was the sixth-largest city in the United States, and over the ensuing six decades, my hometown has endured any number of plagues that, taken together, seem somewhat evocative of the plagues of Revelation 15 and 16.
The Baltimore Sun was once a terrific newspaper; it’s now a parody of political correctness. Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point plant was once the greatest steel mill in the world; today, it’s a vast industrial wasteland, thanks to the plagues of management folly and union folly. Back in the day, Baltimore’s public schools prepared their students for Ivy League undergraduate careers, and high schools such as Dunbar were national models of African-American accomplishment; today, students graduate without elementary-level competencies in reading and math, and that plague known as teachers’ unions cruelly deprives students of the advantages of educational choice. Once upon a time, black entrepreneurship flourished in Baltimore (the capitalization sometimes coming from the numbers rackets, which have now been replaced by Leviathan in the form of state lotteries); today, the city’s African-American establishment is far more heavily invested in Big Government than in business and job creation. A crack-cocaine epidemic, unaddressed by a befuddled and paralyzed mayor, depopulated entire swathes of the city and turned the neighborhood where I went to high school in the late 1960s into something that, today, resembles Berlin 70 years ago. The city’s police department, and indeed its entire approach to rampant criminality, manifestly needs reform; Martin O’Malley made some efforts to do that and to bring Giuliani-style reforms to the plague of crime that was gutting the city, until he discovered that it was much easier to beat an incumbent Republican governor in a heavily blue state while indulging fantasies of the White House.
But the plague that has most devastated Baltimore is the plague that was on vivid and violent display recently: the plague of fatherlessness.At the funeral of Freddie Gray, the man whose death in police custody was the excuse used by violent young men for their destructive behavior, media attention focused on Mr. Gray’s sobbing mother. But where, I kept asking, was Freddie Gray’s father? And where were the fathers of those youngsters who were rampaging outside Camden Yards, burning down a home for the elderly paid for by the widow’s-mite contributions of the people of an inner-city black congregation, and torching drugstores that served their own communities?They were nowhere.Because that is what inner-urban life is like today in too many American cities: In a perverse reversal of Clarence Day, it’s Life Without Father, created by an anti-culture of sexual anarchy that, imported from the white world, has been far more destructive of African-American life than was Jim Crow…”
And why Rich Lowry is so dead-on balls-accurate when he terms…
“President Barack Obama responded to the Baltimore riots with a heartfelt bout of self-righteous hectoring. Supposedly, we all know what’s wrong with Baltimore and how to fix it, but don’t care enough. Not only is this attitude highhanded, it rests on a flagrantly erroneous premise.
President Obama doesn’t have the slightest idea how to fix Baltimore. His solutions fall back on liberal bromides going back 50 years. Dating back to the Kerner Commission after the riots of the 1960s, the Left’s go-to solution to urban problems has been more social programs.Since then, we’ve gotten more social programs — and just as many urban problems.
Exhibit A is Baltimore itself. The city hasn’t been “neglected.”It has been misgoverned into the ground. It is a Great Society city that bought fully into the big-government vision of the 1960s, and the bitter fruit has been corruption, violence, and despair. We don’t know all the facts surrounding Freddie Gray’s tragic death. But as a general matter, it is easy to believe that the Baltimore police are corrupt, dysfunctional, and unaccountable — because most of the Baltimore government is that way.
This is a failure exclusively of Democrats, unless the root causes of Baltimore’s troubles are to be traced to its last Republican mayor, Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, who left office in 1967.And it is an indictment of a failed model of government…”
Which reveals the reason neither Progressives nor their puppets in the press can afford to have Americans realize the reality of what they’re watching.
Dimocratic misdirection and denial of any culpability for what befell Baltimore reminds us of another infamous band of merry misfits unwilling to abide by the rules governing the rest of society:
Except the perfidies perpetrated by the Deltas were pure fiction; what we’re experiencing is undeniably the here and now.
Meanwhile, as the country is caught up in yet another diversion of Dimocratic design, the Divider-in-Chief continues his unwearying pursuit of insoluble instability abroad and utter economic chaos at home, as Hope ‘n Change details:
Post Parting Depression
As miracle workers go, Hope n’ Change is forced to tip our hat to Barack Obama for reinventing a couple of classics previously performed only by Moses and Jesus.
The parting of the Rio Grande is the most obvious. Millions of illegal immigrants are now able to flood into our country with Obama holding back the churning threat of red tape, using nothing but his God-like Executive Order powers – and a promise to make life a living hell for any border agent who tries to enforce our actual immigration laws.
But that’s only his warm-up miracle. Obama then goes the “loaves and fishes” route to magically multiply the number of actual immigrants!
Here’s how it works: under the guise of “prioritizing deportation,” Obama has unilaterally declared that millions of illegals won’t be deported. Half a million have already been given social security numbers and work permits, and there are reports that nine million more will be getting them soon. And that’s a lot of folks, right?Wrong…
Because once Obama has given an illegal immigrant that paperwork, they can legally bring in their spouse and any children under 21. And if any of those children also have children of their own, they can all come too! And if those young parents happen to be married, they can also bring their spouses and the parents of their spouse!
Of course, hauling that many people to Los Estados Unidos is a dauntingly expensive and exhausting challenge for these impoverished folks – which is why you get to pay for it. That’s right, your tax dollars will fly all of those folks into the heartland and provide “resettlement assistance” to make life a little easier until they start receiving the full taxpayer benefits which they are suddenly – indeed, miraculously – eligible for.
Speaking of miracles, it would be a whopper if dumping this much unskilled labor into the marketplace didn’t drive down wages and put additional pressure on our nation’s poor and middle class. But then, that’s what Obama’s policy is intended to do. After all, the worse things get for the poor and middle class, the greater will be the calls to “topple the 1%” (or 10%, or 25%), redistribute their ill-gotten money, and (just for fun!) defile the corpses of the evil rich and/or the annoyingly solvent.
But wait, there’s more! Remember when Obama promised a “fundamental change” to our nation? It’s already happened – and is probably unstoppable. As much of 80% of our population growth is now directly attributable to immigrants, legal and (especially) illegal. The demographic shift is irrevocably changing our economy, our culture, and what used to be our future.
Let us be clear: illegal immigrants aren’t necessarily bad people (outside of being law-breaking criminals) and they’re dragging their huge, extended families to the United States in hopes of finding opportunity. Those opportunities – and our nation’s redistributable wealth – are finite and already spread too thin. But ironically, because our compassion is almost infinite, we’ll keep trying to make this overburdened system work until it destroys us.
Whether you’re religious or not, you’ve got to admit that for one nefarious man to pull that off is a miracle.
“Man”? Maybe…
…maybe not!
Regardless, at the same time The Dear Misleader is able to produce seemingly unlimited funds for illegal aliens, our veterans continue to endure long waits for substandard healthcare in overcrowded, underserved facilities. Makes sense only if you value one group over the other!
And more importantly, a number of supposed-Republicans…
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