12/17/15, "GOP Sells America Down the River," Rush Limbaugh
"And
now the Republicans have the largest number of seats in the House
they've had in Congress since the Civil War. And it hasn't made any
difference at all. It is as though Nancy Pelosi is still running the
House and Harry Reid is still running the Senate. "Betrayed" is not
even the word here. What has happened here is worse than betrayal.
Betrayal is pretty bad, but it's worse than that....[W]e don't even
need a Republican Party if they're gonna do this. You know, just elect
Democrats, disband the Republican Party, and let the Democrats run it,
because that's what's happening anyway."
...............
Oct. 20, 2011, "The Lost Decade," Angelo Codevilla (years 2001-2011)
(scroll to subhead) "Public Safety"
"Solidity of the home front, i.e., mutual trust between the people and their government, has to be statecraft's paramount priority. But the assumption on which our ruling class based its approach to internal security against terrorism-namely, that it is impossible to distinguish ordinary Americans from terrorists—negates the basis for mutual trust. Ordinary Americans, on whom the government imposed ever more intrusive security measures and whom it scolded for being "Islamophobes," reasonably felt that government might regard them as "violent extremists." Our rulers also went out of their way to appease the most unfriendly parts of America's tiny Islamic population, including seeking advice on the proper attitude to take toward Muslims from the transparently anti-American Council On American Islamic Relations. But this simply gave such people more power to further their agendas, while foisting upon the American people a dispiriting political correctness. How could anyone have imagined that any people would not lose confidence in elites that seemed arguably more solicitous of enemies than of fellow citizens?
What would have happened if, instead, our ruling class had approached the problem of internal security by reminding itself that the American people had secured American society very adequately during World War II and the Cold War, against enemies far more potent and who blended into American society more easily than contemporary terrorists ever could? Honesty would also have required admitting that the hijackers of 9/11 were able to succeed partly because the U.S. government had trained a generation of Americans not to interfere with hijackings....Our rulers might have paid attention to Alexis de Tocqueville's observation that America was much less policed than Europe, but suffered from less crime because ordinary citizens took public safety into their own hands.
Only with difficulty can we imagine post-9/11 America...minus the TSA screeners (whose uselessness is demonstrated by every "red team" test penetration). But we don't have to imagine that the passengers of Flight 93 took matters into their own hands the moment they realized that government rules were costing them their lives, and that, ever since, aircraft passengers have policed their flights with absolute efficiency. Nor do we have to imagine that ordinary Americans naturally recoil from and protect themselves against persons who display the kind of foreignness and animosity that Islamists and their sympathizers cannot hide. The 2006 case of "the flying Imams" showed the Imams' threatening behavior caused ordinary Americans to remove them from a flight and hence from the possibility of doing harm. Unfortunately, it also showed that the U.S. government came close to making the Americans' immunological behavior liable to civil penalties.
Again and again, the American people are forced to confront the fact that its ruling class is not on its side.
After 9/11 President George W. Bush told the American people to go shopping and behave normally. In short: forget that you will never again be free to live as before. Think about money. This advice followed naturally from the government's decision to persist in its ways instead of lifting terrorism's burden from America....It sought to satisfy the American people with the pretend-safety of "homeland security," with images of U.S. troops in combat, and perhaps above all with domestic prosperity fueled by record-low interest rates and massive deficit-spending.
This pretend-prosperity aimed not only to anesthetize criticism of endless war, but also to feed both political parties' many constituencies—the ruling class's standard procedure. Both parties joined in expanding federal guarantees for sub-prime mortgages, subsidies for education, alternative fuels, and countless activities dear to well-connected players. Both parties congratulated themselves for establishing new entitlements for prescription drugs and for medical care for children. When the "great recession" began in 2007 Democrats blamed Republicans' excessive spending on "the wars," while Republicans blamed it on Democrats' excessive spending on everything else. Both are correct, and both are responsible.
Hard Choices
Ten years after 9/11, America is not at peace, is poorer, less civil, and less hopeful. But the experts are in charge as never before.
In the American political marketplace of 2012, the American ruling class's stock is at a historic low....For us to understand how these mostly intelligent people could have made errors so big for so long requires understanding the principles they violated, and the moral as well as the intellectual dimensions of their errors. More difficult yet, both intellectually and morally, is the essential task of explaining the hard choices that will be required to deal with the troubles bequeathed us by this decade of defeat."
==========================
Ellis Island
Commenter to PPP: Suggests using the term "internment" in the headline of a future Democrat poll since it was actually the policy of Democrat icon FDR:
12/15/15, "Trump Edges Cruz in Iowa; His Supporters Think Japanese Internment Was Good; Clinton Still Well Ahead of Sanders In State," Public Policy Polling, Tom Jensen