What the Heck was I Thinking!?

I thought to call this post “Revenge of the Nanny”. Then, “Death of a Thousand Cuts”. Finally, I thought, “Drowning a Quarter Inch at a Time.” 

I just gave up. QandO has a post about all the most recent demonstrations of the petty abuses of power. Local and state intervention into more and more of our lives.

Like Gulliver, we are being tied down by tiny threads of control over more and more of our lives - for our own good, no less!

From QandO:

Hardly a day goes by without hearing of some city councilman or county supervisor, or state legislature that wants to ban some trivial act for some terribly important reason. It’s rarely a direct assault on the big civil liberties. But it’s happening in tiny increments here and there. It’s the slow, quiet Tyranny of Details

Source: http://www.qando.net/ - The Tyranny of Details

Venezuelan dictator, Hugo Chavez, has gained additional powers from his rubber stamp National Assembly. According to BBC News:

Venezuela’s National Assembly has given initial approval to a bill granting the president the power to bypass congress and rule by decree for 18 months.

President Hugo Chavez says he wants “revolutionary laws” to enact sweeping political, economic and social changes.

He has said he wants to nationalise key sectors of the economy and scrap limits on the terms a president can serve.

Mr Chavez began his third term in office last week after a landslide election victory in December.

This was pointed to by QandO blog. QandO posts:

Now anyone believing the 18 month sunset provision will actually be obeyed, please line up on the left over there for some great land deals west of California. My guess is a convenient emergency will find away to emerge at just the perfect time. This is the guy Jimmy Carter certified as having won his election fair and square. Of course we know better now.

For students of history, this is the standard approach used by Cult of Personality dictators such as Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin and Fidel Castro, among others.

If I were a member of the Venezuelan middle class (aka bourgeoisie), I’d be packing my bags and my savings (if possible) and clearing out before they lock the doors.

Venezuela will take a while, what with their oil revenue, but will eventually look much like the Soviet Union or Cuba. That model of the exercise of power has been tried and found to be a massively destructive failure.

Original Source: http://www.qando.net/ - Portrait of a Dictator (UPDATED)

Dean Barnett posted at Hugh Hewitt’s TownHall.com about the latest Fox News Poll results:

Do you personally want the Iraq plan President Bush announced last week to succeed?

Here are the results:

          Overall: 63% Yes 22% No 15% Don’t Know

    Democrats: 51% Yes 34% No 15% Don’t Know

  Republicans: 79% Yes 11% No 10% Don’t Know

Independents 63% Yes 19% No 17% Don’t Know

(emphasis mine)

It’s refreshing to see that almost 2/3 of us want the plan to succeed. It is dismaying to note that nearly half of Democrats either can’t decide or definitely don’t want the plan to succeed.

Mr. Barnett asks for some explanation:

I would love to hear why losing in Iraq would be in the national interest. And I would love to hear the humanitarian justification for leaving Baghdad’s civilians to the tender mercies of the murderous militias and terrorists that stalk that city.

And I would also love to hear Democratic leaders respond to these poll numbers. But I won’t hold my breath.

This post by Barnett was liked to by Dr. Sanity in this post. She discusses what, in her view, has caused all this willing defeatism.

One cause she notes is:

The first is extremely effective leftist propaganda that is bruited about pretty mindlessly by the mainstream media. Either these nincompoops are completely unaware how they have been completely brainwashed by neo-Marxist class wars nonsense (oh, and see here for an extremely revealing look at the USA communist party agenda which just happens to coincide pretty closely with most of the talking points of the Democratic leadership) , or they haven’t got the intellectual balls to question the underlying ideology that has been the prism for all their economic reporting since Republicans have occupied the White House. (emphasis mine)

The second cause she sees is:

When it comes to the Iraq War and the War on Islamofascism in general, there also happens to be some pretty clever propaganda that is contributing to this sort of data; but let us not forget this important psychological factor: DENIAL

Six years after our generation’s Pearl Harbor, there remains considerable psychological denial about the fact that this country is at war with a well-organized and funded group of radical Islamists who desperately want to bring down our country and its values.

While this might explain why many in the West, not just the US, want the military to fail in Iraq. It demands that those who do completely ignore what has happened and what is promised to happen in the event that we do fail - more Islamo-fascist terrorism around the world, especially here.

To quote Dr. Sanity:

Thus we focus on the make-believe “horrors” of life under the BushHitler; and manage to almost entirely block out the tragedy and death that came before, and which still hangs over us, poised to decimate our world once again.

It really is so much more pleasant, gamboling in that utopian meadow of peace, brotherhood and harmony, isn’t it?

Yes, until Godzilla comes.