WorldNetDaily Does Victory Lap on Van Jones

Good on WND, and on Glenn Beck. One down, a whole bunch of Obamaphiles to go, leading to Barry Soetoro getting perp-walked out of the White House in chains by a squad of federal marshals.

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Read your post and ask yourself this. Are you loving your neighbor as yourself? (Don't forget everyone is your neighbor). If not you need to reevaluate the direction your life is taking. It seems to me that you have a lot of hate where there needs to be love

Nope. Not “everyone is your neighbor” in the sense that they themselves are determined to live peaceably – without designs on their own neighbors' lives, liberties, and property.

Some of them are vicious predators, capable of camouflaging themselves under illusions of benign seeming. Once identified as predators, as evil people, they must be treated as such if one's purpose is the preservation of innocent people's rights.

The more gormless low-church Christian stupidities fail to take this into consideration, and to embrace religious tenets – if those idiocies even deserve to be dignified by the use of that word – that turn the individual human being into nothing more than feedlot cattle to be slaughtered by these predators is hideous and hateful.

Study the concept of “just war” and consider that people like Van Jones and Barry Soetoro have declared themselves to be in a state of war against the lives, liberties, and property of you and your “neighbors.”

If you believe that your life is a gift of God, and not to be surrendered to evil, you have a duty to God to defend your life and the means with which to preserve your life. Violate that duty, and no matter what you confusedly think you believe, you are a sinner of the darkest, most vile sort imaginable, and you deserve eternal death.

We really need to start charging a troll toll around here. The sound these words make when read aloud is that of tin foil crinkling.

Get yourself a Harvard Law degree;
at this time you have zero credibility &
not showing much promise

So exactly what crimes are you accusing BHO of? I can give you at least two for GWB (FISA, and the Convention Against Torture), not like it mattered to our corrupt congress and media. As much as your ilk would like otherwise, “being a liberal” (or, in Barry's case, a centrist) isn't against the law yet.

Sad about Van Jones, but inevitable. Pretty soon the only people we'll have in government are hacks who were been planning to be high public office their freshman year… anybody worth their testicles/overies was a crazed radical (one way or the other) at some point in their lives

the berserkers are upon us

Ooh, a schizophrenic Obamaphile. Auditory hallucinations he's doing already. How nice.

Hearing things, jerkwad?

Religious belief is always a matter of “credibility” because it's based on what one believes. The shyster's art relies upon the auditor's credulity (which is to say – and to an Obamaphile I'm writing this – the recipient's susceptibility to lies).

lollin' @ right wing humor

You know what the worst thing about you reactionaries bleating that Obama is a socialist? You all almost had me believing it! I thought to myself, if the conservatives are this freaked out, maybe he is a real liberal, one who will raise taxes on the rich, advocate for single-payer heath care, and prosecute the criminals whose lies got more than 4000 Americans and a 100,000+ Iraqis killed. Sadly, he's turned out to be Clinton Part II–a neoliberal who would be right of center in any country save this one, one who respects all those beltway niceties and has no problem selling out his base.

I hope you all will be happy when your astroturfed outrage gives enough cover for our sold-out congress to implement a health care bill that does nothing but force Americans to buy insurance. “America is just not liberal enough for more a public plan, let alone single payer!” the Blue Dogs and republicans will say. They'll say it all the way to the bank , where they'll cash crisp new checks signed by insurance CEOs.

But yeah, _socialism_ is the real problem facing this country! Jesus wept and so do I.

I like the claim that WND broke the “first major story.”

On the one hand, it implies that a WND article is indeed a “major story,” somehow on par with legitimate news agencies.

On the other hand, it manages to avoid giving any credit to blogger Trevor Loudon of New Zeal, http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2009/04/obama-file-… , who did pretty much all the original research that Aaron Klein borrowed and retyped into a WND story. It even follows the same narrative flow, with Klein simply lifting one of Loudon's paragraphs verbatim at one point.

Go back to that one WND article in April, http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=94771 . Klein acknowledges Loudon midway through the article, but in a way that implies that Loudon only contributed the names of some people who worked with STORM, as opposed to being the source for the whole story. Klein then links to Loudon's blog, but not to the particular post he drew all his material from.

So “WND's 5-month series of exposés” leading to Jones' resignation consists of one April article that consisted almost entirely of retyping a blogger's research with minimal credit given, and then nothing about Van Jones again until mid-August. It's apparently a “5-month series” even though (or possibly because) there was a 4-month gap between the first and second articles. That's some hard-hitting journalism, there.

Tuci78, you're back after going into exile again!

So, how was Hell? Did ya take any pictures? Is it hot like everyone says, or are there micro-climates?

“Once identified as predators, as evil people, they must be treated as such if…”

See, the problem is that your targeting system has mud all over it.

Back before Bush invaded Iraq, Saddam was reportedly made aware of the fact that our Apache helicopters can track 16 targets simultaneously. Saddam was unimpressed, and reportedly argued that his troops could throw mud on the Apaches and screw up their targeting system.

You're a living argument for Saddam's plan.

If you were any good at identifying evil people, your quote would be less ridiculous. Still grossly over-simplified, but less ridiculous. You think everyone who doesn't hate government must therefore worship it, and you thnk that Socialists would knock at your door if you tore the tag off your mattress that reads “Do not remove under penalty of law.” Of course, that law is aimed at the retailer and does not apply to the consumer. And there are no Socialists here.

You should pull a Nietzsche and go Beyond Good and Evil, Tuci78.

“Inside every man is a struggle between good and evil that cannot be resolved.” –Homer Simpson, whose brain then reveals a Homer in a devil costume dancing in a circle around the corpse of a Homer in an angel costume with maracas and singing “I am evil Ho-mer, I am evil Ho-mer”

Wow. If there's a word you have no business writing, it's “credibility.”

At least you put it in quotes, as though you recognize the absurdity inherent in your attempt to use that word, Tuci78.

You aren't writing to any Obamaphiles. You just encountered a few more normal people who aren't lunatics, like you are. Thus they take issue with your lunacy. They have not shown any irrational love of Obama.

You must have noticed that they aren't susceptible to your lies. Your lack of credibility strains credulity.

After all your nonsense about government, and all your absurd prison sex fantasies and assassination threats involving the President, I think you're the last person who should go around telling anyone what it takes to be a good neighbor or what one must do to stay in God's good graces.

Who would have thought that after all the time you spent wishing that I would go to Hell, you'd be the one to visit there. I'm not sure why you came back here again, but I hope you brought pictures of the jagged rocks you had to sleep on, and the molten magma where you bathed.

“Auditory hallucinations he's doing already.”

Whoa, what's with the syntax? When you were in Hell, were you roommates with a Yoda impersonator? Or maybe a stereotypical Jewish grandmother?

Stupid things, you're writing again. Not surprised, am I.

Any “health care bill that does nothing but force Americans to buy insurance” is socialist. All such compulsory collectivization of risk is by definition socialist, in that it holds the “social good” superior to the individual's right to say “no.”

That Barry Soetoro doesn't jump through every hoop you choose to hold up for him doesn't mean that he's not as thoroughly malevolent in his intentions and designs as you are.

You want to run your neighbors' lives. So does your Mombasa Messiah. Both of you suck, each along precisely the same totalitarian line of power-drunken arrogance. Your respective rottennesses differ merely in degree.

Harnessing the government for corporate profit isn't socialist by any sane definition. If someone were looking to be inflammatory they could probably call it fascist. Plutocratic would probably be even more accurate. Regardless, its business as usual in post-Reagan America.

I mean, really, you think insurance CEOs and lobbyists are socialists? You think the Goldman Sachs people who control the treasury are Marxist? Do you honestly think the Congressional Dem leaders who took single-payer off the table–didn't even use it to highball people–are looking to radically remake America in a more equal form? Why would they? They're all doing just fine the way things are.

Socialism isn't defined as “any ideology that isn't reflexively hostile to the state.” The word you're looking for is at least “statist,” and really just “not libertarian.” I mean, hell, my tax dollars going to our military is a compulsory collectivization of the risk of foreign invasion, it socialist now too? Quit reading Jonah Goldberg.

Government “picking winners” in the economy by holding the customers of politically favored corporations (or other vendors) under compulsion with the ostensible objective being “the social good” is by definition socialist.

It's the same old “we're doing it for the greater good” excuse. Call it “progressivism” or “Liberalism” or “fascism” or “Christian socialism” or whatever else you like, it's the forcible and aggressive denial of the individual's ability to say “no” in the name of benefiting society as a whole.

The use of government as an agency for “legal plunder” (and I'm reading from Bastiat, not Jonah Goldberg) is as ancient as the city of Ur. But only since the 1830s has the excuse for such plundering been “the good of society.”

Not the divine right of kings or the ordinances of Holy Mother Church but the sanctified “we're all in this together, and how dare you question authority!” majority.

And that's socialism. The legitimatizing factor – that which has been used to disarm opposition, to demonize the defenders of individual rights.

To the extent that government has a legitimate sphere of function in a political system founded upon the validity of individual rights, what goes to the military – to break things and to kill people in defending those rights against “all enemies foreign and domestic” – is about all there is that could possibly justify the “compulsory collectivization” of which you speak.

And even with the imperialism we've experienced since the end of Lincoln's War, that's a mighty low-cost function.

Seems you could do with a bit more reading of Jonah Goldberg, couldn't you? While you're at it, try Thomas J. DiLorenzo as well.

First off: If it directly benefits the rich at the expense of the poor and the middle class, it's not socialism–both critics and proponents should agree here. You may disagree with my desire to soak the rich, and you can argue that doing so would inadvertantly make the non-rich worse off, but you can't tell me I'm a secret ally of Wall Street or K Street.

So you're a libertarian who doesn't want to see any government stronger than the Articles of Confederation. That's fine, there's nothing wrong with that–libertarianism is a reasonable and coherent ideology. But you're literally arguing against the social good, which undoubtedly puts you in a minority of Americans. Most people, for example, support public schools and roads and police and all of the many other areas where yes, we _have_ decided that we're all in this together and would be better off forming a government to provide services for the common good. Hell, almost everyone supports Medicare and Social Security, both of which are far more liberal than anything Obama has pushed though Congress thus far

But we're really only arguing semantics here, and whether you know it or not the definitions you're using were not chosen in good faith. Goldberg and his ilk have taken the definition of socialism and broadened it to cover just about any form of government with a strong state. To pick an example neither of us are probably crazy about, the Iranian theocracy routinely and violently tramples on the rights of individuals for what it views as the greater good. By your metric, it is socialist–but putting it in that category teaches you nothing about Iran. You can't compare it in any but the most superficial ways to the USSR, to Sweden, to Venezuela, or any other country that's not a represive theocracy. That's why normal people would call it a repressive theocracy.

No, when you're trying to shed light on things, you create categories that are more specific, not less. When you take a word that refers to a fairly specific form of government and expand that definition to mean anything strong government that isn't (a very specific form of) right wing, you're obfuscating. You're trying to shut down debate, to divide people, to demonize your opposition.

When you say:

” It's the same old “we're doing it for the greater good” excuse. Call it “progressivism” or “Liberalism” or “fascism” or “Christian socialism” or whatever else you like, it's the forcible and aggressive denial of the individual's ability to say “no” in the name of benefiting society as a whole. “

you're doing exactly what I accused you of doing: conflating “statist” with “socialist.” There's basically no reason to do that other than to capitalize on the fact that socialism is a dirty word.

You can have the last word; unless you surprise me by saying something new (I know I didn't really, which is always a bad sign) I'm done here.

GospelofJames07 – what are you talking about? I like the Golden Rule reference but do you think it's really applicable?

stephenperry – That made absolutely no sense whatsoever despite giving the appearance of incorporating the machinations of logic and formal argument.

This site isn't living up to the label “independent”. It is more a vomitorium of liberal pandering and arena of progressive ideological bullying than it is a site of “independent” political discussion.

While socialism is a form of statism, it is a specific form thereof, recent in its development and definable in its characteristics. That the language and other usages of socialism should be exercised for the benefit of a particular faction at the expense of the less politically powerful – the “the poor and the middle class,” the proles – so that the nomenklatura, the cadre, the Party Leadership, the well-connected types achieve levels of comfort and security the lesser elements cannot be afforded….

Well, that's socialism. In the Western tradition, that's how it's always been. Animal Farm. Can't be avoided, and never has been avoided.

There are other forms of statism, of course. The wonderfully corrupt Islamic Republic of Iran is explicitly a theocracy, with the ruling mullahs and their thugs governing in the name of Allah and their interpretation (sincere or hypocritical) of Islamic holy writ. It's not in the name of “the people” that individual rights are violated in Iran, but rather in the name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate.

The obtaining hypocrisy of the West today is socialism, no matter how it might be clumsily and ridiculously disguised. Doesn't matter whether you or anyone else consider socialism “a dirty word.” If the violation of individual rights is undertaken in the name of “society,” that violation is socialist.

Doesn't hurt to call it what it is, does it?

What, do you bear some kind of brief for this peculiar evil? Is there some way in which you personally conceive of socialism whereby it is not inescapably malignant and rotten to its very roots?

Interesting. SOMEONE liked it. And I am certain that Tuci78 understands it. And he's the one I was writing to.

I referred to mattress tags, mud, maracas, and Homer Simpson. Not sure I was going for “formal argument,” but I concede that I did use copious amounts of logic.

If you think my post made no sense, you're welcome to ignore it. The fact that you felt compelled to respond suggests you understood it. Or at least that you want attention. You'll have to get in line, if so. There are a number of birthers here who have more compelling needs than you do. For example, you spelled all the words in your post correctly.

“progressive ideological bullying…”

Hmmm. How many of the hundreds of posts written by Tuci78 have you read?

How many of Randwulf's posts?

AristotletheHun?

RedGraham?

naturalborn?

drlove999?

Adam?

franknowzad?

GolemCohen?

d2i?

If you read just a handful of Tuci78's posts, you could be forgiven for using the word “bullying,” but not for using the word “progressive” or “ideological.”

If you find this site to be a vomitorium, you might ask yourself what the nauseating odor is. It's the smell of birther posts. The rest of us mock them because they disgust and annoy us.

If you don't want to be here, I'm sure your web browser has a “Back” and a “Home” icon. You'll be missed.

Aw c'mon, Tuci78. Pick a level of intellectual discourse and stick with it.

You cannot lead with words like “compulsory collectivization” and follow it up with “both of you suck.”

Your need to find a resonant frequency. You're all over the dial.

Moreover, neither Obama nor the person you're writing to has given any indication of wanting “to run your neighbors' lives.”

I'm concerned that your analytical abilities, meager though they were, got melted when you were exposed to prolonged extreme temperatures during your all-too-brief stay in Hell.

That's it, old boy! Never give up! Socialists! Socialists everywhere!

“Snakes! Snakes everywhere!” –Barney Gumble, drunkenly pounding the empty sidewalk with a stick

“Getting ready for 'Whacking Day, Barn?” –Lenny, referring to an annual event where Springfielders whack snakes

“What's 'Whacking Day?'” –Barney