God, Guns and Grits

As Hannibal Smith used to say, I love it when a plan comes together. Well, even when I don't have a plan, I love it when the public wakes up and smells the coffee, as the late Sen. Jesse Helms said.

I've been heartsick (and genuinely queasy also) at the developments flowing like an overloaded sewer out of Washington, from the Obama White House to Nancy Pelosi's House of Representatives to Harry Reid's Senate. Socialism rising unchecked, threatening our great republic's freedoms.

But lo and behold, as King James saith, the whole stinking mess is imploding. Obama's healthcare "reform" is being exposed as the socialistic scam as the people nationwide learn what it will do. And the so-called solution to the global warming crisis-that-ain't, the Obama-Pelosi-Reid cap and trade legislation that would tax most American businesses right out of business, is also sinking fast.

And what's Obama, Pelosi and Reid doing about the rising tide of dissent from everyone from a million Joe the Plumbers to gray-haired grannies? Calling them un-American traitors and worse. Wow, what a great strategy to win friends and influence people to come around to your way of thinking. Somehow I don't think that's a winning strategy.

Wesley Pruden of the Washinton Times turns the tables on Saul Alinsky's disciples, Obama chief among them.

Angry lynch mobs (to hear House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her sidekick Steny Hoyer tell it) of elderly gents on walking sticks and little blue-haired ladies in their 80s have descended on congressmen at town meetings across the country - in California, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Maryland, Ohio, Georgia and other places. They're taking out their anger and frustration at the Obama health care "reform" in the robust American way, but Mrs. Pelosi professes to see "reform" adrift on a turbulent sea of Nazi swastikas. Rep. Brian Baird of Washington sees a blur of Brown Shirts. Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas calls the dissenters "un-American." She later remembered where she was and said she didn't mean to call them that. Her contempt for Arkansas folks just popped out. In Georgia, Rep. David Scott tried to calm a town meeting with a plea to "calm down and take a deep breath," then took a deep breath and scolded everyone with a hysterical screed about the "hijacking" of his meeting.

Rep. Steve Cohen treated his Memphis constituents with similar contempt: "Take two aspirin and come back in the morning." Rep. Russ Carnahan told livid St. Louis constituents, naive yokels in his view, that they had been "mobilized [by] special interests in Washington."

The frightened Democratic reaction to robust debate - "the conversation" that "progressives" are so eager to have with those who disagree with them - recycles the insults and epithets last heard in confrontations over civil rights and the war in Vietnam. The protests are "organized," the work of "outside agitators." Martin Luther King, by Democratic reckoning, was an outside agitator. The marches against the Vietnam war were marvels of organization, true, but ... umm, well ... that was different. Mr. Obama should recognize outside agitation when he sees it, given his career in outside agitation in Chicago. He was taught by Saul Alinsky, "the father of American radicalism," that the left-wing strategy for achieving an unpopular goal is to "pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

We're almost there. The Democrats are trying to impose rationed government health care (the target) quickly, before the public wakes up from entertaining distractions (the freeze), making villains of all who oppose (personalizing it) and creating a chaotic controversy (polarizing it) that can be effectively exploited. Mr. Obama once taught Saul Alinsky workshops in Chicago, so he was ready when he thought he heard opportunity knocking.

But the president and his congressional accomplices forgot that timing is everything. The public-opinion polls show that bare majorities think there's a health care crisis, but bigger majorities are satisfied with their own coverage. The majority can smell government medicine and the confiscatory taxes on the way. The president further miscalculated when he agreed to the insertion of a scheme, hidden in the thousand pages of the House legislation, to "offer" counseling to the aged about how they want to die. Nothing there about the "how" and "when." That comes later.

When he confronts mortality, a man is suspicious of boodlers with smooth tongues. Roger Fakes, 70, a retired businessman, showed up at the Memphis "town hall" in neither Brown Shirt nor swastika (he's actually a Presbyterian elder). His congressman's insistence that Obamacare would not disturb his private insurance moved him to his feet with polite but pointed questions and observations: "There are some of us old gray-haired folks who don't want the government involved in any of our business." And not just the gray-haired folks. Congressmen are learning the hard way they sometimes have to listen, like it or not.

And on the other big socialist scheme of the day, cap and trade legislation, Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young steps into the fray to rebut the two of the leading apostles of that ripoff, Sen. Barbara Boxer (Lunatic-California) and wannabe-Presidential-failure John Kerry. While ripping into that pair's three-card-monte ripoff scheme, Young also defends Sarah Palin, who's stepping into the fray now that she's no longer encumbered by the limitations of a governor's office.

On July 24, Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer of California and John Kerry of Massachusetts took to The Washington Post to attack former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's opposition to the Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax legislation and her overall energy philosophy.

Mrs. Palin correctly criticized the scheme presented in the legislation sponsored by Democratic Reps. Henry A. Waxman of California and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts. By only citing a report from the left-of-liberal Center for American Progress, Mr. Kerry and Mrs. Boxer naively underestimate the effects the legislation will have on the American economy. Other, more mainstream organizations, such as the Brookings Institution and the Black Chamber of Commerce, disagree.

Waxman-Markey artificially creates competition between cheap, abundant energy and unreliable, expensive renewable forms, compelling utilities to use heavily subsidized, politically correct "renewable energy" while thousands who work producing traditional energy lose their jobs.

All the while, American industry will flee to other countries where they can power their assembly lines with cheaper energy. Because nearly four decades of obscene subsidies for wind and solar power haven't worked, Waxman-Markey ups the ante and engages in societal re-engineering and fundamental restructuring of America's energy supply.

Pass the popcorn. This is really getting interesting. I think I'll just hide and watch for a while.