En Garde In The Bunker

Obama the Woodrow Wilson clone. On this, the closing day of 2014, one would think that the public would understand the failures of one, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era. Central control provides nothing good for the nation. It creates an ever expanding bureaucracy funded by ever increasing tax burdens (see for instance “Obama Imposed 75,000 New Pages of Regulations In 2014”)

Which Wilson do you suspect Thomas Sowell had in mind in his brilliant piece coming up after this intro? The arrogant, self-righteous, intellectually snobbish, egotistical one; or the racist, closed minded, feckless, indecisive one? Perhaps in the case of this President he meant both; Obama the Woodrow Wilson clone.

This follows the 100th Anniversary of 1913 that gave America the Federal Reserve, the Progressive Income Tax and destruction of the representation of States in the Federal government with direct Election of Senators. What followed after 1913-14 was a severe Depression, out of which Harding and Coolidge returned to free markets and the Constitution that gave us the roaring twenties.

Woodrow Wilson was a tool of the bankers. He was given an enormous salary as college president and, like the rogue fraud “president” we have now, was carefully groomed to be planted (after all they had already purchased him). And he did their bidding: Federal Reserve Act, Income Tax and World War I to save JPM’s “investments” in the war. Now we have “too big to fail”, where Obama-the-Tool and the bank always wins and We The People lose (GM having become “Government Motors” having very much lost its way, and rapidly going down the tubes).

Harry Truman said: “There’s no such thing as the future, just history that hasn’t happened yet.” Yet we never seem to learn. On one point I tend to disagree with Dr. Sowell, as Obama has taken us to one man rule because accomplices in the GOP Establishment (and God knows, we all know who they are) refuse to enforce the Constitution, content to wait for their turn at the throne; statists all. Let’s hope history repeats itself, and we have our own versions of Harding and Coolidge warming up in the bullpen to get rid of the memory of Obama the Woodrow Wilson clone.

Happy New Year.

Now on to Dr. Sowell and his piece…

2014 has been a year of anniversaries. It was the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War — a war which many at the time saw as madness, and predicted that it would be the harbinger of a Second World War a generation later.

2014 was also the 70th anniversary of the fateful landing at Normandy that marked the beginning of the end of World War II.

2014 was likewise the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that marked the beginning of the end of racial segregation, the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and of the beginning of President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” programs.

Anniversaries are opportunities to look back at historic turning points, compare the rhetoric of the time with the reality that we now know unfolded — and to learn hard lessons about the difference between rhetoric and reality for our own time.

A hundred years ago, the President of the United States was Woodrow Wilson — the first president to openly claim that the Constitution of the United States was outdated, and that courts should erode the limits that the Constitution placed on the federal government.

Today, after a hundred years of courts’ eroding the Constitution’s protections of personal freedom, we now have a president who has taken us dangerously close to one-man rule, unilaterally changing laws passed by Congress and refusing to enforce other laws — on immigration especially.

Like Woodrow Wilson, our current president is charismatic, vain, narrow, and headstrong. Someone said of Woodrow Wilson that he had no friends, only devoted slaves and enemies. That description comes all too close to describing Barack Obama, with his devoted political palace guard in the White House that he listens to, in contrast to the generals he ignores on military issues and the doctors he ignores on medical issues.

Both Wilson and Obama have been great phrase makers and crowd pleasers. We are still trying to cope with the havoc left in the wake of Woodrow Wilson’s ringing phrase about “the self-determination of peoples.”

First of all, it was never “self-determination.” It was the arbitrary determination of the fate of millions of people in nations carved out of empires dismembered by the victors after the First World War. Neither the Irish in Britain nor the Germans in Bohemia were allowed to determine who would rule them. Nor was anybody in Africa.

The consequence of fragmenting large nations was the creation of small and vulnerable nations that Hitler was able to pick off, one by one, during the 1930s.

Minorities who protested that they were being oppressed under the Austro-Hungarian Empire got their own nations, where their own oppression of other minorities was often worse than they had experienced in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

We are still trying to sort out the chaos in the Middle East growing out of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. How long it will take to sort out the havoc left behind by Barack Obama’s foreign policies only the future will tell.

It should be noted that, after the charismatic Woodrow Wilson, none of the next three presidents was the least bit charismatic. Let us hope that the voters today have also learned how dangerous charisma and glib rhetoric can be — and what a childish self-indulgence it is to choose a president on the basis of symbolism. Woodrow Wilson was the first Southerner to be elected president since the Civil War, as Obama was to become the first black president. But neither fact qualified them to wield the enormous powers of the presidency. Nor will being the first woman president, the first Hispanic president or other such firsts.

Since 2014 has been the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty,” we should note that this was another war that the Johnson administration lost. Both President Johnson and President John F. Kennedy before him said that the purpose of the “war on poverty” was to help people become self-supporting, to end dependency on government programs. But 50 years and trillions of dollars later, there is more dependency than ever.

Let’s hope we have learned something from past debacles.

(Copyright 2014 Creators.com under attribution)

Source American Spectator; personal archives…