Patricia Smith and Charles Woods, whose children Sean Smith and Tyrone Woods, were killed in Benghazi, are suing Hillary Clinton for the wrongful death of their children via negligence. They are also suing for Hillary defaming them when she called them liars and they are suing for intentional affliction of emotional distress for lying to them about why their children had to die.
Twitchy has links to the docs.
Our reaction to tonight’s debate:
Donald Trump has lead a flamboyant life. What is interesting is that Hillary has memorized every bad thing he has ever done. Quite the accomplishment for someone who testified “I don’t recall” hundreds of times to avoid prosecution.
Well Megyn Kelly wasn’t the only elite media personality to go on Howard Stern and talk about boobs, vajajay and sex.
Most every elite media figure has done interviews on Howard Stern. Here is the list, 17 pages, 100 people per page…
Very accurate indeed. (Full disclosure: Our editor used to work for Carly)
If you think you know something about Donald Trump, watch these:
Milo Yiannopoulos
RACIST!!! We hear this every election season. If “Bush is elected churches will be burned”, “blacks will be dragged on the street by pick up trucks”, Joe Biden said that blacks “will be put back in chains”, etc etc. The fear mongering, divide and conquer tactic has been the staple of the far left campaign book for decades.
The Daily Caller:
According to the Wall Street Journal and the Anti-Defamation League, Donald Trump is largely responsible for desegregating Florida’s wealthy sporting clubs.
The story starts back in the spring of 1995, when Trump officially opened the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach.
Palm Beach had only agreed to Trump’s plan after placing “restrictions on the club, such as allowing no more than 500 members, to allay residents’ fears about traffic congestion and noise,” the Wall Street Journal’s Jacqueline Bueno reported in 1997.
Then this happened:
The culture clash began to approach a climax last fall, when Mr. Trump’s lawyer sent members of the town council a copy of the film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a film that deals with upper-class racism. Mr. Trump then approached the town council about lifting the restrictions that had been placed on the club. He also asked some council members not to vote on the request because their membership in other clubs created a conflict of interest.
Last December, after the council refused to lift the restrictions, Mr. Trump filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Palm Beach, alleging that the town was discriminating against Mar-a-Lago, in part because it is open to Jews and African-Americans. The suit seeks $100 million in damages.
“He put the light on Palm Beach,” then ADL national director Abraham Foxman said after meeting with Trump on the issue. “Not on the beauty and the glitter, but on its seamier side of discrimination. It has an impact.”
A Latina former Trump employee speaks out:
A black former Trump employee speaks out:
Black pastors in Cleveland pray for Donald Trump:
“Forget moral or ethical considerations… The end is what you want, the means is how you get it” – Saul Alinsky
At the web site of WFAA in Dallas they asked their viewers what they thought of Glenn beck’s speech to the NRA convention. The following is the response of one Saul Alinsky inspired leftist named Darrel Drake, who ironically enough, says that he has a Journalism Degree from the University of Oklahoma. The spelling errors are his:
Glen Beck is a nut job with a reich wing agenda. Since when has the 2nd amendment become more important than the rest, 1st and 14th especially. Funny how Republicans want to use government to control marriage, religion and vaginas, but not jobs or improving our economy. They want smaller, less government for whom? I guess they want it only for themselves and to Hell for the ret of us tax paying citizens.
People see through these pandering self- righteous, GOP “Christian Taliban” wackos like Beck. The country is waking up and finally saying no to hate and bigotry disguised as a religious belief! The majority simply do not want to become a Christian version of Iran! Beck is nothing but a pandering nut job making millions off fearful, ill informed Americans.
This is a textbook example of the hate, racial agitation, bigotry, and red herrings that Saul Alinsky inspired leftists engage in. They will never engage in any substantive debate on verifiable fact. All one can get from them is the type of hateful venom that Darrel gave us a textbook example of. For the Alinskyite, their purpose is to be so nasty with their hate and vitriol that more sensible people will be intimidated by it and just keep quiet.
When you fight back the first thing the Alinskyite pulls is the civility card. Never be intimidated by this tactic. No one who is such a dishonest broker and engages in such tactics has any claim to the civility card.
Harry Reid not only violated Senate rules in his tirade. What Harry Reid tried to do that generated the floor objection of Ted Cruz is also very worthy of noting. What Reid tried to do was have the right to add language in the bill that was not voted on in the Senate in secret.
That is correct, the Senate leadership since 2006 has been legislating behind closed doors in secret during the conference process. The House under Nancy Pelosi was doing that until the Republicans took back the House. Please see our editor’s note below.
When called out by Senator Cruz on trying to use such a dirty trick against the American people, Harry Reid went on a name calling tirade.
Senator Ted Cruz:
Senator Mike Lee:
Editor’s Note: The videos below are from 2009. The Democrats inserted language in a bill (during conference in secret) to make it legal to give bonuses to the AIG execs who we were bailing out. Those execs were big donors to Democrat Senator Chris Dodd. After lying about it, Dodd and the Democrats finally confessed at what they had done:
Editor: There are only a few in Washington that we respect because they are men of integrity, good sense, and good character. Ted Cruz is among them and this short video reveals why.
They cover several issues here, they are right that the Boston investigation is a mess. We will have a post about why that is soon.
What happened to the leftist civility police?
Since this following is not safe for work due to the language I am going to give you the link HERE.
Who is Kermitt Gosnell? He is, for the lack of a better term, he is the most ‘successful’ serial killer in the history of the world.
UPDATE – Reports are popping up all over the net that Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder and his wife are at least part owners of this mill.
He is responsible for running an abortion mill that was essentially a little shop of horrors. Expectant mothers died, but that is not the half of it. Gosnell was delivering babies alive and killing them after delivery. The toilets were stopped up from flushing baby parts down. The details and pictures are too graphic to be placed here. If you really want the play by play, Gateway Pundit, as well as Life News, have as good a round up as anyone
Aside from Marc Lamont Hill (in the video at the link below) at the Huffington Post, Kirsten Powers has been the only liberal television pundit I am aware of who has had the courage to speak out about it, and of course both worked for Fox News.
Pundit Briana Madsen points out what is obvious to those of us who study the elite media:
This story demonstrates that MSM is not providing the country with factual stories and information, but instead only stories which promote their liberal agendas or are of no importance. We are being lied to by omission. How many 1,000’s of pieces of information have they not shared, stories not aired… and we are a free country (insert sarcasm). I guess they found it too difficult to spin!
The cat is finally out of the bag. A blogger for the liberal Huffington Post has finally admitted that liberal mainstream 
media outlets made a conscious decision to ignore the Kermit Gosnell abortion-murder trial.
In a HuffPost Live segment today on the issue, host Marc Lamont Hill admitted what many pro-life advocates have been thinking:
“For what it’s worth, I do think that those of us on the left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it’ll compromise abortion rights. Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there’s a direct connection between the media’s failure to cover this and our own political commitments on the left. I think it’s a bad idea, I think it’s dangerous, but I think that’s the way it is.”
The video from the Huffington Post can be seen HERE.
Other liberal media outlets and pro-abortion bloggers have also begun admitting there was a blackout on covering Gosnell.
Most charities help the wounded, the ill and/or the poor. Obama constantly claims that Republicans want to balance the budget on the backs of the poor and the old, but Obamacare and his budget do exactly that. Democrats often blame Republicans for exactly what it is they are doing. Obamacare’s transfer of $714 Billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare bureaucrats has caused premiums for the elderly to rise.
President Obama’s long-awaited budget proposal, to be released today, does not come right out and say that it intends to reduce contributions to charity—but that is almost certainly what would happen were it to become law. Here’s why. The White House has effectively doubled down on a tax change it has been pushing for four years that would limit the value of the charitable tax deduction. The Administration has, since 2009, pushed unsuccessfully to allow only 28 cents on a dollar donated to charity to be deducted—even though the top tax rate for the wealthy donors who make most use of the deduction has been 35 percent. In the budget released today, the President again proposes to cap the charitable deduction at 28 percent—despite the fact that the top rate on the highest earners has increased to 39.6 percent. Think of it this way: the White House proposal would raise the cost of giving to charity from 60 cents per dollar to 72 cents per dollar. That’s a 20 percent increase in what can be called the “charity tax.”
When one taxes something more, of course, one gets less of it—and it’s likely that the current $168 billion in itemized charitable giving would decline. Indeed, Indiana University’s Center for Philanthropy has previously estimated that capping the charitable tax deduction’s value at 28 percent—even when the top income tax rate was 35 percent—would lower giving by 1.3 percent, or some $2.18 billion in 2010. The new proposal would likely take an even bigger bite from giving. The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that the reduction in giving could be as high as $9 billion a year.
The left has a long history of trotting out victims; those who will gladly use the victim card as a device to put politics over morality and truth in order to push an agenda most good people would otherwise never accept.
After observing how the far left politicized 9/11 this writer decided that he would never be intimidated into silence again by such underhanded tactics.
What politicization you ask? There are many examples, but the one that stands above the rest are the “four 9/11 widows” who claimed to speak for all 9/11 victims. These political operatives, often called the Jersey Girls, behaved as celebrities while engaging in the most histrionic demagoguery against President Bush. I remember one of them saying (paraphrasing):
It was President Bush’s fault that so many died on 9/11 because when we were under attack he was reading to school children. That’s where he was on the morning of 9/11.
These four women, opposed very vocally and often ridiculously, every action President Bush took to protect the nation and when called to back up their statements they would attack you for daring to be so insensitive to their victim-hood, as if these four political hacks were infallible.
The whole point of “the victim card” is to use the grief to make a political point while preventing anyone from responding. After the Jersey Girls wore out “their 15 minutes” with their antics Pulizer Prize winning journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz undressed the Jersey Girls in her famous piece in the Wall Street Journal.
A prominent Marxist once made the point clearly:
Freedom is a bourgeois prejudice. We repudiate all morality which proceeds from supernatural ideas or ideas which are outside the class conception. In our opinion, morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of the class war.
And this brings us to former Member of Congress Gabby Giffords who had this to say in a recent op-ed piece she wrote:
What they will do is create one fair system for all gun buyers, instead of the giant loophole we have now. Right now, we have one system where responsible gun owners take a background check — my husband, Mark, took one just last month, and it took 5 minutes and 36 seconds. I remember waiting a lot longer than that for the subway to take me to my office when I lived in New York City! And then we have a second system for those who don’t want to take a background check. Those people — criminals, or people suffering from mental illness, like the young man who shot me — can buy as many guns as they want on the Internet or at a gun show, no questions asked.
That doesn’t make sense. We know how to fix it — by establishing a universal background check system. And yet some of our elected officials are not listening. Some even say this legislation shouldn’t get a vote in the United States Congress.
Giffords clearly states that the young man who shot her, Jarrod Loughner, did not go through a back ground check. That is not true. Loughner most certainly did pass a back ground check and she well knows it, as it has been widely reported.
Giffords is lying and pointing this out is critically important for several reasons. Everyone who buys firearm from an exhibitor at a gun show goes through a back ground check. Private sales between collectors at gun shows who are not licensed dealers are rare. Instances of private collectors selling guns to genuine criminals are so rare that it is not able to be statistically measured reliably.
The first elephant in the room that Giffords is lying about and helping to paint a false picture of to help conceal is this – what she is calling a “universal back-ground check” is in reality a civilian gun registration scheme. A way to know what honest civilians has what guns, so that the database can be used to data-mine those people for political purposes, up to and including eventual confiscation. Such people tend to be the political enemies of far left Democrats. See ATF Seeks ‘Massive’ Database of Gun Owner’s Personal Info: ‘Assets, Relatives, Associates and More’.
One newspaper printed such a list in New York solely for the purpose of smearing gun owners, violating their privacy and endangering them. Quite simply, there is no reason to believe that such data will not be abused. The Patriot Act has strong provisions against the abuse of the tools it granted government, but we have all seen what has happened in its application.
The second elephant in the room that Giffords is concealing is just why Jarrod Loughner was able to pass the back ground check and buy the handgun that he used.
The case of Jarrod Loughner is especially egregious as he had multiple contacts with university police and the sheriff’s department. The police reports show that they knew Loughner was dangerously mentally ill. Arizona has the law in place to have people forcibly evaluated and all police and/or the sheriff had to do was dial a 1-800 number to get it done. The sheriff’s department did not do so because Loughner’s mother is a supervisor in the county parks department. That same sheriff, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, fellow Democrat and friend of Gabby Giffords, publicly blamed Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin for the shooting.
If Sheriff Dupnik had simply done his job and used the tools the law gave him, Loughner would have been entered in to the national instant check system and would have failed his back ground check. He would also have had a real chance to get treatment for his severe mental incapacity.
If Giffords is genuinely concerned about the quality of back ground checks, where is her critique of Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who is as responsible for her terrible injuries as anyone? Where is her critique of the Obama Administration who is failing to enforce the back ground check system we have now? It stopped 70,000 ineligible people from getting guns, over 15,000 of which were felons trying to trick the system, and guess how many the Obama Administration prosecuted for trying to get a gun – 44.
If Giffords is genuine in her concern for guns on the street, where is her critique of the Obama Administration who sent thousands of guns to Mexican drug cartels in an effort to blame the following bloodshed to “make the case for more gun regulations“? The administration was outed by their own ATF agents.
Instead, Giffords is a willing participant in what is nothing more than a political attack on 80 million innocent gun owners, most of whom oppose what President Obama and the Democratic Party leadership is doing. Giffords can be sure that the vast majority of those 80 million gun owners, Americans, including this very writer, prayed for her speedy recovery again and again.
Today some of the parents of the Sandy Hook shooting victims were taken to Capital Hill on the taxpayers dollar to lobby members of Congress to pass this registration scheme. Parents of victims who were not fooled and do not support the gun registration scheme were not invited to speak. Are their dead children somehow less precious? Why are they denied the same opportunity to speak to Congress?
And the legislature did not become aware of it until 875 school districts had already adopted the program.
The curriculum, called CSCOPE, includes a list that shows capitalism on the bottom of the list of “just economic systems” along with nazism; with socialism and communism at the top of the most just. Of course those who have taken most any serious political history classes well knows that nazism and communism, in application, are virtually identical.
[Note While the propaganda used to sell communism and nazism/facism is very different, in application, as Professor of Russian and European history Dr. Dmitry Shlapentokh put it, “One is a great white shark and the other is a killer whale, sure one is a fish and the other is a mammal, but as far as their prey are concerned they are one in the same”.]
The curriculum also includes lessons having students design a new communist/socialist flag, pledging allegiance to Mexico, capitalism is “selfish”, the Founders were terrorists, etc. Sen. Larry Taylor (Friendswood) said he found the lesson plan “very egregious as a Texan and an American.”
We, here at Political Arena, have been following this story. When parents first became alarmed went to school boards for answers they were denied access or review of the curriculum. In some school districts students were even told to not tell parents what they were reviewing in class.
In fact, Texas State Board of Education member David Bradley issued the following statement:
…the ten-page CSCOPE contract that teachers are required to sign prior to using the curriculum. It prohibits educators from showing CSCOPE content to parents. This directly conflicts with the state law assuring parents the right to review any and all curriculum used in public schools to instruct their children.
In this same vein, it took the Chairman of our Education Board six months to obtain an access password from CSCOPE developers known as the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative (TESCCC). The TESCCC board is comprised of the 20 executive directors of the 20 publicly funded Regional Education Service Centers in Texas. Access to their meetings and minutes was repeatedly denied until the Texas Attorney General insisted that their meetings be posted and open to the public in accordance with the Texas Open Meetings Act.
This behavior indicates that the school administrators know very well what they are pushing on the kids and their efforts to keep it secret have been significant.
Defenders of CSCOPE have come up with a list of talking points to defend the curriculum with talking points that are a pack of lies.
We have reported here at Political Arena that the radicalization of our public education is widespread and not a week goes by where we do not see several heinous examples of this.
Imagine the ideological wolf pack mentality among teachers and school administrators to get this implemented in 875 Texas school districts before parents and the state legislature started to become aware, there was not one teacher or administrator who blew the whistle, not one.
LINKS:
http://eagnews.org/texas-6th-graders-design-flags-for-a-new-socialist-nation/
http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/01/31/4591624/senators-question-creators-of.html
http://www.txcscopereview.com/2013/cscope-myths/
http://www.txcscopereview.com/2012/cscope-rotten-apple-award/
Lies about sequestration, scores of lies about Benghazi, the release of illegal criminal aliens, Obama sending guns to Mexican drug cartels, the debt, and transparency.
The video doesn’t lie, but the Obama Administration has been constantly. If you know anyone who is still smitten by this man, show them these.
Here is the video referenced by Judge Pirro about how Obama lied about the release of thousands of criminal illegal aliens who were multiple offenders and other lies.
By Chuck Norton
[Editor’s Note – This post is about the propaganda technique described, we are not interested in having a “gay marriage” thread and any comments trying to make it so may be deleted at the Editor’s discretion.]
The left uses the tactic seen in this video endlessly. They try to redefine and/or justify something based on a rare exception and not the pattern, the ideal or the principle. Such as, 80 million gun owners should have their guns taken away because of the actions of a few untreated schizophrenics.
How about a 60,000 page tax code to allow the government to pick winners and losers in the economy, enabling massive corruption and job killing regulations, all because “a few people are too rich”?
In the case of the video below, marriage has no ideal and cannot be about procreation or a contract to raise children well because an elderly couple who marries is unlikely to have children.
Truth is in fact a long series of sub-truths that create a narrative or “paint an accurate picture”. When many of those sub-truths are omitted the crumbs of truth that are left are manipulated to paint the desired false picture. When your child throws a ball in the house and knocks over a lamp, breaking it, and the child tells you that the lamp fell over – sure the lamp did fall over, but he is still lying by omission and deception. This is the type of lie President Obama and the the elite media use constantly to manipulate the public. Consequently, anyone who engages in such a dishonest tactic has torn up the “civility card”.
Dr. Ben Carson
By Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton
Senator McCain said that members of his own party that are concerned about “Drone Strike” policy are “wacko birds” while insisting that no innocent Americans are going to be killed with drones.
The problem is that innocent Americans have already been killed, namely the 16 year old AMERICAN son of a terror suspect. The Obama Administration flippantly said “the kid chose the wrong father” when critiqued. President Obama asserted that he has the power to lock up Americans indefinitely or even kill us, his administration has even made cracks about the “kill list“.
When questioned about some of these extra constitutional powers they said, “trust us” because they would give people on such target lists “administrative due process” which is something that the Obama Administration made up out of this air and essentially means that even when it comes to Americans not engaged in combat, but are merely viewed as a terror threat, the Administration can act as judge, jury and executioner.
Keep in mind that all of what we just told you are facts that are not in dispute.
This made some civil libertarians in both parties nervous for good cause. So members of the House and Senate started asking questions about how the Administration sees the limits of this power and in every case the Obama Administration would use lawyerly rhetorical slight of hand to avoid answering simple questions about the limits of such a policy.
Over and over Senators such as Rand Paul would ask simple questions, so would Senator Ted Cruz, only to get the run around. After weeks of rhetorical gymnastics and Senator Rand Paul’s epic filibuster the Obama Administration, suffering public humiliation on the issue, finally answered a straight question with a straight answer.
Why can we not just “trust them”?
Keep in mind that the Obama Administration willingly and knowingly sent guns to Mexican Drug Cartels in an effort to blame the subsequent loss of life (hundreds killed including an American border agent) with those guns on American gun owners and use the subsequent bloodshed as an excuse to attack the 2nd Amendment. The administration was outed by their own federal agents.
This is the same administration that is facilitating the transfer of arms to Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, helped the Muslim Brotherhood take over Egypt and Libya (Jordan is next) and is even sending tanks and F-16’s to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt who are already murdering Christians, promising war with Israel and are publicly crucifying its political enemies.
This is the same administration that ordered that the jihadist attack on Fort Hood be labeled as “workplace violence” and after promising to get the victims all the help they would need, has an administration that is quite publicly denying those victims and injured heroes such as Kimberly Munley benefits and aid.
This is the same President and his administration that have been caught in lie after lie after lie in their cover up of the four Americans murdered in Benghazi. President Obama still refuses to let Congress have any access to the survivors of the attack.
While Rand Paul was having his epic filibuster on the Senate floor with the help of Republican Sens. Mike Lee (Ut.), John Barrasso (Wyo.), Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), John Cornyn (Tex.), Jerry Moran (Kan.), John Thune (S.D.), Pat Toomey (Pa.) and Ron Johnson (Wis.). Sens.Ted Cruz (Tex.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Tim Scott (S.C.) made their first speaking appearances on the Senate floor. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) also voiced their support.
Senator Mark Kirk, made his first appearance on the Senate floor after having a stroke, he did not speak but he brought Rand Paul an apple and a thermos full of of tea (the same refreshment that Jimmy Stewart used in his famous film about a Senate filibuster).
From the House Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.) Justin Amash (Mich.), Ron DeSantis (Fla.), Doug LaMalfa (Calif.), Garland “Andy” Barr (Ky.), Trey Radel (Fla.), Michael Burgess (Tex.), Jim Bridenstine (Okla.), Raul R. Labrador (Idaho), Keith Rothfus (Pa.), Paul Gosar (Ariz.), Steve Daines (Mont.), Bill Huizenga (Mich.), Richard Hudson (N.C.) and David Schweikert (Ariz.) all came over to the Senate floor to show their support.
While Senator Rand Paul was engaging in his epic filibuster to fight for your rights under the Constitution, John McCain was having dinner with President Obama. The problem is not that Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Justin Amash are “wacko birds”, the problem is that John McCain doesn’t get Barack Obama.
UPDATE VIDEO:
Democrats Colorado state Rep. Joe Salazar got women’s attention when he essentially told them that they are too stupid to know when they are being raped and who is raping them, which is why women cannot be trusted with guns. He is far from the first Democrat to make such comments:
It’s why we have call boxes, it’s why we have safe zones, it’s why we have the whistles. Because you just don’t know who you’re gonna be shooting at. And you don’t know if you feel like you’re gonna be raped, or if you feel like someone’s been following you around or if you feel like you’re in trouble and when you may actually not be, that you pop out that gun and you pop — pop a round at somebody?
Amazing….
Rape victim Amanda Collins was interviewed on the Cam Edwards show. Collins responds to the Democrats’ preposterous assertions and tells how she was treated by CNN, Piers Morgan, and NBC.
Below is the Democrat idiot from Colorado who says that you are too stupid to know who is raping you:
Below, Michelle Malkin responds:
This video is from a few months ago, but it is revealing in demonstration the way the leftist elite media tries to frame the debate falsely, quite frankly, with assumptions that are just lies.
Notice how David Gregory never wants to talk about truly important topics or be critical of President Obama in any way.
It was amazing.
How so?
Even though I have made it my specialty to study liars and the propaganda that is used to market evil to those who are not vigilant, it amazes me when I watch President Obama because, unlike most politicians who lie to get themselves out of trouble or do it off the cuff in the heat of the moment, this new crew of Saul Alinsky inspired Democrats use lies and the most advanced propaganda and deception techniques as a tool for calculated aggression. This writer has no doubt that Obama’s staff has “think tank” sessions where they come up with such lies, distortions, and dishonest associations and even take the time to focus group the lies so as to tweak them for believability.
What I found most offensive was when he perverted the message of America’s Founders as an affirmation of Marxist collectivist propaganda:
… fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. For the American people can no more meet the demands of today s world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people [government must do it]
Individualism of course does not mean always acting alone. Did George Washington with the revolution by himself? Can people not cooperate to make things as complex as a pencil do so without government controlling it all? By using false definitions and associative propaganda techniques this line is designed to undermine and twist the idea of rugged individualism and the idea that in our form of government is the citizen that is the sovereign, not the state.
What we saw in Obama’s speech are the kinds of self serving twists, distortions, and straw-man arguments that tyrants have used for centuries. What makes this different is that , it is being used by an American president, and the quality of such lies is the best I have ever seen since Goebbels.
I was in the process of going through the entire speech so I could deconstruct the lies, but Mytheos Holt at The Blaze has done a nice job of doing this that.
Unfortunately, another characteristic was also in evidence in Obama’s speech: namely, his tendency to argue against positions that nobody holds (and by extension, to mischaracterize his opponents’ views so as to make them easier to argue against). In logic, this unfortunate tendency is referred to as a “straw man fallacy” and it was well-worn in President Obama’s speech today – so well-worn that at times, he seemed to cough up a new straw man fallacy with every sentence. How many of these arguments in bad faith did the President use? Read on as we list each one and explain their fallacious nature.
Straw Man #1:
“For the American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias.”
The President’s line about muskets and militias is a rhetorical flourish more than an argument, but the first part of this line is an obvious straw man. No one in the current political climate is arguing for a complete dissolution of government power such that only the American people as a collective would be responsible for defending the country or performing any other task. Rather, the question is how much responsibility should be left to private citizens. Saying “private citizens cannot handle all responsibilities” is not the same as saying “private citizens cannot handle any responsibility at all.”
Straw Man #2:
“No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores.”
Like the first straw man, this one argues against something which is obviously false, and which no one believes. A single, individual person obviously cannot do all of this alone, but again, that does not imply that if someone cannot do something alone, the government must step in and do it for them. For instance, an architect cannot build a skyscraper alone. He needs laborers, engineers, and other people. But saying he can’t do this alone is not the same thing as saying that private citizens cannot cooperatively agree to do this without help from the government.
Straw Man #3:
“We reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future. For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn.”
No one is proposing completely giving up caring for older generations, nor is anyone proposing completely ignoring young people’s needs. The question is how much government can afford to spend on each. More to the point, no one on either side is proposing complete abolition of programs that help the elderly or the disabled.
Straw Man #4:
“We do not believe that in this country freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few.”
This particular straw man presumably is meant to apply to income inequality. At least, that’s the only public policy issue that this author can see it relating to. However, as with the others, it is a misreading of people who argue against greater income equality. For one thing, freedom and happiness are not necessarily the same as money, and luck is not the only thing that makes a person wealthy. Moreover, people who argue that income inequality is not necessarily a problem are not defending the idea that only a few can be wealthy, which is a question of income mobility, not equality.
Straw Man #5:
“Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms.”
This straw man, which deals with global warming, is actually two fallacies in one. It is a straw man because no one believes they can avoid the impact of natural disasters completely, and it also begs the question by assuming that solving global warming will solve the problem of fires, drought and storms, while simultaneously trying to prove that by solving global warming, natural disasters will be lessened.
Straw Man #6:
“We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.”
The President’s critics on national security do not believe in perpetual war. They may believe in seeing some wars through to their conclusion, or starting other wars out of necessity, but none of them believes in perpetual war for its own sake.
Straw Man #7:
“For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts.”
People arguing against bills such as the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which claim to be devoted to ensuring equal pay for women, often do so because they are concerned that these laws give trial lawyers too much of an excuse to sue, not because they believe women should be underpaid.
Straw Man #8:
“Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law, for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.”
Again, there are no mainstream political figures who believe that gays should be unequal before the law. In fact, gays enjoy all the same constitutional protections as straight people. The question of whether the right to marriage is one of those constitutional protections, however, is an unresolved question, though the Supreme Court may resolve it later this year. This straw man also assumes that the only function of marriage is to facilitate love. That is certainly one view, but it is not one that all critics of gay marriage subscribe to, and thus assuming that they oppose gay marriage out of opposition to love is a straw man.
Straw Man #9:
“Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity.”
Shutting off immigration completely is not a policy proposal being offered. What is being argued about is the question of what to do with people who immigrated to the US in contradiction to its laws.
Straw Man #10:
“Being true to our founding documents does not require us to agree on every contour of life. It does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way or follow the same precise path to happiness.”
This is obviously true, but is also a straw man because no one believes that following a blueprint for governance requires the people following that blueprint to make all the same lifestyle choices. This is not even an argument that constitutional originalists on the Supreme Court advance. The President is arguing against a position that is not held by his critics.
So let me get this straight. When a policeman pulls over a car with possible illegal aliens in it, he cannot ask certain questions because liberals say it’s racism. But liberals want gun owners to be registered, fingerprinted, and data-based up and down, as well as having our names and addresses printed in the paper.
Who is preferred and who is treated as the non-citizen?
And junk science it is. This “study” (see below) is filled with very bogus cliché in the book. This “study” , like all too many writings from radicalized academics, is filled with opinion presented as fact, including but not limited too: small government activists are racists, leftists are “future oriented” modern and “progressive” while conservatives are backwards and “in the past”.
The “study” also paints traditional Americans as THE domestic terror threat, but the FBI has listed far left groups such as ALF, ELF and other left-wing groups as the most active and deadly domestic terror groups and have for many years.
The left is future oriented? As if centralized government control of society and the economy is somehow a new concept? On the contrary that idea is as old as the idea of government itself. The vast majority of man throughout history has lived under such rule.
The idea that rights come from God and cannot be usurped by government, government should be limited by rules and separation of powers, and where the minority is protected from the whims of the majority by law are new concepts and the United States was the first country in the history of the world to be founded upon those ideas; so if anything it is American conservatism that is modern, and those who favor a leviathan state, whatever the spin used to sell it, the dinosaur form of government.
The “study” also says that the left values separation of powers. Anyone skilled in politics is already laughing at this one. It is the Democratic Leader in the Senate who is asking President Obama to violate separation of powers by legislating via executive order and unilaterally raise the debt ceiling illegally. It is the left that ignores the limits placed in Article I, Section 8, as well as the 9th and 10th Amendments as well as the 5th Amendment clause about not taking property without just compensation and that is just for starters.
This is far from the first time an “academic study” ended up being nothing more than a vehicle for politically motivated slander. The IU School of Journalism published this study comparing Bill O’Reilly to the Nazi’s using laughable “fast and loose” terms and tactics. These attacks from radicalized academia are used to justify the kind of hate that we saw when far left groups attacked a charity that helps rape victims for the terrible crime of letting Bill O’Reilly raise money for them.
The report issued this week by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., is titled “Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right.”
The center — part of the institution where men and women are molded into Army officers — posted the report Tuesday. It lumps limited government activists with three movements it identifies as “a racist/white supremacy movement, an anti-federalist movement and a fundamentalist movement.”
The West Point center typically focuses reports on al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists attempting to gain power in Asia, the Middle East and Africa through violence.
But its latest study turns inward and paints a broad brush of people it considers “far right.”
It says anti-federalists “espouse strong convictions regarding the federal government, believing it to be corrupt and tyrannical, with a natural tendency to intrude on individuals’ civil and constitutional rights. Finally, they support civil activism, individual freedoms, and self government. Extremists in the anti-federalist movement direct most their violence against the federal government and its proxies in law enforcement.”
The report also draws a link between the mainstream conservative movement and the violent “far right,” and describes liberals as “future oriented” and conservatives as living in the past.
“While liberal worldviews are future- or progressive -oriented, conservative perspectives are more past-oriented, and in general, are interested in preserving the status quo.” the report says. “The far right represents a more extreme version of conservatism, as its political vision is usually justified by the aspiration to restore or preserve values and practices that are part of the idealized historical heritage of the nation or ethnic community.”
The report adds: “While far-right groups’ ideology is designed to exclude minorities and foreigners, the liberal-democratic system is designed to emphasize civil rights, minority rights and the balance of power.”
The report says there were 350 “attacks initiated by far-right groups/individuals” in 2011.
Details about what makes an attack a “far right” action are not clear in the report, which was written by Arie Perliger, who directs the center’s terrorism studies and teaches social sciences at West Point.
A Republican congressional staffer who served in the military told The Washington Times: “If [the Defense Department] is looking for places to cut spending, this junk study is ground zero.
“Shouldn’t the Combating Terrorism Center be combating radical Islam around the globe instead of perpetuating the left’s myth that right-wingers are terrorists?” the staffer said. “The $64,000 dollar question is when will the Combating Terrorism Center publish their study on real left-wing terrorists like the Animal Liberation Front, Earth Liberation Front, and the Weather Underground?”
The “true socialism” argument is what every would be tyrant (or useful idiot) says for the excuse of every human atrocity that has resulted from experiments in socialism and a state run economy.
by Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton
Liberal activists stopped new laws in Connecticut that could have helped Adam Lanza get the mental help he needed…..
[Political Arena Editor’s Note: Before we get onto the the disturbing details, this very writer has a great deal of experience in helping treating a schizophrenic. I have pretty much seen it all. As well as read the articles, dealt with good doctors and as well as the bad ones who just “don’t get it”. I have dealt with the insurance issues, legal issues and the social issues of it. As much as any non MD can be I am an expert.
With that said, I was lucky in that most of the time mine wanted treatment because she was getting the “Clive Barker” treatment behind her eyes and that scared her. Some patients resist treatment which is a mistake. The legal system must back parents up and help the patient even if it is against their wishes. D.J. Jaffe has a GREAT editorial about changes in the law that can help such patients – LINK ]
There is little doubt that not only was Adam Lanza partially autistic, (Asperger’s syndrome – this disorder has no history of causing violence), he also suffered from extreme depression and/or schizophrenic disorder as he fits the profile like a glove.
It is not multiple personality disorder as is so often shown on television. Schizophrenia acts to change how your brain perceives what the five senses tell it. The signals to the brain intermix the schizophrenic’s perception of reality with ones own imagination and even memories such as what one has seen in a movie.
What the schizophrenic sees, feels, and hears sometimes becomes a jumble. At other times one can hallucinate and/or hear voices. Those with schizophrenia have a hard time relating with others because they misperceive the nonverbal cues that are so crucial in interpersonal communication. If the disorder is pronounced enough the direct verbal cues may also be misperceived.
The mind tries to make order out of the chaos. The mind does not wish to accept their condition so the schizophrenic invents elaborate conspiracies to attempt to rationalize and make order out of the chaos they are perceiving. Since schizophrenic events are often accompanied with a cognitive skills impact the conspiracies do not seem too outlandish to one so affected.
Most normal people can look at a problem of moderate complexity and come to the same conclusion. The schizophrenic will come to a different, completely irrational conclusion, and if you don’t agree with them YOU must be crazy, because to them it is so obvious. For Example:
Three plus seven is 18 and I can prove it by counting the clouds outside. If you can’t see that than you are either an effing idiot or a liar.
The unfortunate truth is that for those so affected such as Jarrod Loughner, who perpetrated the Gabby Giffords shooting in Arizona, in his schizophrenic mind he had to shoot Giffords and her party because reason demanded it.
In more severe cases the schizophrenic may hear voices, see people who aren’t there and have conversations with them that are as real to them as can be. For some schizophrenics the life they live behind their own eyes is like a Clive Barker horror movie that they can never escape from without treatment.
Those who get the help can usually be treated with the proper medication. Those who do not usually try to self medicate with drugs or alcohol to try to cope.
To compound the problem, there are a great many family doctors who simply “don’t get” schizophrenia and I have personally encountered a staff psychiatrist at a hospital who could not comprehend the condition. Why? Largely because of “Normalcy Bias”. In a nutshell, those with “Normalcy Bias” apply their ability to reason to everyone else and assume that simply because the person with the bias can make out the situation with relative ease, that the schizophrenic patient must also, so therefore the patient is just lying, or acting out for attention etc. They will ask things like, “Well if you heard things then how come you don’t now” and “you are all better now you faker?” Those with schizophrenia and associated conditions have episodes where the problem is much worse, and much better. Stress can bring about a psychotic episode even over the effects of medication.
As in the case of Jarrod Loughner, the signs were there, lots of people including parents, teachers, administrators and even police saw them and yet, no one took the appropriate action.
The UK Daily Mail published a quite complete bio of Adam Lanza that shows that he fit the profile of someone with a schizophrenic or similar disorder. Here are excerpts:
Crazed killer Adam Lanza was a ‘ticking time bomb’ who suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome and was painfully shy and awkward, former classmates said yesterday.
Last night, a troubling portrait began to emerge of the ‘Goth’ loner, who dressed all in black and was obsessed with video games.
Goth like “death music” with theses about rejection, suicide, and the horrors of the world seem appealing to schizophrenics as in some ways it is how they perceive their own world. Some video games are popular with schizophrenics because in them they can have some control over their reality and create dramatic scenarios , again, in which unlike in the real world, they have some control.
Others say Lanza used to be a mild-mannered student in high school, making the honor roll, and living with his mother, Nancy Lanza, who in turn loved playing dice games and decorating their upscale home for the holidays.
‘No one is surprised. He always seemed like he was someone who was capable of that because he didn’t really connect with our high school, with our town.’
Another former school friend, Jamie Crespo, 19, said: ‘He used to hang with the freaks, guys who dressed in trench coats.’
Other students remember him walking through school dressed in black, carrying a black briefcase.
Family friends said Lanza’s problems started to escalate when his parents divorced in 2008 after 18 years together.
His father Peter, a wealthy executive for General Electric, who is believed to earn $1 million a year, moved out of the family home in 2006, citing ‘irreconcilable differences’.
One of Lanza’s former classmates spoke of his ‘noticeable decline’ after his parents’ divorce. ‘He was a loner at school and hyper intelligent,’ he said. ‘But in recent years he disappeared off the radar.
‘The word is that he was badly affected when his parents split and that might be what pushed him over the edge.’
‘He was always weird but the divorce affected him. He was arguing with his mother. He was a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.’
In several press accounts, Adam Lanza went from a typical Asperger’s kid, to a dark, more disturbed, more isolated troubled young man. This is typical of those with schizophrenia because it tends to manifest itself after puberty. Stress tends to bring on more psychotic events and makes the condition worse.
A relative to the family said that Adam Lanza was ‘obviously not well,’ adding that he often seemed troubled.
Lanza’s aunt, Marsha Lanza, said her nephew was raised by kind, nurturing parents who would not have hesitated to seek mental help for him if he needed it.
Everyone hesitated including mom and dad. As is so often the case, parents and some relatives just won’t see it. Some are shamed into inaction, some are just too proud to admit that “their offspring is schizo” because of the stigma. Some are simply in denial. “Oh he just had a bad day”, “but he only does that sometimes”, “the stressful situation made him do it”, “no really he is better now (until the next psychotic episode)”, “but what can I do”, “it’s just kids being kids” and “every kid now a days acts strange” are typical rationalities.
How long did mom (who is now dead sadly) hesitate?
The New York Daily News reports:
Less than a week before her son would launch his horrifying attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School, Nancy Lanza knew “she was losing him” and that “he was getting worse.”
A drinking buddy of Lanza told The Daily News that her son Adam had long been troubled and rarely came up in conversation.
“She just looked down at the glass and said, ‘I don’t know. I’m worried I’m losing him,’” said the bar pal, who did not wish to be named, of the ominous conversation at the bar My Place in Newtown, Conn.
“She said it was getting worse. She was having trouble reaching him.”
Adam, who the coroner’s office said Sunday shot Nancy Lanza, 54, several times in the head before unleashing a nightmarish attack that killed 20 schoolchildren and six others Friday, was prone to hurting himself, the drinking buddy said.
“Nancy told me he was burning himself with a lighter. In the ankles or arms or something,” he recalled of a conversation they had about a year ago. “It was like he was trying to feel something.”
Self mutilation such as cutting and burning actually provide temporary relief to those having psychotic events of depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
Criminal Psychologist Dr. Alan Lipman: The FACT is that every One of these episodes Is proceeded by an undiagnosed mental illness:
UPDATE II – Unconfirmed report that Nancy Lanza was petitioning the court for conservator-ship over her son to have him involuntarily committed:
Joshua Flashman, 25, who grew up not far from where the shooting took place. Flashman, a U.S. Marine, is the son of a pastor at an area church where many of the victims’ families worship.
“From what I’ve been told, Adam was aware of her petitioning the court for conservatorship and (her) plans to have him committed,” Flashman told FoxNews.com. “Adam was apparently very upset about this. He thought she just wanted to send him away. From what I understand, he was really, really angry. I think this could have been it, what set him off.”
Off the cuff, I do not think this update is true. If it is where is the court petition and where is the attorney? I do think that it is entirely possible that she discussed doing this at one point. However, if Connecticut had an AOT law such as “Laura’s Law” Nancy Lanza would have been able to get Adam Lanza the help he needed with little difficulty. But who is it who actively resists such laws? Read below.
Counter Contempt reported:
Here’s a fact you might not know – Connecticut is one of only SIX states in the U.S. that doesn’t have a type of “assisted outpatient treatment” (AOT) law (sometimes referred to as “involuntary outpatient treatment”). There’s no one standard for these types of laws, but (roughly speaking) these are laws that allow for people with mental illness to be forcibly treated BEFORE they commit a serious crime. Whereas previous legal standards held that the mentally ill cannot be institutionalized or medicated until they harm someone or themselves, or until they express an immediate intent to do so, AOT laws (again, roughly speaking) allow for preventative institutionalization or forced medication (I highly recommend reading the data cited in the link I provided in this paragraph, especially regarding what is known as “first episode psychosis”).
AOT laws vary state-by-state, and often bear the name of a person murdered by an untreated mentally ill person (“Kendra’s Law” in New York, “Laura’s Law” in California, etc.).
Earlier this year, Connecticut considered passing an AOT law (and a weak one, at that), and it failed, due to protests from “civil liberties” groups.
Most states have laws and even a 1-800 mental health hotline and free clinics to help those who are mentally ill. Arizona had such laws and facilities, but not even the local police called the number after they determined that Jarod Loughner had troubles perceiving reality. Loughner, like Lanza should have been forcibly evaluated. If evaluated, Jarrod Loughner would not have been able to buy the weapon that he bought to do his terrible deed as his evaluation would have been reported to the proper authorities.
We have gun laws that work pretty well, but no system works unless the people on the ground take action to put those laws and resources into action.
Those who engage in “Normalcy Bias” when it comes to mental illness have plenty of cover in leftist academia (also via Jim Hoft):
For Your Country posted this back after schizophrenic Jared Loughner went on his shooting rampage in Arizona that left several people dead and US Rep. Gabby Giffords seriously wounded.
It actually very hard to force people with severe mental diseases to be treated because of a range of reforms pushed by progressives starting in the 60′s:
- Ronald David Laing, a Scottish Psychiatrist, In the 60′s put forth the foundation of the Anti-Psychiatry movement. He maintained that schizophrenia was “a theory not a fact”. The popularity of Laing’s theories is blamed for decline in students entering the psychology profession.
- President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 Community Mental Health Centers Act accelerated the trend toward deinstitutionalization with the establishment of a network of community mental health centers and changes in laws regarding commitment.
- Kenneth Kesey, wrote “One Flew over the Cukoo’s Nest” based in part on Laing’s thinking (and his own intensive use of drugs). “Kesey did not believe that these patients were insane, rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave.” The Book,play, and later the movie, portrayed a anti-psychiatry philosophy leading to a public displeasure with residential mental facilities resulting in further deinstitutionalization policies.
- Deinstitutioanlization led to many legal and structural changes. American public mental hospital patients declined from more than 550,000 in 1955 to fewer than 40,000 at present. The displaced patients now represent 30-50% of the homeless populations.
As a result of Laing, Kennedy, Kesey and public efforts to transform the mental health care system to be more humane, to characterize mentally ill people as “Just thinking differently”, and characterizing mental health care as some form of evil, we now have a system that makes it virtually impossible to get folks like Loughner the care they need.
Deinstitutionalization policies driven by “do good” liberals and the federal government put focus on limited bad acts. Kesey wrote a story based on his LSD induced observations in one VA mental hospital. Once his story was put into film, his small example falsely characterized the bulk of mental health care as dehumanizing and made it impossible to force the Loughners of the world to get treatment.
Critics will focus on gun control after today’s school massacre. The focus should be on failed liberal policies that excuse rather than assist extremely dysfunctional individuals.
Related:
Illinois Issues blog: Closing mental health facilities could cause other problems, opponents say
Alabama Plans to Shut Most Mental Hospitals
After closing psychiatric hospitals, Michigan incarcerates mentally ill
Illinois Mental Hospitals to Turn Away Thousands of Patients
We here at Political Arena are the last to look for government to offer up solutions, but in the case of the mentally ill, most do not have insurance and need state assistance for treatment. Only by education and treatment on a level comparable to that which has been used to combat AIDS will this problem get seriously better.
[Editor’s Note – While not every teacher in Israel carries a rifle, military personnel, reservists, and those with a gun license may carry a weapon openly in Israel. Israel provides armed security for most of its institutions including schools.]
While there is no question that those who are bent on destruction will often find a way to do so with or without access to firearms, sometimes access to guns, in this case stolen guns from a relative, amplifies the damage a disturbed person can cause.
It is important to examine the big picture. In Switzerland and Israel where guns are everywhere there is very little gun crime and very few mass shootings, but in areas of Europe that have gun control laws that essentially turn the citizens into mere subjects, according to studies by Dr. John R. Lott and others, per capita they have about the same number of deaths via mass shooting as the United States does. In states areas where more citizens carry guns legally there are drops in crime and gun violence in almost every instance. Put simply, criminals and those with ill intent prefer helpless unarmed victims.
England may have a virtual ban on guns, but they also have among the highest violent crime in the world, even higher than South Africa and the United States. England’s gun crime increased by 35% in the years following the ban.
In fact, it seems that the Aurora, Colorado Cinemark shooter, aside from being schizophrenic, targeted that particular theater because it had signs up announcing that it was a “Gun Free Zone”.
UPDATE – When Adam Lanza discovered that armed responders were on the scene, that is when the rampage ended – “We surmise that it was during the second classroom episode that he heard responders coming and apparently at that, decided to take his own life,” Mr. Malloy said on ABC’s “This Week.”
According to the Brady Center to Prevent Handgun Violence Connecticut ranks fifth best in the country for toughest gun laws.
Dana Loesch has put together a handy list of sourced and credible statistics about gun crime in general. Notice how violent crime, according to government and academic sources, is much higher in areas where citizens are restricted from using firearms for self defense.
Those with a knee jerk reaction may blame the guns, but do they credit guns with the killing of Osama bin Laden or do they credit the Navy Seals? There is clearly a double standard at play here, and in the case of politicians who know better, the double standard is an agenda driven one.
That agenda is parroted by a liberal elite media which not only focuses on the guns due to their statist ideology, that agenda is also what results in that same elite media not reporting cases where armed citizens prevented mass shooting such as the case of Appalachian Law School, and just two days ago an armed citizen stopped a mall shooting in Portland. When the deranged gunman saw the armed citizen he took cover and then took his own life. When heroic Sandy Brook School principal Dawn Hochsprung lunged at Adam Lanza, she deserved to have the right to lunge at him with something better than a ball point pen.
Many critics are being nakedly political by blaming the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA trains every police firearms instructor and almost every civilian firearms safety instructor in the country. The NRA runs the largest firearm safety program for kids in the country and teaches in many schools. The NRA is also the most powerful political lobby in Washington DC.
Blaming the NRA for this tragedy is like blaming anti-drug war groups for substance abuse and drug overdoses. It really does not get much more irrational than that.
UPDATE: O’Reilly Factor goes to Fordham University – VIDEO
Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate:
Censorship is a huge problem in public schools and universities and most parents have no idea. If you doubt it simply go to thefire.org where you can see literally thousands of examples of illegal censorship and retaliation by academics and university administrators. The site is updated almost daily with new examples.
To see real life examples of incredible censorship and retaliation on video go HERE.
Fordham President Joseph McShane, S.J. expressed his “disgust” with College Republicans for inviting Ann Coulter to campus, and the invitation has now been withdrawn. He sent an e-mail to all students and parents accusing her of “hate speech.”
Fordham’s 2006 commencement speaker was MSNBC host Chris Matthews. The university did not even wait for Coulter to give her speech before condemning her.
Robert Shibley of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education said “Can Fordham’s adult students not be trusted to make up their own minds about the views expressed by a speaker? Does Father McShane believe Coulter is so diabolically clever that her use of ‘disgusting’ rhetoric will somehow fool Fordham students into believing what she wants them to believe? If so, he has a significantly lower opinion of the quality of American college students than I do.
“If Fordham students truly lack the ability to listen to an invited speaker, separate rhetoric from reality, and make up their own minds, then Fordham has much graver problems than Ann Coulter coming to campus.”
Coulter is shown answering questions at the Yale Political Union. The Yale Daily News said “Love her or hate her, it is impossible to ignore Ann Coulter. She’s made a career out of being a firebrand.” Below are a few of her more quotable moments at Yale:
“Liberals love mobs because they see them as their path to power.”
“I love the argument that illegal immigrants need a path to citizenship. We have a path to citizenship: it’s called legal immigration.”
“Every single thing President Obama has done is designed to wreck the economy and drive up the unemployment rate. It’s like he took everything Reagan did right and did exactly the opposite.”
“As long as Obama’s playing golf, he isn’t socializing anything else.”
Political Arena 