Gem of the Week: Woody the Fascist

 

“It is a fool’s prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.” 1

In a recent interview published by a Spanish language newspaper, film director and comedian Woody Allen had this to say about Barack Obama: “I am pleased with Obama. I think he’s brilliant. The Republican Party should get out of his way and stop trying to hurt him… It would be good…if he could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly.” 2

Dictator? Really?  Sounds ridiculous, right?  And coming from a nutty—albeit highly accomplished and creative—guy like Woody Allen, it’s to be easily dismissed. Or is it?  Perhaps Woody himself is unaware of just how germane his comment really is. 

First, need we remind ourselves that Obama and his party control the White House and both houses of Congress.  As Commander in Chief, he of course has full control over the military.  And in less than two years, the Obama government:

• controls at least one-sixth of the American economy through the new healthcare law;
• controls a large part of the automotive industry with the bailout and takeover of General Motors;
• controls or exercises daunting power over the insurance and financial industries with the bailout of the banks and AIG;
• controls 96% of the housing market through quasi-government housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac;
• will have unprecedented control over a large part of the energy sector with the passage of “Cap and Trade” legislation;
• will have unprecedented control over news and other media outlets that it doesn’t already have de facto control over (i.e., NBC and MSNBC) with the passage of the “fairness doctrine” or its equivalent.
• will have unprecedented control over the Internet with the passage of so-called “net neutrality” or its equivalent.
• is attempting to infiltrate and exercise control over the nation’s churches through a new faith-based initiative program that merges churches with the EPA.
• is attempting, through the Justice Department, to usurp control over a state’s right to duly enact laws to deal with immigration problems within the state (Arizona);
• is publicly contemplating, through the Justice Department, a modification to the Miranda laws with respect to certain U.S. citizens.

It would seem all President Obama needs now is some kind of national catastrophe or emergency (real or contrived) as justification for enacting his own form of “enabling” law to sweep away any remaining dissent and fully suspend all freedom of speech and civil rights.  So I’d say Woody is just one Reichstag Fire away from getting his wish. 3  But Woody may want to be careful what he wishes for.  His people don’t have a really good history with dictators, don’t cha know. 

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Footnotes:

Fn. 1: Attributed to Neil Gaiman, in Dream Country

Fn. 2: For Woody Allen quote:

http://entertainment.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/05/17/woody-allen-president-obama-dictator/

Fn. 3: For more information on the German Reichstag fire click here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire

Gem of the Week: The Right to Disneyworld!

Tourism is now a human right in Europe!  Yep!  Not simply the right to move freely or travel about, but the right, if you are a European, to demand of your government a taxpayer-subsidized vacation to somewhere like, say, Disneyworld!  Euro-Disney, that is.  Wow, Europe must be such a wonderful place!  But where-oh-where do they get all that free money from?  I mean it must grow on trees over there!  Or maybe the Europeans who work at all the amusement parks, hotels, resorts and other vacation spots just work for free.  Not to mention all the folks working on the planes, trains, buses, etc. that are needed to transport everyone who chooses to exercise their new free tourism right.  Oh well, I’m sure they’ve got it all figured out.  Besides, who cares when it’s a free vacation!

With the big debate over here being about whether there is even a right to healthcare, those fancy European Union folks must think we’re just a bunch of heathens.  You can almost hear them in Brussels saying, “Healthcare a right? Oh, mon dieu! Of course that is a right!  We’ve wrapped that one up and given it to our peoples long ago, Messieurs.  Even Hitler and Stalin knew that! What is it with you provincial Americans and your so-called Natural Laws anyway?  No wonder we kicked you out.  Ignorant philistines!”

The Griswolds in Europe

Ah, yes.  It would indeed appear that the wise men and women of Europe have “progressed” to bigger and better things.  The Times Online reports that the European Union has formally declared that tourism is now a human right and that “pensioners, youths and those too poor to afford it should have their travel subsidized by the taxpayer.”  According to EU Commissioner for Enterprise and Industry, Antonio Tajani, “Travelling for tourism today is a right. The way we spend our holidays is a formidable indicator of our quality of life.”  According to Tajani’s spokesman: “Why should someone from the Mediterranean not be able to travel to Edinburgh in summer for a breath of cool, fresh air; why should someone from Edinburgh not be able to travel to Greece in winter?”  1

And why not indeed?  Well, I guess they always have been a few steps ahead of us over there.  I for one will not be completely happy (as is my right) until everyone has a right to a mansion and a yacht and a Maserati Quattroporte and, oh yes, a free lap-dance from that Taiwanese stripper I met the other night.  Now that’s what I call exercising a natural right!

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Fn. 1:  To view the full Times Online article, click here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article7100943.ece

For a related post on this topic, link to:

https://culturecrusader.wordpress.com/2010/03/20/why-you-don%e2%80%99t-have-a-right-to-healthcare/

Gem of the Week: Porn Exchange

As a publicity stunt, it seems a cabal of Godless young enterprisers at the University of Texas at San Antonio are offering their fellow students porn in exchange for their bibles.  According to the student atheist group, pornography is no worse than the text of the Bible, so why not do a fair exchange?  Well, not to get too technical, but the standard dictionary definition of pornography is: “films, magazines, writings, photographs, or other materials that are sexually explicit and intended to cause sexual arousal.” (Emphasis added.)  While there appear to be arguments out there (way out there) that the Bible contains some passages that could be interpreted as slightly suggestive (eg., The Old Testament’s Song of Solomon), one can hardly seriously argue that these rise to the level of sexual explicitness intending to cause arousal.  Or to put it another way, if you’re reaching for the Bible to get your jollies, you’re pretty pathetic.

At any rate, there is nothing novel about yet another group of self-important college students employing sophomoric shock tactics to seek attention.  However, what is news is the school’s reaction to the event.  When asked for comment, school officials mildly replied that the atheist group is perfectly within its legal rights to conduct the swap.  According to University Spokesman David Gabler: “As long as students are not violating laws or violating the Constitution, they have the freedom of speech and assembly.”  He elaborated, “We are a marketplace of free ideas here at UTSA, and our students have all constitutional rights afforded to all individuals in the United States.”

Well isn’t that nice.  Apparently, the school is not the least bit scandalized by any of this.    At a time when colleges seem to think of every reason under the sun why a conservative group cannot have this or that speaker appear on campus, how refreshing it is to see the open-minded University of Texas officials suddenly standing up for free speech and assembly in the marketplace of ideas.  Given this new laissez-faire approach, one wonders if they would be quite so accommodating of other groups employing similarly obscene tactics.  Suppose a Christian student group decided to do a Bible for Quran exchange?  What if a white supremacist student group offered an exchange of Hitler’s Mein Kampf for copies of the Torah?  Or an even greater sacrilege: an exchange of Mein Kampf for Barrack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope.  Would the liberal thinking administrators of the University of Texas still be so tepidly neutral?

Our rights are guaranteed under the Constitution and are there for our protection, not for our abuse.  On the spectrum of bad examples the school could set for its students, the only thing worse than condoning the abuse of a right (in this case free speech), is the picking and choosing of when and for whom a right applies, and when and for whom it does not.  And that is nothing short of obscene.

For a related post, link to:

https://culturecrusader.wordpress.com/2010/03/23/gem-of-the-week-oh-canada-what-a-houles-you-are/

Inconvenient History

Over the past several weeks, I have grown increasingly impressed by the President’s determination, in the face of daunting public opposition, to press on with enacting his plan for government-run healthcare.  Notwithstanding a growing number of angry Americans who clearly do not want the national experiment that is this plan, this President appears resolute.  I am reminded of the words of a noted historian:

“Like many of the revolutionaries and conquerors of history, from Alexander to Napoleon to Stalin, he was a foreigner among his countrymen.  There is surely a psychological link between this sense of being an outsider and the readiness to employ a whole nation as material for wild and expansive projects, even to the point of destroying the nation.”

Excerpt from: Hitler by Joachim C. Fest.  (New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1974), p.14.