Vermont: If at first you don't secede...

(This article was first published at The American Thinker on 02/02/2010.)
Despite being wildly over-represented in Congress considering their pint-sized population and their woeful insignificance to all but the maple syrup, macrame' plant-hanger and lib-tard industries, it looks like Vermonters would like to secede. A collection of native moon-bats has formed the ""left-libertarian, anti-big government, anti-empire, antiwar,...small is beautiful" Second Vermont Republic with plans to unhook the Green Mountain State from the tenous tether to sanity maintained by its inclusion in our 50 states.You see, Vermont, like Texas (I bet you never thought you would see those three words strung together), was an independent republic before it ever became our 14th state. Originally a French possession, Vermont was the booby prize awarded to the British in 1763 for their victory in the French and Indian War. From 1777 to 1791 Vermont was a power unto itself led by it's fierce militia. Called The Green Mountain Boys, their army was comprised of itinerant furniture makers including Ethan Allen and his crafty young recruits, Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders.After more than two centuries of statehood, however, the hearts of Vermont's Ben & Jerry's-swilling populace was broken by Barack Obama. The secessionist party's gubernatorial candidate is currently the owner of Radio Free Vermont and states the case for those northeasterners desirous of opting out of the U.S. of A.:
"People in Vermont in general are very antiwar, and all their faith was in Obama to end the wars. I ask people, 'Did you get the change you wanted?' They can't even look you in the eyes. We live in a nation that is asleep at the wheel and where the hearts are growing cold like ice." The secessionist movement already commands the support of 13% of Vermont's voters. If supporters for the state's drive to legalize the use of marijuana for the treatment of sandal fungus, windmill pox and solar panel blindness succeed, pundits expect support for secession to rise to near unanimity. The well-organized movement has a slogan: "Imagine Free Vermont." I guess living in those monts verts inspires a desire to take the high ground, with the iconoclasts from Montpelier (population 7,760) believing they have cornered the market on morality:
"The U.S. government, they said, was an immoral enterprise - engaged in imperial wars, propping up corrupt bankers and supersized corporations, crushing small businessmen, plundering the tax-base for corporate welfare, snooping on the private lives of citizens - and they wanted no more part of it."In addition, the free-thinkers from the Burlington Mutineer Factory believe that by going even greener, the residents of Vermont can cast off their corporate oppressors and achieve energy and economic indepence:
" (they can do so) with a tax structure reformed to incentivize small business and industry (and to make life difficult for large out-of-state corporations). By 2020, they foresee Vermont producing at least 75% of its own electricity and heat, using wind-, solar-, biomass- and hydro-power....(furthermore they believe that) current U.S. law enables multinational corporations to abuse Vermont as a "resource colony." Citing a 2008 study by the University of Vermont, Wagner says the state stands to gain over $1 billion a year in revenue by taxing equitably the corporate behemoths that exploit Vermont's "commons," which includes everything from the state's groundwater, surface water, wildlife and forests, to the public spectrum of the airwaves. Pardon my cynicism, but if Vermont wanders off on its own, it won't be 12 months until their native deposits of snow and Stowe-bud run out and the Birkenstock Flannel Revolution comes a cropper. That's not to say I don't like the idea of Vermont's secession: I say let 'em yoke themselves to the Mexifornians and the Tundra-Pinkoes from Wisconsin and go over the falls in a troika-barrell.

American Francophiles

(This article first appeared at The American Thinker on 01/30/2010.)
Barack Obama and his allies a gauche would like to model our national economy after that of the Social Democrat statopias of Western Europe, with the model of France being a particularly attractive model for leftists. A reading of the auto-biography of Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (Harcourt, Brace & Company 1948) suggests that the American national psyche has already gravitated toward the francophilic.Merton spent the better part of his life in cloistered monasteries, practicing a mixture of fierce Christian faith and a meditative practice that drew from the ways of Eastern spirituality. As a child, he lived in France and came to revile it and the change in the character of the French people as their sense of cultural smugness blurred their sense of place in both the world and the universe.
"..I suppose the most shocking thing about France is the corruption of French spirituality into flippancy and cynicism; of French intelligence into sophistry; of French dignity and refinement into petty vanity and theatrical self-display; of French charity into a disgusting fleshly concupiscence, and of French faith into sentimentality or puerile atheism." (pg 51 TSSM)If one were to substitute the words "America" and American for the words, "France" and "French," one would have a clear picture of the dissolution of the American character, particularly as represented in the politically correct worlds of academia and journalism.Only a return to a focus on educational principles grounded in the thorough study of history, religion and the humanities can prevent our continued slide into the economic and social morass currently inhabited by the nearly bankrupt, demographicly dead-end states of Western Europe.

Americans Wake Up to Obama's Lies

(This article first appeared at The American Thinker on 01/20/2010.)
As much as Barack Obama professes his admiration for our 16th POTUS, Abraham Lincoln, B.O. still seems determined to disprove one of Honest Abe's most famous bromides:"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."(Abraham Lincoln ) The fact that this duplicitous non-achiever was elected in the first place proves his ability to fool nearly all of the people some of the time. Despite a near total lack of credentials, a voting record vacillating between rad-lib and "present," and a passel of communists, terrrorists, anti-Semites and criminials in his close circle of friends, Obama rather easily fooled nearly all of the people in our great land. Especially those who went to journalism school.The increasingly tin-tongued Speechifier-in-Chief seems deterrmined to flay the dead horse that Obamacare has become, just as he continues out in front of the politically correct nit-wit national security apparatus he has constructed, believing that he merely needs to find the right way to parse his promotion of these bankrupt ideas so his intellectual inferiors can finally "get it."Well, we're getting it, all right. The latest Rasmussen poll demonstrates just how much of America Obama has lost. When asked whether B.O.'s proposed freeze of discretionary federal spending would help much, fully 9% of respondents agreed that it would while 81% of those polled believed that the freeze would be little help, if any. I'm sure Joy Behar, Keith Olbermann and Henry Waxman are still on board. After all, Lincoln did state that you can fool some of the people, all of the time. The starry eyed residents of Lib La-La Land are snug in their tin-foil hats with their Obama blankie to keep them safe and warm. It appears that all Obama has left is the true believers. After nearly a year of B.O.'s fork-tongued pontificating, he is reduced to fooling almost none of the people, all of the time.