Quotes

"Fascism and communism both promise "social welfare," "social justice," and "fairness" to justify authoritarian means and extensive arbitrary and discretionary governmental powers." - F. A. Hayek"

"Life is a Bungling process and in no way educational." in James M. Cain

Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. Sir Winston Churchill

"summum ius summa iniuria" ("More laws, more injustice.") Cicero

As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.”

"Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan

"Law is where you buy it." Raymond Chandler

"Why did God make so many damn fools and Democrats?" Clarence Day

"If I feel like feeding squirrels to the nuts, this is the place for it." - Cluny Brown

"Oh, pshaw! When yu' can't have what you choose, yu' just choose what you have." Owen Wister "The Virginian"

Oscar Wilde said about the death scene in Little Nell, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

Thomas More's definition of government as "a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a commonwealth.” ~ Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” ~ Jonathon Swift

Thursday, April 14, 2011

1979-11, Echoes of Carter "Breaker, Breaker"

Echoes of Carter | FrontPage Magazine
By Daniel Flynn On April 14, 2011

A 2004 issue of The New Yorker magazine that ran photographs of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter left and then Sen. Barack Obama 300x200 A 2004 issue of The New Yorker magazine that ran photographs of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, left, and then Sen. Barack Obama

A 2004 issue of The New Yorker magazine that ran photographs of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, left, and then Sen. Barack Obama are shown on display during the media preview of the Richard Avedon Photographs 1946-2004 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re really living in a television program? For 2011 America, the rerun we are collectively forced to act in is That ’70s Show.

Supermarket prices have skyrocketed. An energy crisis looms. The economy sputters along. Back then, the president imposed price controls on oil as a misguided means to keep consumer costs under control; now, the president is poised to implement price controls as part of his health care plan. People talk openly of an America in decline.

We may have traded in CB radios for Facebook, streaking for celebrity sex videos, Betamax for Blueray, and eight-tracks for MP3s. But the similarities between our times and those times are uncanny.

“I believe we can have a foreign policy that is democratic, that is based on fundamental values, and that uses power and influence, which we have, for humane purposes,” Jimmy Carter announced at Notre Dame’s 1977 commencement ceremonies. The 39th president committed America to regarding “human rights as a fundamental tenet of our foreign policy.”

“Sometimes, the course of history poses challenges that threaten our common humanity and our common security,” Barack Obama explained in his recent televised address on the Libyan intervention. He continued that America, by working alongside allies, should “see that the principles of justice and human dignity are upheld by all.”

One hears the echoes of Carter not only in the call for a foreign policy occasionally divorced from national interest and tethered to human rights. The echoes reverberate loudest in the manner foreign policy is carried out in the Middle East. The Carter administration in 1979, and the Obama administration in 2011, cheered on the fall of a garden-variety strongman as the dawn of something better.

...

When events went sour in Iran and Egypt, President Carter and President Obama reversed course on support for dictators who had supported the United States.

[Read more of these parallels at the above link.]

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