ALAN KEYES SPEAK AT DAYTON TEA PARTY

DR. ALAN KEYES IN ROUSING SPEECH taunts crowd to leave the comforts of yesterday and stand up against those who would seal their fates by trampling on the US Constitution...

MALAISE REVISITED: OBAMA AND JIMMY

Dead ringers.

ON JULY 15th, 1979, PRESIDENT Jimmy Carter made a televised address to the nation that later became known as “the malaise speech.” America’s economic problems were bad and getting worse. Lines at gas stations, inflation, rising unemployment. The speech that President Carter gave that day was presumably meant to inspire, but ultimately fell on many people’s ears as a litany of what was wrong with Americans and with America.

Carter seemed to be blaming Americans for creating their own troubles with their lack of confidence and spirit. It came to define his presidency for many. Of-course, he had already been president for two and a half years when he made this speech. The smiling peanut-farmer from Georgia had become transformed for many into a sour, pinched and pained version of himself. In 1980, Americans chose another smiling former governor as president. Ronald Reagan’s optimism, however, proved considerably more resilient.

President Barack Obama has been president for two and a half weeks. Yet, part of the reason that his honeymoon has been so short (about one day by my count, i.e., Inauguration Day) is that for many, in the media as well as the populace, he effectively became president the day after the election last November. Since then, so many wanted him to be president already, and to shoo George W. Bush out the door, that it feels like he’s already been in office for about three months.

And yet, this President Obama we have just doesn’t seem like the Barack Obama that won the election. The American electorate, it has been said, always goes with the perceived “sunnier” candidate when voting for president, and you can make a very good case for that. There certainly was little contest on that basis between Barack Obama and John McCain. Obama spoke constantly of hope, avoided controversial wedge issues, and projected one of the most unflappably pleasant dispositions of any presidential candidate since the dawn of the TV age.

His motto was, famously, “Yes we can.” Yet, the day after the election, Barack Obama turned on a dime. Suddenly, he started telling us, things were not only very bad, but were going to be getting a lot worse. Inevitably.

It was easy enough to see the point of this move, tactically speaking. He needed to lower people’s expectations of the coming New Jerusalem that would arrive with his inauguration, just a tad. He needed to set the bar lower with regard to how success would be defined for him in his first few months. And—more controversially, but, I am convinced, truly—'he wanted to foster to some extent a sense of crisis, as it would assist him and the Democratic congress in quickly passing sweeping measures to advance their political agenda.

Read it all.

THE RON PAUL ERROR

Presidential candidate Ron Paul has finally spoken to the issue which I have been waiting to hear him speak. While I am in absolute awe of his strict constitutionalism, and wish him the best of luck in turning this country back to its original path, I realize geo-political concerns are vastly different in this global supersonic nuclear age, and America's future cannot be resolved without recognizing this more complicated set of affairs. This is not the steam engine era. But with Prof. Paul's recent comments about Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, the slavery issue, and now the Islamic problem, I know I cannot wholeheartedly support this man's candidacy, despite the vapors of wishful thinking of which I may occasionally succumb in a fit of inconvenient nostalgia for the patriotism I was taught in my fifth grade civics class and confirmed in the Boy Scouts of America, Troop 219. The argument that had America stuck to the constitution in the first place, the world and the States would be a very different place, has no worthwhile rebuttal. However, that hallowed place is not where we find ourselves today.

Paul repeats several tired misconceptions about the nature of contemporary Islamic agitation and jihad, blaming the West again despite evidence that this aggression is being accelerated all over the globe and into areas which have nothing to do with American bases, forces, pop culture, morality, or lack of it. It has everything to do with the prime directive of Mohammed to go forth when possible and dominate the earth, giving it over to Allah worship. Muslim leadership sees this time of global crisis amid their own oil wealth as Allah's sign to them to push jihad into all lands of the kaffir. It's that simple, folks.

Another fissure in Paul's flimsy "occupied holy land" construct is that rapidly after 9/11, the US completed a withdrawal from Saudi Arabi, yet today we learn that this terror spewing nation remains one of the major exporters of murderous Jihadis.

Fact: The United States leaves the "holy" trash heap of Saudi Arabia, and the Jihad impulse remains intact and even amplified.

Fact: Leave Gaza, and the bombs and exterminationist rhetoric only elevates, as exemplified here.

Fact: Exterminate Israel, and the work of the pious Muslims is not yet complete.

We are left with the realization that if one comprehends the true nature of expansionist triumphalist fascist Islam, one would must also understand instantly that such Islamic victories would only whet Muslim lust for more booty, more murder, and more territory for the imperialist nightmare of Islam.

An argument can and should be made that today there are more Muslims than ever supporting UBL and al-Qaeda, or offshoots of al-Qaeda. Rather than blaming our actions and our policies, (or our inactions for that matter) for this reality, as many Westerners (and ALL Muslims) do, it's much simpler to explain it as something intrinsic within the infinite hideousness of Islam. Murderous, expansionist, terroristic Jihad is a creed deeply entrenched within Islam. Hatred of non-Muslims is intrinsic. Lust for booty and war too. These, and many other evil and vile strands are in the very weft of Islam, inseparable from it.

These evils are the monster which bin Laden brilliantly awoke and vexed back to full consciousness after centuries of relative dormancy. It is ALL Islam...

As the Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote around the turn of the previous century:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?