<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>Obama&#039;s Enemies List: A Growing List of Obama&#039;s Enemies &#187; Berlin Wall</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.obamashitlist.com/category/berlin-wall/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com</link>
	<description>Are you on OBAMASHITLIST?</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Sat, 11 Feb 2012 02:30:30 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en</language>
	<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
	<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	<generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1</generator>
		<item>
		<title>Obama Scissorhands</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2012/01/12/obama-scissorhands/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2012/01/12/obama-scissorhands/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:09:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Markisacopyrightthief</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Ahmadinejad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berlin Wall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ahmadinejad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[asia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[george-bush]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[greece]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[intelligence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[italy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[money]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.obamashitlist.com/2012/01/12/obama-scissorhands/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ There are two ways to react to President Obama's latest round of defense spending cuts. One is emotional but somewhat justified. The second is to analyze of Obama's plans critically to reveal a transformation of our military that is as dangerous as Obama's transformation of our economy. Since Obama appeared with Defense Secretary Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey in the Pentagon press room last Thursday, many commentators have written and railed at length on radio and television about how these cuts will hollow our forces' readiness to fight. That reaction is understandable but it isn't on more solid ground than Obama's plan, because neither the plan nor the common reaction deals with the real dangers our nation faces. Under former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Obama imposed about $400 billion in defense spending cuts by his "Queen of Hearts" method of budgeting for defense: verdict first, trial after. They ended, for example, production of key weapon systems such as the F-22 fighter, the C-17 transport aircraft, and the DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer. Gates imposed those cuts before the Quadrennial Defense Review -- "QDR" in the inevitable acronym -- was performed. The QDR was supposed to be the congressionally mandated analysis of the threats the Pentagon is expected to deal with and from which its budget is supposed to be derived. But Gates and his team wrote the post-cuts QDR to justify the cuts rather than to justify a budget that answered the threats. In April of last year, Obama praised Gates's first round of cuts and then ordered a review of defense spending to double them. Last week's announced plan was the result of that review. It repeated the Queen of Hearts exercise and took it one step further. It took the planned smaller budget, fashioned our military's future around it, and then made big promises that cannot possibly be kept. The plan announced by Obama and Panetta plans a revision of our force structure: • To refocus our military to meet the rise of China's military force by "rebalancing" toward the Asia-Pacific region. • To be able to win one conflict and fight another to a stalemate. • To provide standing forces, for a limited time, to engage in new nation-building operations. • To meet every other challenge in space, cyberwar, and other fields of unconventional operations. So if we have to fight China, Israel has to deal with Iran on its own, Europe can deal with Russia, and the Middle East can stew in its own juices. And stalemate is now a strategy. But even that's a very tall order for a force that may be cut by as much as $1 trillion in spending over the next ten years. Let's get that bogeyman out of the way first. Just because a Pentagon budget is $700 billion a year doesn't mean that it will be more effective at deterring or defeating the threats than a threat-based $350 billion a year force might be. The unanswered questions are what capabilities do we need and what will it cost to have them? And there's the rub. Neither the Pentagon nor, as far as I can determine, the intelligence community has done the essential analysis to determine what we need our military to do. Obama's plan mentions things such as missile defense, cyberwar, and space operations as targets for investment, but it also plans to pour money into strengthening the failed NATO alliance and other such boondoggles. There's not enough money to go around. Our NATO allies haven't invested in their own defense since the fall of the Berlin Wall. With the euro about to slip on Greece and crash down on Italy, that trend isn't going to be reversed in the foreseeable future. Obama didn't demand that they do more for themselves, and under his plan we will not be able to do more from them without robbing money from funds essential to performing other plans Obama made. Obama knows that and, to be sure, Vlad Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hu Jintao know it as well. So with all the broad promises, where's the leaner budget to be spent, and how do we know that it won't be spent unwisely? For example, Obama's new-found dedication to nation-building is limited by its own statement that "U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations." You can't have it both ways. George Bush's biggest mistake since 9/11 was to pour too much blood and treasure into nation-building and it failed comprehensively despite the enormous investment. Planning to do less means you will accomplish less. Does anyone believe that Obama will allow further investment in missile defense or the other capabilities we need to thwart China's rise? I don't believe he will, and everything he has done to date reinforces that belief. China is investing unknown billions in an area-denial force. Its ships and aircraft aren't being designed to defeat the U.S. Navy, but only to deny it the ability to intervene successfully in Chinese operations in the Pacific region. Obama's plan says he will invest in everything we need to counter the area-denial strategy. But the categories of weapon systems Obama plans to use to respond to China -- missile defense, a new stealth bomber, undersea capabilities and space-based capabilities -- are among the most expensive weapons we ever buy. (A single spy satellite can cost over $1 billion.) With the cuts already in place, and more to come, we simply won't be able to spend enough to do what Obama falsely promises. The falsity of Obama's promises is clear from any serious review of his plan. He's making plans he knows will not -- and cannot -- be implemented. Based on his transformation of our economy into a government-run enterprise, Obama is -- not coincidentally -- making it financially impossible for our military and intelligence services to do what they will have to do even under his reduced vision of U.S. military power. There probably are ways to restructure the Pentagon budget. There could be a much less expensive force that would be more capable and effective in deterring and defeating aggression than the current $700 billion a year force. But, right now, nobody knows what it would look like. Back in the good old days (1981-1988) we had something called "defense guidance," which was the basis for something else called the "POM." The annual defense guidance process combined the best thinkers from the intelligence community and the military. They'd sit down and -- one by one -- assess our adversaries' intentions and capabilities. Once that assessment was done, they would analyze what we needed to have in the military tool box to deter or defeat the threats and compare it to what we already had or we'd already planned. They would propose to retire outdated weapons, resize and reshape our forces, and then come up with an outline of what we needed to pay for and invest in to ensure the threats were answered. That was the defense guidance for the year. At that point, the Pentagon's bean counters would turn it into the "program objective memorandum" -- the sacred "POM" -- from which the Pentagon's budget would be derived. It sounds simple, but defense guidance was an enormously complex intellectual exercise. Until we perform that process again, we can't know what our military forces need to be able to do to answer the many threats we face. Obama is leading us down a blind alley, and the only certainty is that what we will have -- in ten or twenty years -- won't be what we need. That gap in capabilities will, inevitably, be filled. Either with a properly-designed force, or with the bodies of those serving in one that was designed to fit a budget cut rather than the threats. ]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2012/01/12/obama-scissorhands/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Case for a Conservative</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/12/27/the-case-for-a-conservative/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/12/27/the-case-for-a-conservative/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:09:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>concernedcoloradoan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berlin Wall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ronald Reagan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rush Limbaugh]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[arguments]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[country]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[review]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[time]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[white]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/12/27/the-case-for-a-conservative/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ Did you hear the news about]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/12/27/the-case-for-a-conservative/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>President Robespierre</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/10/25/president-robespierre/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/10/25/president-robespierre/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:10:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>LanaGalloway</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berlin Wall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nancy Pelosi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[america]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attention]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[berlin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[black]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[german]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hawaiian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[personal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[revolutionaries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[street]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[time]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united-states]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[video]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/10/25/president-robespierre/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ "One section leader proposed to cure economic distress by putting all rich people to death." -- The French Revolution as described in The Age of Napoleon by Will and Ariel Durant Why was the frequently outspoken actress Daryl Hannah suddenly so shy when talking to Sean Hannity? Why was the always outspoken actress Roseanne Barr suddenly so angry with a celebrity financial website? And why was the never shy Alec Baldwin twittering cagily in non-denial denial mode? What could possibly make these three famous activist actors so respectively reticent, furious and coy? The Occupy Wall Street Movement has received cheers from President Obama, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats, with the President's union and media allies swarming to support the protest. What is the question that, according to Occupy Wall Street supporter and Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs, is driving the movement? Simply put, Sachs sums up the driving force as "economic justice." It is this that has caused liberals to rally, conservatives to be appalled. The issue is thus joined, and goes precisely to the heart of what kind of a country America will be. Since "economic justice" is the demand here, let's explore why liberal actors and Occupy Wall Street enthusiasts Hannah, Baldwin and Barr would suddenly exhibit the behavior they have so publicly displayed. What specifically is the history behind this demand for economic justice, or the division, as it is currently phrased, between the "1%" and the "99%"? How did previous supporters seek to bring "economic justice" for the "99%" to reality? Is there something in the history of this issue that is affecting the behavior of Hannah, Barr and Baldwin, while posing considerable risk to Democrats in the 2012 presidential election? In 1789 the rumblings of an earlier version of Occupy Wall Street were already in evidence. By 1792 King Louis XVI was under arrest and France was launched on the first serious modern movement dedicated to what is now called "economic justice." It became known, of course, as the French Revolution. What happened? As the Revolution picked up speed, famously under the influence of a Jacobin leftist named Maximilien Robespierre, a Catholic priest named Jacques Roux and his followers -- the "Enraged Ones" -- marched on the new authorities in Paris, a.k.a. the Committee for Public Safety in which Robespierre played such a key role -- saying: "Yours is no democracy, for you permit riches. It is the rich who have reaped, in the last four years, the fruits of the Revolution; it is the merchant aristocracy, more terrible than the nobility, that oppresses us." Within two months a French deputy in the Revolution pronounced the rising sentiment: Let Terror be the order of the day. The cry went out: "War on tyrants, hoarders and aristocrats." And so it was. The demand went up for authorities to travel France with a "portable guillotine" compelling any French citizen of any discernible wealth to, as recorded in The Age of Napoleon , "surrender his hoarded produce or be executed on the spot." The Terror began, and the hated French capitalists of the day and others who had incurred the wrath of the mob became the first -- after the King and Queen -- led to the guillotine. Death sentences were issued at the rate of seven a day. Every rich person available was hustled away from home and hearth, given a brief, well-fixed trial or none at all -- than summarily carted to the guillotine. On and on this went -- and then, inevitably, the charges of wealth and just about everything else from suspected loyalty to the dead king to insufficient rigor in supporting the Revolution was deemed as treason to the masses and took the inevitable turn. Shocked, one prominent Frenchman of the day observed: "The Revolution… is devouring its own children." The city of Lyons was seen in the day as "almost the capital of French capitalism" -- the 18 th century French version of New York City and Wall Street. Robespierre issued his edict: The city of Lyons shall be destroyed. Every habitation of the rich shall be demolished… A "Temporary Commission" was created to judge the entrepreneurs of Lyons. Those suspected of possessing any signs of wealth would receive a "trial." All private wealth was to be confiscated, "the rich" and others to have their property taken. When a petition signed by ten thousand women begged mercy for their family and friends already now imprisoned, the response was the public execution of sixty of the "prisoners." Then another 209 the next day. Then three days later another 200. All shot to death with "showers of slugs or grapeshot from a row of cannon." A proposal was floated that all rich people should be put to death. Prices rose amid the blood, in direct contradiction to the promise of the Revolution. Lines formed for bread, milk, meat, butter, oil, soap, candles and wood. Which only increased demands to increase the power of the state. The "laws" tumbled forth proclaiming "free, universal primary education" and the establishment of a welfare state. Rationalism was the order of the day, and religion was to be replaced. In Paris, the Cathedral of Notre Dame was momentarily renamed "The Temple of Reason." By the time this was all over, with revolutionaries turning on each other with swift judgment, the total number of victims in this swirling madness is estimated to have reached some 40,000. Eventually, predictably, the attention of the Revolutionaries now busy devouring their own children turned on one of its fathers -- Robespierre himself. He met the guillotine on July 28, 1794. Jacques Roux, the head of the Enraged Ones had preceded Robespierre -- the latter having already turned his sights on his one-time political soul mate and imprisoning him over a disagreement of political ardor. Roux committed suicide in prison six months before the blade finally came around to Robespierre's own neck -- when Robespierre's comrades decided their leader had been found wanting. Alas for the world, there was more to come from the believers of "economic justice." The philosophy of the Nazis, the German National Socialist Labor Party, is the purest and most consistent manifestation of the anti-capitalistic and socialistic spirit of our age. So wrote the famous biographer of the idea of economic justice in practice, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises in his landmark book Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis . Mises noted that the Nazi slogan Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz -- the commonweal ranks above private profit -- "implies that profit-seeking business harms the vital interests of the immense majority and that it is the sacred duty of popular government to prevent the emergence of profits by public control of production and distribution." The Nazis applied this "justice" argument not only economically inside Germany itself, it formed the basis of their belief in the need for Lebensraum (living space). Which is to say, the Nazis demanded not only the redistribution of income -- but the redistribution of land, of physical living space outside of Germany -- and the resources that went with it. They demanded " Nahrungsfreit " -- freedom from importing food. Which began the Nazi takeovers of Czechoslovakia, Austria, and eventually on to the rest of Europe. Nazism, says Mises, "was nothing but the logical application of [the tenets of economic justice] to the particular conditions of comparatively overpopulated Germany." Mises goes on to note that German academia had for decades previous to the rise of Hitler "eagerly imbued their disciples with a hysterical hatred of capitalism, and preached the war of 'liberation' against the capitalistic West.… When the Soviet policies of mass extermination of all dissenters and of ruthless violence removed the inhibitions against wholesale murder… nothing could any longer stop the advance of Nazism." Adolf Hitler was a "maniac" and "sadistic gangster" but…and this is important to note…he was not the founder of Nazism -- he was the product of it. Not only did the Nazis aim to abolish free-market economics, they intended to abolish the laissez-faire production of human beings. They would become the managers of a "breeding farm" intent on "rearing superior men and eliminating inferior stock." To wit: Jews, gays, the disabled, gypsies, and so on and on. The mass slaughters that horrified the world, as Mises describes them, were the result of "the logical and consistent applications of doctrines and policies" in a society that had been swept away by socialist doctrine -- the doctrine of economic justice. This, of course, does not touch the murderous reign of the Italian Fascists, their program as adopted in 1919 described by Mises as "vehemently anti-capitalistic." Nor can one leave out the obvious: Marxism in the Soviet Union as detailed in The Black Book of Communism : Crimes, Terror, Repression . The concept of "enemies of the people" (the wealthy, those who worked in banks, the "bourgeoisie") swept through the new Marxist state after 1917, with specific measures designed to intimidate those who did not cooperate. What began with names printed in newspapers and lists posted in public places quickly became the sweeping and constant state of violence against those judged to be "in contradiction with the worker and peasant government, or with the political programs of the Socialist Democratic or Socialist Revolutionary parties." A state of mind that morphed into Stalin's mass murders, the gulags and for the duration of the Cold War held behind the "Iron Curtain" a considerable portion of Europe, ending finally with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and eventually the Soviet Union itself. Here then are four examples from the 18th century to the 20th of anti-capitalist revolutions or societies that have acted on the expressed ideal of "economic justice." Their resulting actions speak for themselves -- and they speak loudly down through the centuries and the recent decades that were the end of the 20th century. And what is it we are seeing now -- right now -- in this Occupy Wall Street movement? Two interesting facts that have emerged. • Doug Schoen, the longtime professional pollster and Democrat, an adviser to the Clintons, took the moment to send his polltakers down into the Occupy Wall Street camp in New York's Zuccotti Park. Here's his piece in the Wall Street Journal . What did he find? "The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies." Then Schoen says: Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn't represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda. Coming in at about the same time was a poll taken of one hundred of the Occupiers by New York Magazine which found an unnamed number wanted to "burn it [Wall Street] down" and that 34 percent believed the United States government was "no better than, say, Al Qaeda." Catch that? One poll finds those who believe in burning down Wall Street? And in another 31 percent -- nearly a third -- would support violence to advance their agenda of "radical redistribution of wealth." This is, of course, precisely the same agenda of Robespierre and the Jacobins in the French Revolution, of the Nazis in Germany, of the Communists in the Soviet Union. • Fact two? It emerges that the American Nazi Party supports the Occupiers, as seen here in this official statement . So too does the Socialist party USA endorse the protest, as seen here . Not to be left out is the Communist Party USA, as heard here in their You Tube conference call Now take a look here at this video posted by my colleague Quin Hillyer, which he discovered in turn from our friends at National Review . It's the Oakland, California edition of Occupy Wall Street and someone has taken the time to interview the participants. Here are a few of the quotes: "We're here to build a movement for economic justice." "I don't really have a lot of…any… sympathy for people with, you know, obscene amounts of money, you know…anything over $200,000 is like…you're…that's…no one spends that amount of money on anything. That's ridiculous." "The people who have all the money certainly didn't work for it." "The rich, the elite…are exploiting the people." "I don't think the rich people realize whose going to go first." "My landlord is rich…I say eat her." "Kill 'em. Just kidding." And while she's not on this tape, here is the recent quote from Roseanne Barr that was in the news: "I first would allow the guilty bankers to pay… back anything over 100 million in personal wealth because I believe in a maximum wage of 100 million dollars and if they're unable to live on that amount then they should go to the reeducation camps, and if that doesn't help, then be beheaded." And then there are these statements not from Occupy Wall Street in 2011 (here is a link to their official manifesto) but an earlier time: "Every habitation of the rich shall be demolished." -- An October 1793 Robespierre directive issued by the "Committee for Public Safety" in Lyons, France. "We will make France a graveyard" -- French Revolutionary Jean-Baptiste Carrier in July 1793 of his campaign to kill the wealthy of France. He had fifteen hundred men , women and children loaded onto vessels of all types -- then scuttled them in the Loire River. Within four months he had disposed of four thousand "undesirables." Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz -- Nazi slogan from the 1930s meaning "the commonweal ranks above private profit." Note the eerie similarity in this slogan to these words from the official Occupy Wall Street press release linked above that attacks those who "place profit over people." "We reject the old systems of morality and 'humanity' invented by the bourgeoisie to oppress and exploit the 'lower classes'. Our morality has no precedent, and our humanity is absolute because it rests on a new ideal….Blood? Let blood flow like water! Let blood stain forever the black pirate's flag flown by the bourgeoisie…For only through the death of the old world can we liberate ourselves forever from the return of those jackals!" -- A 1918 editorial from Kiev's The Red Sword , the newspaper of the new Soviet political police, the Cheka. "We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. In your investigations don't look for documents and pieces of evidence about what the defendant has done, whether in deed or in speaking or acting against Soviet authority. The first question you should ask him is what class he comes from, what are his roots, his education, his training, and his occupation." -- Martin Latsis, deputy chief of the Cheka, in a November 1918 order to his officers that was part of a first campaign of Soviet genocide by the new Communist government of Vladimir Lenin. Now. Again. What is it that we know that has caused Daryl Hannah to suddenly become tongue tied in her radio interview with Sean Hannity? What is it that caused Roseanne Barr to launch a twitter tirade against a celebrity financial website? And what is it that caused Alec Baldwin to become uncharacteristically twitteringly coy? That's right. It was references to their personal wealth. Sean Hannity asked Daryl Hannah how much money she was worth. Ms. Hannah, suddenly hemming-and hawing, declined to answer. According to Celebrity Networth , the correct answer is that Daryl Hannah is worth $15 million. Roseanne Barr, she of the statement cited above that those worth more than $100 million should be beheaded, was absolutely furious with the very same site, Celebrity Networth . Why? Because it lists her wealth at $80 million. To be precise, Ms. Barr, who dwells richly in Hawaii,]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/10/25/president-robespierre/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Santorum&#8217;s Moment: The Reagan Library Debate</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/09/07/santorums-moment-the-reagan-library-debate/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/09/07/santorums-moment-the-reagan-library-debate/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 07 Sep 2011 15:09:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>richwas</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berlin Wall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ronald Reagan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rush Limbaugh]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sarah Palin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[america]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[berlin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[conservatives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[events]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[library]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle east]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[modern]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nuclear]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reading]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ronald reagan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united-states]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[video]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[words]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/09/07/santorums-moment-the-reagan-library-debate/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ "Why is an alliance between conservatives and libertarians inconceivable? Why, indeed, would such articles of confederation undo whatever gains conservatives have made in this United States? Because genuine libertarians are mad -- metaphysically mad. Lunacy repels, and political lunacy especially. I do not mean that they are dangerous; they are repellent merely, like certain unfortunate inmates of 'mental homes.'…. At the Last Judgment, libertarianism may find itself reduced to a minority of one, and its name will be not Legion, but Roth bard."]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/09/07/santorums-moment-the-reagan-library-debate/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>He Called Me Friend</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/15/he-called-me-friend/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/15/he-called-me-friend/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Aug 2011 15:11:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>IDontThinkSo0001</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berlin Wall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Coal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[america]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[autumn]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[council]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[friends]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[person]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[time]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[university]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[work]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/15/he-called-me-friend/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ In the autumn of 1991, I was in Italy for a conference on economics and religion in Foligno, a beautiful town south of Florence. One morning I was driven to Rome where, as I often did, I was staying overnight with the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. At dinner, a phone call came for me, for which I had to leave the table. It was the Vatican, and I was being invited for dinner with the Holy Father the very next evening. I should enter at the Bronze Door next to the Basilica, and the Swiss Guards would show me up. Back at the table, everyone was excited, no one more than I was, although I did my best to look suave and cool. In a way, the background of the Pope’s invitation to dinner was, it seemed, the publication of my book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism in 1982. That book made two points that seemed to many others around the world, not only myself, useful to those who helped Pope John Paul II in the drafting of his historic encyclical of 1991, Centesimus Annus —the “hundredth year” after the first of all social encyclicals in 1891. The first point grew from my experience as a grandson of immigrants to the United States from Central Europe (the villages of the Tatra Mountains in northern Slovakia). What they found in the United States was not only “capitalism” the economic system, but simultaneously the political system that protected their individual rights and the cultural system that strengthened the rights and duties of the free public exercise of multiple religious traditions under the protection of law. The United States also allowed for each people of the world to sound distinctive notes in the one national cultural symphony: English, German, Irish, Latin, Slavic, Jewish, etc. The tripartite definition of this free system—economic, political, and cultural—showed up very clearly in paragraph 42 of Centesimus Annus . (More on that encyclical later.) My second political thesis was that the most under-reported fact of the 20th century was the death of socialism as a plausible idea for the future. In practice, it did not work. More than that, its underlying theories made it impossible for socialism to work. The best hope of the poor in the world was not socialism. The actual history of my own family and millions of other poor families showed Marxism to be the opiate of intellectuals and students. The much despised “capitalism,” combined with a polity of law and rights and a culture of spirit, routinely turned workers into middle-class families, with positive attitudes toward personal initiative and personal responsibility. Two of the closest colleagues who expressed gratitude for my work (without necessarily agreeing with all of it) were John Paul II’s own immensely talented papal secretary, Monsignor (later Archbishop, and in 2006 Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow) Stanislaw Dziwisz, and the philosopher and Italian political leader Rocco Buttiglione. After I arrived for dinner, during the very long climb up the three flights of stairs, accompanied by a serious Swiss Guard, my lungs were burning with the strain, but my tall, young guard was not even red in the face. I was ushered into the reception room where Monsignor Dziwisz met me. “Welcome, welcome,” he said, “we know who our friends are.” He told me Rocco was to be a guest, too, and should arrive shortly. In about 1985, Rocco had raised very difficult questions for me (especially about the “common good”) when I first lectured on capitalism and democracy at the Catholic University of Milan, but over the years as he read more of my work he had come to grasp the good parts of it better than I did, and fixed them into his own vision. Later, become good friends, we were making plans to begin a summer program to bring Eastern European and American students together to study economics and democracy, preferably in the West. So it was great to learn that Rocco would be a guest, too. Rocco arrived, and then the Pope silently entered, with his trademark smile, slightly ironic, and in a white papal soutane. A bishop from Poland who worked in the Vatican and whose English was fluent also joined us, so we were five. I was so awestruck I hardly said a word for a while. One thing I noticed is that Monsignor Dziwisz wanted to keep the conversation light, and instigated some bantering between Rocco and the Pope. Rocco was a professor at two Roman universities as well as the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein, but the Pope had come to know him well in Krakow, where Rocco had gone to study the famous Polish phenomenologists. There Rocco learned Polish passably well, and became a good friend of Wojtyla, a fellow philosopher. When Cardinal Wojtyla was then elected Pope John Paul II, he invited Rocco to come back to Italy with him as a close intellectual friend. In the autumn of 1978, the election of a man from behind the Iron Curtain to become the new Pope was a startling choice. It sent shockwaves throughout the Communist side of the Iron Curtain. The Communists immediately started laying plans to try to limit Pope Wojtyla’s influence, to undermine him, and if necessary to wipe him off the chessboard of European political leadership. They feared Wojtyla, but they did not fear him enough. Wojtyla was a lot more clever than they, and nearly always moved before they did, a step ahead of them on the chessboard. By natural talent a warm-hearted and eloquent communicator, an actor who enjoyed being in crowds large or small, a skier, a poet, and a very brave man, Karol Wojtyla seized the imagination of the world almost immediately. He was young, vital, vigorous, and very handsome, with a flair for dramatic action and swift repartee. When I had first seen him in Washington, D.C., on his first papal visit to the White House, standing alongside President Jimmy Carter, I was struck by the Pope’s naturalness and ease. It was a beaming Carter who seemed a little stiff. Then, later, the Pope stood on the balcony of the priests’ house at St. Matthew’s Cathedral on Rhode Island Avenue, just east of Connecticut Avenue. My wife, Karen, had brought my excited mother with us, and we stood right below him, across the street. The happy crowd all around us filled to overflowing the street below him, and began to shout very loudly: “JOHN PAUL II, WE love YOU! JOHN PAUL II, WE love YOU!” After a little while, the Pope held up his arms to ask for a pause. He smiled and then shouted into the microphone: “JOHN PAUL II— I love YOU!” Laughing, clapping, and with not a little weeping, the crowd picked up as before. I was glad my mother and my wife were at my side, drinking in and enjoying every moment of it. SOME MONTHS LATER, the Pope flew to the New World again, this time to Canada, to consecrate a new Eastern Catholic basilica, near Toronto. William Baroody, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, belonged to the Maronite Rite, one of the Eastern Catholic Churches, and took me with him for the occasion. Our host was Stephen Roman, the Slovak immigrant who was called “the richest man in Canada.” Steve had bought cheap a lot of farmland to the west, under which some time later the largest uranium deposits in the world were found. From then on, wags said, Steve dealt only with heads of state. Steve Roman belonged to the Byzantine Catholic Rite. It was typical of Pope John Paul II’s larger ambitions, even from the first, that he undertook this long trip across the Atlantic Ocean to consecrate a small Eastern Catholic basilica. All through history, unlike many other of the Eastern Rite churches, including the Greek Orthodox of Constantinople and the Russian Orthodox of Moscow, the Byzantines and the Maronites and some others stood tall in a long and faithful communion with the Bishop of Rome. The Pope took the view that 1,000 years of separation between Rome and Constantinople/Moscow was enough. He wanted, before he was done, to end it. In that, he didn’t quite succeed, but he made lots of valiant attempts and took many initiatives and made many visitations to Eastern patriarchs. It was a terribly annoyed Wojtyla (I have always imagined) who after his death protested to St. Peter that he had not been given a few more years to achieve the required unity of the Church of Christ. On that occasion, with a fairly cold Toronto wind blowing our scarves about our faces along the whole reception line, the vigorous young Pope at last approached our small group. He lingered for some time with Roman and Baroody, and then looked at me closely and seemed trying to recall something as he briefly held my hand. Slightly younger than he, I had attended two sessions of the Second Vatican Council, at which Wojtyla of Krakow had emerged as a coming star, especially for his leadership on the 1965 document on religious liberty. True, my report on the second session, The Open Church , became fairly well known among the world’s bishops. A Polish friend of mine assured me that the Pope knew of me from that time. Then, too, as I shall explain below, the Pope had been sent an early copy of the illegal Polish translation of my The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism being handed around in Poland in samizdat . Still, I always got the feeling that the Pope was a bit uneasy with my left-wing past. He asked some of his friends who knew me well some questions about me, they reported. One, from Philadelphia, gave him a very clear and clean recommendation. SO THERE I WAS seated at dinner with the man who had seized my imagination ever since the day of his election, and of whose emergence toward the end of the Council as the favored spokesman of the Central European bishops I had taken note. It thrilled me that he was a Slav, as my family had been. Moreover, it was said (I believe apocryphally) that the Pope’s mother was Slovak. One thing is certain: both his southern Poland and our northern Slovakia were for some centuries thought of as one people (a tough mountain people), and actually organized as part of the one Polish nation for around 300 years. On this point, some years after this dinner, the Pope in fact told George Weigel, his great biographer: “Michael Novak says he is Slovak. But he is actually Polish.” Coming from him, I took this as a great compliment. Later I wrote him a letter that said: “By the Magisterium I may be Polish, but by family, genetics, and geography I am Slovak.” A few weeks later I ran into a map on the castle for which my ancestors had labored for centuries, which showed clearly that the 11 northern counties of which we were a part did belong to Poland for three centuries. So I had to write again: “Darn infallibility! You are right again, and I was wrong.” But all this was years later. I remember saying very little at this first dinner in 1991. Rocco and Monsignor Dziwisz kept the banter going. Much later, at yet another dinner, the Pope did ask me what I recommended to help the millions of poor whom he had just seen in Latin America. I don’t recall his being terribly convinced by my three points, telegraphically put forth. They were raising universal education from the third grade (on average) to the 12th grade, and focusing it on initiative and enterprise; changing the law to make the formation of micro-enterprises quick, cheap, and easy; and introducing new small and local banks (like the U.S. farm credit bureaus) that specialize in making loans to poor people on farms and in new businesses. I remember fondly how much like a dinner at my grandmother’s our dinner was. A hot chicken broth and, then, in a nod toward Italian cuisine, a small antipasto of a white-buttered spaghetti, followed by lightly roasted pork with little round potatoes and cabbage. Dessert, as I recall, was fruit. The wine was an inexpensive local white wine, probably Frascati, from out near Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s retreat from the summer heat of Rome. I also remember resolving that if I ever came back to dinner, I would come armed, like Dziwisz and Rocco, with some good jokes or funny stories, which the Pope seemed to love. Most of the time his blue eyes twinkled merrily like those of St. Nicholas of old. But when I congratulated him on his part in the unexpected “miracle” of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism, he looked at me with a certain pity. He waved his hand as if my ignorance was too much for him. “Getting rid of that Mickey-Mouse system was no miracle. It was a matter of time. It was built to fail.” (I cannot swear from this distance that the Pope actually used the words “Mickey-Mouse”—we may at that point have been speaking in Italian—but he said something remarkably close to that.) Then, after dinner, just before we took our leave, the Pope took my hand a moment and looked me directly in the eyes. “Monsignor Dziwisz showed me your article for this week in Tygodnik Powszechny ” (the Krakow Catholic weekly). My theme in that article had been the remarkable change in the Pope’s thought since his encyclical Laborem Exercens , in which he had written that labor is superior to capital because labor is always persons, and capital is inferior since it is always composed of things. In his 1991 encyclical, Centesimus Annus , by contrast, he was writing that the causes of the wealth of nations were knowledge, science, practical insight—and he called such habits “human capital.” In any case, after mentioning my article in Tygodnik Powszechny , the Pope said kindly, in a slightly accented voice, “You understand my thought pritty gut .” I replied that I had planned the article to appear just as I was to meet him. He recognized the irony with a smile. He well knew that when I was writing the article, I had had no idea of ever seeing the Pope at dinner. Wow! What an exhilarating evening. I could hardly breathe, and felt I was walking on air. I thanked Rocco profusely, as he drove me to the embassy after dinner before heading to his home on the other side of Rome, in case he had had something to do with the invitation. Rocco kept me guessing. He neither denied nor claimed responsibility for it. Rocco always loved keeping a wisp of mystery and behind-the-scenes maneuvering about him. He enjoyed pretending to the realism of Machiavelli, and affected the habit of playing three-corner billiards—it would be only after the third bounce that you could see what he had been up to all along. Incidentally, I should add that before that dinner with the Pope, a great Polish lay thinker had appeared at my office in Washington. He told me he was on his way to a cancer center in New York, but felt he had to see me. His name was Miroslaw Dzielski, an editor in Krakow who was known to many as “the Polish Hayek.” He told me that he was the one responsible for getting The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism translated into Polish in 1984-85. He told me of the long fight that was waged back and forth among the four great “regions” of Solidarnosc, the socialist labor union founded by Lech Walesa. Some did not want to publish a book linking the verboten word “capitalism” to democracy. They thought it far too risky to the fate of Solidarnosc to publish such a title in an illegal samizdat under the union’s own imprimatur. The “ayes,” he said, carried it by one vote. Some years later, when I visited with him in his cabinet office in the Walesa government, the youngish Aleksander Hall corroborated the story, admitting proudly that he had cast that vote, to swing the “seacoast” delegation to “aye.” Not many weeks after that vote, a young Pole materialized suddenly at my door in the American Enterprise Institute. He looked over his shoulder as he spoke, and was hesitant even to enter the room completely, keeping the door open. He lowered his head humbly and told me that he came from Solidarnosc to ask my permission to publish the Polish translation of Spirit . I smiled broadly but said that I would need to charge royalties. His face fell, and he began to stammer that that was not possible—until I told him what the royalties were: “One copy for the Pope, and one for me.” He broke into a large grin and extended his hand thankfully. “The first will be easy,” he said. “The second will take a lot longer.” Still later I learned from Vaclav Havel that he and four or five of his best friends from Prague used to meet at his home in the mountains every month or so to discuss that book chapter by chapter. Some used the Polish translation, some the English. I never did learn whether the Pope got a copy. The Man of Prayer FOUR OR FIVE TIMES, sometimes with my wife at my side, I was also invited to attend Mass with the Pope in his miniature chapel. Crowded in, there was barely place for 16 people. When one entered the chapel some moments before Mass, the Pope had already been at prayer for a long time. He knelt bowed over on his prie-dieu so rapt in prayer that his demeanor produced in all of us a kind of awe. The Pope seemed caught up in a world far deeper and more holy than ours. It was not that he seemed devout. Rather, he seemed transported out of himself. One could feel it in the air. I have never felt such a presence. Over the years I heard several different cardinals, some of whom were not among his admirers, say how moved they also were by his posture at prayer. The Pope seemed not to be in this world at all. Some spoke of him as “our mystic Pope.” They did not say this with particular respect, nor with disrespect either; they were reporting what they saw. They wondered at it. Almost always when I was at Mass, Monsignor (later Archbishop) Dziwisz asked me to be the lector. I remember trying to read in a steady, linear voice, while praying that the Holy Spirit would gently inflect this flow by the quiet power of the words read—none of me in the reading, only the Holy Spirit. This is probably self-deception, but that is what I prayed for. One felt obliged to be decreased in the presence of a Pope who was so deeply immersed in God, as if only God and he were present. One did not want to interrupt that silence. On one such occasion, my beautiful and soft-spoken wife, Karen, was carrying in her arm a bronze corpus of Jesus dying on the cross. She had cast it herself, and wanted to present the piece to John Paul II, whom she had always loved from a distance. Seeing the heavy bronze as we came out from Mass, Monsignor Dziwisz led us to the rear of the line that was forming around the large table in the center of the ample room outside the chapel. All the other participants he encouraged to go first. “So you will have more time with the Pope,” he whispered to Karen. When the Holy Father reached us he took in the beauty and gentleness of Karen, and reached out for the heavy bronze on her arm. He immediately pointed to its heavily arched back. Slowly he said, “Exactly at the point of death.” Karen was touched that he grasped so instantaneously the point of what she was striving for. Just as quickly she fired back to him, “ Crossing the Threshold of Hope ,” the title of his most recent book, which she had loved. He burst into an appreciative grin, and it was clear that she had gone straight to his heart. Many times thereafter, whenever the Pope spotted Karen in a group, even in those later days when his face had fallen into a kind of mask that his steadily advancing disease would no longer enable him to control, the sight of her caused him to relax and break into a smile and a pleased nod. I saw this happen more than once. At another time, for example, the Pope welcomed all our Liechtenstein and Krakow alumni and faculty of the Summer Institute Tertio Millennio ( On the Third Millennium ) to a private audience. It was the very first day of the new millennium, January 1, 2000. Just over a hundred of us gathered in the high Clementine Hall, marvelously painted and cleanly laid out, where a small dais and papal chair had been set up down front. We were milling about in a semicircle, excited and a bit in awe at the paintings on the walls and the high ornate ceiling. We were more excited still about the soon-expected entrance of the Pope, and we hoped he would stay for at least a few moments. We had practiced a Christmas song for him, in Polish, as a surprise. Meanwhile, there was plenty to chat about as we waited. Karen and I sidled toward the rear of the group, so the younger people could be up front. We didn’t know it at the time, but the door near us on the right was the one through which the Pope actually would enter, instead of the main door to the left. Then Karen saw him first, when the door opened, a few steps down the hall. When he reached the door, the first face he recognized was Karen’s, and once again his drooping mask broke into a lively smile as he nodded to her warmly. Then he walked to the front, said a few jolly words, and our Polish leader, Father Mattias Zieba, O.P., whom the Pope treated almost as a son, told him we had a surprise. Our choir leader stepped forward, and we sang our Polish song of Christmas greeting. (About half those present were Polish, and carried our uncertain Polish vowels along safely to port.) The Pope joined in the song and beamed with pleasure. He said a few kindly words of welcome and gratitude for all the time we were putting into his social thought every summer. (“I wish some of the bishops would study as you do,” he once wrote us in a letter while we were in Krakow.) Then he invited everyone in the room to come up singly for a blessing. Scott and Erica Walter, who had recently been married, came forward in their formal wedding attire. Then Catherine and Michael Pakaluk approached, with their youngest son in his arms and her next child, in his eighth month, bulging out beneath her navy blue maternity dress, and the kindly Pope blessed the couple and their babe in arms. Then with a great smile he made a blessing over the child in the womb. Some of us smiled and some shed tears. The Pope laughed with Father Mattias, and spoke with Father Richard John Neuhaus, then George Weigel for some time, smiling the while and joshing with them. They were our most distinguished faculty members, and already well known to him. He blessed every single one of us. It was a heckuva way to begin the millennium! Incidentally, too, the front page of L’Osservatore Romano that day carried a photograph of the first person to pass through the great Jubilee Doors of St. Peter, after 25 years of closure—and the handsome young man striding through in the photo was a seminarian from the North American College in Rome, also one of our students. The night before, the Pope had also sent us special tickets to be in St. Peter’s Square for the concert and prayers and expectation of the New Year and New Millennium. The night air was chill. We had driven in good time (about an hour) across the countryside from our rooms at the University of Dallas’s Rome campus near Castel Gandolfo. But in the incredible tangle of Rome traffic, in which no one lets anybody else pass, while all sit immobile and blow horns, and no one yields, our trip home took a bone-wearying four hours. Our hearts were exultant. Leading Up to Centesimus Annus EVERYBODY IN THE WORLD knew that there would be a papal encyclical in 1991 to mark the 100th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s justly famous Rerum Novarum ( On the New Things of Our Time ). There had already been encyclicals on the 40th (Pius XI) and 80th anniversaries (Paul VI). At the American Enterprise Institute, indeed, I had been running monthly seminars on just this point since at least 1981, to ask the question (from many points of view, not only religious), “If you were asked to give advice, what would you recommend should be in the coming encyclical?” It’s just as well we started thinking about it early. For in late 1990 and early 1991, I encountered several front-page newspaper articles in Europe, supposedly based on interviews with those busily drafting the upcoming document. These screaming articles announced that with this new letter the Pope would take his place decisively as the foremost leader of the social democratic left, with Willy Brandt, François Mitterrand, Neil Kinnock, and others. This new letter would put “capitalism” and “free markets” to rest once and for all. In social democratic Europe, both terms “capitalism” and “free markets” were nearly always uttered as terms of opprobrium. Some newspapers also reported that there were at least two, maybe three, drafting groups, and all were tending in the same direction. An American monsignor, who claimed to have visited in Rome and been shown the drafts, warned a conference at Notre Dame (with me in the room) that “people like Novak” would be cut off at the knees. But there was another drama afoot that journalists involved in the prepublication leaks were not aware of. In 1987, the Pope had issued his second encyclical on the social question, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis ( In Solicitude for Social Reality Today ) . As the Associated Press announced this new text in its first reports, the new encyclical had as its main theme the moral equivalence of the two systems that then menaced Europe, the Eastern Bloc’s communism and the West’s capitalism. This report left me sick at heart. I could hardly wait to get the original text in my hands. True enough, there was a passage in the encyclical that seemed to justify such reports. “Each of the two blocs,” the Pope wrote, “harbors in its own way a tendency toward imperialism, as it is usually called, or toward forms of neo-colonialism.” And again: “The Church’s social doctrine adopts a critical attitude toward both liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism.” Yet it was impossible to believe that this Pope from Krakow, where he had suffered keenly under Communist oppression, could see no difference between Krakow, say, and Columbus, Ohio—let alone Florence, Aix-en-Provence, and present-day Coventry. In fact, the complex and well-argued text thoroughly undermined the prevailing early interpretation. Alas, however, the bright, usually fair, and acerbic columnist of the New York Times , William Safire, had hammered that early interpretation home, bitterly accusing the Pope of a despicable doctrine of moral equivalence as between East and West. Slowly I worked on a close textual examination, which showed rather devastatingly how the encyclical’s praise of “enterprise” and “economic initiative” as a fundamental human right of the person went beyond any other papal document. The letter also went decisively in the direction of the kind of capitalism that Americans have experienced in small town after small town from sea to sea, and even in big booming cities. The encyclical also made a sophisticated argument against the many Communist arguments (well known to this Pope) against democracy and those vital civil societies (uncontrolled by the state) that are its lifeblood. The Pope laid out his case point after point, in fact, as a manifesto in favor of a liberal society, articulated against the rival totalitarian alternative. The style, alas, was Italianate, without the bluntness of English. But even so, the meaning is unmistakable. THEN IT SO HAPPENED that just at that time, the first President Bush was scheduled to travel to Rome for a visit to the Vatican and an audience with the Pope. At the time I didn’t know this, but Secretary of State James Baker asked the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican to request a reliable interpretation of the encyclical, with which the president might accurately inform himself. The American ambassador brought the matter up with Cardinal Ratzinger, then prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (“The Holy Office”), and after some reflection, the cardinal recommended my article for the president’s reading. In any case, it was obvious in 1991 that the Pope was rather distressed by the awful misreading, especially in America, of what he had had reason to think would be a widely applauded document. Those who knew the Pope personally, such as Mr. Edward Piszek of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and his neighbor and friend, James Michener (author of many successful novels including Poland , on the country and the fascinating history from which this Pope sprang), knew well the Pope’s deep love for America and all it meant for Poland. The Pope was also upset at the facile anti-Americanism so commonly expressed in certain organs of the Vatican, which repeatedly buckled under the pressure of European “political correctness.” Thus, the Pope resolved in 1991 to take under his personal care a final revision of the drafts he had been sent, with which he was notably unhappy. He also sent an emissary to America to go over the main points of the final draft with a number of Catholic thinkers who had some feeling for American intellectual opinion. For this task there were a number of priests and lay people in Rome who knew the work of the drafting committees thoroughly, and also understood where and why the Pope was unhappy. This emissary was instructed not to show the final revision (which was secret), but to convey its main points orally, especially those points that might be unwittingly controversial (in the way that errant passage in Sollicitudo had been). I do not know how many other people were consulted, but I do know the emissary had two long conversations with me. After I had heard the emissary through, never interrupting him, I told him that essentially I liked the document very much—it was a big step beyond anything in the past—but I thought there were at least three points that could evoke a huge backlash in America. I mentioned them briefly, and just as briefly gave him new language as I thought it ought to be. My points were in clarification, for an American audience, of points it seemed the Pope wanted to make; yet in these three places the final words (as rendered to me) came out in ambivalent and possibly inflammatory language. The person asking my opinion was super-bright; there was no need for pen and paper. I deliberately limited my remarks to three, in my mind the most crucial three. In 1991, the Pope also saw to it that the first distribution of the final draft would be much more thoughtfully carried out. Someone near him ordered that three separate sources send me the document two days before publication . My task was then to copy it immediately to two other knowledgeable lay writers closer to the Pope than I was. We planned simultaneously to have articles in the hands of three key American publications ready for print as soon as the embargo on the texts had expired. The only problem was that two of the official sources charged with getting me an advance copy failed to cooperate with their instructions. I got a call from the emissary to see if I was as pleased as he hoped I would be that all three of my suggestions were incorporated into the final text. I told him that the actual text had still not arrived on my desk. He was quite upset, but calmly told me to telephone the third source, whom he knew already had the text. I phoned and asked the person to read three specific passages to me. There my three points were. Perfect! Within an hour or two, the document was in my hands, and then copies on the way to my associates. The next morning we beat the whole world to press. Years later, the leftish British writer on the Vatican, Peter Hebblethwaite, formerly a Jesuit, asked me at a party in London how “that” had happened. He insisted to me that he had been sure the final draft was as he wanted it. He had seen two drafts that had him excited, and how they failed to get by the Pope he could not understand. He seemed to have been drinking at the party for some time, so I was more than usually careful. “I’m just an American,” I said, or something like that, “and I don’t know quite how these things are done in the Vatican.” To myself, I was thinking, “I’ll bet it was much more fun for me to write about the final draft than it was for you.” But I kept on my mask of innocence. Centesimus Annus — the Hundredth Year—turned out to be a huge hit in America and in the Third World (but not among Marxist-leaning liberation theologians). A papal document on contemporary social questions deserves plenty of criticism and examination. There are a vast number of contingent judgments to make, several steps removed from any biblical texts. But they are intended to be redolent with the wisdom of the Gospels, and to stand as serious attempts to interpret the present time in an evangelical light—even the highly contingent and complex year “1989,” as interpreted in Centesimus Annus , chapter 3. Yet even devout Catholics of good will may well disagree over the meanings of key words and the interpretation of particular events. Just the same, the dozen or so important social encyclicals of the last 100 years make a sobering impression on most who read them, even those who came to mock. For instance, such passages as Rerum Novarum ’s long list of reasons why socialism must fail read far better today than the rosy hopes placed in socialism by many Western intellectual eminences. They read a lot better, in retrospect, than the paeans to socialism penned by major writers from John Stuart Mill to Jean-Paul Sartre to Antonio Gramsci. In addition, all the popes over many long decades made a consistent defense of both labor and private property—labor and capital both —which mattered a great deal in Europe’s political upheavals after World War II. I HAVE MANY OTHER precious memories of John Paul II. Among these are the great struggle of conscience I faced when in 2003 the Pope did all he could to avert the second war in Iraq, whereas my own conscience told me that, while everything might go wrong, still, this war was indispensable to getting an example of a working democracy in the Middle East, to inspire those other Middle Eastern nations that had so far been utterly resistant to democracy. I hated to take a position different from that of the Pope, which might mean I would lose his friendship, one of my most precious treasures. I reread the Catechism on just war (#2309), which made clear that such a decision is a prudential one, which persons of good will might measure differently, and above all a decision to be made by political leaders. In the following years, there was no diminution in the friendship and support shown me by the Pope, Archbishop Dziwisz, and Vatican press secretary Joaquin Navarro-Valls (who was, in fact, of great assistance to me). I was glad that the Pope opposed the war, and thus blocked any hint of a war between the world’s two largest religious bodies. I was also glad that President Bush maintained the honor of the UN by following through on its formal threats to Saddam Hussein and by working so mightily over the next few years in nourishing the bright coals of democracy among Arab nations. Another vivid memory is of being invited by President Bush to fly with his party to pay homage to John Paul II lying in state in St. Peter’s Basilica after his death, and then sitting in attendance at the dramatic funeral. At one point, a sudden breeze turned the pages of the open book of the Gospel highly visible on the central lectern. Then, as the varnished wood casket was lifted to be carried into St. Peter’s, the wind blew the clouds away, and for the first time that day, a beam of sunlight fell directly upon the casket and the pallbearers. The contrast between the early grayness and the sudden rays of the sun is vividly caught in photos taken before and after the ray of sun broke through. (I tracked down these photographs myself several months later, after a couple of hours of searching the archives at L’Osservatore Romano .) I am not saying this was an act of God; natural causes could explain it. But these signs expressed what we felt when we shouted with the great throng, “ Santo Subito! Call him a saint soon!”  ]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/15/he-called-me-friend/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Flying Debt Ceiling SGO</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/15/flying-debt-ceiling-sgo/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/15/flying-debt-ceiling-sgo/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Aug 2011 15:09:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Markisacopyrightthief</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berlin Wall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[adversary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[chinese]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[friends]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[night]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[source]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[training]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[warrior]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/15/flying-debt-ceiling-sgo/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ Fifty years and two days ago, the Soviet Union began building the Berlin Wall. It seems almost that long since Senate Democrats passed a budget. But now that the glass debt ceiling has been shattered, and a congressional Supercommittee has been created to vouchsafe to us our economic future, we have a moment to catch up with the global reality show. There's an awful lot of important SGO we've ignored in during the debt ceiling mess, so we have to do at least a quick roundup. (For those just joining us, "SGO" is the comprehensively-useful acronym for "s*** goin' on" invented by my pal and former SEAL, Al Clark.) President Sarkozy's excellent Libya adventure goes into its sixth month without noticeable effect on Muammar Gaddafi. President Obama, playing Sancho Panza to Sarkozy's Don Quixote, has kept the operational tempo of US Air force sorties sufficiently high to conceal our allies' inability to go it alone. So, while the Supercommittee debates defense budget cuts, just how is the Libya operation being paid for? According to congressional sources, the Air Force is robbing its training budget to pay for its part of the Libya operation. I can only guess which part of the training budget is being raided, but I'm sure it's not being taken out of the funding to train airmen on how to accept openly-serving homosexuals in their ranks. The repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is being implemented as the Obama regime's top military priority. Maybe the Libya costs are being taken out of the budget for training of Air Force pararescue jumpers. You don't know the PJ's: they train much like the SEALs do, but their mission is combat search and rescue. Their school is known in the spec ops community as "superman school," so the PJ's probably won't be cut by the Supercommittee, if only out of professional courtesy. So the Air Force is probably taking the Libya operational costs out of the training budget for our fly-guys. That's no problem because now-retired Defense Secretary Bob Gates was sure that we'd never have to fight a conventional war again. So if every hour of flying over Libya is paid for by canceling an hour of some graying lieutenant colonel flying against a few greenhorn lieutenants to teach them how old age and airborne treachery overcome youth and enthusiasm, it's no big deal. Until some of the young'uns have to fly air combat maneuvers in something other than a flight simulator. And as well as things are going in Libya, they're just as good elsewhere in the Middle East. While we are playing tag with Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad -- the Syrian guy whose daddy achieved a coveted spot on the "state sponsors of terrorism" team in 1979 -- is merrily massacring his subjects. According to Hillary's State Department, Bashar has devolved from "reformer" to "illegitimate" in just a few months, merely for murdering a few thousand Syrians who are left to his mercies while we defend innocent Libyans, if any such there be. The Big Question in the White House is whether Barry should demand Assad's resignation. As the Washington Post recently editorialized , a presidential demand for Assad's resignation would be the "last handkerchief" to be dropped. The Post is wrong. Barry has a whole drawer full of handkerchiefs. The presidential gauntlet has been sent to a GSA warehouse to be placed aside Indiana Jones' lost ark. We have an immediate and compelling interest in removing Assad from power. The facts that we are engaged militarily in Libya where we have no such interest, and that Barry is tossing wet hankies at Assad, will not go unnoticed by enemy and friend and nations such as Iraq, which is both. And while we're guessing how quickly our Iraqi experiment in nation-building will fall apart (it's even money which will go first: Iraq or Afghanistan), it's anyone's guess how many covert cyberwar missions were blown by McAfee's revelation of "Operation Shady Rat." The aforementioned Rat was an enormous cyberespionage operation against 72 entities -- governments, companies and even the International Olympic Committee -- which the computer security company said indicated was the creation of a "state actor." In this case, as McAfee's report implies at length, the "state actor" was clearly China. That China would be responsible is not exactly a surprise. "Shady Rat" is the apparent successor to the "Titan Rain" Chinese cyberespionage op of the late 1990s to early 2000s. The severity of the Chinese cyperespionage campaign cannot to be overestimated. As McAfee's report said: What we have witnessed over the past five to six years has been nothing short of a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth -- closely guarded national secrets (including from classified government networks), source code, bug databases, email archives, negotiation plans and exploration details for new oil and gas field auctions, document stores, legal contracts, SCADA configurations, design schematics and much more has "fallen off the truck" of numerous, mostly Western companies and disappeared in the ever-growing electronic archives of dogged adversaries. McAfee's report, according to a source in the cyberwar community, may have done more harm than good because it indirectly divulged that McAfee was doing its own cyber-counterattacks. It said: McAfee has gained access to one specific Command &#038; Control server used by the intruders. We have collected logs that reveal the full extent of the victim population since mid-2006 when the log collection began. McAfee and our intelligence and military cyberwarriors should -- absolutely and comprehensively -- be on the counterattack, as I argued in the latest AmSpec magazine . The obvious question that my source said was worrying our intelligence and law enforcement communities is whether the revelation that McAfee gained access to the [Chinese] command and control server resulted in the adversary's ability to track and terminate several classified cyber operations against them. Classified information, contrary to the liberal meme, is not made public for damned good reasons. I'm betting that the McAfee report didn't release something that the Chinese didn't already know. That's not likely the case in the White House's latest escapade. First the tragedy, and then the outrage. The Jedi -- aka "DevGroup," formerly known as SEAL Team 6 -- lost seventeen of its men in the Taliban shootdown of a Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan. About thirteen others -- sailors, airmen and soldiers -- were also lost. We must grieve for them all. And -- if you'd like to do something to help the kids of these brave men -- please visit www.specialops.org , the website of my friends at the Special Operations Warrior Foundation. SOWF helps the children of fallen spec ops guys get into college and pays their way all the way through their degree. Last week, the SOWF board voted to extend their scholarships to all killed in the Chinook crash, whether they were spec ops guys or not. Please give generously. At about the same time, we learned that the Obama regime was cooperating with a group of Hollywoodenheads producing a movie about the DevGru operation that got Osama bin Laden. The producers are being given access, according to many reports, to military, intelligence and special operations information, as well as to White House and administration officials. Inevitably, much of what they learn will be highly classified information. Whether or not all they learn ends up in the movie, it will all become public. That movie will -- coincidentally, I'm sure -- be released about a month before the November 2012 election to maximize the political benefit bought with classified information. Never mind the SEALs, the Night Stalkers who flew them, the USAF assets in the air and the CIA people on the ground. I can't wait to see how Obama and his White House Supercommittee heroically pulled it all off. ]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/15/flying-debt-ceiling-sgo/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Germany marks 50 years since Berlin Wall</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/13/germany-marks-50-years-since-berlin-wall/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/13/germany-marks-50-years-since-berlin-wall/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 14 Aug 2011 03:32:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>concernedcoloradoan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berlin Wall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[berlin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[headlines]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[years-since]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/13/germany-marks-50-years-since-berlin-wall/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ Germany marks 50 years since Berlin Wall ]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/13/germany-marks-50-years-since-berlin-wall/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Extremism and the Democratic Party</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/01/extremism-and-the-democratic-party/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/01/extremism-and-the-democratic-party/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Aug 2011 15:08:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>DixiePeters</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berlin Wall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[africa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[america]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[berlin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[business]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[democratic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[environment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[european]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Governor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[house]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle east]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[voters]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/01/extremism-and-the-democratic-party/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ Democratic leaders and liberal commentators declaim against the Tea Party members of the Republican House and Grover Norquist for the no-new-taxes pledge to which many Republican Senators and House members have subscribed and have promised their constituents in return for their vote. They are lambasted for their "extremism" in the debt ceiling debate. How convenient for the Democrats to be able to point to specific targets of their wrath. Would that conservatives and Republicans could point to a particular group of Democrats or a particular pledge Democrats take as evidence of their extremism. The reason conservatives and Republicans cannot point to such a group or pledge is because extremism on the Left infects the entire Democratic Party. • It's extremism, the Democrats say, to oppose new taxes.]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/08/01/extremism-and-the-democratic-party/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The GOP&#8217;S Reykjavik Moment</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/07/26/the-gops-reykjavik-moment/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/07/26/the-gops-reykjavik-moment/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 26 Jul 2011 15:09:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>markboabaca</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berlin Wall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ronald Reagan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stimulus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[modern]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[night]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nuclear-weapons]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[philosophy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[secretary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[senator]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/07/26/the-gops-reykjavik-moment/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ "It's the laboratory -- or goodbye." Mikhail Gorbachev barked out the words, his eyes cold, temper flaring. Ronald Reagan sat directly across the table from the Soviet leader, staring calmly. In the wake of President Obama's speech to the nation last night, shamelessly quoting Reagan out-of-context to give the impression Reagan would have approved of Obama's spend-thrift ways, another particular Reagan moment is worth summoning. It was October 1986 in Reykjavik, Iceland. The two were engaged in the final day of a hastily called summit conference. This night they sat directly across from each other in Hofdi House, a stark, white-washed wooden building on the perimeter of the Icelandic capital overlooking the frigid North Atlantic. Outside in the cold Icelandic darkness, the international media was gathered, hundreds of cameras and microphones poised and ready. Breaking the agreed-upon press embargo, the Soviets had already leaked to the reporters outside that the two leaders were nearing a historic agreement on Reagan's demands for deep cuts in strategic weapons and a "zero-zero" agreement (the latter eventually zeroing-out certain nuclear weapons systems based in Western Europe and the Soviet Union). Now the media was set up, the pressure ratcheting upward with the President himself aware that if this negotiation failed -- it would be cleverly portrayed as his fault. The price for this agreement? He would have to restrict SDI to laboratory testing -- which both he and Gorbachev knew would effectively kill the idea of an American nuclear shield completely. For a moment, time seemed to stop. Outside -- just as in today's debt-ceiling battle -- was the press. Waiting. Waiting. Inside, with a historic agreement to slash record numbers of nuclear weapons hanging in the balance, and a potential of banning them completely, the President of the United States considered the words he had just heard from the man who sat in Lenin and Stalin's chair. "It's the laboratory -- or good-bye." Either Reagan did what he, Gorbachev, wanted -- or the Reykjavik summit would come to an abrupt, immediate end. Right now. Right this minute. With Reagan portrayed as the bad guy. The man who failed the cause of world peace. "The laboratory -- or goodbye." The words echoed. Reagan scribbled a note to his Secretary of State, George Shultz. "Am I wrong?" Shultz leaned in to the President's ear. "No," whispered Shultz, "you are right." And with that, with Gorbachev's cold eyes fixed on him, with the television lights just outside the door and the world watching, Ronald Reagan delivered his answer. Without saying a word he stood up. And he gathered his papers. Gorbachev, startled, stood. He hastily grabbed for his own notes. He looked at Reagan and blurted "please pass on my regards to Nancy." Each man put on his overcoat and walked silently, side by side, out the front door into the blinding klieg lights of the cold Icelandic night. The look on Reagan's face was instantly clear to everyone. He was mad. Furious. He made no pretense whatsoever about the fact. A thousand cameras snapped in the darkness, transmitting the image of the unsmiling president and his Soviet counterpart around the globe. Gorbachev was so startled by all of this that he had blurted a semi-apology to Reagan: "I don't know what more I could have done." Replied Reagan: "You could have said yes." And with that, the President slipped into his waiting limousine and went home. As the showdown in Washington between President Obama and Republicans reaches its peak, the story of Reagan in Reykjavik is worth recalling for one very, very important reason. What Ronald Reagan was really about in Reykjavik, as history now records, was a crusade. He didn't see the summit as one more chapter in an endless procession of summits between American presidents and Soviet leaders. That was the view of Washington elites and their international counterparts, the crowd who long ago began treating the Soviet Union as just one more respectable international player. Reagan was about something different altogether. "We win, they lose" he had told his national security advisor when discussing his strategy. Within days of taking office Reagan acted on his belief that the Soviet Communist empire was not just another routine international player but rather an empire run by leaders who "openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat..." Later he applied another specific -- the Soviet Union, he said, was an "evil empire." And when he finally sat down with a Soviet leader for the first time -- in Geneva with the newly installed Gorbachev -- he promptly did something American presidents never did: give a stern, personal lecture on the evils of Marxism-Leninism to the head of the Communist Party. Indeed, while at Reykjavik Reagan did this yet again, with Gorbachev sitting stone-faced as Reagan began quoting Lenin. Gorbachev finally replied drily: "Well, at least we've gotten past Marx and on to Lenin." In other words, Ronald Reagan was not a man of process. He did not view the Cold War as something that was no more than a perpetual negotiating process with those who represented a system the world simply had to accept. His idea was not co-existence, it was victory. And in the end, against all the conventional wisdom of Washington elites, Reagan won. The Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall came down -- and the Soviet Union, unable to sustain its ideology, collapsed in on itself. AS THE DRAMA in Washington -- nominally over an increase in the debt-ceiling -- reaches a climax, this is the moment to ask the question: What are Republican leaders really all about here? Are they doing the domestic version of what Reagan refused to do with the Soviets? Treating the idea of perpetually massive, financially crippling government spending as just one more legitimate argument in a world of legitimate arguments? Or are they willing to do exactly what Reagan did with the Soviets? Take on the philosophy behind all of this debt, spending and regulation directly, to delegitimize it by doing the functional equivalent of walking out of Reykjavik? While today's Republicans delight in talking fondly of Reagan, many of them are terrified of behaving in a Reaganesque manner. Normally sensible Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn and Georgia's Saxby Chambliss, Republicans both, discussed their views on Sean Hannity's radio show last week. It seemed the only real Reaganite in the discussion was not Coburn or Chambliss but Hannity. Neither senator was talking about defeating the Obama agenda. Each went on at length about the prospect of accommodating it. A startled Hannity pointed out the obvious: Why were Republican senators involved with creating a bipartisan "Gang of Six" when the conservative "Cut, Cap, and Balance" proposal was on the House floor? Coburn and Chambliss both quickly replied that they were for Cut, Cap, and Balance, just like Jim DeMint, but, you know, " realistically ..." Said Coburn in another venue, Newsweek , in distinctively un-Reaganesque style: "I don't see a time anywhere in the future where there's 60 people that'll be in the Senate that think the way Jim DeMint and I do."]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/07/26/the-gops-reykjavik-moment/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Gorby Obama and the Collapse of the American Left</title>
		<link>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/07/19/gorby-obama-and-the-collapse-of-the-american-left/</link>
		<comments>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/07/19/gorby-obama-and-the-collapse-of-the-american-left/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Jul 2011 15:09:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>richwas</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berlin Wall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ronald Reagan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[america]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[barack obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[barack-obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[british]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Governor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[north]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[north-korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[river]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[south-korea]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/07/19/gorby-obama-and-the-collapse-of-the-american-left/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ In an ironic sense Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political And one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: Of all the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward the Communist world…. What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term -- the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people. ]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.obamashitlist.com/2011/07/19/gorby-obama-and-the-collapse-of-the-american-left/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

