Much will follow here on MRC on how we move forward. But, today, I offer perspective on the changes occurring in our nation by a NON American – Canadian poet, essayist, author, and Pajamas Media contributor, David Solway. Oft times we skim over articles without really reading, contemplating, or digesting content. I hope you’ll gift yourself with time to read and ponder every word of the article Solway published today:
The American people have elected a president for whom the critical battleground in the world is not the Middle East, Iraq, Iran, or even Afghanistan.
[…]Some PJM readers might ask themselves why a Canadian is so preoccupied with American politics. For one thing, America, as we used to say back when, is “where it’s happening,” for how America goes, so goes the world. Additionally, the immediate political and economic fate of my country is ineluctably tied to that of the U.S. We have the same enemies, our militaries are integrated through NORAD, we share the longest undefended border in the world, we buy property, visit, and vacation in one another’s lands, and of course, under the provisions of NAFTA, the U.S. is Canada’s largest trading partner. If America implodes, we go down the tubes with it.
Thus I pay close attention to the American political scene, which is always fascinating and always instructive, a bellwether for the future. This will explain why I have grown increasingly distraught when I consider what the American people inflicted upon themselves (and the rest of us) by electing a president on a dream and a catchphrase — a man with a dubious leftist background, with no relevant experience apart from serving two years as a junior senator, with little in the way of detectable credentials, boasting a CV with major areas blacked out, who enjoyed the mentorship of impenitent America haters, and who promised to “fundamentally transform” a country that didn’t need to be transformed, only responsibly governed.
The current American president is arguably the gravest mistake the American electorate has ever made and one it may not survive intact. It will inevitably come to regret its decision. This is not the place to run through the chronicle of Obama’s blunders, backslidings, broken promises, outright lying, despotic tendencies, shallow education, historical falsifications, ludicrous policies, betrayal of allies, and economic bungling (assuming this is not deliberate) — the record is accessible in all its details to anyone who wishes to consult it. What strikes me as most ominous, however, is that the American people have elected a president for whom the critical battleground in the world is not the Middle East or Iraq or Iran or even Afghanistan. For this president, the war he is declaring is to be fought right here on American soil against a late-awakened majority of his own countrymen, on whom he wishes to impose a political structure alien to their history, culture, economy, and feeling of exceptionalism. This is a president who is foisting a radical, far-left agenda on a center-right country and who will not be deterred from ramming his project into existence.
Indeed, one must really wonder, as Nancy Morgan has written, whether Obama is trying to bankrupt America, “adopting a strategy outlined by Cloward-Piven: overwhelm the system until it fails, and then replace it. … Based on Obama’s actions to date, reasonable people must allow for the possibility that the change Obama promised may include destroying the free market economic system in order to replace it with an economy regulated by government entities.” Similarly, if the Democratic liberal-left is so smart, Tom Blumer asks rhetorically, why are we so broke? And answers: “because they want us to be.” And as Nancy Coppock writes at American Thinker, “It is not alarmist to identify this situation as a coup d’état.”
Pajamas Media Chicago editor Rick Moran believes that “President Obama means well,” since “even at the risk of disastrous political defeat at the polls in November for his party, he is willing to undertake this imprudent, radical, and unnecessary change in the relationship between the governed and the governors.” I respectfully disagree. I suspect, rather, that what we are observing is an authoritarian personality and dogmatic political commissar intent on forcing his doctrinaire convictions upon the body politic regardless of the cost. It is, so to speak, to the Finland Station or bust. It’s either The Socialist Republic of America or it’s nothing. Let’s not kid ourselves. Obama and his catwalk crowd are not to be intimately equated with Lenin and his Bolsheviks, but they are definitely in the same snack bracket. As J. Robert Smith writes, “the differences … are significant,” yet “Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are decidedly pale reds.” Lenin, he concludes, “would be proud.”
We must not sell Obama short. He is a determined man. He is supremely confident in his oratorical powers, even if his rhetoric sounds somewhat wattled when he’s off the teleprompter. He has the backing of his party, the liberal intelligentsia, the mainstream media, and the teeming campus myrmidons. He is imbued with the theories of leftist revolutionary Saul Alinsky and has no doubt learned much from his friend and former neighbor, founder of the terrorist Weather Underground Bill Ayers, and has mastered what has come to be known as “Chicago tactics — “a machine,” according to Michael Gecan writing in the Boston Review, which “thrives on narrow or limited voting situations” and is predicated on “centralized power and influence.”
Obama’s presidential chutzpah knows no bounds and his primary impulse is winning above all else. But all this and more should be common knowledge by this time. What is not common knowledge is the extent to which the Cloward-Piven doctrine, which envisions the destruction of a capitalist economy and the democratic state on which it is based by spending the nation into financial collapse, seems to inform the president’s domestic strategy. This is the real meaning of Rahm Emanuel’s aphorism: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.” Accelerated borrowing and debt, galloping inflation (and its twin, deflation of the currency), unaffordable government-controlled health care and the monopolizing of industries and banks, and endlessly expanding entitlement programs which the nation cannot pay for are the weapons of choice to parlay the “crisis” into the statist takeover of a free market economy. Like Shakespeare’s profligate King Reignier, the president is a man “whose large style/Agrees not with the leanness of his purse.” Those who claim with former director of Citibank, Walter Wriston, that nations, unlike individuals or corporations, do not go bankrupt, should think again. Zimbabwe argues otherwise. The miseries of Argentina between 1999-2002, staggering under the combined weight of unemployment, stagflation, and the flight of capital, furnish a paramount object lesson. Sound familiar?
A nation is not built from cyclopean stone. It is a fragile tissue of shared assumptions about the nature of its history, its social consensus, its cultural and political coherence, and its implicit sense of destiny which is always subject to the threat of unraveling into a tangle of loose strands. This is a process that has been gathering momentum for some time now. It did not begin overnight. We can trace this gradual dénouement (or unknotting) from the “progressive school” of education in the 1920s and 30s with its child-centered deprivileging of hard content in favor of method and personal experience, through the student revolution of the 1960s, to the affirmative action enterprise and self-esteem movement of the latter part of the last century, to the postmodern attack on the concept of verifiable, objective truth and the politicizing of the universities we see today.
Allan Bloom charted the impending disaster in his magisterial The Closing of the American Mind which, despite the beating he took for his views in the liberal press and the politically correct modern academy, was frighteningly prescient. This relentless disintegrative process has now come to fruition. America has been demonstrably Zinned and Zizeked. It is only a poorly educated, materially pampered, emotionally driven, and largely ahistorical electorate that could have put a man like Obama into power — a man, as we have noted, enmeshed in a circle of highly problematic friends and allies, with a very sketchy résumé, a patchy and volatile voting record in the Senate, and ultimately with no visible qualifications for the presidency — on the strength of a few resonant clichés and a skein of empty slogans.
Open wide! Our Physician-in-Chief president has ordered a constant dose of 
Romney is in Sacramento today and has already completed one of the stops on his book tour. It seems he will appear at the GOP convention as well. 
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