For everyone out there supporting the #Occupy Movement, who calls themselves part of “the 99%”, identifies with their alleged struggle, and supports their strategies and tactics, you may want to think twice.   History has taught that when the Left uncorks the radical movement, change comes swiftly…to the Right.

If one hops into the Way-Back Machine and plops down in late 18^th century France, one is apt to re-discover that fixture of high school European history known as The French Revolution.  Few would argue that French monarchy was a system worth endorsing.  But how quickly we forget what replaced it – a radical left-wing action that resulted in a secular Democratic republic that was a wee bit authoritarian.  Actually, if memory serves, there was this thing called The Committee of Public Safety – a virtual dictatorship run by crazy Robespierre that resulted in the Reign of Terror.

There’s a great quote from Robespierre to justify the use of violent repression, “Terror is nothing else than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible”.   Hmmmm.  Terror = Justice.  Now just slip the word “Social” in there before “Justice” and you can see where I’m headed.  But just so I can complete this parallel, Robespierre arranged to have even his allies executed so he could run the show himself, with his power assisted throughout the countryside by the Jacobin Club aka Popular Societies aka ACORN.

While the MSM spins about the “non-violent, non-Anti-Semitic non-racist #Occupy Movement”, your intrepid journalists here at The Bigs have uncovered tons of evidence that demonstrate just the opposite. Indeed, plans are in the works to….what’s the word?….terrorize the opponents of the People’s Revolution aka Obama’s #Occupy Movement. The result of all this violence was The Thermidorian Reaction – a swing back to the Right following the revolution.   I repeat, to the Right.

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In last week’s essay, we quoted Winston Churchill’s memorable statement that “Democracy is the worst system there is except for all the others.  We also restated Churchill’s observation by noting that we need to revise our delegate selection process and “the sooner the better.”

This observation is most particularly true for the nominating process of either party seeking to replace an incumbent President or the party of an incumbent who is not running for re-election.

With Iowa’s caucus and the New Hampshire primary finished, we should pause and look at a little history to illustrate how our current process, in effect, disenfranchises a majority of voters.

In 1952, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois (perhaps one of that state’s last governors who did not go on to a career of making license plates)  was selected as the nominee at the Democratic convention through a series of state primaries and won the 1952 nomination at the Democratic convention on the third ballot.  Today, nominating conventions have no real purpose to them except for the public learning the nominee’s vice-presidential choice.  Bringing party professionals into the mix might spare us another Sarah Palin debacle.  Perhaps there is a role for smoke filled rooms, even though smoking would be banned!

In 1952 the process produced Senator John Sparkman as the democratic Vice-Presidential choice, an obvious sop to party bosses who did not trust the candidate Estes Kefauver, who went into the convention with the most pledged delegates. After the first two ballots Kefauver led but was overtaken on the third ballot when Stevenson was nominated.  The 1952 presidential race had earlier been thrown into disarray when President Truman announced that he would not seek re-election.  As we all know, General Eisenhower was elected President in November 1952. In 1956 Kefauver ran again and won the New Hampshire and Minnesota primary over Stevenson.  Although Stevenson was again nominated, this time around the party chose Kefauver as his running mate.

Fast forward to 1968 when President Johnson made his surprise announcement to a nation bitterly divided by the Vietnam War that he would not seek another term.  Senator Robert Kennedy won the California primary in June, defeating anti-war Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota.  Kennedy in his final words said “on to Chicago” before being shot by a lunatic, Sirhan Sirhan.  In the end, Senator Hubert Humphrey received the nomination, but lost the general election to Richard Nixon, who had stated in 1962, after losing the California governorship, that we wouldn’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.

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Today marks the 48^th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and with it, 48 years of conspiracy theories.

The Left has promulgated nearly all of these theories since the day of the assassination in 1963. Kennedy was killed by a communist — someone to the left of him — but yet we’re still told this was some grand conspiracy, involving what would necessarily be dozens or even hundreds of people who orchestrated and executed it (and then kept the secret!) with right wing forces at the center.

Various suspects have included military industrialists, the CIA, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, pro-Israeli groups, oil magnates aligned with Lyndon Johnson, right-wing racists, E. Howard Hunt, and J. Edgar Hoover.

Even at the time, the Kennedys and the mediacouldn’t accept that a lone deranged leftist was responsible. Kennedy, after all, was in Dallas, a hotbed of rightwing extremism as they saw it. Even as the shooting was taking place, Connally yelled out “They’re going to kill us all!” Jacqueline Kennedy didn’t change her clothes until she got back to Washington, stating to Lady Bird Johnson she wanted “them to see what they did to Jack.” (Emphasis mine.) This was the liberal mindset, from the people in the car on out.

Gerald Posner’s 1993 book “Case Closed” makes a strong and convincing argument that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and for it he’s been demonized as a right wing stooge, a Kennedy-hater, or enforcer of the establishment line, obviously on the payroll of some nefarious right wing phantom.

But Posner did what most of the conspiracy theorists don’t do: look at the actual evidence that exists, and at the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. Why do all these conspiracy theorists typically ignore all that’s known about Oswald? Because there’s a clear trajectory in his activities that led to the assassination.

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Forty seven years ago this week, Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in the biggest landslide since 1936. Today, both left and right see in Goldwater’s defeat the beginnings of the conservative revolution that would bring Ronald Reagan into office in 1980. Missed in this thesis, though, is how 1964 was a prime example of modern Democratic campaigning with its allies — the mainstream media — that we suffer under today. It was also a historic turning point that might have been avoided.

It is fashionable for the Left to co-opt Barry Goldwater as they have Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton called him a “patriot” and James Carville characterized him a “principled conservative,” at odds with today’s “loony right.” But this was not so in 1964. The mainstream media, not called that then, labeled him a fascist. Walter Cronkite said of him that “Goldwater was going places, among them Nazi Germany.” Psychiatrists lined up behind the Johnson campaign, declaring Goldwater “emotionally unstable.” Reporters were aware that LBJ was heightening the conflict in Vietnam, but said nothing while LBJ promised not to send “American boys nine or ten thousand miles from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”

Journalists on the campaign trail saw Johnson drunkenly board a plane armed with nuclear weapons and then accidentally drop them on the United States. Luckily, by the grace of God, they did not go off. None of this was reported, while newspapers editors worked in overdrive to portray Goldwater as eager to push the button. Today, pundits argue that dirty tricks by Carville and Begalia were something new on the horizon for Democrats and were borrowed from decades of Republican campaigns. But Johnson was a pioneer of the Clinton War Room. He used the FBI to wiretap the candidate, bought political information from Goldwater defectors, and in an eerie foretaste of Watergate, put domestic CIA chief Howard Hunt on the White House payroll to infiltrate, even burglarize, Goldwater headquarters (with Democratic blessing, Hunt filtered his findings and received cash through a dummy corporation called National Press). What is striking about these tactics was how unnecessary they were. Johnson beforehand knew he was going to win, but he wanted “to crucify” Goldwater nonetheless.

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While Obama tours the country promoting his personal donation plan, the Republican Presidential hopefuls are in a pitched battle for the nomination and arguing which tax simplification plan is best. Threatened with the possibility of rate cuts, the Media and politicians trot out the usual suspects of lies about tax hikes and tax cuts.  This is a battle Republicans must win and, to do so, they need to expose those lies.

Keep in mind that the battle between those who create wealth and those that want to redistribute it, mainly politicians, is as old as civilization itself.  We read of tax battles and even reform in every age, like Urukagina’s tax reductions in Babylonia/Sumer in 2350 BC.  Equally venerable are the constant set of demagogic lies by those against tax cuts and simplification.  It is important to note that politicians like complicated tax codes and high tax rates because they control those rates and dispense the loopholes and regulations that complicate the tax code.  Tax simplification means they lose power.  As a result, resistance to tax reform is more often the rule than reform. As for the lies, they abound, so let’s consider just a few:

Lie # 1: Tax cuts cause deficits/Tax hikes balance the budget.  The Media and the Left often say that the Reagan and Bush tax cuts led to deficits while Clinton’s tax hikes led to a balanced budget. In truth, according to the IRS, federal tax revenues rose dramatically after the overall Reagan tax cuts/reforms (98%) and the Bush tax cuts (a record $700+ billion). This is just as they did after the Harding/Coolidge cuts (61% revenue increase) and after the Kennedy/Johnson cuts (62% revenue increase).  Those are the four major income tax reductions we have had since the inception of the income tax in 1913 and every time revenues rose after they were in place – every time.

So did the tax rate cut cause a deficit? The lie, of course, is to blame the revenue gathering mechanism (tax code/rate cut) instead of the revenue spending mechanism, i.e. Congress/Presidents.  The spenders kept spending – often at an accelerated rate when they saw the new revenues.  Thus, the fault for continuing deficits lies not with tax rate cuts, which produced higher revenues, but with politicians who spent too much.

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“Radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of conservatives,” said the small-c communist tactician Saul Alinsky, who is now worshipped by the Obama administration and the activist Left. The thuggish, in-your-face activist group ACORN was the vehicle that 1960s radicals created to bash Americans’ heads in to get them to accept a radical transformation of American society. The antisocial group also led the way in destigmatizing welfare by pushing people to abandon their job searches and get on the public dole.

When Barack Obama was a little boy surrounded by parents and grandparents and mentors sympathetic to communism, likeminded people were building ACORN’s parent organization, the National Welfare Rights Organization. Armed with tax dollars, left-wing extremists Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven, and Alinsky were at play in the 1960s, wreaking havoc on society in an effort to induce revolutionary change. All three of these at the time relatively obscure figures labored to create NWRO along with a vast constellation of tax-supported groups determined to destroy the American society they loathed.

Changes in federal social policy in the early 1960s helped to lay the groundwork for this artificial activism and the welfare-related unrest it caused. President Lyndon Johnson’s “unconditional war on poverty in America” really should have been called an unconditional war on American values. For four decades, ACORN destroyed property, forcibly occupied banks, assaulted employees of the companies they targeted, intimidated executives and government officials at their family homes, and engineered home invasions in order to seize foreclosed properties. ACORN took money from powerful special interests to produce instant rent-a-mobs to harass their clients’ competitors.

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In 1999, James Earl Ray was found innocent of killing Martin Luther King Jr. in the same way O.J. Simpson was found guilty of killing his wife Nicole and Ron Goldman – in a civil trial. In fact, King’s family was as convinced of Ray’s innocence as the families of Nicole and Ron were convinced of Simpson’s guilt. In King vs. Loyd Jowers and conspirators unknown, there were 70 witnesses called; twelve jurors found in favor of the King family, which held a press conference after the verdict.

One of King’s sons – Dexter – had expressed his adamant belief that Ray was not his father’s assassin. In 1997, King told Ray personally that both he and his family believed him. What would it have taken for the Goldmans and the Browns to have believed Orenthal’s story that he was innocent? Anyone who remembers the looks on their faces, their resolve and their anger would have to concede that it would have required nothing short of cold hard facts.

The verdict in King vs. Jowers found a government conspiracy involving city, state, and federal agents complicit in the murder. Dexter King went so far as to name Memphis Police Department Officer, Lt. Earl Clark as his father’s assassin.

One week prior to King’s assassination on April 4, 1968 he had gone to Memphis to show support for local sanitation workers. Riots erupted in Memphis; one person was killed and sixty were injured. The incident was incredibly damaging to the cause of King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). A consequence of King’s alleged involvement in those riots was that it caught the attention of some powerful politicians. A Democratic Senator from West Virginia delivered an extremely incendiary speech on the Senate Floor that was directed specifically at President Lyndon Johnson, also a Democrat. (more…)

Phase one for restoring the republic is over: the House is now in Republican hands, thereby assuring nothing radical will sail through the Congress in the next two years (although it would be wise to be on the alert for unconstitutional executive orders intended to accomplish that purpose). If the electorate remains informed and stays on task, 2012 will see the Senate flip as well since the majority of seats up for reelection are currently in Democrat hands.

Phase two may be more difficult. How likely is it that an incumbent president will be stripped of his position? What will it take? Some say it’s a very difficult task, yet it has occurred rather often. Under what circumstances? A short survey of twentieth-century presidential politics may offer some clues as to the feasibility that Barack Obama will be a one-termer.

We can begin with William Howard Taft, Republican winner of the 1908 election as the handpicked successor to Theodore Roosevelt.

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A talk Before a Tea Party rally sponsored by the Cecil County (Md.) Patriots in Elkton, Md., 10/23/10

Twenty months ago, on February 19, 2009, business reporter Rick Santelli of CNBC took to the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to deliver his famous rant against government bail-outs, and call for “a Chicago tea party.”

Santelli may have sparked the Tea Party movement. But he only tapped into outrage that had been growing in many of us for decades.

For too long, you and I have watched helplessly as a clique of politicians, intellectuals, activists, and bureaucrats from both parties have tried to obliterate our Constitution, our capitalist system, and our personal liberty. This “bipartisan Ruling Class”—as scholar Angelo Codevilla describes it—sees itself as a moral, cultural, and intellectual elite. Codevilla says that “Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits.”

Oozing sanctimonious arrogance, viewing the rest of us as coarse, unsophisticated rubes who cling bitterly to guns and bibles, this class seeks to impose its own supposedly superior values and visions upon the rest of us, by force of law.

As we know too well, the ultimate goal of our Ruling Class is power. They exist—not to produce, not to invent, not to create—but to manipulate and master others. Ronald Reagan memorably summed up the Ruling Class’s governing outlook this way: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

By contrast, the rest of us Americans seek power over circumstances, but not over each other. We acquire our personal sense of identity and self-esteem through productive work—not through imposing our will, values, and visions on our neighbors. We accept a “live and let live” philosophy.

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Rand Paul’s controversial remarks about the 1964 Civil Rights Act illustrate what I have been saying for years, that Republicans would benefit tremendously from knowing and appreciating the heritage of our Grand Old Party.  That landmark legislation was the culmination of a century of efforts by Republicans to protect African-Americans from their Democrat oppressors.  Let’s look at the facts.

On his deathbed in 1874, Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA) told a Republican colleague: “You must take care of the civil rights bill – my bill, the civil rights bill.  Don’t let it fail.”  In March 1875, the Republican-controlled 43rd Congress followed up the GOP’s 1866 Civil Rights Act and 1871 Civil Rights Act with the most comprehensive civil rights legislation ever.  A Republican president, Ulysses Grant, signed the bill into law that same day.

Among its provisions, the 1875 Civil Rights Act banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.  Sound familiar?  Though struck down by the Supreme Court eight years later, the 1875 Civil Rights Act would be reborn as the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

During the twenty years of the FDR and Truman administrations, the Democrats had refused to enact any civil rights legislation.  In contrast, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which had been written by his Attorney General, a former Chairman of the Republican National Committee.  The original draft would have permitted the federal government to sue anyone violating another person’s constitutional rights, but this powerful provision would have to wait until the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  The bill had to be weakened considerably to secure enough Democrat votes to pass, so violations would be civil, not criminal offenses, and penalties were light.  Vice President Richard Nixon helped overcome a Democrat filibuster in the Senate.  The GOP then strengthened enforcement with its 1960 Civil Rights Act.

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A must read in today’s New York Times: (it happens)

With the Senate’s passage of financial regulation, Congress and the White House have completed 16 months of activity that rival any other since the New Deal in scope or ambition. Like the Reagan Revolution or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the new progressive period has the makings of a generational shift in how Washington operates.

First came a stimulus bill that, while aimed mainly at ending a deep recession, also set out to remake the nation’s educational system and vastly expand scientific research. Then President Obama signed a health care bill that was the biggest expansion of the safety net in 40 years. And now Congress is in the final stages of a bill that would tighten Wall Street’s rules and probably shrink its profit margins.

If there is a theme to all this, it has been to try to lift economic growth while also reducing income inequality. Growth in the decade that just ended was the slowest in the post-World War II era, while inequality has been rising for most of the last 35 years.

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David Weigel, at The Washington Post, asked me to comment on Michael Steele’s view of  the so-called Southern Strategy.

Speaking at DePaul University on April 20, RNC Chairman Michael Steele urged Republican leaders to work with the Tea Parties.  He has the right approach, to which I would add the fact, per my article on BigGovernment.com, that The Republican Party began as a Tea Party Movement.

Steele then went on to say:

“We have lost sight of the historic, integral link between the party and African-Americans.  This party was co-founded by blacks, among them Frederick Douglass.  The Republican Party had a hand in forming the NAACP, and yet we have mistreated that relationship.  People don’t walk away from parties.  Their parties walk away from them.  For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.  Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, ‘Bubba’ went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton.”

Chairman Steele makes an interesting point, but he is accepting as true the Democrat version of events.  The theme of Back to Basics for the Republican Party is that celebrating our party’s heritage is not just for minority outreach but for all Republicans to appreciate that the GOP has been a great force for good ever since being founded in 1854 to oppose the Democrats’ pro-slavery, anti-freedom agenda.  I drew on that record of achievement in writing the historical information on the RNC website, also posted as Heroes and Heroics.

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Politics is a game of addition – successful politics anyway.  Great leaders, when faced with a divided electorate, not to mention difficult economic times, use a limited agenda to forge consensus out of broken paradigms.  Once they achieve an initial success, they seek a broader consensus.  In the 1980’s Reagan faced a divided Republican Party and a fractured and dispirited nation.  Concentrating on the prosperity issue and our national prestige, Reagan first brought Republicans together and then independents and even many Democrats.  Indeed, so successful was Reagan at bringing people together, that in time he could rely on a group of Reagan Democrats.  Few other Presidents have had such success at building consensus let alone are able to claim a voting block from the other party in their name.

There is little doubt that Obama faced a divided electorate when he first took office and a difficult economic climate.  Rather than start with a limited agenda designed to build consensus, Obama did the opposite.  Obama chased too many rabbits at once and preferred ideological fights over practical solutions.  As a result, the Country is more divided than ever – not less.

The most recent manifestation of that divisive M.O. is the White House’s amazing decision to insist on a terror trial in New York.   Of course, it remains a jarring ideological decision to treat KSM as a “criminal” versus the warring “terrorist” that he is.  As I wrote, in my article Internment, CSI and Eric Holder’s Disarming of America, that decision will have profound negative consequences for decades to come.  To the point of this article, Obama is compounding his initial divisive decision (treating him as a criminal) by fighting with New York over the place of the trial.  It is a political fight which he cannot win regardless of the outcome of the trial.

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These may well be the times that try the souls of Democrat politicians.

In the year since Obama took the oath of office, the fortunes of the Democrat Party have changed substantially. Voters, especially Independent voters, now favor Republicans on many issues and in Rasmussen’s Generic Congressional Ballot by 9%. Entrenched Senate Democrats like Christopher Dodd and Byron Dorgan are retiring and now – in no small irony – in the election heard ‘round the world, Scott Brown, campaigning against ObamaCare was elected to “Kennedy’s seat.”

It has been a remarkable turnaround – yet the worse is yet to come for Democrats in office.

Keep in mind that voters turned out the Republicans in 2006 and 2008 in large part because they spent too much, reformed too little and ran up the deficit into the $400 billion range. By the end of the Bush Presidency, economic troubles were mounting and the Republicans had no clear plan for a national recovery.

Today, the incidence of buyer’s remorse for voters over Barack is mounting for all the same reasons and more. Unemployment is at double digits, government reform has been abandoned in favor of unprecedented government spending and the deficit is in the $1.5 trillion range. All of that, with no meaningful recovery in site.

Beyond that, the President has his Party in the stickiest of wickets known to you as the Health Care debate. By allowing Pelosi and Company to write the bill, Obama lost control of the process and now public opposition to the bill is at an all time high.  Even so, the Democrat leadership still promises to push it – whether we like it or not.

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Midterm elections can present a considerable risk for a new President.  Often viewed as a referendum on a President’s policies, the last 45 years featured such huge party losses as 54 House seats under Clinton, 48 seats under Ford, and 47 seats under Johnson.  While Ford’s fate was not entirely his own, the fates of Johnson and Clinton present foreboding scenarios for Democrats in 2010.

Johnson and Clinton: Unpopular Policies Lead to Midterm Losses.

In 1964, the Democrats were sitting atop the political world.  They held 68 Senate seats and gained 36 House seats for an overwhelming margin of 295 to 140 – not to mention winning the White House.  Just two years later, however, they lost 48 seats.  Why? A series of policies that were unpopular including a “credibility gap” on the Vietnam War and what one Democrat Governor said was “Frustration over Vietnam; too much federal spending and… taxation; no great public support for your Great Society programs; and … public disenchantment with the civil rights programs.”  Despite the economy growing 6% because of the Kennedy/Johnson tax cuts, the divide between Johnson’s policies and public opinion produced a 49% approval rating for Johnson and resulted in historic losses for the President and his party in 1966.

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