Bushs AmeriCorps Fraud by James Bovard September 1, 2007 Politicians have long used moral doggerel to make citizens docile. Though President Bush is often verbally inept, he has hit the same chords his predecessors played to sway Americans to glorify government workers as moral icons worthy of gratitude and respect. Two months after the 9/11 attacks, Bush announced that he was expanding AmeriCorps and that all of us can ...
How Bogus Fears Bought Bush Four More Years by James Bovard July 1, 2007 Is a president entitled to frighten voters into submission to perpetuate his power over them? While many people are catching on to Bush’s deceits on Iraq, most Americans have forgotten the scams of his reelection campaign. George W. Bush was reelected in large part because he boosted the number of Americans frightened of terrorism during 2004. In October 2001, 73 ...
Ron Paul and the MSNBC Debate by Jacob G. Hornberger May 9, 2007 During the recent MSNBC Republican presidential debate, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul made three profound points on U.S. foreign policy that the American people would be wise to heed. Needless to say, Paul’s three points, being libertarian in nature, aren’t likely to be favorably received within the Washington, D.C., establishment, especially among lobbyists ...
Speaker Spotlight: Ron Paul and Andrew Napolitano by Jacob G. Hornberger May 4, 2007 This week we spotlight Congressman Ron Paul and Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst Andrew Napolitano, our two Sunday dinner speakers for our upcoming June 1-4 conference Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties in Reston, Virginia. If there is a genuine hero of our time with respect to the advancement of liberty, it is Ron Paul. The ...
Boxer’s Confusion about Ownership by Tibor R. Machan May 4, 2007 California Senator Barbara Boxer sent around a letter to the editor that was published in The OC Register on April 30th, hoping to clarify my California Wild Heritage Act. She states in this letter that the approximately 2.3 million acres included in the bill are all publicly owned lands. Not one acre of private land is included in the ...
What Do Citizens Owe Government? by James Bovard May 1, 2007 When politicians are not promising new benefits to citizens, they continually remind citizens what they owe the government. From their first years in government schools, children are indoctrinated with the notion that government provides them some grandiose benefit. This seed often produces a harvest of servility in later life. But few people stop and ...
Why Germans Supported Hitler, Part 2 by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 2007 Part 1 | Part 2 The most remarkable part of the movie Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is the courtroom scene, which is based on recently discovered German archives. Sophie and her brother Hans, along with their friend Christoph Probst, stand before the infamous Roland Freisler, presiding judge of the People’s Court, whom Hitler had immediately sent to Munich ...
Why Germans Supported Hitler, Part 1 by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 2007 Part 1 | Part 2 It has long intrigued me why the German people supported Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. After all, every schoolchild in America is taught that Hitler and his Nazi cohorts were the very epitome of evil. How could ordinary German citizens support people who were so obviously monstrous in nature? Standing against the Nazi ...
Ford’s Legacy: Lawless Government by James Bovard March 1, 2007 The death of former President Gerald Ford unleashed a tidal wave of bathos and political bunkum across the land. Ford was far more exalted in death than he had been during his time in office. Slate’s Timothy Noah critically noted, Within the narrow confines of Permanent Washington — the journalists, lobbyists, and congressional lifers who are the city’s avatars ...
The Active Authoritarianism of Teddy Roosevelt by George Leef March 1, 2007 Bully Boy by Jim Powell (Crown Forum, 2006); 329 pages, $27.50. Most historians rank Teddy Roosevelt as one of America’s great or near-great presidents. That is mainly because he is regarded as a “progressive” — a trustbuster, a proponent of government regulation of the ...
Executive Orders and the Decline of Law, Part 2 by William L. Anderson February 1, 2007 Part 1 | Part 2 The longest-lasting legacy of Lincoln is not the War Between the States or even the violent way in which slavery ended in the United States. Lincoln was able to use brute force to “settle” the various arguments regarding the centralization of political power in this country. As the late Shelby Foote said during an ...
Bush’s Doublethink by Sheldon Richman January 19, 2007 The most peculiar passage in President Bushs much-dissected surge speech was this: I have made it clear to the prime minister and Iraqs other leaders that Americas commitment is not open-ended. If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people. What could the president have meant by ...