Amused Cynic

Michael Barone is one of the most reliable and important commenters on national politics, and serious people generally pay attention when he offers an opinion.  The question before us this November:  Are there enough serious people among the electorate to stop the Obama travesty?  Barone is no Cassandra, so this is quite sobering:

“I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors,” Barack Obama told a crowd in Elko, Nev. “I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face.” Actually, Obama supporters are doing a lot more than getting into people’s faces. They seem determined to shut people up.

[...]Today’s liberals seem to be taking their marching orders from other quarters. Specifically, from the college and university campuses where administrators, armed with speech codes, have for years been disciplining and subjecting to sensitivity training any students who dare to utter thoughts that liberals find offensive. The campuses that once prided themselves as zones of free expression are now the least free part of our society.

Obama supporters who found the campuses congenial and Mr. Obama himself, who has chosen to live all his adult life in university communities, seem to find it entirely natural to suppress speech they don’t like and seem utterly oblivious to claims this violates the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. In this campaign, we have seen the coming of the Obama thugocracy, suppressing free speech, and we may see its flourishing in the four or eight years ahead.

Think that sounds too harsh?  Well consider this Rolling Stone article from almost exactly 3 years ago, on the man who could well become the next House Majority Whip….perhaps even Speaker.

Friends and enemies agree that the key to [Rahm] Emanuel’s success is his legendary intensity. There’s the story about the time he sent a rotting fish to a pollster who had angered him. There’s the story about how his right middle finger was blown off by a Syrian tank when he was in the Israeli army. And there’s the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting “Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!” and plunging the knife into the table after every name. “When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape,” one campaign veteran recalls. “It was like something out of The Godfather. But that’s Rahm for you.”

Of the three stories, only the second is a myth — Emanuel lost the finger to a meat slicer as a teenager and never served in the Israeli army. But it’s a measure of his considerable reputation as the enforcer in Clinton’s White House that so many people believe it to be true. You don’t earn the nickname “Rahmbo” being timid.

McCain campaign, repeat after me:  “There are no rules in a knife fight.”  Those of us on the Right who may be sounding angry have good reason.   I wonder if Rahm Emmanuel really lost his middle finger in a meat slicer…or if he just wore it out.

Related:  Neo is also feeling the chill wind.

According to Bookworm, to many Americans today, socialism is:

…just another content-neutral political ideology. In our non-judgmental age, it falls into the same category as Liberal vs. Conservative, or Left vs. Right. To most people, it just means Obama is a more liberal Liberal, or a leftier Lefty, and they already knew that.

Some people think this point of view is possible—and socialism is neutral or even desirable to many Americans—because we’re one of the few Western countries that haven’t had that much of a taste of it. The theory is that if we actually were to experience it we would resoundingly repudiate it.

But this argument fails to take into account the institutionalization of statism. Once the mechanisms are in place—and especially if the party in power has the ability to re-organize districts and voting laws and courts and term limits to favor their own side—it can become more and more difficult to change and revert back even if it’s the will of the people to do so. Just ask the people of Venezuela.

And once a population has become accustomed to being on the dole, it has a seductive attraction and is very difficult to give up. Just ask most of Europe.

Further update:  Yard sign rage.  Just lovely.  The same kind of losers who keyed my car.  If this had happened to an Obama sign Katie Couric would be reporting it.

Also:  Treacher on the new lefty narrative:  The McCain campaign as “Krystallnacht ‘08.“  Angry yet?

Patterico has more examples of our tolerant would-be overlords in action.