Of New York Times columnist David Brooks it has been said that he is “the sort of conservative pundit that liberals like.” Not being a conservative or a liberal, I find him consistently wishy–washy and inane, without a controversial or interesting thought in that head of his.

Although it comes close, Brooks’ “Act of Rigorous Forgiving,” dealing with the antics of NBC’s Brian Williams, is not a complete dog’s breakfast of a column. The aspect of the Brooks column that piqued this scribe’s curiosity is that of forgiveness.

“Williams’ troubles,” you’ll recall—as chronicled by The Daily Beast—”began with his false account of a March 2003 helicopter ride during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which he told, with dramatic variations, on David Letterman’s late-night talk show and Alec Baldwin’s radio show in March 2013, and repeated on his own Jan. 30 newscast—only to recant it and apologize five days later after Stars and Stripes blew it out of the sky. Now he’s also facing scrutiny for stories of possibly untrue exploits during his 2005 coverage of Hurricane Katrina, and even whether, as a volunteer teenage firefighter in Middletown, New Jersey, he saved one (or maybe it was two) puppies from a burning house.”

Brooks’ trouble is the breakneck speed in which he shifted into a discussion of forgiveness. Is this not premature? Brooks, moreover, is also plain wrong in claiming that transgressors are treated “barbarically” when they “violate a public trust.” In a culture steeped in moral relativism, this is simply untrue. Paris Hilton debuted her public life with a self-adoring pornographic video. It only increased her profile. Likewise Kim Kardashian, who has been bottoms-up ever since her maiden performance. Her sibling, as vulgar, has visited the White House. Barack Obama lied intentionally when he vowed, “You can keep your healthcare if you want to,” but all was forgiven and forgotten. The president’s latest lies are that ISIS is un-Islamic and that “Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding.” These fables are cut out of whole cloth. The same goes for the web of lies “W” wove on the matter of WMD in Iraq. On and on.

… the offender has to get out in front of the process, being more self-critical than anyone else around him. He has to probe down to the root of his error, offer a confession more complete than expected. He has to put public reputation and career on the back burner and come up with a course that will move him toward his own emotional and spiritual recovery, to become strongest in the weakest places. …… It’s also an occasion to investigate each unique circumstance, the nature of each sin that was committed and the implied remedy to that sin. Some sins, like anger and lust, are like wild beasts. They have to be fought through habits of restraint. Some sins like bigotry are like stains. They can only be expunged by apology and cleansing. Some like stealing are like a debt. They can only be rectified by repaying. Some, like adultery, are more like treason than like crime; they can only be rectified by slowly reweaving relationships. …

Indeed, penitence, especially in the case of a sustained, prolonged pattern of abuse, can “only be [achieved] by slowly reweaving relationships.”

To simply demand forgiveness because one has said sorry without convincingly and consistently acting sorry, and to proceed further to conduct one’s self like a victim because the victim has failed to extend an instant pardon: This is unpardonable. To shift the guilt onto the injured party for not granting that minute-made (or is it “minute-maid”?) clemency: This too is beneath contempt.

Alas, flash forgiveness is not the province of Christians alone. Jews, too, it would appear, have moved into the realm of pop religion. “According to the Talmud,” I was recently lectured, “a person who repents is forgiven his past and stands in a place of righteousness.” No mention was made of the hard, lengthy work of “slowly reweaving relationships.” The demand was for forgiveness in a New York minute.

Also conspicuous by its absence was chapter-and-verse proof for the alleged Talmudic injunction to decouple easily expressed feelings from difficult-to-do deeds. (And even if the edict exists, unless just in natural law—it would amount to an argument from authority.)

My guess is that instant expiation flows more from the values of the 1960s than from any doctrinal Christian or Jewish values. Whichever is the case, the corollary of the current practice of no-effort forgiveness is that “it not only abolishes the necessity of repentance; it abolishes sin itself.”

For the neoconservatives, ground zero in the creation of the Islamic State (ISIS) is the departure of the American occupying forces without a Status of Force Agreement (SOFA). At the behest of President Barack Obama, or so the allegation goes, the American military decamped, in December of 2011, without securing an SOFA. A residual American military force in Iraq was to be the thing that would have safeguarded the peace in Iraq. Broadcaster Mark Levin regularly rails about the SOFA amulet. Most Republicans lambaste Obama for failing to secure the elusive SOFA.

So high is Barack Obama’s cringe-factor that conservatives have been emboldened to dust-off an equally awful man and present him, his policies and his dynastic clan to the public for another round. The man, President George W. Bush, did indeed sign a security pact with his satrap, Nuri al-Maliki, much to the dismay of very many Iraqis. Although the agreement was ratified behind the barricades of the Green Zone, journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi “spoke” on behalf of his battered Iraqi brothers and sister: He lobbed a loafer at Bush shouting, “This is a farewell… you dog! This is for the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!”

Saddam Hussein—both dictator and peace maker—had no Status of Force Agreement with the U.S. He did, however, use plenty of force to successfully control his fractious country. Highly attuned to the slightest Islamist rumbling, Saddam squashed these ruthlessly. When the shah of Iran was overthrown by the Khomeini Islamist revolutionaries, the secular Saddam feared the fever of fanaticism would infect Iraq. He thus extinguished any sympathetic Shiite “political activism” and “guerrilla activity” by imprisoning, executing and driving rebels across the border, into Iran. It wasn’t due process, but it wasn’t ISIS.

This “principle” was articulated charmingly and ever-so politely to emissaries of another empire, in 1878: “My people will not listen unless they are killed,” explained Zulu King Cetshwayo to the British imperial meddlers, who disapproved of Zulu justice. They nevertheless went ahead and destroyed the mighty Zulu kingdom in the Anglo-Zulu War (1879), exiling its proud king.

Ask any ordinary Iraqi struggling to eke out an existence in what remains of his pulverized homeland, and he’ll tell you: “Keep your Status of Force Agreement. Give us back the Iraq of Saddam Hussein.” True, the Kurds were not in a good place. And Shia madrasahs were regularly shuttered. But some reconstruction was underway. Democratic plans were being drafted (albeit slowly). A “nonaggression pact” and a “cooperation council to promote economic and cultural development” had been established with the Arab neighbors (Kuwait, not so much). Best of all, Iran was on the run.

A 2012 Zogby poll, highlighted by The American Conservative, questioned Iraqis about the impact on their lives of the American invasion. “For the most part, Shia and Sunni Arabs perceive almost every aspect of life to have become worse or not [to have] changed.” And this was in Iraq BI: Before ISIS.

Not long after the “great” American troop surge of 2007, Global Policy Forum questioned Iraqis, too. (This was more than Bush had done when he ordered that BLU-82Bs be dropped on their neighborhoods.) What do you know? With the surge and without an SOFA, Iraq was oh-so violent. By September, Iraqis were still citing a “lack of security and safety in general” as one of their most pressing existential concerns.

The answer to the question, “Who do you blame the most for the violence that is occurring in the country?” placed the U.S. up there with al Qaeda and foreign Jihadis as the root of all evil. Harmony being what it was in Iraq during the halcyon Bush years—Shia blamed Sunni and Sunni blamed Shia for their respective woes.

Guess who, in 1994, had advised against an invasion he went on to orchestrate, in 2003.

… if we had gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. It would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over and took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world. And if you take down the central government in Iraq, you could easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have, the west. Part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim. Fought over for eight years. In the north, you’ve got the Kurds. And if the Kurds spin loose and join with Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

This astute, if utilitarian, analysis was that of Bush’s Vice president, Dick Cheney. The architect of the invasion of 2003 had counseled against it in 1994. The man’s predictions have come to pass. The Bush SOFA specified a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces by Dec. 31, 2011. Despite negotiations thereafter, Iraqis rejected any further infringements on their sovereignty.

In short, it was not the departure from Iraq that guaranteed the rise of ISIS aka ISIL (in Yiddish) alias Daesh (if you want to sound as cool as John Kerry); but the invasion of Iraq.

©ILANA Mercer
WND,  Junge Freiheit, Target Liberty, Quarterly Review,
Praag.org & The Libertarian Alliance
February 6, 2015

The Fourth Estate has moved the country into the Third Dimension. The media lie so much, that when stuff happens that scares them, they no longer know where to turn for the truth.

For now, mainstream media have stopped meditating on Charlie Hebdo, and moved on to the weather and other woes. But something changed after this month’s strike, carried out by French recruits to Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, on the offices of Charlie Hebdo.

The frightful events that unfolded in Paris seemed to have triggered something of a come-to-Jesus moment among members of the media. For example, before Charlie Hebdo, supernova Megyn Kelly’s everyday “expert” on Islam was one Brooke Goldstein. Unless good looks qualify one to expatiate on Islam, Goldstein was—still is—gormless about the vexation that is the Muhammadan faith. However, right after Charlie Hebdo, Kelly traded Goldstein for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is both victim of and expert on Islam. Even CNN’s Anderson Cooper quit beating about the bush. Cooper listened without interruption when Hirsi Ali mentioned the “absolutely immoral” proclivities of “the Prophet Muhammad, especially in his years after Medina.”

Lo and behold, Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch made the rounds, myth-busting about the aforementioned muses for murder: Islam and its Prophet. The New York Times was really running scared: Its editors solicited a piece from the pen of Marine LePen, leader of France’s rightist Front National. While she did not quite counsel pulling the drawbridge up, LePen questioned the wisdom of inviting “waves of immigration, both legal and clandestine” into the West.

Like lab rats, media are maze-bright, no more. Other scribes found solace by levitating in the Parallel Universe, pretending that in the Hebdo massacre we had a Whodunit to unravel. “Both the motive and the identity of the perpetrators are still unknown,” intoned a cipher at Slate. For a while, Wolf Blitzer of CNN was all wide-eyed wonderment, too. Across the pond, the constabulary in Hamburg, north Germany, informed its citizenry that the motive for an attack on the Hamburger Morgenpost, a newspaper that published the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, was “still under investigation.”

Just as some mediacrats still pretend the phrase “radical Islam” is not a redundancy—Islam is radical!—others make believe that the motive for shooting up a place of business while yelling praise for the Prophet Muhammad is a mystery. Unless authorities say otherwise.

Disaffected, disadvantaged, disenfranchised is how progressives prefer to depict the Muslim murderers in their midst. After all, progressives hail from the school of therapeutic “thought” that considers crime to have been caused, not committed. Misbehavior is either medicalized and outsourced to state-approved experts, or reduced to the fault of the amorphous thing called society.

The most famous advocate of the-Camel-Ate-My Homework theory of criminal culpability is Barack Obama. Obama’s flabby assumption has it that the poor barbarians of France’s burbs have been deprived of fraternité. “Europe needs to better integrate its Muslim communities,” lectured the president.

Also guilty of a social determinism that flouts their philosophy of individual freedom are libertarians. For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society and libertarian saddle the state: U.S. foreign policy, in particular. A war of aggression, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and torture are thus “principal catalysts for this kind of non-state terrorism,” argued Ray McGovern.

“The-state-made-me-do-it” argumentation apes that of the left’s “society-made-me-do-it” argumentation. Both philosophical factions, left and blowback-libertarian, are social determinists, in as much as they implicate forces outside the individual for individual dysfunction.

Myself, I despise U.S. foreign policy as deeply as any Muslim. But it would never-ever occur to me to take it out on my American countrymen.

In the context of free will, and in a week in which we remember the Holocaust, Viktor E. Frankl rates a mention. Dr. Frankl came out of Auschwitz to found the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy. The philosopher and distinguished psychiatrist said this of his experience in the industrial killing complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau: “In the camps one lost everything, except the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

To plagiarize another Jews (myself): “You can see why liberals have always preferred Freud to Frankl [my family included]. They retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian fiction that traumatic toilet training is destiny.”

Dr. Frankl lost his beloved young wife in Auschwitz, yet told poignantly of finding her, if figuratively, in a tiny bird that flitted close by. If this man was able to discover the reality of free will and human agency in a laboratory like Auschwitz; so too can Muslims find the will to respond adaptively to events that enrage them and are indeed unjust: Western foreign policy.

The idea that the Brothers Kouachi and thousands of their coreligionists in the West who’ve joined ISIS were driven by “disaffection” to do their diabolic deeds conjures a skit from the “Life of Brian,” John Cleese’s parody of Judea under Rome.

In what is a typically Jewish dialectical session, Reg and his band of anti-Roman rebels are debating the merits and demerits of the enemy. So, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” asks Reg. “The aqueduct,” ventures one rebel. “Sanitation” pipes-up another: “Remember what the city used to be like?” A third praises the roads. A fourth, the public baths. Exacerbated by the growing list of Roman improvements, rebel-in-chief Reg responds: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health—what have the Romans ever done for us?”

By the same token, what have those “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” ever done for their Maghrebian immigrants (les beurs, as they are known)—apart from replacing the mud huts of their ancestors with subsidized housing and modern plumbing, giving them schools, job-training institutes, cradle-to-crypt welfare, health care and, my personal favorite, the Musée du Louvre?

While Obama sounded a bum note, British Prime Minister David Cameron acquitted himself well with this take on criminal culpability: The Muslim murderers in our midst “have had all the advantages of integration,” they’ve “had all the economic opportunities that our countries can offer.”

Indeed, Western foreign policy is a necessary but insufficient reason for Muslims aggression.

©ILANA Mercer
WND, JungeFreiheit,Target Liberty,
Quarterly Review, Praag.org & The Libertarian Alliance 
January 30, 2015

My man Richard Sherman said something that kicked off the 2014, year-round, banal, racial back-and-forth that parades as debate in the U.S.

Other than that the Seattle Seahawks are my team, on account that they’re from my neck of the woods; what I know about American football is dangerous. So naturally, I was rooting for, if not watching, the Hawks, when, following their victory over the San Francisco 49ers, Sherman said That Thing. And from their citadels of stupidity, U.S. mainstream media—conservatives, liberals and libertarians—went into full St. Vitus mode.

“I’m the best corner in the game. When you try me with a sorry receiver like [Michael] Crabtree, that’s the result you gonna get. Don’t you ever talk about me!”

Sherman sounded good to me. Still does. The man was pumped, as men ought to be in a testosterone-infused game. The Seahawks’ cornerback was correct to point out that his “outburst,” following the “defensive play that sealed his team’s trip to the Super Bowl,” was an extension of “his game-time competitiveness.”

“Let’s not make thug the new N-word,” pleaded John McWhorter, a scholar of color, whose intellectual and moral authority in the culture stems primarily from the concentration of melanin in his skin cells, not from the force of his argument.

Come again?

As in January of last year, I still don’t get the reason for the fuss over what Sherman said. His boisterous bit of theatre set in motion some racial, national free-association, which no man or woman with a brain cell to rub between them can follow.

Speaking of mindlessness, in February, the president of black America launched his “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative. Barack Obama claimed “this initiative” as his “lifelong goal,” “even after he leaves office.”

If to go by Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” “rising inequality and declining mobility,” as well as “widespread decay in moral fiber”—these are as serious and widespread among “white, lower-status, less well-educated Americans,” as they are among the black and Hispanic communities. It was against this backdrop that Obama signaled his intention to deploy his signature initiative to keep at least $200 million belonging to “leading foundations and businesses,” for “programs aimed at minority youth of color.”

“Winning” means “spinning.” In April, the media-run, Barack Hussein Obama witness-protection program got a boost: a secretly recorded, racially charged private conversation between one Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, and his mistress du jour, a dark-haired Jenna Jameson look-alike. Joy! Here was another cover for a “news” media that had refused to cover the many outrages and scandals of the Obama presidency.

CNN took a break from its non-stop, no-news vigil for missing Malaysian Airline Flight 370 to ride the Sterling racism ass. Hard. And from abroad, the president who promised to see to it that ebony and ivory would live together in perfect harmony told the world that the U.S. “continues to wrestle with the legacy of race, slavery and segregation,” a lie he would repeat throughout the year.

August saw the start of Trayvon Martin round two. The shooting death, in Ferguson, Missouri, of Michael Brown (black) by police officer Darren Wilson (white), sparked country wide unrest among the perpetually restive, when the officer was vindicated by the grand jury. It transpired that prior to being gunned down; Brown had robbed a convenience store and tackled the cop.

In their shared hatred for white America, Attorney General Eric Holder and Mr. Obama were like two pimps in a pod. Both rushed to racialize what was strictly a law-and-order incident. “I am the attorney general of the United States, but I am also a black man,” declared the AG to his black constituents. Hitherto, the president of black American had been mum about cops, soldiers or white kids coming under black attack. But he just couldn’t put a sock in it when it came to his personal affinity for Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. True to type, Obama saddled a “deeply rooted” racism plaguing the U.S. for the mishaps between cops and the communities of color they police.

One among many pig-ignorant panels on CNN—this one comprising Marc Lamont Hill and two interchangeable females—magically coalesced around a consensus parroted widely in pixels and print across the country: There was absolutely nothing racial whatsoever about the latest attack upon whites by blacks, this time of a store keeper in Memphis, Tennessee. Only a week back, the same sort of empaneled fools were intoning in unison about the ostensible racism behind the Ferguson killing ad nauseum.

Well, of course.

Memorable to a majority marginalized was Martha MacCallum’s plainspoken, Fox News column about Brendan Tevlin. The blond, blue-eyed anchor’s words reached deeper than the convoluted fare of most: “A 19-year-old, suburban boy. Strawberry blond, athletic, bright and smiley. … When I look at this picture of Brendan Tevlin, I think, he could have been my son.” Brendan Tevlin of New Jersey was murdered by Ali Muhammad Brown, an African-American. A precious boy’s death at the hands of the detritus of humanity did not rate a mention by Big Media and its protégé.

Alas, white commentators—liberals, conservatives, even libertarians—and their fans converge on matters racial. All are constitutionally primed to convulse hysterically over race. Take Judge Andrew Napolitano. A left-leaning, highly principled libertarian, the judge wrote a hot mess of a column, asserting that in Ferguson we saw “the error and perversion of the grand jury,” not to mention a “toxic mixture of a black underclass and a white power structure and the corrupt advantages people on the make and people on the take can exploit from it.”

That’s left-libertarianism for you: In-thrall to postmodern constructs like “power structure,” “white privilege,” the left-libertarian’s tinny, rigid adherence to bogus theory is often foisted on facts that don’t fit. Thus did John Stossel mar a perfectly reasonable column on Ferguson,” with a nod to the endemic racism meme.

As far as promoting the demonstrably false racism meme—what speech is racist, which feelings are bigoted; the kind of humor that is off-color; the fears of The Other that are forbidden—conservatives too are indistinguishable from liberals.

Consider the witty email exchange between a Sony executive and a producer concerning Obama and his racial proclivities. Leaked as it was by hackers, these emails were ruled by Megyn Kelly of Fox News to be wrong, racist and racially insensitive: all the dumb things liberals say about risquéexpression.

Lesson no. 1: When they rabbit on about race, America’s chattering classes—blacks, whites, Democrats, Republicans and libertarians alike—exhibit an unthinking habit of mind. These are individuals (for they are not individualists) who’ve been trained by their political and intellectual masters to respond in certain, politically pleasing ways.

Don’t listen to them! Americans are not racist.

Despite the mindless racial merry-go-round manufactured by American media and cognoscenti, I suspect even liberals may have internalized another important lesson of survival:

Never elect a black liberal president again. That’s lesson no. 2.

Grand-jury deliberations were conducted behind closed doors. The decision was announced at night. It was too dark. Jurors were given too much information to absorb. The St. Louis County prosecuting attorney was not sufficiently involved in the proceedings. The latter, Bob McCulloch, was too”cold” in sharing the cold, hard facts of the case with the public. His remarks were excessively long or redundant all. The police were too passive in their response to the pillage that followed the unpopular decision.

These are a few of the complaints voiced by the “Racism Industrial Complex (RIC)” against a grand-jury decision in the shooting death of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. A quorum of ordinary Americans has determined that Officer Darren Wilson was not “the initial aggressor,” that the officer “acted in self-defense”; that he “was authorized to use deadly force,” in a situation in which he found himself being punched—and then bull-rushed by a demonic-looking mountain of flesh, Michael Brown.

Brown’s interactions with Officer Wilson would have been fueled by a consciousness of guilt which likely amplified the young man’s aggression. For prior to being shot, surveillance video had surfaced of Brown roughing up and robbing a shopkeeper. The “Big Kid” was no gentle giant; he was a brute. At the time of their fateful encounter, Officer Wilson suspected Brown of robbing a convenience store.

“The Racism Industrial Complex (RIC),” explains originator Jack Kerwick, “include the majority of journalists and commentators in corporate media; most academics in the liberal arts and humanities departments of America’s colleges and universities; entertainers; and politicians. In concert, they labor fast and furiously to ensconce within the American consciousness the idea that blacks and other racial minorities are perpetual victims of ‘white racism.'”

Commensurate with the “RIC” narrative, Michael Brown’s blackness is mentioned always in mitigation; Wilson’s whiteness as an aggravating condition.

Right away, the governor of Missouri, Jay Nixon, promised “a vigorous prosecution.” Feeling the heat from the head honchos of the “Racism Industrial Complex” (Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama), Nixon had sought to indict the white officer as a gesture to the Brown family. It is alleged, moreover, that Missouri’s governor and the DC “RIC” are behind the meek response to the November riots, underway across the country.

I hate to say it, but these riots are an object lesson as to what transpires in certain chaotic communities when the police practice peaceful resistance. 

Let’s face it: Had St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch, a Democrat, opted for an open, probable-cause hearing before a judge, as opposed to convening a grand jury, the “Racism Industrial Complex”—forced to face a decision not to its liking—would be decrying the despotism of this single judge. They’d be calling for a jury of the people’s representatives, as bequeathed by the Founding Fathers, in the 5th Amendment of the Bill of Rights. The grand jury institution, as legal analyst Paul Callan has explained, “was actually created by the Founders to provide a wall of citizen protection against overzealous prosecutors.”

Had the decision been revealed in the AM, the RIC herd would have argued for a night-time reveal.

Had Mr. McCulloch meddled with the jury, he’d still be accused of rigging the outcome against Brown.

Had McCulloch hand-picked the evidence for the grand jury, instead of providing the 12 jurors with access to all of it—a “document dump,” brayed Big Media—he’d have been accused of concealing information.

Had the cops moved to curtail the crowds from “venting” over “legitimate issues,” caused by “the legacy of racial discrimination”—the president words—they’d have been convicted of police brutality.

As to the affective dimension, McCulloch’s alleged frigid demeanor: A silent majority whose “culture” is being crowded out still finds such WASPY mannerisms comforting and familiar; a sign of professionalism, dignity, decorum and rationality. Profoundly alien and disturbing was the wretched excesses of Michael Brown’s mother (Lesley McSpadden) and her new husband (Louis Head)—both of whom have had brushes with the law—howling, “Burn this bitch down.”

Regrettably, at the time of the shooting, this libertarian column had expressed the opinion that Brown was the victim of murder-by-cop. I was wrong. Far from the militarized mob, a remarkable process has unfolded in Ferguson. Praise for it belongs to Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch and a grand jury selected by a judge, in May of 2014, long before the shooting occurred.

McCulloch’s remarks were impressive. They revealed the exhaustive scope of the search for truth undertaken by a grand jury that was left to its own devices. Since the text of the statement has not been disseminated, I’ve summarized some of it for interested Americans. Particularly brilliant is the manner in which McCulloch co-opted the DC “RIC” in support of the rule of law, in Ferguson, Missouri:

St. Louis county police conducted an extensive investigation at the crime scene together with agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, at the direction of Attorney General Eric Holder. Together they sought out witnesses and gathered additional information over a period of three months, beginning on the day of the shooting death of Michael Brown. Fully aware of the growing concerns in parts of the community that the investigation and review of the death would not be full and fair, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch decided to hand over to a grand jury all physical evidence related to the case, all individuals claiming to have witnessed any aspect of the events and any and all related matters. The grand jury comprised of 12 members of the community.

Federal investigators worked closely with local law enforcement, with the St. Louis county police and persecutor and Attorney General Holder and his department vowing to follow where the evidence led. These federal investigators shared information with St. Louis county investigator and vice versa. In addition, the Department of Justice conducted its own investigation and performed its own autopsy. Yet another autopsy was carried out by the Brown family and all information was shared and collated. All testimony before the grand jury was immediate forwarded to the DOJ. Eyewitness accounts were compared with the physical evidence. Many witnesses contradicted their own statements and the physical evidence.

As an example of witness testimony that contradicted the physical evidence McCulloch offered numerous statements that claimed to have seen Officer Wilson stand above Michael Brown and fire many rounds into his back. Others claimed that Officer Wilson shot Mr. Brown in the back as he was running away. Once the autopsy was released showing that the deceased did not sustain injuries to his back, statements to that effect were retracted. Others admitted they had, in fact, not witnessed the shooting.

All statements were recorded and presented to the grand jury before the autopsy results were released. There was no “document dump,” as some media claimed. Two of Bob McCulloch’s assistants presented the information to the jury in an organized, systematic manner. All jurors heard every word of testimony and examined every item of evidence presented. McCulloch described a proactive and engaged group working since August 9th to do their due diligence.

In the course of 25 days, the jury dissected over 70 hours of testimony and listened to 60 witnesses. They heard from three medical examiners and many other DNA and forensic experts. They examined hundreds of photographs and looked at various pieces of physical evidence. They were instructed in the law and presented with five possible indictments. Their burden was to determine, based on all the evidence, if probable cause existed to determine that a crime was committed and Daren Wilson committed that crime.
There is no question that Officer Wilson caused the death of Michael Brown by shooting him. However the law authorizes an officer of the law, and all people, to use deadly force to defend themselves in certain situations.

The grand jury considered whether Officer Wilson was the initial aggressor, or whether he was authorized to use deadly force in the situation and acted in self-defense. They were the only people who examined every piece of evidence and heard every witness. They debated among themselves. After an exhaustive review of the evidence the grand jury deliberated further over two days to arrive at their final decision. And it is that no probable cause exists to file any charges against Officer Darren Wilson. They returned a “No True” bill on each of the five indictments. All the evidence, witness statements included, was made public.

Not even the unethical, ongoing, subversive interventions from the attorney general of black America and the president of black America, on the side of the Brown family, swayed a grand jury guided by the search for truth. For fact-finding is the essence of the law—the law is not an abstract idea of imagined social justice that exists in the arid minds of the perpetually aggrieved. Unfortunately, “the Racism Industrial Complex (RIC), also “the hegemonic power of our generation,” sees law as a weapon, to be co-opted to its ends.

Today, we should give thanks for a prosecuting attorney and grand jury who grasped the evidently archaic idea of ordered liberty. This is a good day for American justice.

©2014 ILANA Mercer
WND,  Junge Freiheit,  Target Liberty
Quarterly Review,  Praag.org
November 28

Barack Obama’s remarks on the results of the midterm congressional elections of 2014 were, well, remarkable. What else was the upheaval in the balance of power between the White House and Capitol Hill if not a repudiation of President Obama and his policies? Republicans gained control of the Senate. In the House they won the “largest majority since World War II, 246 seats in 1946, when Harry Truman sat in the White House.” There were major gubernatorial gains as well. Yet the message the president took away from the defeat of Democrats country-wide was that he needed to “get the job done.” He had not been busy enough.

Semantic sophistry being Obama’s forte, the president attempted to delegitimize the results of the midterm elections. A master of divide-and-control tactics, Pharaoh quickly blamed his party’s electoral ousting on a minority: those who voted. “To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too,” he said.

Luckily for him, Obama did not cry racism—although he had sent race RoboCop Eric Holder and his federales to election stations across the country to ensure that anyone who wanted to vote could, and that if a voter were asked for an ID, informed of a citizenship requirement, hadn’t been provided with “bilingual assistance” or a ramp for a wheelchair—this disenfranchised soul could quickly dial into a hotline to register a complain of “intimidation, discrimination, obstruction,” and racism, naturally.

Having faulted a misguided minority—the few who voted—for rejecting his regime, the president proceeded to reaffirm the policies just repudiated. “[M]ore Americans are working. Unemployment has come down.” [So has participation in the labor force: more than 102 million Americans are not working.] The “minority” that voted were informed, too, that “more Americans have health insurance” [because those who don’t need it, 19- to 25-year-olds, have been forced to purchase it; and the rest of us are paying for them and other indigents in exorbitant deductible and cost-sharing ploys]. “… Our deficits have shrunk [due to crippling taxes, and as the national debt balloons to $17.9 trillion]. Yes, “our economy is outpacing most of the world,” but that’s due entirely to the resilience of America’s private economy and a dearth of the same drive elsewhere in the world.

According to the unrepentant Obama, it’s all good, except that Americans are not feeling it … yet. His mission is thus to keep plugging away “until every American feels the gains of the growing economy.” Just how “magnanimous” is this man? Obama has invited the victors into his legislative inner-sanctum, so that they may partake in sanctioning more government make-work schemes: “rebuilding … roads, bridges, ports, waterways.” If Republicans behave, Barack will also collaborate on “tax reform.” To Obama this means “closing tax loopholes.” In other words, increasing the taxes on the profits of those nasty corporations who account for the productivity the president just touted as his own.

“I hear you”; you want me to … “close divisions, break gridlock, and get stuff done,” preached the president to those “few” voters who, if they could, would have ousted him from office, Tuesday. Just as Obama was once the guy “who was elected by everybody,” by his own admission, he now finds himself as the guy who was rejected by everybody. And the lesson he has learned? Everybody wants him to get busy.

Having never hesitated to jam through legislation by executive action and Senate sleight-of-hand, our munificent loser has suggested this: If Republicans table bills to comport with his “legislative priorities”—pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens, or amnesty, for one—he might refrain from resorting to executive action.

But right Obama is. He has executive authority. The Constitution has saddled Americans with a very strong presidency, should he choose to act on the veto it grants him. Buried in the constitutional thickets, concedes historian Paul Johnson, are “huge powers.” The American president “was much stronger than most kings of the day, rivaled or exceeded only by the ‘Great Autocrat,’ the Tsar of Russia (and in practice stronger than most tsars). These powers were not explored until Andrew Jackson’s time, half a century on, when they astonished and frightened many people.”

Had the “self-restraint and common sense of George Washington” not “prevented any display” of these presidential powers in the 1790s—this “formidable potential authority” vested in the U.S. presidency “would certainly have led to protest and constitutional amendment.” What’s left for Americans is to hope that Obama’s get-busy schemes will revolve around planning a bourbon summit with incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Hit the bottle, Barack; stay on the juice, just don’t juice the economy.

©ILANA Mercer
WND, Junge Freiheit, Target Liberty,
Quarterly Journal &  Praag.org
November 7, 2014

The tweets came fast and cynical: “That’s so science!” “I saw those white lab coats on the men behind [Obama], which pretty much convinced me.” “Another day, another POTUS presser on Ebola. If you missed it, here’s the summary: ‘White lab coats, science.'”

The Obama Ebola Doctrine (OED) was dictated during the second of two presidential addresses, this week, on Ebola. The message, delivered against a backdrop of demigods in freshly unpacked, white laboratory coats, was hardly subliminal. So serious was Obama, he even threw in references to a God not himself, something he rarely does.

The president used the word “troops” to describe the individuals stationed behind him. These public health workers were “serving” America (much like soldiers would). Theirs was a “sacrificial service” (much like that of saints). They were “citizens of the world, global citizens,” who were “leading globally” (as all you locals should strive to do).

Volunteering in Africa Obama has equated with American “patriotism.” Well of course. If being “citizens of the world” is the inexistential state-of-being—then patriotism must be redefined. No longer does it mean the love of one’s country and countrymen, but love of The World. Go to West Africa, and you are demonstrating “citizenship … and public service at its best.” In Africa, you will be serving America, “the country that we love.”

The medics who rush headlong into the Ebola maelstrom embody “American exceptionalism” (unlike all those Americans who run businesses they didn’t build).

To the extent that America’s Ebola workers are motivated by “faith,” it is their “sense of faith and grace” that Obama has commanded all Americans to emulate.

The president is now defining for his subjects the very meaning of worship.

Aversion to Ebola, Obama mocked as “hiding under the covers,” indirectly associating precautions with cowardice, even venality.

His Holiness “saluted” Dr. Craig Spencer for “his service”— Spencer is the saint in scrubs who lied to investigators about his whereabouts. He had been gallivanting around Manhattan when already symptomatic.

Is Nurse Kaci Hickox next to be canonized? Just back from treating Ebola-afflicted patients in Sierra Leone, Nurse Diesel—contempt dripping from every word disgorged—threatened: “If the restrictions placed on me by the state of Maine are not lifted by Thursday morning, I will go to court to fight for my freedom.” Paul Callan, a usually reserved, dignified, civil-rights attorney expressed his disgust: Hickox is “setting a bad example … for the rest of the public” in the event that “this thing gets out of hand,” and there’s a quarantine across the United States.

So listen up, petty, provincial Americans: These are your new deities. Worship the saints in “spacesuits”!

Ultimately, Americans are meant to forget that the duty of the U.S. government is to its people, first. Obama is obligated by the Constitution to protect the liberties of his constituents. Without life there is no liberty.

But not according to the Obama Ebola Doctrine, which is this:

• The health of West Africa is the health of America.
• Those serving as healers in Africa are serving as healers in America.
• Africa’s medicine men are America’s medicine men.
• Local yokels dare not “discourage” these new deities; “disincentivize” or inconvenience them. Rather, the “health care workers” who are sacrificing for us must be lauded and “applauded,” and should certainly not be made to bear the brunt of our scientific ignorance.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, parroted the president: “by going over there, they are helping us to protect America.” Therefore, the lives of doctors fighting Ebola in West Africa must not be “disrupted” on return.

This means no quarantines, cretins.

There you have it. Funded by Americans, the role of the president of the U.S. is to engineer desirable political, social, medical and financial outcomes for the world.

What else does the OED imply?

Preparing Americans for the inevitable sacrifice for the greater global good is essential. As we move to eradicate Ebola “at the source,” we, concomitantly, must maintain the unfettered movement of people in and out of the U.S. Consequently, our prejudiced, unworldly citizens must be conditioned to accept “the few Ebola cases that we see here.”

A few dead Americans is a small price to pay for the greater global good.

The Bush Terrorism Doctrine was as follows: We’re fighting them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here.

The Obama Bioterrorism Doctrine runs parallel. BHO’s express objective is to convince Americans that if we fight Ebola in West Africa, it won’t threaten America: “If we [don’t] deal with this problem there, it will come here,” he asserted.

However, as revealed by State Department documentation marked “Sensitive But Unclassified, Predecisional,” the policy is as fluid as the “liquefying” internal organs of a hapless Ebola patient. Prior to being petitioned by a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act Request and subsequently exposed by Fox News—the knaves at State were considering the “expeditious” “medevacing” of Ebola-infected non-citizens into the United States for treatment.

If Ebola doesn’t “come here” in a big way, Obama may just introduce it to you by hook or by crook.

Africa, Like Trayvon Martin, is extremely important to Barack Obama. “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” the president said famously about the slain teenager. His fellow-feelings about the continent, the president expressed during the August 4-6 U.S.-Africa Summit, this year: “I do not see the countries and peoples of Africa as a world apart; I see Africa as a fundamental part of our interconnected world – partners with America,” he said.

With the wealth of the most industrious, generous and gullible taxpayer at his disposal, the president believes that it is his duty, first, to stop the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, when, in fact, the duty of the president of the United States is to those who pay the piper.

America’s governing elites habitually betray their constitutional and fiduciary obligations to their constituents. The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Tom Frieden, and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, claim that restricting entry into the U.S. from the Ebola ground zero is without merit “from a public health standpoint,” and will only worsen matters. For whom, pray tell, Dr. Fauci? For American nurses? Cui bono Dr. Frieden?

Contrary to the Frieden-Fauci-Obama obfuscations, it is quite possible to both stop at-risk individuals from entering the U.S., as well as assist in curbing the contagion in the hot-spot countries of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. The two are not mutually exclusive. While the U.S. welcomes, on average, 150 daily travelers from West Africa; dozens of infection-free African nations have done the sensible thing to contain the spread of the dread disease. The most advanced of them, South Africa, has “restricted entry for all non-citizens traveling from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.”

OBAMA’S OBFUSCATIONS ABOUT EBOLA

Back in South Africa of the mid 1990s, I trained and volunteered as an HIV/AIDS counselor. My last client, before I decamped to North America, was a lovely gay man who had just been diagnosed HIV positive and whose CD4-cell count was already low. He wept in my arms for hours.

My point: Comparing HIV/AIDS to Ebola, as the Frieden-Fauci duo has repeatedly done, amounts to politically correct theatre. For one thing, it is not easy to contract the human immunodeficiency virus. For another, the virus is relatively fragile outside the host. Viral load (or titer) factors into the chances of transmission. It is both easy and cheap to prevent infection. HIV infection rates in Africa have little to do with a lack of resources. Rather, they are associated with violent and unprotected sex irrespective of ample outreach and education.

Ebola is the opposite. It is not difficult to get. The virus doesn’t easily destruct outside the body. And it is hard to stop an Ebola epidemic in West Africa because of the magical thinking that pervades the culture and a lack of infrastructure.

Front men for the CDC and offshoots have obfuscated aplenty about Ebola. However, Dr. Barack “Obola,” who should get that growing proboscis checked out, takes the cake. The president has managed to dispense Ebola prescriptions in direct contradiction to even the CDC’s breezy platitudes: “You cannot get it through casual contact like sitting next to someone on a bus. … Ebola is not spread through the air like the flu. … You cannot get it from another person until they start showing symptoms of the disease, like fever. … You cannot get it from someone who’s asymptomatic.”

In fact, “casual transmission in close quarters, in public spaces is quite possible.” Spending a protracted time within three feet of an infected person is not without risk. Flecks of “viremic” spittle sprayed in your direction from a coughing or animated interlocutor on a bus ride could result in transmission.

CONSPIRACY OR JUST GOVERNMENT SOP?

Be it for Jihad or germs, the government prohibits what I’ve termed rational profiling. As to Jihad, airport personnel screen everybody alike, grandma from Nebraska and Abdullah from Mecca. As to germs, the CDC advises screening for symptoms of the Ebola disease. If a traveler is “asymptomatic,” CDC guidelines, given with government imprimatur, prohibit the detention or quarantine of nationals or residents from the “hot zone” countries.

All this is in the service of the deadly dogma of political correctness.

As a Liberian living in the devastated capital of Monrovia, Patient Zero (Thomas Eric Duncan), who brought Ebola to the U.S., posed a grave risk to Americans—as do all residents and nationals of countries at the epicenter of the outbreak. Writing for the Canadian Center for Research on Globalization, Dr. Jason Kissner hypothesized that the U.S. government refused to isolate Duncan on the basis of his Liberian and Monrovian origins, because it doesn’t want Americans to associate country of origin with an Ebola risk factor, as this could “conceivably completely destroy the One Party State’s immigration reform goals—especially given psychological associations with mystery viruses and other illnesses believed to have arrived from south of the border.”

While I am no conspiracy theorist—never have been—the theory proffered by Kissner seems plausible, if not by design at least by default. Reflexively if not intentionally, government operatives work to retain their positions and increase their sphere of influence. To that end, justifying their mission—open borders and multiculturalism, always—is necessary at all costs.

GRATITUDE BREEDS CONTEMPT

The index patient aforementioned received exorbitantly expensive, tax-funded care from the dedicated healthcare providers of Dallas’ Presbyterian Hospital, two of whom are fighting for their lives. Nevertheless, the family of the late Mr. Duncan has accused his benefactors of racism. Had he survived, Duncan’s own government, promised the Liberian ambassador to the U.S, intended to sue him for lying to Liberian authorities about his exposure to Ebola on a perfunctory screening questionnaire.

Those of us who hail from Africa proper know how conservative Africans truly are. Most Africans would find American moral relativism repugnant. Ambassador Jeremiah Sulunteh has condemned Duncan’s deception. “Our hearts are broken to witness this reckless behavior on the part of Duncan,” lamented the Liberian diplomat, who had nothing but praise for “a country that has been there for Liberia all the way.”

Let’s see, in the capital Monrovia, American marines are mounting a heroic response to the Ebola outbreak. Stateside, in Maryland, our scientists are developing a vaccine. The Brits will soon land in Sierra Leone with men and medical materiel of their own. Germany, too, is galvanizing its formidable resources. Founded by French physicians, Doctors Without Borders is second to none in alleviating Third World misery.

Yes, Ebola will be defeated by a munificent West. That’s who Africans must thank.

Come to think of it, Obama owes a lot to the same, much-maligned “system.” From financial aid (for foreign students) to an affirmative-action placement in Harvard Law School, Barry Soetoro is a Frankenstein of America’s creation. Obama didn’t build what he has; he got it by grant of government privilege. But like the family of Thomas Eric Duncan, Barack Obama repeatedly demonstrates that gratitude breeds contempt.

©ILANA Mercer
WND, Junge Freiheit, Target Liberty,
The Quarterly Review,  Praag.org
October 17, 2014

The pols and the pundits are cut up about a breach or two in the White House’s formidably protected perimeter. The People should not be. Working for government ought to be one of the most dangerous jobs ever. Thomas Jefferson, a real prince among men, traveled on horseback and wore plain clothes. Not only was he unguarded, his house in Washington was open to all-comers. Anyone who wrote to Jefferson received a reply in the great man’s hand. He paid for postage out of pocket. Never again will a Jefferson occupy the People’s House. But occupational hazard might just get us a better class of parasite.

In any event, the latest security breach at the White House—there have been many under departing Secret Service Director Julia Pierson—saw 42-year-old Omar J. Gonzalez rush across the lawn and into the first family’s residence, where the trespasser was “confronted by a female Secret Service agent, whom he [naturally] overpowered.” No wonder Pierson and the press have circled the wagons. The same lady officer, or another with a similar skill set, had also failed to lock the front door. Disarmed, too, was an alarm meant to alert officers to intruders.

All in all, officers on-duty stood down and an off-duty officer manned up. (The canine unit, sick of eating Michelle Obama’s carrots, was busy digging for bones.) Gonzales could have bounded up the stairs to the first family’s living quarters had the off-duty officer not tackled him. He must be male. Were he a woman, or something in-between, he’d be up for a medal of honor.

It’s always good to see gender set-asides and affirmative action—in particular, the delusion that women are just as qualified as men to be soldiers, security guards, firefighters and cops—hurt those who inflict it on non-believers. As for Pierson, like other ciphers in skirts (or pantsuits) promoted by this administration, she is something else—but nothing like stumblebum Marie Harf, the sibilant spokeswoman at the State Department.

Watching Miley Cyrus’ hootchy hoopla is less offensive than enduring a press conference with Ms. Barf, where reasonably intelligent, veteran newsmen attempt to engage this schoolmarmish, tartish young woman in reasoned repartee. Marie Barf is intellectually inconsequential, to put it kindly. Only the other day did she claim, most memorably—and from the safety of her perch—that the outsourcing, in Benghazi, of the safety of American diplomats to the enemy, a local Muslim militia, is justified because it is part of the protocol. The militia hired to protect the compound was late to the scene, possibly complicit in the carnage.

Another exhibit is Lois Lerner. She “is toxic,” conceded Politico, before segueing into a puff piece about this corrupt kleptocrat. The central conceit of the Politico exposé, “Lerner Breaks Silence,” is that she’s a “complicated figure.” The characterization doesn’t jibe with the main character’s actions and demeanor. Lerner is, in fact, consistently one-dimensional. An example: The Treasury Inspector General determined that Lerner’s IRS division used “inappropriate criteria … to identify tax-exempt applications for review,” and that certain organizations applying for tax-exempt status, singled out for their “policy positions,” were harassed for “significant amounts of information.” Translated from bureaucratese, Lerner used a vast, oppressive apparatus—the Internal Revenue Service—to hound right-leaning non-profits, threaten their mission and menace their donors.

In particular, this bloodhound instructed her elite Unit (Determinations U) to BOLO (Be On the Look Out) for tea-party or 9/12 patriots. The GI made his recommendations. Lerner fobbed him off. The Office of Audit grumbled that it does not believe the “alternative corrective action” proposed by the Lerner division “fully addresses” the problems: “We do not consider the concerns in this report to be resolved.” Befitting the flat, uncomplicated, venal personality she is, Lerner showed no commitment to correct her agency’s ways. Post resignation, lippy Lerner remains unrepentant. “I am not sorry for anything I did,” she declared breezily to Politico.

Signally unsuccessful as head of the General Services Administration was Martha Johnson. (Like IRS top officials, she too was in-and-out of the White House.) On YouTube, taxpayers watched Johnson’s jolly bureaucrats having a whale of a time at their expense. Chins, butts and guts wiggling obscenely, the grotesque GSA training conferees stayed in lavish spa resort casinos, as detailed in a damning Office-of-Inspector-General report. In selecting resorts in which to party, our corpulent public servants conducted “dry runs” and “scouting trips” to destinations like the Ritz-Carlton. Underwritten by taxpayers too were assorted team-building exercises, a bicycle-building project, for one. The OIG lists corrupt contracting practices, a miscellany of employee misconduct, including excessive and impermissible expenditure on luxury suites at Nevada’s M Resort; on 1,000 sushi rolls at $7.00 apiece; and on “$6,325 on commemorative coins ‘rewarding’ all conference participants.”

These are but some of the president’s women—not even the heavy hitters. Barack Obama’s liberal utopians, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, lied the country into bombing and killing Libyan soldiers who had done nothing to the U.S.

The real news this week is not that Barack Obama has knowingly lied since his election—the president is a habitual liar—but that NBC News covered his Big Lie in a big way.

This, after all, is the “news” network that recently ran a week of programming to help Obamacare get off to a good start, by Townhall’s telling, and has not stopped propagandizing for the president since his election. What happened? Is this a mea culpa for dereliction of journalistic duty? Have the culprits in cover-up after cover-up begun to rethink their historic role in bamboozling Boobus Americanus about a matter as crucial as health care? Or has NBC talent lost medical benefits because Obama legislated their plum policies out of existence? One can only hope it’s a bit of both.

The “Obama administration knew millions could not keep their health insurance,” blared the headline on NBCNews.com. Uncharacteristically, network writers even deigned to excerpt one variation on the lie Obama told at least two dozen times, from 2009 through to 2012:

“If you like your health care plan, you will keep it. Or, “If you got health insurance and you like your plan and like your doctor, you will keep your plan, you will keep your doctor.”

Just imagine! NBCNews.com has actually gone after a big news story that disgraces Obama big time, even publishing expert opinion that doesn’t exculpate, but incriminates, the president. To wit, “When they made the promise, they knew half the people in [the individual market] outright couldn’t keep [the policies] they had and then they wrote the rules so that others couldn’t make it either.” The administration “wrote Obamacare rules” cognizant of cutting the ground out from under 14 million policy holders and their dependents.

(Many analysts of the conservative and libertarian persuasion prefigured our current predicament. It is not rocket science, but simple reason. The Big-Media collective, however, is slow, stupid and shackled by ideology. Reality must bite them before they’ll recognize it, much less report it.)

Thus do we learn from “Robert Laszewski … a consultant who works for health industry firms … that 80 percent of those in the individual market will not be able to keep their current policies and will have to buy insurance that meets [the] requirements of the new law, which generally requires a richer package of benefits than most policies today.”

Blurted a Michigan retiree angrily: “[Obama] wrote the regulations so strictly that none of the old polices can grandfather. … I heard him only about a thousand times. I didn’t believe him.”

Voluntarily, 14 million Americans had purchased and paid for their now-obsolete, outlawed health-care insurance. Stated differently, these individuals valued what the policy had to offer more than the money it cost them. They liked the product the president has proscribed. And they don’t like what replaces it.

George Schwab of North Carolina was “‘perfectly happy” to continue paying Blue Cross Blue Shield a premium of $228 a month to insure himself and his wife. President Obama wasn’t having any of it. By legislative fiat, he stopped what was a mutually beneficial arrangement between the two consenting parties.

On Oct. 30, Big Brother Obama claimed that Mr. Schwab and millions of happy customers like him were “underinsured.” So Obama ensured that for “underinsuring” themselves, these Americans would lose their insurance.

Mr. Schwab and his ilk are now without insurance. From the president’s perspective, the 62-year-old man does not know what’s good for him. Fortunately for Mr. Schwab and other clueless clients like him, Big Brother does. To the rescue came Obama. Mr. Schwab had fallen prey to a “bad apple insurer,” grated the president. He is among “five percent of Americans, who’ve got cut-rate plans that don’t offer real financial protection in the event of a serious illness or an accident.”

Foolish Mr. Schwab. He was content with a purchase Mr. Obama deemed “substandard.” Luckily for Mr. Schwab and a million other Americans, so far, the president removed their “substandard plan” before it could hurt them.

Better to be uninsured than to have “substandard” insurance.

Also on Oct. 30 did Mr. Obama vow to the Mr. Schwabs of America—roughly 14 million of them—that they would be “getting a better deal.” “Almost all the insurers,” cooed the president, “are encouraging people to join better plans with the same carrier and stronger benefits and stronger protections while others will be able to get better plans with new carriers through the marketplace …”

Desperate, Mr. Schwab went looking for the Promised Plan.

He discovered that Barack Obama’s command-and-control, nationalized “marketplace” would be charging him $948 a month for a plan that met the president’s requirements, one of which was that everybody must “contribute.” Everyone must “take some measure of responsibility,” preached Obama.

A monthly premium hike of more than 400 percent is to be Mr. Schwab’s “contribution” to the un-Affordable Care Act’s collective kitty. Alas, the plan does not meet Mr. Schwab’s needs. For affordability, too, is a “need.” This American is unable to and uninterested in parting with $948 for the added “benefits” of birth control, maternity and neonatal care, mental-health coverage and addiction disorder services for himself and his 62-year-old spouse.

In other words, Mr. Schwab values the $948 Obama wants him to part with monthly more than the policy Obama has willed him to purchase.

Wait a sec: Didn’t Barack Obama just promise that the “five percent of Americans who buy insurance on [their] own … will be getting a better deal”? Is paying $948 for something you don’t want better than paying $228 a month for something you want?

There you go again, President Pinocchio. Get that growing proboscis checked out. Use your “Cadillac” health-care plan.