Power Grab

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Men may come and men may go, because God has left plenty of room for the to and fro of their free-will; but the substantial lines of nature and the not less substantial lines of Eternal Law have never changed, are not changing and never will change.  There are bounds beyond which one may stray as far as one sees fit, but to do so ends in death; there are limits which empty philosophical fantasizing may have one mock or not take seriously, but they put together an alliance of hard facts and nature to chastise anybody who steps over them.  And history has sufficiently taught, with frightening proof from the life and death of nations, that the reply to all violators of the outline of "humanity" is always, sooner or later, catastrophe.

From the dialectic of Hegel onwards, we have had dinned in our ears what are nothing but fables, and by dint of hearing them so often, many people end up by getting used to them, if only passively.  But the truth of the matter is that Nature and Truth, and the Law bound up in both, go their imperturbable way, and they cut to pieces the simpletons who upon no grounds whatsoever believe in radical and far-reaching changes in the very structure of man.

The consequences of such violations are not a new outline of man, but disorders, hurtful instability of all kinds, the frightening dryness of human souls, the shattering increase in the number of human castaways, driven long since out of people's sight and mind to live out their decline in boredom, sadness and rejection.  Aligned on the wrecking of the eternal norms are to be found the broken families, lives cut short before their time, hearths and homes gone cold, old people cast to one side, youngsters willfully degenerate and -- at the end of the line -- souls in despair and taking their own lives.  All of which human wreckage gives witness to the fact that the "line of God" does not give way, nor does it admit of any adaption to the delirious dreams of the so-called philosophers! (Giuseppe Cardinal Siri, Men's Dress Worn By Women.)

 

Yes, I began  Dialectical Americanism three weeks ago today with this quote from the late Giuseppe Cardinal Siri, Archbishop of Genoa, Italy, from May 29, 1946, to July 6, 1987. The late Cardinal Siri's words are useful once again to illustrate the fact that the power grab now under way by the Wizard of Obama and his henchmen from the Cook County, Illinois, Democratic Party machine is but the result of all of the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational and semi-Pelagian principles of the modern civil state, including the United States of America. Although some defenders of the American founding would like to believe that "all we need" is to return to "constitutional" principles to restore "sanity" in our country, the truth of the matter is, of course, that it is those constitutional "principles" that have brought us to the point of  Communist takeover of this country.

That is, men who reject the necessity of the confessionally Catholic civil state and who believe in man's ability to pursue virtue of any kind, including the "civic virtue" extolled by the American founders, without belief in, access to and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace, disregarding as well the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ entrusted solely to the Catholic Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication, their institutions of civil governance on the quicksand of various naturalist lies. There is no rational or logically consistent basis to oppose "infidelity" to the "founding principles" of "limited government" when those founding principles are themselves unfaithful to the Divine Plan that God Himself has instituted to effect man's return to Him through the Catholic Church. We are merely witnessing the perfection of the inherent degeneracy of the founding principles. It is impossible for any naturalistic philosophy or ideology to stop the inexorable march of naturalism to the point of totalitarianism.

Indeed, men steeped in one lie of naturalism after another find it next-to-impossible to muster the moral courage to even attempt to retard bits and pieces of the march to totalitarianism as to do so might anger some constituency group that is important for their re-election or for the funding of their campaigns for re-election or that might provide them with "good press" during a re-election campaign. One of the apostasies of contemporary politics, driven as it is by the rationalism of Protestantism and the exigencies of sentimentality and careerism spawned in the wake of the Protestant Revolt and its overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King, is to anger key constituency groups or to be considered anything other than a "moderate" by the "mainstream" media.

This is why United States Senator John Sidney McCain III (R-Arizona) eschewed, at least for the most part, efforts on the part of campaign advisers to portray then United States Senator Barack Hussein Obama (D-Kenya, excuse me, Illinois) as a Marxist even though his philosophy was shaped by the late Marxist from Hawaii named Frank Marshall Davis and by the "organizing principles" of the late Saul Alinsky. It's not considered "acceptable" in the terminally "nice" parlance of American electoral politics to call one's opponent a Communist even if the appellation is accurate. "Undecided" or "independent" voters might recoil against such "un-niceness," if you will. And the "mainstream" media stands ready to eviscerate anyone who dares to attempt to bring truth to bear against one whom they have "anointed" as the next leader of the United States of America.

Although no one in the "mainstream" media is as yet using the term "Communist" to describe the Wizard of Obama's power grab, there are some who are beginning to question the radical nature of his policies and who are honest enough to admit that the man who wanted to "transcend" partisan politics has dished out some pretty good tongue lashings to those who speak out against his proposed Fiscal Year 2010 budget as the chief means by which he can effect the permanent nationalization of the economy of the United States of America and the mandatory indoctrination of American youth in the ways of Marxism-Obamaism through the "Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act," which will be the subject of an upcoming article on this site.

A number of unlikely Obama critics from the false opposite of the naturalist "left" have accused Obama of painting a rosier picture about the economy of the United States of America than is warranted so as to make more possible the passage of his $3.6 trillion Fiscal Year 2010 budget, replete with the most massive expansion of the size and scope and the power of the Federal government since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "New Deal" and Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society, which occurred at about the same time as Mao Zedong's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News provided some unexpected criticism of Obama from the left in his column of yesterday, March 22, 2009:

Everybody makes mistakes, and I made a beaut the other day. I was wrong to call members of Congress blow-hards and buffoons and declare them worse than useless.

I was too kind.

I should have said our representatives are gangsters in pinstripes and pearls. They are petty tyrants and the more power they grab, the more at risk we are. Homeland Security should flash Code Red any time this Congress is in session.

It is twilight in America now. The House vote to use the tax code to retroactively punish bonus babies was an act of sheer madness. What started as phony outrage at AIG has crossed the line into insane policy. It is stunning that the vote was lopsided and bipartisan.

The Senate is itchy to go along, and President Obama says he's ready to tighten the thumbscrews on the banks. Is there no adult who will bring a straitjacket?

We should all be very afraid. Class warfare is mere predicate for a witch hunt that, once unleashed, will not stop with misbegotten wealth. It will punish success and stifle innovation. Dissent will invite dishonor.

That Congress is a gang of cheap connivers is not news. Chris Dodd, Charlie Rangel, Charles Grassley, Barney Frank - they have been national embarrassments for years.

But now they are dangerous, emboldened by public fear and anger. They know nothing, but have power and smell opportunity for more.

Missing in action is the Barack Obama who vowed to unite the country around common values. Lately he has been the very opposite of the man he promised. Instead of hope, many have a growing fear of the arrogant government he leads.

Obama is smart, quick and charming, and, as he showed on "The Tonight Show," owner of a thousand-watt smile he can deploy at will. He silkily manages to make the ridiculous sound reasonable. When he insults the Special Olympics, he is forgiven.

Yet even "Tonight" host Jay Leno broke from full flattery to reveal his qualms about the meaning of the bonus tax. "Here's something that kind of scared me," he said. "If the government decides they don't like a guy, all of a sudden, hey, we're going to tax you and then, boom, and it passes."

Obama brushed it off, part of an endless road show claim that he will bring back "common sense" to the financial system and restore "those values that built America."

If only. In truth, there is no history for what he is doing. He is the most radical President of our times, far outside the mainstream of our political philosophy.

He is not a reformer who fixes things. He fancies himself "transformative," a man who reshapes and reorders. It apparently begins with smashing the existing order under the pretext of managing the crisis he inherited.

During the campaign, a fellow journalist confided that "I know Obama is a Manchurian candidate, I just can't figure out what for."

I laughed then, but no more. Obama represents a secular religion that believes, no matter the malady, Washington is the antidote. More government is the chicken soup of his tribe.

It is an illusion of many Republicans and Democrats that Washington can successfully manage the economy and our lives. Our institutions and culture are too big, too diverse and too unruly to be run like a banana republic.

Yet the economic mess has robbed the nation of its confidence, and the vacuum is being filled by politicians bearing promises and borrowed dollars. The true cost of this "help" will come later, with back-breaking debt and a lack of growth and opportunity.

We can't say we haven't been warned. "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad" is more than folklore. It predicts our fate if we follow the government mob. (Government Mob Run Amok)

 

Mr. Goodwin does not realize that the power grab we are witnessing at the present time is but the result of the nearly half of a millennium of disorder and chaos wrought by the Protestant Revolt's overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King. He does not realize that Catholicism is the one and only means of social and personal order. However, Mr. Goodwin is honest enough to see that Obama, taking full advantage of the power grab that took place during the administration of former President George Walker Bush, is indeed "the most radical President of our times, far outside the mainstream of our political philosophy."

Alas, this is not news. Obama had the most consistently "liberal" voting record of anyone in the United States Senate. He revealed his disdain last year for "small town" America when he addressed like-minded leftist elitists at a fund-raising meeting in San Francisco, California:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.  (Barack Hussein Obama, Obama: No Surprise That Hard-Pressed Pennsylvanians Cling to Guns and Religion; see also Obama's Communist Mentor .)

 

Very few in the "mainstream" of American politics, including John McCain himself, wanted to examine Obama's Communist background or to take it seriously as an indicator as to how he would govern once elected. Taking full advantage of the economic crisis to shape a budget that is designed to break the back of the private sector and to indenture future generations of Americans to the  Federal government and its programs of indoctrination, the Wizard of Obama must "sell" his budgetary proposals on the false premise that the economy is "poised for a recovery." Even the likes of the liberal Paul Krugman of The New York Times has written that Obama's bank policies are bound to fail:

The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank. As Tim Duy put it, there are no bad assets, only misunderstood assets. And if we get investors to understand that toxic waste is really, truly worth much more than anyone is willing to pay for it, all our problems will be solved.

To this end the plan proposes to create funds in which private investors put in a small amount of their own money, and in return get large, non-recourse loans from the taxpayer, with which to buy bad — I mean misunderstood — assets. This is supposed to lead to fair prices because the funds will engage in competitive bidding.

But it’s immediately obvious, if you think about it, that these funds will have skewed incentives. In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be worth something; and if it isn’t, that’s someone else’s problem.

Or to put it another way, Treasury has decided that what we have is nothing but a confidence problem, which it proposes to cure by creating massive moral hazard.

This plan will produce big gains for banks that didn’t actually need any help; it will, however, do little to reassure the public about banks that are seriously undercapitalized. And I fear that when the plan fails, as it almost surely will, the administration will have shot its bolt: it won’t be able to come back to Congress for a plan that might actually work.

What an awful mess. (Despair Over Financial Policy.)

 

What these naturalists miss, however, is that the Wizard of Obama means to stifle political dissent by means of its economic and other domestic programs, which is why his administration is seeking to "partner" with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform (ACORN), a Marxist-based Alinsky group accused of voter registration fraud, to conduct the 2010 United States Census as a means of "cooking the books" to assure the perpetual control of Democrats in the United States House of Representatives:

ACORN has been accused of voter fraud, embezzlement, and more... and yet this is a group that the federal government wants helping with the census?" asks Bobby Eberle of GOPUSA.

“It’s a concern, especially when you look at all the different charges of voter fraud. And it’s not just the lawmakers’ concern. It should be the concern of every citizen in the country,” Rep. Lynn A. Westmoreland, R-Ga., vice ranking member of the subcommittee for the U.S. Census, told FOXNews.com. “We want an enumeration. We don’t want to have any false numbers.”

ACORN came under assault in 2007 when Washington State filed felony charges against several paid ACORN employees and supervisors for more than 1,700 fraudulent voter registrations. In March 2008, an ACORN worker in Pennsylvania was sentenced for making 29 fraudulent voter registration forms.

Meanwhile, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, a member of the House census subcommittee, said, “I feel fairly confident that the penalties for an individual manipulating the count are pretty severe,” noting that the penalties would certainly deter any fraud in the counting by workers. The penalty for any fraudulent activity can be up to five years in jail.

The census count is critical to both politicians and states because it not only determines congressional allocation, but it also provides the raw data by which government spending is allocated on everything from roads to schools. (Newsmax.com - ACORN to Partner With Government for 2010 Census.)

 

When all is said and done, however, naturalists of the false opposites of the "left" and of the "right" who are frightened by the Wizard of Obama's radicalism will be unable to do much, if anything at all, about the power grab now under way. Obama is a master manipulator. He makes former President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton seem awkward and ill-at-ease in spinning his tall tales. Obama is smoother and slicker than "Slick Willie" himself, especially when relying upon his TelePrompter for his artificial "eloquence." People have short memories. Obama's glib persona will appeal to a lot of people even after many of their legitimate liberties have been curbed as a result of his power grab.

Obama also has a phalanx of Catholics who stand ready to indemnify this unapologetic pro-abort at almost every turn. After all, it is a most telling sign that the institution from which I received my Master of Arts degree on January 10, 1974, the University of Notre Dame, has extended an invitation to this statist pro-abortion to speak at its commencement on May 17, 2009 (a subject that I will discuss in tomorrow's commentary). How can commentators of the naturalist "left" and the naturalist "right" hope to dent Obama's power grab when he is being enabled by so many Catholics yet attached to the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism?

There is, of course, no naturalistic way to retard the power grab that is represented by the Marxist policies of the Wizard of Obama and his administration. Even though there is a good deal of incoherence and contradictions in the official pronouncements of Obama and his Cabinet members, they are of one mind when it comes to consolidating more and more power in their own hands. They are leftist elitists who do indeed believe in the secular "salvific" power of their false ideologies. They are the penultimate "religious" zealots who will let no one one stand in opposition to their belief that the government, far from being the means by which the common temporal good may be pursued in light of man's Last End, is the means of "assuring" the Marxist "ideal" of a "classless" society, albeit one in this instance where everyone is equally impoverished and thus reliant upon government-subsidies that are funded by their own tax dollars simply to survive.

Once again, good readers, few in numbers though you may be, it is good to be reminded that Catholicism alone is the antidote to all forms of naturalism, including Obamaism:

. . For there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it. (Pope Saint Pius X, Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906.)

God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but, as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole object of Christian doctrine and morality is that "we being dead to sin, should live to justice" (I Peter ii., 24)-that is, to virtue and holiness. In this consists the moral life, with the certain hope of a happy eternity. This justice, in order to be advantageous to salvation, is nourished by Christian faith. "The just man liveth by faith" (Galatians iii., II). "Without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews xi., 6). Consequently Jesus Christ, the creator and preserver of faith, also preserves and nourishes our moral life. This He does chiefly by the ministry of His Church. To Her, in His wise and merciful counsel, He has entrusted certain agencies which engender the supernatural life, protect it, and revive it if it should fail. This generative and conservative power of the virtues that make for salvation is therefore lost, whenever morality is dissociated from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" john xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi., 16). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime. (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)

This, nevertheless, is what they want to do with human society; they dream of changing its natural and traditional foundations; they dream of a Future City built on different principles, and they dare to proclaim these more fruitful and more beneficial than the principles upon which the present Christian City rests.

No, Venerable Brethren, We must repeat with the utmost energy in these times of social and intellectual anarchy when everyone takes it upon himself to teach as a teacher and lawmaker - the City cannot be built otherwise than as God has built it; society cannot be setup unless the Church lays the foundations and supervises the work; no, civilization is not something yet to be found, nor is the New City to be built on hazy notions; it has been in existence and still is: it is Christian civilization, it is the Catholic City. It has only to be set up and restored continually against the unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants. omnia instaurare in Christo. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

 

One of the reasons we had the "Bush 43" power grab and are experiencing the Wizard of Obama's power grab is that no on--as is absolutely no one--in the doctrinally and morally and liturgically corrupt "hierarchy" of the counterfeit church of conciliarism speaks in these confessionally Catholic terms, choosing instead to speak in terms of Americanism by making referencing to the "founders," many of whom had, of course, a founding hatred for Christ the King. The very men who should be seeking the conversion of the nation are the inheritors of a self-satisfied accommodationism to the false principles responsible for the rise of statism. All of the huffing and puffing by conciliar "bishops" about Obama's various anti-life policies rings hollow when one considers that these "bishops" do not believe that it is at all necessary even to plant the seeds in their parishes for the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King.

The way out of this mess runs through Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. There is no short-term, political, constitutional, legal, ecumenical, inter-denominational, nondenominational, philosophical, electoral or ideological means out of this mess. We must attempt to fulfill Our Lady's Fatima Message in our own lives as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit. We are living through a chastisement for our own sins an those of the whole world. A nation cannot permit the killing of over fifty million innocent children by surgical means alone, no less export various evils (blasphemies against the Holy Name of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His Most Blessed Mother in the name of "freedom of speech," immodest fashions in dress, "entertainment" fare that is an enticement to commit sins of one sort or another, usury) abroad that are institutionalized within its own boundaries, without being chastised.

We must remember that the forces we are not fighting earthly powers. The likes of Obama are merely earthly manifestations of the forces of darkness that have enveloped large parts of the world after first enveloping large numbers of souls. Saint Paul warns us to fight these forces of darkness in our own lives lest we be overcome by them:

Put you on the armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil. For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places. Therefore take unto you the armour of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and to stand in all things perfect. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of justice, And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace: (Ephesians 6: 11-15.)

 

We are now more than halfway through the penitential season of Lent. Although we have the oasis of the Feast of the Annunciation in two days, we have seventeen more days until the Paschal Triduum of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ commences on Maundy Thursday. Seventeen more days in which to try to make reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary for our sins and those of the whole world. We may not live to see the fruit of our efforts in our own lifetimes. However, the seeds that we plant now might, please God and with Our Lady's maternal intercession, flower in the vanquishing of the lies of Modernity in the world and Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism once and for all.

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now so that we can make a "power grab" of our own in behalf of the conversion of men and nations to the Social Reign of Christ the King?

.

Viva Cristo Rey!

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon.

 

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us!

 

Saint Joseph, Patron of Departing Souls, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints