Jackbooted Thugs Crush Freedo...

Jackbooted Thugs Crush Freedom Protesters

by Mark Luedtke

Like many people around the world, I found myself riveted to the recent coverage of protests in Iran. They remind us that people everywhere who do not have freedom yearn to be free. I was heartbroken at the murder of protesters by the Iranian government and its militia lackeys.

According to many reports, the violence in Iran is greater than we've seen. While the government's storm troopers have successfully chased large demonstrations off the streets, protesters are chanting from their balconies at night, and the government backed militia, the Basiji, is breaking into homes, busting up the property, beating homeowners, and disappearing people in the night. The government is disappearing patients out of hospitals.

A lot has been made about how technology, mainly twitter, empowered the protesters to get information out of Iran. None of us will ever forget the video of Neda Soltan's murder, but Iranian authorities have successfully blocked 99 percent of electronic communications from leaving Iran. Officials are using electronic images of the protesters to hunt them down and arrest or disappear them. This should be a lesson to those who consider technology to be a force for freedom. Governments are slow to adapt, but once they do, they are very effective at using technology against their own people.

Unfortunately, we have only the tiniest of window into the ongoing human and political drama in Iran. Two factions in Iran's government have come to a head, and because the government has crushed the public protests, a political shake-up may be the only tangible change in the short run. But it's hard to imagine the Iranian regime surviving the greater force of freedom fighters for long.

This unrest illustrates everything we've known about Iran is accurate. Iran is run by a dictator who thinks nothing of killing his own people. President Ahmadinejad is a figurehead for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. He stuffed the vote counting agency with his own people to steal the election. The idea of negotiating with these murderers is absurd. On the other hand, we always knew the Iranian people were sophisticated and yearn for freedom.

I have to give President Obama credit for refraining from interfering in Iran's internal politics. I can't help but imagine what "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" McCain would be doing if he was president. Since at least 1999, McCain has advocated toppling rogue regimes including Iran's with force. If McCain was president, we'd be lucky if he hadn't bombed Tehran by now. Even in the best case, McCain's blustery rhetoric would have made the protesters look like western stooges. Because Obama refrained from interference, the regime's attempts to make that case look foolish.

But Obama's failure to support early on the people fighting for freedom gives us more evidence into his flawed character. Like a person with anti-social personality disorder who doesn't get the joke and only laughs to fit in after everybody else is laughing and he's sure the joke isn't on him, Obama's bizarrely belated condemnation of the Iranian regime's violence against the protesters is scary. While normal people saw freedom fighters dying the streets, Obama saw a debate, as White House spokesman Gibbs put it, between political factions. While normal people were wrenched by images of murder in the streets, Obama observed a minor speed bump in his grand plan to transform the Middle East by force of personality alone.

Extreme moral relativism and narcissism are a dangerous mix. In his Cairo speech, Obama compared Hamas's terrorism to Israel building houses in settlements. He compared women's struggles in Islam, where they can be stoned to death, to women's rights issues in America. Extreme moral relativism becomes amorality. Because Obama has no moral compass, he still plans to meet with the Iranian regime to discuss its nuclear program.

This also shows Obama's extreme narcissism. After what we witnessed, normal people recognize that such talks are worse than futile, they elevate the tyrants, and come up with a better policy. But Obama's narcissism convinces him he'll succeed.

Obama's actions also show he has more in common with the mullahs than with the people of Iran or America. If Obama condemned election fraud in Iran, he would open himself up to attack for the widespread election fraud in the 2008 election. Like the mullahs, Obama's policies for health care, energy, education, and every thing else are based on increased government force and the threat of violence against anybody who doesn't acquiesce. Obama's Pentagon is currently teaching newcomers that protesters are low-level terrorists, inviting comparison to what we witnessed in Iran. Obama has called for the creation if a civilian militia that sounds reminiscent of the Basiji. Out of six billion humans, the only ones Obama works to free are terrorists in Guantanamo. Obama is an Americanized version of Iran's Supreme Leader. You can't help but think he wants the mullahs to remain in power.

What else would you expect from a man who partnered with terrorist Bill Ayers and idolizes Lincoln and FDR, the two most dictatorial presidents in history? Obama is following in their footsteps. Lincoln and FDR presided over the wars that killed more Americans than any other. Let's hope we can stop Obama from topping that, but his escalation of the war in Afghanistan and into Pakistan is frightening. Obama disdains the rule of law more than Nixon and Clinton. If President Obama doesn't scare you, and if what the Iranian government is doing to its own people doesn't make you question what our government is doing to us, you aren't paying attention.

Watching these recent events in Iran reminds me how lucky I am to be an American. Thanks to our Founding Fathers and the sacrifice of Americans before us, protesters in America, as long as they don't set buildings on fire or throw rocks and bottles at the police or national guard, need not fear being shot or beaten to death.

But Americans are so spoiled by the gift of freedom won for us by the bloody sacrifice of others that every day we piss away more of it to the two factions who rule us, empowering an ever more oppressive government. While the Iranian people are literally dying to win the freedom we take for granted, we're transforming our government into theirs. The most important lesson Americans can learn from the protests in Iran is that we must reverse course and begin fighting to take our freedom back while we can still do it without being murdered by government.

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Reason reminds us how bad the Iranian unrest might have been handled if McCain had been in office. McCain's comments are bellicose and incendiary,
and his actions might have been destructive. But Obama and McCain
aren't our only choices (though our bogus election system led us to
that). There was a good way to respond - with firm and clear support
for the right of the people of Iran to assemble, speak, select their
own government and not be shot, arrested and disappeared for it.

Michelle Malkin exposes tight connections, including sharing donor lists, between not only between Barack Obama's 2008 campaign and ACORN but other Democrats as well.

Why
does this matter? Transparency, tax dollars and electoral integrity.
ACORN's own lawyer Elizabeth Kingsley acknowledged last year that a
vast web of tax-exempt ACORN affiliates were shuffling money around --
making it almost impossible to track whether campaign rules and tax
regulations were being followed. ACORN receives 40 percent of its
revenues from taxpayers. Americans deserve to know whether and how much
commingling of public money with political projects has occurred over
the last four decades -- and what role the Obama campaign played in
this enterprise.

Our taxdollars went to ACORN to help elect
Barack Obama. We finally have the evidence for the ACORN-Obama
corruption many warned about.

Video of Obama calling for civilian national security force which sounds a whole lot like Iran's Basiji militia.

The Pentagon claims that protests are an example of low-level terrorism.
I guess they never heard of the right to assemble acknowledged in the
first amendment. Obama loves the right for ACORN to assemble, but the
rest of us are terrorists when we do it.