Vanderboegh: Unleashing the Killer Angels

Unleashing the Killer Angels

by Mike Vanderboegh
26 October 2008

'If man is an angel, Colonel, he must be a killer angel.'

--Sergeant Buster Kilrain, Twentieth Maine Infantry, in 'The Killer Angels' by Michael Shaara

Lincoln Reincarnated

One of the most amazing things about the present presidential campaign (which has been full of the amazing and improbable) is how historical amnesiacs like Barack Obama and his followers can speak of "The Lightworker" as Abraham Lincoln reincarnated without apparent irony.

In a column in the 26 June 2005 issue of Time magazine, ("What I See in Lincoln's Eyes"), Obama wrote,

"And as Lincoln called once upon the better angels of our nature, I believe that he is calling still, across the ages, to summon some measure of that character, the American character, in each of us today."

His acolytes, in the press and elsewhere, have proclaimed this second coming of Lincoln with great approval. See here and here, among many, many others.

We have it from no less an authority than the Civil War documentary film maker Ken Burns that Obama is the new Lincoln (see "Ken Burns Compares Obama to Lincoln").

Why do they think this? Obama set himself on Lincoln's stage to be sure but he is maintained there by his willing allies in the press. A lifelong journalist, Michael S. Malone, has a theory. You can find it here at "Media's Presidential Bias and Decline".

Malone says, in part:

"So why weren't those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal? The editors. The men and women you don't see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn't; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits. Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power & only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension."

"In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -- and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway -- all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire. And then the opportunity presents itself -- an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career. With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there. And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country."

Legal analyst and talk show host Mark R. Levin expresses the fear that Obama generates in the rest of who have not yet drunk the Obama Koolaid, in "The Obama Temptation".

Says Levin:

I honestly never thought we'd see such a thing in our country - not yet anyway - but I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places. . . There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex. Fainting audience members at rallies. Special Obama flags and an Obama presidential seal. A graphic with the portrayal of the globe and Obama's name on it, which adorns everything from Obama's plane to his street literature. Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama's name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world. I dare say, this is ominous stuff. . .

But beyond the elites and the media, my greatest concern is whether this election will show a majority of the voters susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue. This may seem a harsh term to some, and no doubt will to Obama supporters, but it is a perfectly appropriate characterization.

Obama's entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The "change" he peddles is not new. We've seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism. It is a populist appeal that disguises government mandated wealth redistribution as tax cuts for the middle class, falsely blames capitalism for the social policies and government corruption (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that led to the current turmoil in our financial markets, fuels contempt for commerce and trade by stigmatizing those who run successful small and large businesses, and exploits human imperfection as a justification for a massive expansion of centralized government.

Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created. Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits - limits Obama would set for the rest of us . If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he's now officially "rich." The value of his physical and intellectual labor must be confiscated in greater amounts for the good of the proletariat (the middle class).

And so it is that the middle class, the birth-child of capitalism, is both celebrated and enslaved — for its own good and the greater good. The "hope" Obama represents, therefore, is not hope at all. It is the misery of his utopianism imposed on the individual. Unlike past Democrat presidential candidates, Obama is a hardened ideologue. He's not interested in playing around the edges. He seeks "fundamental change," i.e., to remake society. And if the Democrats control Congress with super-majorities led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, he will get much of what he demands.

The greatest American philosopher of our time, Thomas Sowell, fears that Obama's election will be one from which we will never recover.

"Better Angels" or "Killer Angels"?

And this is where Lincoln's (and Obama's) "better angels" transmogrify into Michael Shaara's famous characterization of the battle at Gettysburg, 'The Killer Angels'.

How is it that these idiots can claim the mantle of Lincoln without irony when Lincoln's first imprint upon the history of the United States was to sunder it into disastrous civil war?

Americans were heaped in bloody windrows in the hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands, and Obama and Company want you to believe that they will do again what Abe Lincoln did then.

This is a GOOD thing?

Levin is right - Obama is a "hardened ideologue" collectivist. He will seek to remake us in his image, and woe betide those of us who resist.

In the final analysis, I don't think Obama himself IS an historical amnesiac. I think that he knows exactly where he's going and where he wants to compel this country to go. In his own way, he has been as up-front about his prejudices and appetites as Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf.

It is just that the press has neglected to inform you of that.

There are those of us who will resist at the muzzles of our rifles where Obama wants to force us to go.

I have said it. So have many others.

We are the "three percent" who will never disarm and never stop fighting for the Founder's Republic we swore to uphold.

They cannot convince us; they will not scare us.

So they must kill us.

Obama, for all his packaged slickness, knows this. He knows of the "bitter clingers" - he has said so.

What he hasn't told you is precisely how he's going to deal with us if we get in his way.

WE are NOT the people HE's been waiting for.

Believe me, Obama's election does not herald the coming of "better angels." It is the killer angels which, like Lincoln's, will once more stride across our blood-soaked land.

Obama is Lincoln. He has said it and we should believe him.

Like Lincoln, he will bring civil war. Lincoln might be forgiven by some for the horror his election created -- he did not know the vast butchery it heralded. Obama, on the other hand, self-proclaimed student of Lincoln and history, has no such excuse. Is this what Joe Biden was hinting at?

In his column for Time, Obama begins:

"My favorite portrait of Lincoln comes from the end of his life. In it, Lincoln's face is as finely lined as a pressed flower. He appears frail, almost broken; his eyes, averted from the camera's lens, seem to contain a heartbreaking melancholy, as if he sees before him what the nation had so recently endured. It would be a sorrowful picture except for the fact that Lincoln's mouth is turned ever so slightly into a smile. The smile doesn't negate the sorrow. But it alters tragedy into grace. It's as if this rough-faced, aging man has cast his gaze toward eternity and yet still cherishes his memories--of an imperfect world and its fleeting, sometimes terrible beauty. On trying days, the portrait, a reproduction of which hangs in my office, soothes me."

So what has Barack Obama learned from Lincoln?

That if you smile through the butchery of your own people, it imparts grace and eternal fame.

May God help us all.

Barack, and his killer angels, cometh.

Get ready to face them.

Mike Vanderboegh
The "alleged leader" of a "merry band" of "three percenters."
PO Box 926
Pinson AL 35126
GeorgeMason1776@aol.com
III

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