North Star Writers Group

With the above phrasing, the Borg began their every encounter with an alien species on "Star Trek: The Next Generation." They flew around in cube-shaped vessels, drones functioning as a single mind, their individuality ruthlessly suppressed and freedom extinguished, relentlessly attempting to assimilate all life forms they met into their collective and the perfection they felt they represented. And they were perhaps the most frightening and effective enemy the crew of the starship Enterprise ever went up against.

So too it is with the forces of the liberal left in America today. About the only saving grace in their attempts to seal her defeat in the War on Islamic Terror and re-make her in their Marxist image is that they are no longer hiding what their true intents and beliefs are. They, like the Borg, are at least announcing themselves and their intentions. And they are simply to reverse the result of the Cold War and turn this nation into a Communist paradise. (Or, more accurately, hell.)

I can hear you objecting already to my having used the C-word, but stay with me for a minute on this. When one examines what the liberal left is truly pursuing, I believe there can be no other way to properly describe it.

Hatred of the private sector. The left never passes up any opportunity to expand government and shrink the private sector. They've already taken over education from kindergarten through college and are targeting pre-school next. (All the better to start assimilating your kids into the collective as soon as possible.) Then there's health care, of which liberals are openly trying to stage a government takeover. Don't forget the whole "global warming" fraud and what it would do to restrict free enterprise. Finally, is there any tax they wouldn't jack up to kingdom come if they could? What simpler way to wipe out the private sector than to provide a disincentive for productivity and steal as much of what still is produced as possible in one fell swoop?

And while they may not have flat-out nationalized large portions of the economy yet, remember they need not do so in order to have control over it. To quote Ronald Reagan: "Now it doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property?" Thanks to government regulations, businesses can be wiped out with the single stroke of a pen. (Just ask any bar owner who had to close down after a smoking ban took his clientele away.) To say nothing of what the trial lawyer lobby can do (being, as they are, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party).

Totalitarian press. The Soviet Union had Pravda and Tass, which pretended to be news outlets but were really just propaganda mills for the Kremlin. We have the New York Times and CBS. Liberals control nearly every potential information outlet, from newspapers and network TV to Hollywood. (And, of course, the aforementioned education machine.) Like their Soviet predecessors, these institutions are used to spew the party line and browbeat opponents into submission. And to see what liberals really think (and mean to do if given the chance), simply look at how much they hate and want to shut down any quasi-conservative outlet that manages to break through their monopolistic control, such as Fox News or talk radio. ("Fairness Doctrine", anyone?) Or what they would do with "campaign-finance reform." (Gag anyone who dares criticize an incumbent politician or his party...unless it's MoveOn.org slandering the few remaining conservatives.) The First Amendment would be put through the paper-shredder once and for all.

Private property/freedom of association. From smoking bans, to fatty foods, to banning incandescent light bulbs, to banning parental spanking, to forcing recognition of "gay marriage," there is simply nothing that the left will leave to individuals to decide or choose for themselves. Businesses will not be allowed to choose their own policies or to which customers and clientele they will cater, as if anyone must work at any particular employer or patronize any particular establishment. Citizens will not be allowed to furnish their homes or discipline their children as they see fit, as if any of that is government's business at all. Much like Gulliver being tied down with a hundred Lilliputian strings, so too will our every move be monitored to make sure each is the "right" one. If it isn't, we simply won't be allowed to make it anymore. (Gotta stamp out that individuality before it hurts the collective.)

Though truth be told, this isn't really about those individual "strings"; it's about making sure we "Gullivers" can't get up. If everyone is a "criminal" in some way, then the moment any of us dares to threaten the left's power, they have flimsy, phony grounds on which they can trump up the authority to crush us. Liberty doesn't exist if a property owner cannot choose to utilize it as he sees fit. Freedom of association must, by definition, include the freedom not to associate, or it's not freedom at all. In other words, it should not matter one whit if you don't like the particular behavior involved; you should defend to the death the right to engage in it. After all, the moment your favorite activity becomes sufficiently unpopular and in the minority, you'll be the next target. If I may paraphrase an old essay: First they came for the smokers, but I wasn't a smoker, so I didn't complain . . .

Add it all up, and you get communism in all its facets. And it explains why the left is so determined to surrender in the War on Terror. They simply share radical Islam's hatred of America. The question is when will we see that both entities are equally determined enemies of those principles upon which America was founded, for which she stands, and which we as her citizens supposedly hold dear? And that resistance of both is most definitely not futile?

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