Mark Levin Nukes Obama's Energy Lies [Transcript]

The living national treasure known as Mark Levin shredded President Obama's fundraising energy policy speech in Miami yesterday, delivering an epic smackdown.

This man has never given a speech, never given a presidential statement without lacing it with politics and his own ego...

"[Obama:] Only in politics do people root for bad news... you can bet that, since it's an election year, they're already dusting off their three-point plan for two dollar gas. And I'll save you the suspense. Step one is to drill and step two is to drill. And then step three is to keep drilling. We heard the same line in 2007 when I was running for president. We hear the same thing every year. We've heard the same thing for 30 years. Well, the American people aren't stupid. They know that's not a plan. "

Mr. President, you may not know this. You may not understand this, because you've never actually taken the time to understand how this works.

But, yes, you have to drill to get oil, to get natural gas. You have to drill. You see, Mr. President, when that fleet of cars drives up to the local gas stations... and they fuel those cars, at our expense of course, the fuel isn't actually in those pumps to begin with, Mr. President.

You have to drill to get that stuff.

That's right! You have to get drill to get gasoline for your car! So a policy that says 'drill', number one, 'drill' number two, and 'drill' number three, is actually the only way to get gasoline, isn't it? Is there some other way to get gasoline, other than drilling?

Is there some other way to get home heating oil, other than drilling?

...So the president, on the one side of his considerable mouth mocks the Republicans for trying to drill, and on the other side of his mouth, mocks drilling! So, ladies and gentlemen, if we don't drill, we don't get oil!

If we don't drill, we don't get gas! Somebody's got to drill!

And there was Hillary Rotten Clinton, her Thighness, yesterday all excited about a deal with the Mexican government to drill in the Gulf in areas that are said to be shared... I could've sworn I heard Hillary Clinton talk about drilling! And we give millions, if not billions, to the Brazilians to do what? To drill!

And what are they doing in the Middle East? These massive ships that the oil companies have to have, that bring fuel back. Where do they get that? Oh, they drill? Yes, they drill!

So he mocks drilling and doesn't realize he sounds like idiot!

No, here's where we're going to get it: from the sun! Really? Solar. And wind! Now he's been president for three years, had complete control of the government for two years, and what did we get from this wind and solar? We got crony capitalism; campaign bundlers who made a fortune and then broke the companies; companies that can't work and don't work because a top-down, government mastermind like Obama can't -- just because he has the law and our money behind him -- do whatever he wants to do, against the laws of nature and physics, until we are able to develop it over the course of time. Until it's profitable, until it makes sense.

We call that whole process, "capitalism."

Related: Deconstructing Barack Obama's Blatant Energy Lies

Liberal Genius: Mark Levin's Ameritopia Is a #1 Bestseller Because Koch Brothers Are Buying Up Books In Bulk

Some progressive kook named "Ramona" (if that is her real name) has a novel theory regarding the rise of Mark Levin's Ameritopia to the top of all of the bestseller lists (The New York Times hardest hit). The Koch Brothers are buying up conservative books like Ameritopia to drive incredible sales volume.

Mark R. Levin, a Right Wing radio personality and "the #1 bestselling author of Liberty and Tyranny and regular Fox News contributor" is on January's cover [of the Books-a-Million catalog]. (Last month it was Glenn Beck). Levin has a new book out called, "Ameritopia, The Unmaking of America". Before I saw that cover, I confess I had never heard of Mark R. Levin. (Go ahead and strip me of my Rotten Persons Investigator badge--I know now that his new book, "Ameritopia" is at the top, the very tip-top, of this week's New York Times non-fiction bestseller list! )

So I took a look at the new book by this guy who--my god! NYT Best Seller!--I really should have heard of by now. I turned page after page and, okay, as a new Mark R. Levin reader who is also a liberal, I'm as biased as biased can be. But even I am shocked at how badly this book stinks!

...So here's what I'm thinking: What's to stop [Books-a-Million] from manipulating the market? (They also own a book distribution company.) What's to stop Threshold? What's to stop any of the Right Wing top guns--the Koch Brothers, say-- the people with all the money? What's to stop them from buying up tens or even hundreds of thousands of these books and sitting on them? ... And what's to stop 800+ stooges from churning out magnificent reviews for a book that nobody in their right mind would actually read through to the end?

I truly hope this isn't what passes for informed commentary on the Left.

Eh, Junior: Levin has roughly 10 million listeners for his radio show not because the Koch brothers paid them to listen, but because he explains -- in great detail -- the philosophical, moral, legal and ethical underpinnings of this country.

In other words, conservatism is winning in the marketplace of ideas. And, furthermore, the book's not for dummies. i.e., not for you.

Levin outlines the lessons of Smith, Locke, Montesquieu and others who influenced this nation's founders; the rationale for the form of government they created; and the thousands of years of human experience they leveraged to try to prevent the rise of a corrupt, massive, authoritarian central government. i.e., the Democrat Party.

So tune in to Levin on your local station, schmuck, and try learning something for a change.

Because your philosophy -- the philosophy of Utopianism -- has failed every time it's been tried in human history. Which is, as Levin has also explains, why liberalism is the philosophy of the stupid.

Mark Levin's Ameritopia -- the Complete Epilogue in Plain Text Format

Ameritopia, Mark Levin's latest bestseller, had sold 50,000 copies in two days time as of last night. The book's epilogue -- a brief synopsis of its key themes -- is available in PDF format (hat tip: Dan Riehl). I converted it into text format (actually HTML) because I detest the delays and clunkiness associated with PDFs.

My premise, in the first sentence of the first chapter of this book, is this: “Tyranny, broadly defined, is the use of power to dehumanize the individual and delegitimize his nature. Political utopianism is tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable, and even paradisiacal governing ideology.”

Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Marx’s workers’ paradise are utopias that are anti-individual and anti-individualism. For the utopians, modern and olden, the individual is one-dimensional—selfish. On his own, he has little moral value. Contrarily, authoritarianism is defended as altruistic and masterminds as socially conscious. Thus endless interventions in the individual’s life and manipulation of his conditions are justified as not only necessary and desirable but noble governmental pursuits. This false dialectic is at the heart of the problem we face today.

In truth, man is naturally independent and self-reliant, which are attributes that contribute to his own well-being and survival, and the well-being and survival of a civil society. He is also a social being who is charitable and compassionate. History abounds with examples, as do the daily lives of individuals. To condemn individualism as the utopians do is to condemn the very foundation of the civil society and the American founding and endorse, wittingly or unwittingly, oppression. Karl Popper saw it as an attack on Western civilization. “The emancipation of the individual was indeed the great spiritual revolution which had led to the breakdown of tribalism and to the rise of democracy.” Moreover, Judaism and Christianity, among other religions, teach the altruism of the individual.

Of course, this is not to defend anarchy. Quite the opposite. It is to endorse the magnificence of the American founding. The American founding was an exceptional exercise in collective human virtue and wisdom—a culmination of thousands of years of experience, knowledge, reason, and faith. The Declaration of Independence is a remarkable societal proclamation of human rights, brilliant in its insight, clarity, and conciseness. The Constitution of the United States is an extraordinary matrix of governmental limits, checks, balances, and divisions, intended to secure for posterity the individual’s sovereignty as proclaimed in the Declaration.

This is the grand heritage to which every American citizen is born. It has been characterized as “the American Dream,” “the American experiment,” and “American exceptionalism.” The country has been called “the Land of Opportunity,” “the Land of Milk and Honey,” and “a Shining City on a Hill.” It seems unimaginable that a people so endowed by Providence, and the beneficiaries of such unparalleled human excellence, would choose or tolerate a course that ensures their own decline and enslavement, for a government unleashed on the civil society is a government that destroys the nature of man.

On September 17, 1787, at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Delegate James Wilson, on behalf of his ailing colleague from Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin, read aloud Franklin’s speech to the convention in favor of adopting the Constitution. Among other things, Franklin said that the Constitution “is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become corrupt as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other. . . .”

Have we “become corrupt”? Are we in need of “despotic government”? It appears that some modern-day “leading lights” think so, as they press their fanatical utopianism. For example, Richard Stengel, managing editor of Time magazine, considers the Constitution a utopian expedient. He wrote, “If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so. . . . The framers weren’t afraid of a little messiness. Which is another reason we shouldn’t be so delicate about changing the Constitution or reinterpreting it.” It is beyond dispute that the Framers sought to limit the scope of federal power and that the Constitution does so. Moreover, constitutional change was not left to the masterminds but deliberately made difficult to ensure the broad participation and consent of the body politic.

Richard Cohen, a columnist for the Washington Post, explained that the Constitution is an amazing document, as long as it is mostly ignored, particularly the limits it imposes on the federal government. He wrote, “This fatuous infatuation with the Constitution, particularly the 10th Amendment, is clearly the work of witches, wiccans, and wackos. It has nothing to do with America’s real problems and, if taken too seriously, would cause an economic and political calamity. The Constitution is a wonderful document, quite miraculous actually, but only because it has been wisely adapted to changing times. To adhere to the very word of its every clause hardly is respectful to the Founding Fathers. They were revolutionaries who embraced change. That’s how we got here.” Of course, without the promise of the Tenth Amendment, the Constitution would not have been ratified, since the states insisted on retaining most of their sovereignty. Furthermore, the Framers clearly did not embrace the utopian change demanded by its modern adherents.

Lest we ignore history, the no-less-eminent American revolutionary and founder Thomas Jefferson explained, “On every question of construction, carry ourselves back to the time when the constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.”

Thomas L. Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times and three-time Pulitzer Prize recipient, is even more forthright in his dismissal of constitutional republicanism and advocacy for utopian tyranny. Complaining of the slowness of American society in adopting sweeping utopian policies, he wrote, “There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”

Of course, China remains a police state, where civil liberties are nonexistent, despite its experiment with government-managed pseudo-capitalism. Friedman’s declaration underscores not only the necessary intolerance utopians have for constitutionalism, but their infatuation with totalitarianism.

It is neither prudential nor virtuous to downplay or dismiss the obvious—that America has already transformed into Ameritopia. The centralization and consolidation of power in a political class that insulates its agenda in entrenched experts and administrators, whose authority is also self-perpetuating, is apparent all around us and growing more formidable. The issue is whether the ongoing transformation can be restrained and then reversed, or whether it will continue with increasing zeal, passing from a soft tyranny to something more oppressive. Hayek observed that “priding itself on having built its world as if it had designed it, and blaming itself for not having designed it better, humankind is now to set out to do just that. The aim . . . is no less than to effect a complete redesigning of our traditional morals, law, and language, and on this basis to stamp out the older order and supposedly inexorable, unjustifiable conditions that prevent the institution of reason, fulfillment, true freedom, and justice.” But the outcome of this adventurism, if not effectively stunted, is not in doubt.

In the end, can mankind stave off the powerful and dark forces of utopian tyranny? While John Locke was surely right about man’s nature and the civil society, he was also right about that which threatens them. Locke, Montesquieu, many of the philosophers of the European Enlightenment, and the Founders, among others, knew that the history of organized government is mostly a history of a relative few and perfidious men co-opting, coercing, and eventually repressing the many through the centralization and consolidation of authority.

Ironically and tragically, it seems that liberty and the constitution established to preserve it are not only essential to the individual’s well-being and happiness, but also an opportunity for the devious to exploit them and connive against them. Man has yet to devise a lasting institutional answer to this puzzle. The best that can be said is that all that really stands between the individual and tyranny is a resolute and sober people. It is the people, after all, around whom the civil society has grown and governmental institutions have been established. At last, the people are responsible for upholding the civil society and republican government, to which their fate is moored.

The essential question is whether, in America, the people’s psychology has been so successfully warped, the individual’s spirit so thoroughly trounced, and the civil society’s institutions so effectively overwhelmed that revival is possible. Have too many among us already surrendered or been conquered? Can the people overcome the constant and relentless influences of ideological indoctrination, economic manipulation, and administrative coerciveness, or have they become hopelessly entangled in and dependent on a ubiquitous federal government? Have the Pavlovian appeals to radical egalitarianism, and the fomenting of jealousy and faction through class warfare and collectivism, conditioned the people to accept or even demand compulsory uniformity as just and righteous? Is it accepted as legitimate and routine that the government has sufficient license to act whenever it claims to do so for the good of the people and against the selfishness of the individual?

No society is guaranteed perpetual existence. But I have to believe that the American people are not ready for servitude, for if this is our destiny, and the destiny of our children, I cannot conceive that any people, now or in the future, will successfully resist it for long. I have to believe that this generation of Americans will not condemn future generations to centuries of misery and darkness.

The Tea Party movement is a hopeful sign. Its members come from all walks of life and every corner of the country. These citizens have the spirit and enthusiasm of the Founding Fathers, proclaim the principles of individual liberty and rights in the Declaration, and insist on the federal government’s compliance with the Constitution’s limits. This explains the utopian fury against them. They are astutely aware of the peril of the moment. But there are also the Pollyannas and blissfully indifferent citizens who must be roused and enlisted lest the civil society continue to unravel and eventually dissolve, and the despotism long feared take firm hold.

Upon taking the oath of office on January 20, 1981, in his first inaugural address President Ronald Reagan told the American people:

If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on earth. The price for this freedom at times has been high, but we have never been unwilling to pay that price. It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government. It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams. We’re not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.

So, my fellow countrymen, which do we choose—Ameritopia or America?

Buy a copy and pass it on. Drop some knowledge on your family, friends and colleagues. These are perilous times. And November is coming.

Mark Levin's new book Ameritopia is out tomorrow. To mark the occasion, I reprise his epic rant, "Why liberalism is the philosophy of the stupid"

In honor of the release of Mark Levin's new book Ameritopia (click here to order), the following is Levin's legendary rant entitled "Why Liberalism is the philosophy of the stupid":

The reason I say that liberalism is the philosophy of the stupid is because we can look at what's going around in the country today. If, in your own lives, you were pursuing policies that were destroying your own home ownership, that were destroying your own job, that were creating a massive, impossible debt for your family and your children in particular, you'd stop it. You wouldn't keep doing it!

And yet for the liberal, if it's imposed on you -- and they feel that they can be immune from it -- they're for it.

They wouldn't do to themselves and their own family what they're doing to you, and your family, and the whole nation!

Take Barack Obama. Does Barack Obama conduct himself in his own, personal affairs, in his family's affairs, as recklessly as he conducts the affairs of the nation? No. Would he run up the kind of relative personal debt that he's running up for the nation? No way.

Would he do anything that would endanger his position as president? Of course not -- he thinks his agenda will return him to office. He's taking care of his constituent groups...

So they do to us -- and they do to our society -- what they would never do to their own families. They do not live in their own lives as they seek to have the rest of us live. Or as they seek to have our society conduct itself.

An extensive interview of Levin by CNS News -- regarding the genesis and thought process behind the book -- is quite revealing and well worth reading.