Don’t miss this hard-hitting piece by Joseph Farah

Of the $800 billion in the so-called “stimulus” bill, only $90 billion will actually go toward things like building highways, upgrading the electrical power grid or meaningful business tax cuts… $264 billion will be directed to encouraging states to sign up more people on welfare… the goal is not to help the economy. The goal is to achieve chaos, because chaos leads to more government control – and that’s what Obama and the Democratic Congress want more than anything.

They don’t believe they should be bothered with elections or dissent or any of the nuisances of a free society. They believe they deserve perpetual power, because they are part of the enlightened elite. They know socialism hasn’t worked anywhere it’s been tried. But they also believe they can do better. They can make it work, because they are smarter than the guys who have bungled it in the past.

It reminded me of this piece I wrote last October on the same subject.

Last week, a level-headed friend and colleague (a starry-eyed Obama supporter also, but no, that’s not an oxymoron) wondered aloud, with a sense of palpable fear and confusion, why “leading economic indicators” seem to be bouncing around, pointing in directions contradictory to one another, and to common sense.

I remained silent and let him finish. This was not a tirade on his part but he needed time to talk himself out. He seemed genuinely perplexed, fearful for his family’s well-being and unsure what to make of it all.

“Are you asking what I think?” I asked him.

“Well, yeah, I guess I am,” he replied. “What do you think?”

“Well…” I began, then paused. I was searching for a way to open his eyes just a little. I wanted to avoid slamming them shut again with a broadside against his guy… spilling out all I know and sense and fear that gets scant attention in the mainstream media about the man he sees as the very embodiment of hope and positive change… the man whom he and many others firmly believe stands for something besides his own arrogance and aggrandizement.

I was struggling to say something that might help him to think more deeply and broadly about it all without coming right out and saying what I’ve sensed for some time: that the president is the long-prophesied one who brings to bitter fruition the schemes of the author of chaos and lies.

Living where I do, I’ve learned (the hard way) to be delicate about such things lest I end up reaching no one at all. As the chasm of perception gets wider, it is getting much harder. Which is no excuse not to try. I plunged in.

“I think the old indicators are no longer useful,” I ventured, stating what I hoped was utterly obvious. He agreed that this seemed right.

“Many folks probably still think those indicators are useful and true, but they’re not,” I asserted. “We’ve moved into territory that is simply unprecedented. To call this equivalent to the Great Depression is only the best we can do with common reference points. I don’t think the comparison does this justice. It’s misleading. This is different, and potentially much bigger, in so many ways.”

“All of those economic indicators are built on assumptions held for so long they’re not even stated anymore, not even perceived or questioned — assumptions about America being, for the most part, a free-market capitalist economy, about some degree of regulatory stability or at least predictability going forward and not a string of capricious, confiscatory surprises of ever-increasing amplitude and frequency, about there not being open calls for revolution that folks today hardly recognize as being so serious that they could boil over into the real thing in just a matter of months, about the entire country not being in hock to our Communist enemies…”

He was listening attentively, not objecting, and so I continued.

“The economics, as bad as they are, aren’t even the most important thing. Step back,” I urged. “Take a look at what is brewing in the Middle East and specifically Israel and Iran.” I walked him through some of the recent developments in Israeli politics that I’ve been following, remarking, with irony, that it felt weird for me to be educating an observant Jew on Israeli politics. He agreed, with good humor.

“Look, I said,” his receptivity emboldening me. “I can’t tell you exactly how it’s going to go down, but it’s getting pretty obvious that there’s going to be a huge military face-off involving Israel within the next couple of years, if not sooner. And whatever happens, it’s going to be big enough and bad enough that you’re not even going to be asking about leading economic indicators anymore when it happens. You’re just going to be trying to get your bearings and protect and feed your family.”

“There’s a prophetic dimension to this as well,” I offered, really going out on a limb. He didn’t object. It wasn’t like the Wall Street Journal was giving him answers. (That word, ‘prophetic’, I’ve found, can be a useful opener in the same way that ’spiritual’ things can be a good softball in a more conventional witness situation. I wasn’t about to start quoting out of Ezekiel 38 & 39 and freaking him out. Slowly, slowly.)

“I think it’s going to involve a peace-treaty first,” I said, though it isn’t really my thought. I was drawing straight from what a study of Revelation, Daniel, Matthew 24 and the major prophets will tell you if you spend some serious time with them. “We’ll enjoy a period of apparent stability… the U.S. taking a much stronger role in settling some initial dispute or conflagration over there. Then it will all go bad in a hurry.”

He didn’t object to that either, but I could sense he needed to get off the bus and onto firm ground again. Some things are too big to take in in one sitting.

“Here’s the thing,” I said, gently. “The most important question is what you and I are going to do about the people closest to us through all of this. If we’re short on time… if this is really going down, then the answers are right at home… all the priorities we’ve known were important all along but postponed.”

I probably could have pressed it further but we left it there. He got it. He had to take his daughter to school.