Pamela Geller is a freedom fighter. She never claimed to be perfect. I am not, nor are you, "freedomforall." Why not comment without personal attacks? It's quite easy for those who think rationally.

Skipped right over Woodrow Wilson, America's first "progressive" president. An ardent racist who resegregated the military. Interesting.

Allowing for the possibility that a person could actually make a living as a politician - making that job a possible career, as opposed to something a citizen volunteered to do for a short period of time, then returned to their 'normal life' knowing they had to live with the consequences of their decisions - has to be near the top. Once that happened, we no longer had government by and for the people, and we were ruled by an out of touch ruling class.

Obama is not the mistake, he is simply the latest named hurricane that's part of the red tide that has been eroding "Liberty Beach" for centuries. This beach WAS mile wide when the founding fathers landed on it and they built a sound foundation and elaborate CONCRETE jetty to preserve it. They called it the constitution.

But with every succeeding wave of elected officials, a little more sand was a washed out to sea. The process was so gradual we didn't notice.

EXCEPT on those occasions when a named hurricane hit the beach and washed huge portions out in a relatively short period of time (4-8 years) . Most of the big hurricanes have been listed here, Roosevelt, Roosevelt2', Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and some minor tropical depressions, whose names all end with an "R".

Obama simply represents the high water mark of the erosion of more than a century. Hurricane Obama only feels more catastrophic because we have become so accustomed to accepting the erosion the little strip of beach left he feels no compunction to lay claim to the rest. He barely has to disclaim his true identity as a socialist storm, unlike his predecessors. Why, because the red tide is with him and rising. he is just riding the wave.

I stopped worrying about the Hurricanes, it's the rising tide and steady crashing of a million waves that has breached our jetties hastening the erosion of our liberty on an exponential basis. NOW when hurricanes, like Obama hit they can all but disregard any barrier, legal or otherwise, and help themselves to all the sand they want.

We need to start focusing on the red tide that has almost imperceptibly seeped into every crevice of our culture and our lives, and thus our leadership. What allowed the American people to offer themselves up to their subtle enslavers. How can their minds hold "double think" contradictions like: unfettered freedom and progressive individualism and tolerance, yet support economic enslavement, the collective good, and subjective ad hoc morality? Rand asked all the right questions, she even predicted what would happen if those questions were ignored. We live in her prognostication because we ( meaning all of us) have failed to stem the red tide.

Those of us who would like to see "Liberty Beach" reclaimed i.e., restoring the freedom we once had, had better start by solving the problem of the red tide, otherwise, any beach reclamation project becomes nothing more that a Sisyphusian fools errand.

let's stop treating symptoms, start treating diseases i.e. The mass delusion of rationalized irrationality.

Yes, after slavery, the second thing would be the progressive movement. When people started saying the phrase, "with a country this rich, we should provide ...", you start a viewpoint that any spending is o.k.. It is like if a business hires someone and they work there for a few years, they don't keep getting paychecks if they decide to stop working. As we've been "progressing", we're only progressing for those who aren't paying for it. Social Security use to be for those who paid it into the system, when they introduced SSI (Supplemental Security Income) they allowed people who never worked a day in their life,

A big problem is our oversized government. Government in a capitalistic society is, by nature, supposed to be a small government. As we've bloated our government, we have it so top heavy that every Director has a Deputy Director who has a couple of Assistant Deputy Directors, who each have their Managers and Assistant Managers. If each of those make $100,000 to $200,000 per year, you can see how each department costs so much. The more people that you have in government, the more corruption and inefficiency that you have in it. If we went back to the Constitution, our Government would be 1/3 its' current size.

It is so easy to “armchair quarterback” if you are not grounded in principle. Ms. Gellar's article, which as flaws, is still an excellent article.

“Slavery” which the Founders detested and wanted to abolish at the git-go is an affront to the Constitution as well as the principals of Ms. Rands “individualism”. But they compromised knowing that any battle with Britain would be lost without the participation of the southern states. History has proved that. I also believe that while Lincoln seized powers that were not his to seize his guidance was to preserve the “All men are created equal” clause of the Constitution and the Republic. His actions could have been thwarted by the Congress had they decided to do so. But they didn't. Fast-forward, for a moment, to present day and those precedents being used by Obama. After the elections of 2010, 2012, 2014, the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives. Since the House, as per the Constitution, holds the power of the purse anything that Obama did could have been pushed aside if the Republicans had the will and backbone to do the hard work. But when one is afraid of their own shadow bad decisions get made. Also our 2 party system is morphing into a single party system because all of those elected have forgotten History and their Oaths to Office.

“Carter” An asshole for all the reasons Ms. Gellar mentioned. But also because of his Community Reinvestment Act which told banks to loan money to people even though those people would not be able to pay back the loan. The festering pus ball was put on steroids by Bill Clinton and in 2008 the pus ball exploded causing the Housing market crash.

“Obama” We are living in the hell this Marxist has created. He clearly is not misguided or incompetent his actions with the economy, foreign policy –- well actually everything he has done has been done to bring America to its knees. I think we all know what each of the issue are as we have lived it.

“Not so Honorable Mentions” Woodrow Wilson perverted Progressive that gave all of Americans value to the Banks of the World and gave us “fiat currency”. FDR which give us further the Welfare State with all his New Deal blah, blah, blah. I understand why his own party began the fight for “Presidental Term Limits” they should have imposed those limits on Congress as well. LBJ for his insane War on Poverty.

America has had many missteps in our History of over 200 years but the fact remain we are still here.

A different three:
- Federal Reserve
- 16th Amendment
- 17th Amendment

(1) Abraham Lincoln bringing forth massive federalism.
(2) Woodrow Wilson, bringing forth the fed and setting the policies of fiat currency and the disaster that portends in motion, not to mention the whole fiasco of involving us in a foreign war in Europe.
(3) F.D. Roosevelt, for bringing this nation closer than any president (save the most recent) to a socialist oligarchy controlled, run, and espoused by the federal government. Also see the foreign war thing above.

Slavery was already on it's way out, and it's pretty well known that it would not have survived the 1860's regardless of the war - I know, it's not politically correct not to eschew the enslavement of humans, and to assume a tremendous amount of collaborative social guilt over that, but reviewing the documents of the times, even the president of the Confederacy admitted that emancipation would have had to occur before 1870. It was not a popular sentiment, but popular or not, it was reality.

Carter was the first person to take 2 middle eastern tribes that had been historically (hell, biblically) at war for centuries and get them to shake hands. He was handed a raw deal with the Shah, and it was our cozying up with Reza Pahlavi for the decades post WW2 (Who, by the way, was notorious for his secret police, the Savak, and dictatorial fist over his country); a man feared and despised by most of his own countrymen, which brought forth former exiles from Iran (such as one Ruhollah Khomeini) to try to take over once the Shah was close to the end of his days. As soon as he came to America (for treatment), the die was cast and the rift appeared allowing the Iranian Revolution to take place and Khomeini to claim the seat of power. It was the US's undying and absolute support of the former Shah that created the Embassy Crisis, which Carter was stuck with.

My only debate is (God forbid) Hillary gets elected, which would be worse - the socialistic, dictatorial communist anti-American in the White House, or the one that immediately preceded her? Seriously - as much as people abhor Sanders, at least his credibility is there. You know what and who he is, and unlike the others, he's not working his butt off to hide it.

I don’t think Geller really studied history. Jefferson changed completely from the guy we all know and love to a land grabber once he became president. Lincoln is the first, though, to completely shred the Constitution and get away with it. Much worse than the Carter and Obama she complains about.

Ridiculous! Study history, Ms. Geller, instead of making embarrasing comments.

I'd put Lincoln's Looter War on Liberty, and 1913 (Income tax and the Fed ) instead of Carter and Obama.

I did not vote for Jimmy Carter to get in. But I think that a far greater mistake was FDR. 4 times. That
was what did so much damage to free enterprise in
this country. I hope that we will be able to convert
enough people to Objectivism in time to repair it,
and recover what we have lost.

Right you are, Pamela! If not limiting it to three, we could add Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, onandonandon. But I cannot think of anything worse than her three.Although I just came across a quote that applies to the above by one of them, none other than Teddy himself: "They are equally deficient in brains and virtue."

not maintaining a republic, as opposed to democracy
2. not preventing Fed
3. allowing organized religion

From one side of her mouth Pamela lauds Individual rights and freedom. From the other side she praises our former ally, the Shah of Iran. Talk about blanking out. The Shah, with the help of our CIA and Israel's Mossad, set up his secret police, the Savak, to torture and kill any Iranians who protested his brutal dictatorship and his selling out of his country's assets to foreign companies, primarily British oil. To say nothing of our overthrowing the Iranian government in 1953 to remove the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and reinstalling the shah as emperor.

It's understandable that Ms. Geller, who is Jewish, would promote the anti-Iran and anti-Muslim agenda in a Christian advocacy site. Nothing like adding more oil to the fire. One has to admire her firebrand advocacy and skillful spins while deploring her subterfuges.