In about ten days time, three things are about to happen. Millions of un-informed Americans are going to march to the polls and vote for someone. Millions of informed Americans are going to march to the polls and vote for someone they think they know something about. Millions more are going to stay home for one of several reasons ranging from apathy to a loss of voting rights. I fall in the second group. I am going to go and vote straight libertarian which is an absolute waste of time- or maybe I'll just pass altogether.
The outcome of course has already been determined. Nothing will change. There will be no lobbying reform, or term limits, no tax reform, voting will not buy us ethical leadership nor a Supreme Court willing to stop the intrusions and illegal seizures of big government. In fact, voting will get us exactly what we already deplore. More of the same- insert a new face here or there. Rinse and repeat. The GOP is anxiously awaiting this year's election because they think their sociopaths are going to beat Obama's sociopaths. So it is, today's victory will be the next election cycle's loss.
We don't have a political problem in this country- we have a personal courage problem. I cannot think of a better illustration than the one I'm about to offer up. In my mind, it is the 20th century's greatest unsolved mystery.
The outcome of course has already been determined. Nothing will change. There will be no lobbying reform, or term limits, no tax reform, voting will not buy us ethical leadership nor a Supreme Court willing to stop the intrusions and illegal seizures of big government. In fact, voting will get us exactly what we already deplore. More of the same- insert a new face here or there. Rinse and repeat. The GOP is anxiously awaiting this year's election because they think their sociopaths are going to beat Obama's sociopaths. So it is, today's victory will be the next election cycle's loss.
We don't have a political problem in this country- we have a personal courage problem. I cannot think of a better illustration than the one I'm about to offer up. In my mind, it is the 20th century's greatest unsolved mystery.
Can you imagine being arrested tonight, carted off to a camp, and jailed for a few years without any sort of due process? How did that happen? Did every citizen of this country just look the other way in 1942? What about the lawyers, what about civil rights? Where were they?
If we are guaranteed rights and freedoms given to us by God, specifically identified and itemized in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights- how was one man able to issue an executive order and remove all of those rights- systemically reducing people to cattle? It was 70 years or so ago and not exactly the dark ages. About 19 years before I landed on this rock.
I have had some furious back and forth with older Americans who rationalize and justify those actions as "reasonable" given the fact there "might be" Japanese sympathizers with ties to Japan and the national mood post Pearl Harbor was unanimously bitter and suspicious toward that class of people. I'm not sure what those potentially embedded west coast Japanese spies were going to do exactly- perhaps they had access to Colonel Sanders secret recipe.
I cannot think of a better definition of mob rule democracy. The rights of the minority were absolutely trampled by the majority. So how and why could something like that happen?
This feat compleat' was done by "executive order." An executive order is a mysterious order which cannot be found in the Constitution nor will anyone find any wording or phraseology that authorizes Presidents to remove constitutional guarantees or the rule of law- whenever they feel the urge. Executive orders do not exist anywhere in the Federalist Papers either. In fact, the framers were expressly trying to stop those very imperial edicts- edicts which abused and removed the God given freedoms and rights of our people.
FDR's very first executive order was an act that seized our gold in 1933. Did someone simply suspend the 4th amendment in the Bill of Rights? Did we not have lawyers and courtrooms back then? Did Congress go on a field trip? (They can overturn an executive order)
Who is going to stop an executive order which will violate immigration law by allowing millions of undocumented aliens into this country? Will Obama try that after the elections? A lot of people think so.
The king of the executive order- issuing more than 3500 of them and about as many as the last 11 Presidents combined- was FDR. Historians might say that Lincoln intruded on state rights and I might agree- but nobody undermined our rights and liberty worse than the Father of Statism- Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Many of FDR's edicts can be traced back to the Federal Reserve Banks' creation which plunged us into the Great Depression some 16 years later. They did the very same thing again- in 2008.
Certainly a President has the right to direct the activities of his cabinet, executive branch agencies, and the like. Nobody will argue that. But where I get a little frosty is when I see Presidents undermining existing law to satisfy their own selfish interests or destroying rights and laws designed to protect our civil liberties by issuing royal edicts. Here's a new twist from President Obama. He is exercising his "executive privilege" and obstructing the disclosure of legally obtainable documents on the Fast and Furious scandal- you know- because he is all about the "transparency." http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2014/10/obama-asserts-fast-furious-executive-privilege-claim-holders-wife-2/
We don't need voters. Voters do nothing other than extend the dysfunctional life of our political process and the sociopaths who make "careers" out of politics.
We need patriots. We need men and women of courage. We need people who understand that the Bill of Rights is not some negotiable instrument to be ignored or marginalized because it is politically expedient in any given moment. We need people who will stand against a mob and say, "We have a rule of law in this country and like it or not- that rule comes first and it protects us all." When we start caving in to the whims of the mob we undermine and lose our freedoms and liberty. We cannot let the mob decide who has rights and who does not or soon, none of us will have any rights at all. I submit- that day is not very far off. The Affordable Care Act has proven that to me.
The problem this country has is far simpler than just labeling everything a political quagmire and ignoring it. We've grown fat, complacent, cowardly. The solution? I'm convinced any such effort must start with campaign reform, political contributions reduced to paltry individual amounts, lobbying reforms, and most importantly- term limits. In fact term limits would go a long way to stop these enormous 100 million dollar re-election campaigns. They wouldn't occur because contributors would realize they would no longer have influence beyond the only re-election bid of any particular candidate. Our country simply cannot operate on a level playing field so long as political influence is available to the highest corporate bidder be it the health insurance lobby, big pharma lobby, or any other corporate interest seeking to monopolize the marketplace.
This week I got a kick out of my old hometown's "pizza and politics" semi annual ritual. Every two years the local newspaper holds debate night where candidates put their best face on and try to pretend that they know what they are talking about. What they are really after is ego gratification, a little power and influence, some money, and a better looking resume'. Events such as this help the "voters" pretend to be informed. http://www.mtexpress.com/index2.php?ID=2007154252#.VEwA8NzB_hA
I shall leave you this week with my favorite all time quote and this blog's former subtitle. It is the very definition of politics. They do it on purpose. Thanks FDR.
“Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.”
― Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine
I have had some furious back and forth with older Americans who rationalize and justify those actions as "reasonable" given the fact there "might be" Japanese sympathizers with ties to Japan and the national mood post Pearl Harbor was unanimously bitter and suspicious toward that class of people. I'm not sure what those potentially embedded west coast Japanese spies were going to do exactly- perhaps they had access to Colonel Sanders secret recipe.
I cannot think of a better definition of mob rule democracy. The rights of the minority were absolutely trampled by the majority. So how and why could something like that happen?
This feat compleat' was done by "executive order." An executive order is a mysterious order which cannot be found in the Constitution nor will anyone find any wording or phraseology that authorizes Presidents to remove constitutional guarantees or the rule of law- whenever they feel the urge. Executive orders do not exist anywhere in the Federalist Papers either. In fact, the framers were expressly trying to stop those very imperial edicts- edicts which abused and removed the God given freedoms and rights of our people.
FDR's very first executive order was an act that seized our gold in 1933. Did someone simply suspend the 4th amendment in the Bill of Rights? Did we not have lawyers and courtrooms back then? Did Congress go on a field trip? (They can overturn an executive order)
Who is going to stop an executive order which will violate immigration law by allowing millions of undocumented aliens into this country? Will Obama try that after the elections? A lot of people think so.
The king of the executive order- issuing more than 3500 of them and about as many as the last 11 Presidents combined- was FDR. Historians might say that Lincoln intruded on state rights and I might agree- but nobody undermined our rights and liberty worse than the Father of Statism- Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Many of FDR's edicts can be traced back to the Federal Reserve Banks' creation which plunged us into the Great Depression some 16 years later. They did the very same thing again- in 2008.
Certainly a President has the right to direct the activities of his cabinet, executive branch agencies, and the like. Nobody will argue that. But where I get a little frosty is when I see Presidents undermining existing law to satisfy their own selfish interests or destroying rights and laws designed to protect our civil liberties by issuing royal edicts. Here's a new twist from President Obama. He is exercising his "executive privilege" and obstructing the disclosure of legally obtainable documents on the Fast and Furious scandal- you know- because he is all about the "transparency." http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2014/10/obama-asserts-fast-furious-executive-privilege-claim-holders-wife-2/
We don't need voters. Voters do nothing other than extend the dysfunctional life of our political process and the sociopaths who make "careers" out of politics.
We need patriots. We need men and women of courage. We need people who understand that the Bill of Rights is not some negotiable instrument to be ignored or marginalized because it is politically expedient in any given moment. We need people who will stand against a mob and say, "We have a rule of law in this country and like it or not- that rule comes first and it protects us all." When we start caving in to the whims of the mob we undermine and lose our freedoms and liberty. We cannot let the mob decide who has rights and who does not or soon, none of us will have any rights at all. I submit- that day is not very far off. The Affordable Care Act has proven that to me.
The problem this country has is far simpler than just labeling everything a political quagmire and ignoring it. We've grown fat, complacent, cowardly. The solution? I'm convinced any such effort must start with campaign reform, political contributions reduced to paltry individual amounts, lobbying reforms, and most importantly- term limits. In fact term limits would go a long way to stop these enormous 100 million dollar re-election campaigns. They wouldn't occur because contributors would realize they would no longer have influence beyond the only re-election bid of any particular candidate. Our country simply cannot operate on a level playing field so long as political influence is available to the highest corporate bidder be it the health insurance lobby, big pharma lobby, or any other corporate interest seeking to monopolize the marketplace.
This week I got a kick out of my old hometown's "pizza and politics" semi annual ritual. Every two years the local newspaper holds debate night where candidates put their best face on and try to pretend that they know what they are talking about. What they are really after is ego gratification, a little power and influence, some money, and a better looking resume'. Events such as this help the "voters" pretend to be informed. http://www.mtexpress.com/index2.php?ID=2007154252#.VEwA8NzB_hA
I shall leave you this week with my favorite all time quote and this blog's former subtitle. It is the very definition of politics. They do it on purpose. Thanks FDR.
“Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.”
― Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine