Real Clear World describes the latest modus operandi for creating dictatorships in democracies: voting to decide not to vote again.
Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega announced Sunday, on the 30th anniversary of the leftist Sandinista revolution he led, that he would seek a referendum to change the constitution to allow him to seek reelection.
Following in the footsteps of elected regional allies, Ortega told thousands of supporters here that he would seek a referendum to let “the people say if they want to reward or punish” their leaders with reelection.
His close leftist allies who have had rules changed enabling them to remain in power include presidents Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador.
In the last month President Manuel Zelaya in neighboring Honduras.
Some ex-Sandinistas apparenly see the danger that Ortega presents. Nothing so educates a person about Leftism as actual experience with it.
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My concern for Obama’s support of these tinpots is that Mr. Obama does not want to create a precedent which may inhibit his own ambitions. Of course amending our Constitution is much more difficult than holding a referendum. Salute to the Founders for that safeguard.
One Man. One Vote. One TIme.
Peter:
It was also more difficult to amend the Honduran Constitution–arguably even harder than ours, since certain passages are considered “inviolate”–yet that didn’t stop attempts there to hold an illegal referendum.
Yes of course Obama wants to be dictator for life. There’s a substantial amount of people who would vote for a permanent aristocracy with Obama as hereditary King.
Hopefully, those ex-Sandinista have the cajones to fix the problem before it becomes untenable.
Axelrod and Obama are probably reading the Conventions Article and speculating. Remember Axelrod stole the nomination from Hillary by packing the caucuses. It would be his style to have a Kangaroo Constitutional Convention.
Hopefully, WE have the cojones to fix the problem before it’s too late.
#7 Conservababe
It is going to turn on how many of those who have sworn the Oath, remember the Oath.
Subotai Bahadur
I just checked headlines at Drudge, followed the link to the Mail Online article on 5,500 Mexican troops deployed in the state of Michoacan.
The fifth photo image down shows a soldier on a vehicle, with what appears to be a gas or water-cooling system connecting a clip-fed rifle to a reservoir.
I’m not familiar with this one. Anyone recognize the weapon / system?
It seems a little odd to have a cooling system for a clip-fed (not belt-fed) weapon. But what else could that be?
Sorry for the interruption to the normal scholarly and highly intellectual comment stream…
Let’s just remember folks, here in the USA, you can pack Constitutional Conventions all you want, but whatever gets proposed has no legal impact until its passed by at least two-thirds of all our State Legislatures.
That should give one pause.
The guys in the fourth photo should be detained for fashion crime. I see four Swooshstikas on that vehicle.
Mad Fiddler, are you still there?
You seem to have an optical delusion at work.
A bipod is attached to the rifle but you can only see one leg of it.
The rifle is being rested on top of other gear, one of which is the water container with the hose dangling down. Gives the impression you reported of a hose attached to rifle, but is not.
BTW: That is a magazine-fed rifle, not a clip fed. A clip is a device that facilitates loading a magazine. A “clip-fed” rifle implies a fixed magazine and the rounds are either stripped from their holder into place (1903 Springfield) or loaded en bloc (M1 Garand). The latter is often referred to as a Mannlicher clip after the company to first employ it.
IMO: That Garand system is STILL the best
a rifleman can have. 8 rounds does not sound like enough. However, the determinant is not the number of shots between reloads but how fast you can reload if the so-and-so s are getting close. M1 is much faster than anything else.
Russ,
So you counsel complacency based on confidence in the state legislatures?
Looks in the direction of Albany and sighs.
The weapon in question is a H&K G3A3 [7.62 NATO] w/bipod [as Dave correctly noted...]; Mexico has a license to manufacture various H&K ‘products’.
On topic: Yes, the ‘Chavez method’ of gaining ‘permanent’ control is spreading. Please recall that his first ‘re-election’ had ‘irregularities’ with their digital voting machines [a brief, but wide spread power outage, and then after the 're-boot'; victory...with oddly similar percentages at the end of the day.]. I vaguely remember other details, but the press coverage was a bit thin [other Carter's glowing endorsement of the results]; I suspect that bit of history warrants re-visiting; I sorta remember Chavez importing same DVM experts [from the US] to set up their ‘model’ digital voting system.
Who were the key players? Where are they now? What projects they been busy with since then?
That being said, the Chavez ‘election model’ is spreading with, not-so-oddly similar outcomes. Honduras is the first break in that chain; I’m hoping the interim government will have fully public the results of their ‘discoveries’.
Aside from a sizable left-leaning voting block, Mexico’s resisted the Bolivarian tide; I suspect Mexico’s VERY regulated voting system is the key reason.
The common factor is this: fidelity to the ‘constitutional’ structure. As long as the basic system remains intact [with ALL of it's organic 'firewalls'], the Chavez model falls flat. The minute the Left succeeds in knocking down key pillars, the system morphs from a governing ‘societal compact’ into a societal ‘cage’; the ‘keys’ of power passed from the ‘governed’, to the ‘government’.
We’ve lucky enough [as previously noted] to have very strong ‘firewalls’, but they only work as long as the ‘self-defense’ systems are intact.
A fact worth noting.
Could Jimmy Carter have possibly done any more damage to the free world, if he’d INTENDED to?
That 7.62mm H&K is an excellent weapon.
I have great personal experience with a SR9 semi-auto “target” version.
Now with proper “Capitalism”, Mexico would be making semi-auto versions and importing them to the US for legal sale!
It’s amazing we haven’t heard anything about a Constitutional Convention lately.
#10 Russ
That makes the assumption that those calling the “Convention” are operating within the framework of the Constitution. That is a given that may not obtain. Remember, what counts is “the end result” to authoritarians, not the means. If they can produce a facade of a process that gives them the power that they want, they will declare the result legitimate.
Political cultures are a collective set of shared assumptions about how things are to be run. If those who control the levers of power have different assumptions, the end will have to be resolved by conflict because any restrictions on their actions implicit in the assumptions are no longer operative.
Depending solely on the text of a document after a regime decides it to be non-operative is not a successful bet.
And then there is the fact that a depressing number of states [like my own] have Democrat control of both houses of the legislature and the governorship. If “Democratic Centralism” is invoked, they would vote to reimpose chattel slavery, serfdom, and would repeal the XIXth Amendment if they were directed to from above and were also promised increased taxes. [OK, slight rhetorical flourish there, but state Democratic parties are not any more a haven for liberty than the national party; and the Republican party at all levels is a collection of gormless and ghoolie-less wonders.]
Subotai Bahadur
#10 Russ:
That’s 3/4, not two thirds. 38 state minimum.
Thanks, Dave. On closer inspection of the image I see the bipod leg is considerably thicker than the loop of wire (?) that appeared at first to be a continuation of the straight line of the bipod.
Rush to judgment – my usual mode. I need a general function for thinking like the “splee chekcer” for my writing.
Loop is a tie down so that if he lets go the rifle doesn’t fall out of the truck. And his replacement can find it to put it back in operation. All for show though, he isn’t using the larger magazine that would be used in that configuration.