The Route of All Evil
One person remarked on Twitter that never before has the US Constitution seemed so fragile and wondered why so “few people seem to care about it.” But Mario Loyola at American Interest has an explanation. The Constitution now obstructs the way both parties do business. It’s in the way so it’s got to go.
For decades, Democrats and Republicans alike have invested heavily in governance schemes that erode the Constitution’s separation of powers and mar its proper functioning. The Federal judiciary has uniformly rubber-stamped these schemes. The consequence has been an unsustainable spree of borrowing, spending and overregulation at the Federal level, cyclical fiscal crises at the state level, and less accountable and less representative government at every level.
In order for the money to keep flowing both parties had an institutional incentive to outflank the Constitution. They’ve been doing that for years. The overriding imperative was to keep the music playing. And since as everyone knows, when money and principle collide, principle takes a hike, it’s time for that old piece of paper to go.
Not that we’ll miss it, as a New York Times editorial has already explained. Loyola argues that by cleverly shuffling powers around the Congress has managed to usurp the power of the states and the executive has managed to usurp the powers of the Congress over the years. Now the process is near to completion and as one piece of doggerel on the Internet puts it:
Roses are red
Violets are blue.
All of my base
Are belong to you.
It’s game over. Well … not really. Reality has interposed some problems.
There’s still the insoluble money problem to take care of. Walter Russell Mead notes that even with the Constitution out of the way there remains the problem of how to pay for things. Take California. It’s as Blue as state as you can get. But it still has bills to pay. The answer is apparently to squeeze all the stakeholders harder.
as the financing dries up, the state goes after revenue wherever it can, which eventually results in squeezing the incomes of people like professors and doctors. The increasing weakness of the professional guilds makes it easier than ever before for the state to feed the budget beast by raiding their coffers.
That is why people who voted for Obama, from Alan Dershowitz to the unions on down, are feeling betrayed. They thought they were going to get the special treatment. But the system has run out of “other people’s money” already. So now it is going after their money. With the Constitution disabled — and which the supporters helped disable in the first place in the mistaken belief the raids would always be on other people — there is nothing left to protect them.
No justice at all except poetic justice.
What the future holds may be foreshadowed by events in Venezuela. Roger Noriega, writing for Foreign Policy notes that in Venezuela, the hyenas and the buzzards are now fighting over the country’s bones. “With cancer-stricken Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez clinging to life in a Havana hospital, an intense struggle for power is under way in Caracas, pitting Cuban-backed ideologues against narcogenerals.” This is where socialism, taken to its limit goes. Gangsterism.
What’s to stop them? The Venezuelan constitution is now about as unenforceable as Oliver Cromwell’s enactment of 1657 making it illegal to eat mince pies anywhere in England on Christmas Day.
Socialism is a fairy tale they tell chumps but the insiders know that money rules the roost. It’s about ‘who sent you’ and ‘how much are you?’ Noriega notes that Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution was never about high minded principle. It was always about payoffs. Noriega writes that:
The Cubans are working feverishly to ensure Maduro’s succession to preserve their multibillion-dollar windfall of oil and aid from Caracas. But they are not alone among foreign powers with an interest in preserving Chavismo after Chávez. China has pumped about $25 billion in loans that must be repaid in the coming years. Russia has sold $9 billion in arms and eager to capture lucrative oil and gas deals. Iran exploits Venezuelan territory as a platform for evading international sanctions and projecting a deadly Hezbollah and Quds Force presence near U.S. shores.
In addition, narcotraffickers have embraced the Venezuelan state a willing partner in their dangerous activities. According to sources familiar with ongoing investigations, U.S. officials have fresh, compelling information implicating Chávez, Cabello, his former minister of defense, his army chief, his newly appointed deputy Minister of Interior, and dozens of other senior military officials in cocaine smuggling and money laundering. These Venezuelan officials help transport tons of cocaine to Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean, the United States, West Africa, and Europe. …
Venezuela’s inept democratic opposition has no strategy for defending its interests, while career U.S. diplomats are stumbling toward legitimizing an authoritarian narcostate without getting anything in return.
Patria o muerte. Venceremos and all that.
That’s where the US taxpayer comes in. The Chavistas and the Cubans may be too tough to take on. As are the Russians, the Syrians, the Iranians and the Chinese. But since the music has to keep on playing and diplomats need to be paid you may be sure that any number of schemes to stop global warming, outlaw handguns, police the Internet and otherwise bother people who are soft enough to clamp down on will be proposed as urgent and vital. That’s all our hyenas can really handle.
The taxpayers in the Western democracies are soft targets. And a word about the warriors for Global Warming: they may be scavengers, but they’re our scavengers.
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re “That’s where the US taxpayer comes in. The Chavistas and the Cubans may be too tough to take on. As are the Russians, the Syrians, the Iranians and the Chinese. But since the music has to keep on playing and diplomats need to be paid you may be sure that any number of schemes to stop global warming, outlaw handguns, police the Internet and otherwise bother people who are soft enough to clamp down on will be proposed as urgent and vital. That’s all our hyenas can really handle.”
Indeed. This is what our government is best at. Pushing people around who are too weak to push back.
Local government has always consisted of creative cronyism. State and federal legislation, grounded in the Constitution, comprised some kind of imperfect counterbalance.
The genius of Obama and his senders consists of taking the local creative cronyism to a national scale.
Who would have thought it was possible to turn the U.S. into Chicago? You can get a ticket fixed, or a favorable law in Obamacare for your company, but now you owe, because you sold yourself, and there’s no going back.
I am hopeful we can reassert our Constitutional tendencies through the elective process but for that to happen we will need a new party based exclusively on bedrock constitutional principles. Said party would appeal, IMHO, to the widest swath of responsible Americans, many of whom the Republicans have ceeded to the Democrats. I find myself moving away from the GOP and toward the Libertarians.
If not that, the only way to save our republic will be for the most conservative states to band together and reassert their sovereingnty and we already know how bloody that might turn out. Still, “The tree of Liberty,” and all that.
“… inept democratic opposition has no strategy for defending its interests…”
Wow, that sounds suspiciously like another party, struggling to find its way.
Weekend @ Bernies!
I have a doubt or two whether the self-styled “progressives” who’ve eviscerated our constitutional republic from within and replaced our national government with an oligarchy in all but name are still socialists at all. I think they were collectivists of one style or another. I think most of the presstitutes in the failed main stream “news” media believe they’re Marxists of one stripe or another. Appearances and assumptions to the contrary, I have a hunch the “progressives” have much more in common with Italian fascists and German national socialists than traditional socialists. I think they’re the visible or semi-visible portion of an alliance among the highest of the high in the feral government, big unions, and very well connected big businesses.
I’m tempted to call them “American neo-fascists,” but that overlooks the “contributions”—a stretch, I admit—of the Chicago way: the nexus of open corruption, crony business and unions, increasingly centralized political and economic and media power, and the endless, increasingly cynical appeal to Democratic [sic] party grievance groups. I suspect there’s as much Stalinism as fascism in the mix. In more than one or two ways, I could describe the feral government as an extortion operation without law enforcement to fear or sense enough to realize stealing everything kills the businesses that hand over the money.
Whatever exactly it ought to be called, it’s toxic through and through. My only hope is it will destroy itself without destroying the entire nation, and do so more quickly than Italian fascism or German national socialism.
Weren’t Cuban authorities involved/implicated in drug smuggling in the past? It would seem that the Cubans have mentored the Chavistas in this role. What do we know about the Iranians’ Quods force in Venezuela? Numbers, weapons, bases, etc?
@6
Stalinists, Fascists, far left, far right, those are just labels that two factions gave one another, because in most real terms they are unidentifiable from one another in the way they run things. “Progressive” is just a new label for the same group of people. Heck, they are financed by a former Nazi sympathizer, who made his bones from the bones of his own kith and kin.
Unfortunately, the truth is, those who gained power through quasi-constitutional manipulation will not go voluntarily via constitutional procedures. Liberty and democracy has never occurred without force of arms, and for those who might cite Ghandi’s India or other “soft revolutions”, liberty either already proceeded those changes (i.e. Britain was a democratic country) or American force of arms quietly backed the change (e.g. Marcos, Franco, Iraq, etc.).
“To arms, to arms …”. Not surprising at all that the main focus of the Obamanistas at the moment is ridding American of it’s Second Amendment protections by any means necessary. The American Democrats have an ambitious agenda, and having 300-odd-million arms in the hands of strict-Constitutionalists is a significant obstacle.
I sound reactionary, do I not? In contrast to the Democrat V.P. who is opening proposing extra-constitutional gun restrictions via Executive Order, and others calling openly for forced confiscation and bans on ammo sales, I think its the reactionaries who run American government.
A few liberals have asked me what I “need” my AR-15 for. I tell them truthfully, it’s mostly useless for hunting and not even the best home-self-defense weapon. I have much better ways to use the money that I have invested in it. I tell them, “it’s only real use is for killing men”. Going further, I tell them I intend to use it to shoot them when they try to take it away from me.
However, I have learned from Jose Guerena; don’t leave your safety engaged, and keep a copy of the U.S. Constitution nearby (and in my case, a copy of my oath of office and officer’s Commission) to remind you why you’re standing your ground.
Today’s Drudge report (01/09/2013) had an interesting photo set up. Hitler and Stalin in reference to the Administrations gun control efforts.
http://www.drudgereport.com/
I suspect, on someone’s “neutral territory” in Venezuela or Cuba, a variant of this scene from “The Godfather” is already being reenacted:
Emilio Barzini: [during a meeting with the Five Families] Times have changed. It’s not like the Old Days, when we can do anything we want. A refusal is not the act of a friend. If Don Corleone had all the judges, and the politicians in New York, then he must share them, or let us others use them. He must let us draw the water from the well. Certainly he can present a bill for such services; after all… we are not Communists.
What is this “evil” you speak of, is there a facebook page for it?
Let us cut to the chase: Evil walks the Earth.
there comes a point where it is no longer politics, but morality and survival.
Evil must be defeated.
Obama is Evil.
Putin os Evil.
Iran is Evil.
Islam is Evil.
Democrats are Evil.
Chicago is Evil.
Chavez is Evil.
Castro is Evil.
The entire government, which supports Obama, is Evil.
They lie continuously, they steal, they cheat, they observe no rules. You are now their prey.
They are the disciples of the Devil, also known as “The Deceiver”. They kill and destroy, because that is what the Devil’s disciples do.
They need to be destroyed, or you will all be destroyed.
That is the nature of things.
All else is merely a distraction.
They observe no rules. Neither should you.
Consult Revelations, for additional details.
As the winner of several bad poetry contests I can say:
The sky is blue,
The sidewalk is cracked,
Socialism’s in full flower,
And that’s a fact.
The re-election of the Boy King was the crowning achievement of Democratic Socialism in Western countries. The ill-doers will run rampant as they tyrannize people for their own good. Now we know it has to get worse before it gets better.
As far as government attempting to confiscate guns; they can be buried or hidden in other ways. As for the other stuff, it will probably be a long drift into a miserable time. Luckily Socialism is not self sustaining. Things that can’t be sustained eventually stop.
Exactly when it stops depends upon the American people. The people invited these ill-doers into their house. Only the American people can make them leave. I believe it will be done at the ballot box, not by violent strife. Concluding with even badder poetry:
No chance that America slips,
Into the maw of Apocalypse.
There will arise hale and hearty,
A shiny new political party.
Really! Who here is ready to give everything up! I just don’t see a violent upraising happening. LeoIII “grass roots” project is several decades too late. You can’t have the advanced society that America has and play by the Constitution rules! Sad indeed, Sad indeed…
who are these magic americans that will save the constitution? they sure didn’t show up on election day.
Time is up for democracy in the U.S. it was meant to be a republic, and an indirect democracy, but it has more and more become a demagogic, crony filled, party-run racket. And now its time is up.
George Washington warned us in his farewell address. I find his words to be better than anything I have read from any U.S. politician, including Lincoln.
Historical events have been up and down for the U.S. since that time, but at long last, I don’t see any more ups in store for this country. Igor Panarin had his timing wrong, but his reasoning right.
Charles #15
An eye for an eye, a gun for a gun, a bullet for a bullet.
This is all an individual can do.
@Still Waters,
Funny you should mention that.
@John J,
Aside from Putin, who is an Orthodox Christian and a Russian patriot, you’re correct.
Too much Russia-bashing on this site.
stevesmith @ 14 – Here is some help from a true American poet
ss @ 14: No chance that America slips,
Into the maw of Apocalypse.
There will arise hale and hearty,
A shiny new political party.
I dunno, it looks to me like my karma ran over your dogma or something.
How then did America arise? Maybe the short answer is, by finding a frontier, and taking two centuries to fill it, and using the fresh resources to live on (unfortunately for the indigenes who were using the resources rather less efficiently).
It’s not the kind of thing that a new political party can solve. Maybe the real problem with America today is more thermodynamic, Malthusian, we ran out of design margin because – we really did run out of design margin, that was built on certain kinds of consumption models.
An excess of resources over consumption can look a lot like “freedom”.
Run out of sugar and you start burning protein.
Who broke first?
The banksters broke in 2008, and much that followed, including Obambus and his trillion dollar coins, can be put on their tab.
The society broke in 1968, putting in afirmative action that killed the idea of objective judgement regarding people, performance, economics – anything. Breaking the western canon of logic in favor of romantic but unworkable fantasies. Losing the Protestant, Puritan work ethic.
We gave up enforcing borders in about that timeframe as well, and the burden of over ten million illegals weighs very heavily on California and on the entire nation. It’s not all negative – but it still nets out negative, and large.
We gave up on the balance of payments in that time frame too. Just how we’ve made it this far is an evil miracle, maybe it’s now documented and accepted over in the Econ department, maybe they knew we’ve been eating the seed corn for over forty years, but hey we had a lot of seed corn and it was darn tasty, and there was nothing else on the table.
The minimum it’s going to take to fix things is going to need to be a lot more aggressive than a political party, it’s going to be more like a cult, and it’s going to resemble a civil war. Or, we just keep sliding into those New Dark Ages. Actually, our failure to remove Bubba Clinton from office is my “oh shit” moment, someone was asking about that on BC or some other PJM forum the other day. He was just a buffoon who could have been removed for Filegate and Travelgate, and should have been. Which also would have rid us of Hillary. We would have had to suffer through a couple of years of Algore, but that would have been mostly harmless, I think.
One can also argue that 1991 was an “oh shit” moment, when we made war on Iraq and got ourselves tangled in the Middle East, which we were not willing to take by the horns and resolve entirely in our favor, for a number of good and bad reasons. Hard to be certain of what would have transpired in the world had we not, maybe all paths were doomed since I peg some of our major economic errors as going back twenty-plus years earlier.
But the First American Republic is certainly over now, and mere party is not going to establish the Second.
–
No poetry has yet occurred to me to express it.
This maybe:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0dxXkMYeVs
Constitution was helpful back when people didn’t know you can say things, protect yourself, and weren’t missing two-fifths of your body to go vote. Today, it’s insulting to let mandarins explain things you already know about, like rights which are safer than ever. Why, years ago my support for the hegemao and exposees about Space Truth would have made me a target with the authorities. I might have died like James Hoffa, Marilyn Monroe, or Gandhi. (All were agents, by the way.)
This is where socialism, taken to its limit goes. Gangsterism.
Chavez is Citgo’s project, which makes him a Capitalist. A blue, capital Capitalist.
poor old constitution.
some americans want to use it as toilet paper these days.
so be it.
there is no hope for those people.
they have no understanding of what they have flushed down the drain.
alas.
they have shat thier next meal.
Those who were supposedly elected and appointed to defend the Constitution and our rights have been slowly destroying it instead for decades. The Constitution is battered but not dead. Yet. But the day Lord Buraq Hussein, our Islamofascist President issues an executive order to restrict gun use will be the day the Constitution dies. The ongoing Cold Civil War will turn white hot in a angry flash that day.
Pity the poor LEO’s who try to enforce that unconstitutional edict, for they will no longer be enforcing the law and will be made illegitimate. They best be thinking about immediate retirement if they know what’s good for them.
21. MachiasPrivateer
Gosh darn, that Paul Revere poem is way better than mine. Right now alarm is a good thing but (admittedly as a spectator) I don’t think a second revolution would be good because it would pull down the entire house around everybody’s ears.
22. Josh
Quicksilver was an underrated band.
I think that the design margin was frittered away by choice. There’s truth in your “more consumption than resources” but I’d call it spending all the wealth created by the U.S. and then spending wealth that was created by someone else. Horrors, those pesky someone elses expect to be paid back with interest.
Malthusian logic implies a finite amount of wealth, a pie of fixed size that people fight over. If I have a slice then you can’t. Socialism and its distribution of wealth is based upon the same thinking. My take is that new wealth can be created, it doesn’t have to be from domestic resources alone and if there is a limit on wealth creation that we are nowhere near reaching it.
Spend wealth faster than you create it or increase the population faster than you create wealth and you will get poorer. Create wealth faster than the population grows and spend less than you create and you will stay solvent and get richer.
Last point. By nature I’m a grinder not a revolutionary and grinding has generally worked for me. I think that a whole bunch of American grinders are needed to turn this thing around. To my mind LL-3 is a grinder.
75 percent of Wisconsin’s share of the Trillion dollar stimulus went to save the jobs, salaries, and benefits of teachers and other public sector unionistas.
A good chunk then got recycled back to the Obama Campaign and other Democrats.
Their support getting out the vote never waivered.
A closed system run on other people’s money.
Some people profit, some don’t approve, others are oblivious.
ss @ 26: Quicksilver was an underrated band.
First generation rock, no auto-tune. But this song has haunted me for no reason since the first time I heard it long years ago. Now, well, there it is and here we are.
Malthusian logic implies a finite amount of wealth
Also a geometric increase of consumers that no finite resources can satisfy, aka Parkinson’s Law. Much of the Obamanation can be seen in that light, just no self-control at all, in their urge to control everything non-self.
Last point. By nature I’m a grinder not a revolutionary and grinding has generally worked for me. I think that a whole bunch of American grinders are needed to turn this thing around.
But nobody grinds when the sharers and gatherers come around, the grinders go Galt and perhaps they should. Still, every problem is an opportunity, and properly read it passes the time:
(warning: graphic)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1RsM69L400
Woke up the next morning Nikki wasn’t there
I looked all over and all I found
Was a phone number on the stairs
It said, “Thank you for a funky time
Call me up whenever you want to grind“
Killing me softly with my own money, our USG!
To life (L’Chim) my friends! …
“It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was
founded not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religious, but on the
Gospel of Jesus Christ. For that reason alone, people of other faiths have been
afforded freedom of worship here.”
— Patrik Henry
“Invention is continually exercised, to furnish new pretenses for revenues
and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape
without tribute.”
— Thomas Paine (Rights of Man, 1791)
“Law represents the effort of man to organize society;
governments, the efforts of selfishness to overthrow liberty.”
— Henry Ward Beecher
“Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone
who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it
but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined.”
— Patrick Henry, Virginia’s Convention to Ratify the Constitution 1788
“Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing
degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense?
Where is the difference between having our arms in our possession and
under our own direction, and having them under the management of
Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in
whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to
us, as in our own hands?”
— Patrick Henry, 3 Elliot Debates 168-169.
Candy A** pedaphilic sadomasochistic English School Masters used to establish control by calling the least offensive boy to the front of the class and thrashing him in front of the bullies. See “How Green Was My Valley.” It would not surprise me if Obama did something massive to Denmark. If the Danes seem to doughty then he might turn on Iceland. It is full of hated “Ice People” Caucasians. Japan should not trust Obama as far as he can sink a putt.
Outside of Kipling, I’m not a big fan of poetry.
Inside of Kipling, it’s too dark to read.
Paraphrasing Instapundit quoting one of his readers a short while ago, the Constitution isn’t just an impediment to politicians absconding with all the money. It’s also the thing that says we can’t string the politicians up from the nearest lamp post for squandering our money.
They may want to reconsider disabling the document.
Maybe that’s the change we make to the next Constitution. Any time two-thirds of the public declares the government to be in breech of the Consitituion, lynching politicans becomes legal for a defined period of time.
I mean, if we’re going to degenerate into the Roman Empire, let’s not go half way. Et tu, Bubba?
jmh @ 31: Maybe that’s the change we make to the next Constitution. Any time two-thirds of the public declares the government to be in breech of the Consitituion, lynching politicans becomes legal for a defined period of time.
Lynch first, vote later.
If it saves even one dollar, it was worth it.
The laws are being clear-cut to build whatever “FORWARD” means – utopia for cronies, apparently. The world is your oyster if you have enough juice.
One who understood what happens when inconvenient laws are clear-cut: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-nJR15e0F4
But, but — Herr Jimmy CARTER says the Venezuelan election process is among the BEST in the WORLD!
In other news: Global Warming alarmists racked up some more victims this morning when a New York City to New Jersey ferry (Seastreak), retrofitted to adhere to the eco-Nazis’ demands, crashed into Pier 11 at 12 knots, leaving a huge gash in the starboard bow and sending dozens of passengers and crew to the hospital.
The problem? (I’m amazed See-BS actually reported this …) Apparently, the ferry company had refitted the boat with new, variable-pitch propellors and new engines. These are so difficult to control that the crew had to be retrained to use them. And they’ve had a lot of trouble landing the boat at the East River dock. Trouble they never had with the old “un-GREEN” engines.
Meanwhile, no one besides the patriotic policy wonks even knows that the “global warming” stopped SIXTEEN YEARS AGO, according to the university that started all this uproar in the first place!
THAT doesn’t get reported. You betchya it won’t.
34. Beverly:
Petro power may or may not bring about the end of the World as we know it, but I say why take the chance, when viable options are available?
stevesmith @ 26 – Instead of being miserable, like some Hollywood actors in Les Mis, you need a more positive theme song
Hey, even Canadians can work and be happy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzo6Otpgj-E
Once you get the hang of it, you can aim to become an American, like Frank
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1tGdoA6mCc
1389AD @ 20 – We don’t bash Russians, we bash Putin!
You can tell a lot about a guy by his “friends” (or at least his customers)
Assad
Gaddafi
Saddam
A-Jad
Hugo Chavez
Castro
Now there’s a bunch of “Nice guys” for you.
Let Little Pootie Poo go cry in his room while he serves his “timeout”.
We do not tolerate meltdowns! There is a new Super Nanny in town.
Wretchard wrote:
“Socialism is a fairy tale they tell chumps but the insiders know that money rules the roost. It’s about ‘who sent you’ and ‘how much are you?’ Noriega notes that Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution was never about high minded principle. It was always about payoffs.”
This also explains the results of the last presidential election.
For weeks before the election, the center/right blogosphere was full of predictions about millions who would crawl over an acre of broken glass to vote out Obama and others like him. These glass-crawlers never materialized. Why?
The reality was that the people who were most motivated to crawl over broken glass to vote were recipients of the magic government checks. Yes, yes, recipients of welfare in its various forms, but also nearly every single government employee (including many whose sensibilities are conservative), every rent-seeking regulation dependent business owner and employee, every government contractor outside of defense (and probably more than a few inside it), ag subsidy recipients, education subsidy recipients, SS and Medicare recipients (again, even those who are conservative in every other way), etc.
For months the polling indicated that on a philosophical level support for the president had been falling off and I think that those polls, in retrospect, seem accurate. Yet you never saw panic or even concern over this by the white house. Obama’s inner circle knew that the diminishment of people possessing enthusiam for the philosophical agenda of the left would ALWAYS be more than offset by the panic and dedication of those who were completely dependent on government and transfer of wealth out of the private sector and into their own pockets enforced by the police power of the state in the form of the IRS and state and local taxing authorities. That population is essentially composed 100% of people whose only goal in life is to be in a place where they have bulletproof income stream security, and that is the single issue which influences their voting choices. Obama counted the numbers and knew. The majorities were bought and paid for, using fear as the big stick.
You can talk all you want about women voters, minority voters, the Constitution and its need to be dumped/reconstructed etc., and those are all interesting things and important, but they are truly at the margin of what is motivating great swaths of people right now. Much time is spent philosophizing on this blog and others and that is a valuable and necessary service, but it misses some simple truths. Fear of being dumped into the dreaded private sector and having to live the stressful, uncertain, difficult, and metric-filled life that entails, therefore losing the magic checks – but, more importantly, facing the possiblity of losing the guarantees of the magic checks – that is what will motivate the voting public who are not in the authentic private sector until some type of recovery occurs, and perhaps, by force of habit, beyond even that.
Sadly we are living in a time when Americans have come to value economic security and status over rights in the most cowardly and corrupt manner possible. In times like these liberty does not flourish.
“But since the music has to keep on playing and diplomats need to be paid you may be sure that any number of schemes to stop global warming, outlaw handguns, police the Internet and otherwise bother people who are soft enough to clamp down on will be proposed as urgent and vital. That’s all our hyenas can really handle.”
In all of those schemes there is a fatal flaw. Humans are terrible at predicting the consequences of our actions. The hyenas of the left always assume that when things do not go as planned it is because someone else has stolen the meat. It never occurs to them that the game may have moved on, or died off because the river has dried up.
Last time I was in Israel the land itself was in dire straits. The Kinneret and Dead Sea were so low you could almost walk across. There was a deal in place to import water from Turkey and the country relied on Egyptian gas for energy which hung like the sword of Damocles over the nation.
Today the Russians are lining up to get a piece of the gas boom soon to come. There are pictures out today of Netanyahu having a snowball fight with his wife in Jerusalem (did you hear that global warmists?). The lake is back to normal and the new deslination plants have a source for near unlimited fuel in the near future. Egypt and Turkey can suck eggs. Israel does not need anything from them anymore.
Principles and Constitutions exist because we need a lighthouse. The left thinks it can control the sea. The rest of us just want to get back to shore when our work is done for the day.
no mo uro (#38) Well said Sir, Well said. This very scenario described by “no mo uro” is why the Constitution will become simply a piece of paper from history, several more generations and it will hardly get a mention in the class rooms of the future. Guns too are on their way out, as described by no mo uro, the US is past the tipping point, the gun lovers are a political minority and on the wrong end of the stick! I will stand with my brothers if only my brothers would make a stand! If there is no stand soon it will never happen…
Wonderful essay.
Pretty much nothing Obama could do could dissuade people from voting for him last time. Nothing he can do can get him impeached.
Its kind of a interesting no?
#2 The problem is that “Chicagoism” doesn’t scale up. Chicago can look for other people’s money in Cook County, the State of Illinois and the Nation. As you go up the chain there are fewer and fewer reserves to tap. When you reach the national level you have no backup. We are not flying off to Greece, we are on our way to Detroit.
15. CharlesWhite : Really! Who here is ready to give everything up! I just don’t see a violent upraising happening.
I have been risking all for 26 years in the Marine Corps, why wouldn’t I be willing to risk all for my own liberty? There are millions more just like me. We all gave an oath to the Constitution, not the President or Congress. Don’t think in terms of current troop levels, many of those who serve do so for just 4 years then return to civilian jobs. But as the saying goes, “Once a Marine, always a Marine.” And I know I can count on most of my brothers and sisters in arms from the other services. Does that help?
W: “The Constitution now obstructs the way both parties do business. It’s in the way so it’s got to go… In order for the money to keep flowing both parties had an institutional incentive to outflank the Constitution. They’ve been doing that for years.”
Instead of a real Constitution whose meaning is determined by We the People, and which draws life form the amendment process, we have a so-called Living Constitution – Orwellian Newspeak for Dead Constitution – a Constitution which draws life from a small self-serving group of people in Washington, D.C. The “Living Constitution” is now a mere thing of wax which means everything or nothing at the pleasure of the Supreme Court and their cronies in the Executive and Legislative branches, thus American Federal government has degenerated into an empire of men, and not of laws. We now live under an oligarchy which is becoming more and more like that of King George III – or more and more like that of Vladimir Lenin.
“If ‘the judiciary is the last resort in relation to the other departments of the government,’ … then indeed is our Constitution a complete felo de so. … The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they may please [Living Constitution]… Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure [Living Constitution].” Thomas Jefferson
“There is no good government but what is republican. That the only valuable part of the British constitution is so; because the very definition of a republic is “an empire of laws, and not of men.”” John Adams
History has not stopped — will never stop. Yes, the movement of which Soetero is the apotheois could destroy the US, arguably has already destroyed the US. But that is not the end of the story.
Alexander the Great reportedly cried because there was nowhere left to conquer. And now he is just another Dead White Guy whose name is no longer taught to school children. Stalin ruled his world with an iron fist, but now his body has disappeared from the mausoleum and the empire he ruled is gone & nearly forgotten already.
Life goes on. No-one wins forever.
RE “Our scavengers:” The Pacifica Radio Liberals are whipping the dead Global Warming horse again. Nothing phases them – they will get their carbon tax by spewing a thousand lies if that’s what it takes.
In yesterday’s KPFA-produced “Democracy Now,” lodged between snippets of an interview of a “tortured,” Gitmo Detainee and an unbelievable news-flash stating that the Democrats’ reparations round-robin with Buffet’s Bank of America has yielded a measely $8B in fines (boo hoo!), and that the home buyers “victimized” by Buffet get to keep their homes, was a drawn-out rant about Global Climate Change.
Studying the discourse underpinning the rant I noticed that it was immune to the latest leaks out of the IPCC, that it is aware that the use of arctic temperature and ice-flow data are discrediting (there was not a whiff about ice or bears in the piece) and that new, supporting data has been hyped now, among them Tasmania’s heat-wave and North America’s “record” temperatures, to keep the narrative alive.
These parasites will not give up until they’ve nudged the tip of their phlebotomist’s tap into the Nation’s remaining, turgid blood-vessels.
Leftism is a metaphysical virus that magically transforms envy, greed and lust into the secular virtues of equality, justice and liberation.
Who doesn’t want to live in a free, just and equal society even if we have no clue what those words actually mean anymore? We can however be pretty sure that we will not find the answers in media, politics, the legal system, or education.
Solzhenitsyn’s simple approach is spot on. Participate in and support only those things that promote truth, beauty and virtue; avoid and hinder all those things that do not.
47. Peter Boston
I wonder if other peoples, whatever that means, are looking at American Fubar and planning accordingly? As others have already well said, American suicide should be an ominous portend for the rest of the free world. Are there other patriots?
The proposed Treasury Secretary, who signs his name with 9 zeros, causes me to ask myself if I’m trapped in a bad movie….
(Lost in Space)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG0ochx16Dg
@Peter Boston,
Are you related to Joshua Boston, USMC?
22. Josh
Actually, our failure to remove Bubba Clinton from office is my “oh shit” moment, someone was asking about that on BC or some other PJM forum the other day. He was just a buffoon who could have been removed for Filegate and Travelgate, and should have been.
Heh, I’ve often wondered if the mining operation of Filegate is only now paying dividends. Just think of the people who collapsed on their principles in the last two short years, just when we thought they would “stand and deliver” and vote down the dreaded Obamacare, like the statesmen we presumed – only to learn that they were men without chests.
I wonder what embarrassments the 900 FBI files contained on the likes of Just-us John Roberts or Bart “Baby Killer” Stupak.
43. SpeakEasy
And I know I can count on most of my brothers and sisters in arms from the other services. Does that help?
It does for us sailors. Bahala na?!?!
@ Old Salt
I will be using your line (sorry, no royalties).