Good observation

The “brave artist” strikes again

How’s that again?

Declaration of Independence revisited

In rereading the text of the Declaration of Independence, I am struck by how much of it reads like it could have been written yesterday.  I know that some (probably my son included) will object that I am being overly dramatic.  However, over and over again the political class in Washington has shown that they are turning a completely deaf ear to the genuine concerns of everyday people outside the Beltway:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. –Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. (emph. added)

While this paragraph was specifically addressed to “the present King of Great Britain”, the track record of “a long train of abuses and usurpations” is just as easily demonstrated on the part of the Beltway elites of both parties– members of all three branches of government.  When was the last time that the question of whether or not the Constitution actually gave the government authority to “do something” in a particular case was even given serious consideration?  No, instead the term “unconstitutional” has become only a convenient term clever lawyers use to manipulate the system to their own advantage.  The term has been so abused over the last 50 years that it has totally lost its meaning!

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

When people have tried to petition their “representatives”, they have been rebuffed at every turn.  This first became apparent to me during the immigrant amnesty controversy 2 years ago.  Letters and e-mails to elected representatives received responses which were patronizing beyond belief, amounting to little more than a pat on the head and a “there, there, we know better than you do”.  When I and many other strongly objected to President Bush’s dismissive tone of those who objected to the amnesty bill, those whom we had voted for publicly vilified us as being “ignorant” and “hateful”, and then such people as John McCain and Lindsay Graham turn around and expect us to vote for them again.

More recently, objectors to the pork-laden “stimulus” bill or the MASSIVE deficits being created are derided as “astroturf” protestors, called “nazis” or mocked with a vile sexual variant on “teabags”.  We expect this from the sycophants in the MSM…where it gets a little harder to stomach is when this comes from our “elected representatives” who don’t represent anyone but themselves and their own radical agenda.

The anger that boiled over during the townhall meetings this summer is born of the very real frustration that average people outside the Beltway are feeling more and more that “our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.”  As Congress and the President seem hellbent on ramming this excreble “health care reform” down the throat of a people who more and more are saying we don’t want it, they should know our patience is not unlimited.

What Happened to Liberalism?

A great question that Ben Shapiro addresses here: Ben Shapiro : What Happened to Liberalism? – Townhall.com.

In particular, I like his discussion of how John Steinbeck, once considered a serious voice for liberalism, has been marginalized because he refused to go along with the dismantling of all moral barriers and disparaging of patriotism so popular amongst 60s liberals and their intellectual progeny:

Whereas today’s liberal spokespeople have been infected by a virulent anti-Americanism that sees all businessmen as profiteers and all public workers as saints, Steinbeck was a patriot. He worried about the lack of kindness he saw in his fellow men, particularly the willingness to cut corners to make a buck — but at the same time, he saw the virtue of freedom.

In 1960, Steinbeck wrote a piece in Newsday magazine in which he explained his view of morality. “[It's] very clear that peoples are strong when they are moral in the sense that the good of the group or the nation takes precedence over the selfish good of the individual. And we know from many examples of the past that when this is reversed and the individual raids the public good for his own purposes, the laws of decay have set in.” In short, a nation comprised of a group of individuals governed by a common morality is stronger than an agglomeration of atomistic individuals acting solely for their own benefit.

Steinbeck’s brand of liberalism made political debate a real possibility. After all, conservatives agree that men are neither angels nor devils, and that not everyone will behave with the same honor as an Ayn Rand-ian hero. Steinbeck’s solution to the problem of “immorality” was not necessarily more government, but better men in government, and not necessarily more regulation, but more self-regulation. (emph. added) Communal standards were important, but there was no guarantee that government would be the best judge of communal standards. As Steinbeck wrote shortly before his death, “It is our national conviction that politics is a dirty, tricky and dishonest pursuit and that all politicians are crooks. The reason for this attitude is fairly obvious — we have had cynical and dishonest officials on all levels of our government.”

Yet now we are continually bombarded with the idea that government is the answer to everything!  People who maintain this have obviously not paid much attention to…oh…4500 years of recorded history.  The main thing that more government brings is more oppressive government!

To quote Ben Franklin: “Those who would trade liberty for security will have neither”

A focus on what’s important…

Good for the goose…

You’re kidding, right?

The truth comes out

A more complete picture

As I have listened to the fawning media coverage of the life and death of Edward Kennedy this week, there are a couple of major life events that have been mysteriously missing.  In particular, there is one name rarely mentioned at all, or when it was, in a quick, passing whisper.  As Mark Steyn points out in Airbrushing Out Mary Jo Kopechne:

When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it’s usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy’s biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy’s “achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”

You can’t make an omelette without breaking chicks, right? I don’t know how many lives the senator changed — he certainly changed Mary Jo’s — but you’re struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy’s Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been okay to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo “would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history . . . Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.” What true-believing liberal lass wouldn’t be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?

We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second’s notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty.

While it is one thing to “not speak ill of the dead”, it is quite another to have someone’s entire existence disappear down the memory hole because it is an inconvenient detail for “the Lion of liberalism”.

Another person who might beg to differ concerning the present canonization of Ted Kennedy is Robert Borck.  It has been almost comical to hear commentators wax on and on about how Kennedy was “a man of principle” and, while he forcefully fought for his positions, he “never got personal or petty”.  Really?!?

When a man is capable of what Ted Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterwards, what else is he capable of? An NPR listener said the senator’s passing marked “the end of civility in the U.S. Congress.” Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost “civility” of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution . . . ”

Whoa! “Liberals” (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial, but to suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored re-segregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked “the end of civility” in American politics, that’s a shoo-in.

While a person’s life must be defined by more than a couple of mistakes, it is also true that, until those events are dealt with honestly, they will always remain as the unacknowledged gorilla in the room.  It will be interesting to see this afternoon how many will remain willfully blind to the furry creature lurking in the corner!