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”

Good for the goose…

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!

Wellstone funeral II?

Dems need to be careful or this will backfire too…

Burning down the house

In trying in recent weeks to put my finger on exactly what it is the single worst feature about the Obamacare proposal, there are many things that come to mind… massive government control, exploding deficits, very real possibilities for abuses in the area of abortion and euthanasia… to name just a few off the top of my head.

However, it seems to me that the place to start is with the fundamental underlying premise – that we just have to do “something” about the uninsured.  While I don’t accept the inflated figure so often tossed around of “45 million without healthcare” (particularly since a large percentage of those simply lack health insurance, not health care … many of these by their own choice) , it is probably reasonable to say that there is some number uninsured through no fault of their own… likely in the range of 10-15 million.  Using the high end of that range for argument’s sake, that works out to approximately 4.25% of the US population.   This would seem to be in line with a number of national polls that show 80-85% of Americans as generally satisfied with their own healthcare. (There always seems to be 10% who complain about everything!)

So, in essence, what we’re talking about doing is tearing the entire system apart and remaking it for the sake of 4.25% of the population.  Maybe that makes sense in Obamaworld, but it makes absolutely no sense to me.  Judging from the huge numbers of people showing up at Congressional townhall meetings to speak out against this plan, it seems that it doesn’t make much sense to a very large number of others as well…and is further demonstrated by the absolute freefall the plan is experiencing in national polls.

In trying to capsulate this into an understandable illustration, I came up with the following:  Suppose that my house has some serious plumbing problems.  There are a number of approaches I can take to relieve the problem: fix it myself (not likely), find a friend with more knowledge to tackle it with me or pay a professional to fix it.  One thing that I’m not likely to do, however, is burn down the whole house so that I can build a new one with better plumbing!  I’ m particularly not going to try this approach if my neighbor tried it a few years ago and is now facing bankruptcy because of his giant mortgage on the new house…and his plumbing still leaks!

In a nutshell, that’s what I see the idiots in Congress doing – burning down the whole house of one of the best healthcare systems ever devised.  Is it perfect?  Of course not!  Nothing built by human beings ever is.  But there are plenty of ways of improving it without destroying it in the process… tort reform to stop frivolous lawsuits, allowing medical insurance to be sold across state lines, greater use of medical savings accounts, to name a few.

Like I said, fix the plumbing…don’t burn down the house!

Don’t worry…

The rest of the story…

While Congressmen whine about the idignity of having citizens actually dare to criticize them and then the Botox Queen Pelosi trots out phony charges of protesters “carrying swastikas into townhall meetings”, the MSM dutifully (and with a straight face) reports all the Democratic party talking points as if they are the gospel truth.

Well, for all those who were subjected to the half-truth reporting of the “mob scene” at the townhall meeting in Tampa last night, here are a number of facts from eyewitnesses which the MSM couldn’t be bothered to mention…wouldn’t fit their agenda, don’tcha know!

First, while a large number of individual people opposed to Obamacare arrived more than an hour early and dutifully waited in line, eyewitnesses described large numbers of union people were let in a side entrance and filled up 180 of the 200 seats in the auditorium before the doors were opened to the general public.  How did anyone know they were union people?  Oh, I don’t know…the T-shirts they were wearing emblazoned with the SEIU logo and lettering might have been a clue!

Second, when the doors were finally opened, it was the union goons inside who were pushing against those coming in, trying to keep them from entering.  One elderly gentleman with a heart condition was shoved up against the wall by a guy half his age and twice his size with a forearm across the neck.  It was things like this that set off some of the loud arguing that was shown on TV clips.

Third, the Congressman that was supposedly there to “listen”, Kathy Castor, instead made a speech regurgitating all the stale talking points that have been repeated ad nauseum.  When people tried to ask her questions, more than one of the eyewitnesses described being threatened by SEIU members telling them to sit down and shut up.  That’s when things really got loud, as a number of people objected to the attempt to intimidate them into silence!

The incredible irony of all this is how morons like Nancy Pelosi and Dick Durbin can make all kinds of ridiculous accusations against conservatives about “manufacturing” public outcry against the imposition of socialist healthcare from above and the MSM dutifully reports these charges at face value, never bothering to look beyond the surface.

Of course, if they did, they might find that the accusations being hurled by the Left are nothing more than psychological projection, saying far more about those making the charge than it does about the accused!

What a surprise!

Remember all those campaign promises from the One that no one making less than $250K would have their taxes raised by “one single dime”?  Surprise, surprise…the Exhalted One was just kidding:

President Barack Obama’s treasury secretary said Sunday he cannot rule out higher taxes to help tame an exploding budget deficit, and his chief economic adviser would not dismiss raising them on middle-class Americans as part of a health care overhaul.

As the White House sought to balance campaign rhetoric with governing, officials appeared willing to extend unemployment benefits. With former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan saying he is “pretty sure we’ve already seen the bottom” of the recession, Obama aides sought to defend the economic stimulus and calm a jittery public.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and National Economic Council Director Larry Summers both sidestepped questions on Obama’s intentions about taxes. Geithner said the White House was not ready to rule out a tax hike to lower the federal deficit; Summers said Obama’s proposed health care overhaul needs funding from somewhere.

“There is a lot that can happen over time,” Summers said, adding that the administration believes “it is never a good idea to absolutely rule things out, no matter what.”

During his presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly vowed “you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime.” But the simple reality remains that his ambitious overhaul of how Americans receive health care — promised without increasing the federal deficit — must be paid for.             (see the AP story here)

Oh well, what’s one more lie to add to the mounting pile….

Hurry, hurry, hurry….

Like the Pork-ulus, like Cap and Tax, like just about everything else the Messiah’s administration has tried to do, we are constantly being harangued with “we can’t wait… we have to do this now”.

His legislative strategy moves in two gears — heedlessly fast and recklessly faster.

As with the stimulus package, Obama’s health-care plan depends on speed. More important than any given provision, more important than any principle, more important than sound legislating is the urgent imperative to Do It Now.

Do it now, before anyone can grasp what exactly it is that Congress is passing. Do it now, before the overpromising and the dishonest justifications can be exposed. Do it now, before Obama’s poll numbers return to Earth and make it impossible to slam through ramshackle government programs concocted on the run. Do it now, because simply growing government is more important than the practicalities of any new program.

The stimulus partly drives the rush on health care. The program was so ill-considered and so festooned with irrelevant liberal priorities as the price of hustling it through Congress that it becomes more of a drag for Obama every day. So health care has to be rushed through before Obama pays the full price for the failure of his previous rush job. Haste — and waste — makes for more haste. Rich Lowry – An Ideologue In A Hurry

Our Illustrious Leader is turning into a poor imitation of a carnival barker right before our eyes: “hurry, hurry, hurry, step right up…”