We’ve all heard it said before at one time or another, “this or that is the new something”. Like, “Pink is the new black” or “60 is the new 40”. You know what I’m saying. Heck, you’ve probably even said it yourself. It’s a simple way of transposing one idea or standard with another to create a new one with a slight twist. I’m going to create one now to suit my own personal style. “47 is the new 18”. I figure this should absolve me of acting like a grownup too often while leaving me free to listen to Lynard Skynard at ear splitting volumes whilst I drive around town.
It’s been said countless times and sometimes the comparisons are agreeable but too often, they just seem silly. Pink is not the new black no matter how you look at it. Would men react so positively to a “little pink dress”? Probably not. Can you imagine police cars being called “pink and whites”? I certainly can’t and it’s ridiculous to think anyone else would find it reasonable. Although I suspect it would probably go over quite well somewhere in California.
As a way to provide perspective to this piece let me state clearly that I watch, read and listen to a lot of news. I gobble up as much as I can partly to be well informed and partly due to my fascination with all things “homo sapiens“. People are the most interesting yet puzzling creatures on the planet and I never tire of learning about them. The world truly is a wondrous place because humans are in it. They never cease to amaze me for their great leaps of intelligence, their unyielding commitment to each other and sadly, the depravity they are able to sink to. That depravity is what grounds me and reminds me all too often that we are, after all, just another species of animal. Capable of choosing our own path, in most cases, and also capable of such destructive evil on both a personal and a global level.
The old maxim used to be “Sex sells.” but over the years it seems that it’s been changed to “Death sells.” The one defining characteristic of being human seems to be our never ending ability to visit horror on our fellow humans. Great leaders throughout history have risen to power riding a tide of human suffering and bathed in blood. Ghengis Khan, Torquemada, Mao, Guevara, Stalin and of course, everyone’s favorite demon in human form - Adolph Hitler.
I hold Hitler to be far worse than almost any other purveyor of human suffering in that he convinced his fellow countrymen, or at least most of them, that an entire religion was the single source for all his country’s, and the world’s, ills. The startling reality was that he did this in modern times when news outlets and cameras were readily available to document his atrocities. The mere word “jewish” became synonymous with suffering even to a people who had known thousands of years of it. Even in recent times, Jews are mocked openly, denigrated by millions of people across the globe and treated as less than human by the vast majority of Muslims. Once again, they are held up as everything that is wrong with the world today.
It’s at this point you’re probably wondering why I broke into a lesson on history that you already knew. I’m going to draw a comparison that some of you might cringe at and still others will decry as paranoia and utter stupidity but I’m going to make it anyway.
“Conservative is the new Jewish.”
There. Let that sink in for a moment. Do you feel that vein in your temple beginning to throb? I’ll bet you’re already thinking of the counter argument but let me state categorically that I in no way intend to downplay the suffering or the brutality visited upon the Jewish people nor do I seek to infer that being conservative means they round you up and send you to the gas chamber. Not yet anyway.
I suppose I could say just as easily;
“Conservative is the new AIDS” or
“Conservative is the new ‘negro’”
“Conservative is the new whatever we don’t like and want to get rid of these days.”
It’s dirty word these days no matter how you say it. Not to those practitioners of conservatism like myself but to practically all the media and the rest of the country we are held up as all that is wrong with the modern life. Our individuals and groups are thought of as stupid, dangerous and less than human. We are openly mocked night after night on radio, TV and movies. Our male leaders are called stupid and our female leaders are held up as objects to be sexually denigrated by respectable journalists, celebrities and leaders in government.
“If we could only shut them up, we’d all be better off.”
Or as Dan Savage, liberal radio host and outspoken gay activist said recently, “I wish they were all f*cking dead.” He also said on Bill Maher’s HBO show, Real Time, that he wanted to have violent “hate sex” with Conservative presidential hopeful, Rick Santorum. And not a single peep from the arbiters of tolerance on the left.
We are cast as a plague on humanity. Not only is it perfectly acceptable to say horrible things about us, it is encouraged by no less than the President Of The United States. According to him, we are “bitterly clinging to our guns and religion” and we are cast as “the enemy” to be punished. He openly mocks and seeks to isolate the only news network where conservatives can go to hear their viewpoints expressed as something other than fantasy and hysteria.
It’s trendy and chic to hate conservatives in the swankier restaurants in New York City. It’s a sign of higher intelligence to think we are just a bunch of gun-toting crazies who want to kill everyone who doesn’t look like us. It’s true enlightenment to be tolerant of every kind of societal depravity known to man but not to conservative opinion. Tolerance these days has come to mean being tolerant to those who hate conservatives.
Imagine for a moment that Rush Limbaugh had wished every Liberal dead. Or that he fantasized about violent hate sex with Nancy Pelosi, scary as that might sound. Rush takes enormous heat by saying things that are one-one thousandth as harsh and Dan Savage gets a free pass because he said it about a conservative. That’s ok. Bill Maher can call Sarah Palin and Michele Bachman “milfs” because he said it about conservatives so it’s ok. Olbermann, Schultz and Matthews can call us “tea baggers” as frequently as possible because it’s only being said about conservatives. It’s ok. Obama can call us “the enemy” and get away with it because he’s talking about conservatives. It’s ok.
At what point does shutting us up become ok? When does it become ok to shut down our media sources and deny us free speech? Are we almost to the point when it’s ok to make us wear something that identifies us as conservative? Like a big red “C” sewn into our clothing maybe?
Atrocity starts with a whisper but always ends with a scream. It starts with one group finally deciding they’ve had enough of some other group. It starts with something simple that’s done for the good of a nation but ends with people being rounded up.
Go now and read some of Goebel’s or Gehring’s speeches and substitute the word “jewish” with the word “conservative” and tell me how you feel afterwards.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
The Politics Of Fear
“I cannot guarantee that those checks go out…if we haven’t resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be money in the coffers to do it.”
President Obama in an interview with CBS News’ Scott Pelley
Politicians lie. We all know it. Congressmen, Senators, Cabinet Members even Presidents lie. The truth is that prevarication knows no party lines. It’s not more prevalent on one side or another nor does it only happen once in awhile, it happens constantly. They lie about things great and small, important and inconsequential. They’ll even lie about the color of the sky if it becomes politically expedient to do so. They lie about each other, they lie about their records in the public and private sector and they lie about caring what you and I think, hope for and feel.
We’ve come to accept this sad truth as a nation and even begun to categorize lying for them. We’ve decided to arbitrarily call some lies worse than others so we can better accept the fact that we never know when they’re telling the truth. Thanks to Bill Clinton, we now have a new category of lies. Lies about your private life are suddenly out of bounds and cannot be held up as evidence of poor character or a possible fault in leadership. Lying in your private life no longer matters when put into the context of your job performance. That’s fine if you live in a vacuum.
The media is complicit in helping us categorize lies told by politicians. In fact, they’ve led the charge in defining what constitutes a big lie and what constitutes a lie that doesn’t really matter. Republicans tell big lies, Democrats lie about things that don’t matter for the most part. Case in point: Anthony Weiner. The mainstream media by and large saw no problem that Weiner lied about the scandal that eventually forced him from office. Conversely, the lies told by Mark Foley were egregious and unforgivable according to Newsweek. Foley faced an unrelenting media barrage that sought to expose him for the creep he truly was yet did everything they could to minimalize the exposure of what a creep Anthony Weiner was. When hiding the truth was eventually unattainable, they changed their tactic to downplaying the severity of the scandal saying instead that it was his personal life and we had no right to stick our noses in it. It became a lie that didn’t really matter.
I started this piece with a quote from the President as a way to highlight the kind of lies that I’m talking about. The everyday, garden variety lies that politicians spew with amazing frequency. We have all become so jaded by the lies they tell that we hardly raise our eyebrows when a true whopper comes along. That quote is not just a lie. It’s a true whopper. More than being a lie, it’s a threat and that ventures into a whole new category of lying done by politicians. This particular lie though is of the variety that most often comes from the left. More often than not it comes from desperate Democrats trying hard to scare the right people into believing them. President Obama leveled the “lie laser” at seniors, the disabled and veterans and pulled the trigger hoping to singe as many people as possible.
It is, quite honestly, the most despicable lie that I have heard uttered by a politician in a very long time. Two that spring to mind are;
“I am not a crook.” Richard M. Nixon
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” Bill Clinton
Not since Alexander Hamilton call John Adams a hermaphrodite has the political lie been so egregious, so obviously false and so easily refuted. Before I go into too much detail about the lies told by this man let me share some facts with you first.
During the period of May 12 - June 7, 2011, the federal government took in 296 billion dollars. That’s less than a month when you look at it. Interest payments on our debt totaled 14 billion dollars during the same period. Basic math tells me that there’s about 282 billion dollars left over for all federal spending during that period. Despite what the President may say, there is more than enough money to cover both the debt and the day to day operational costs of the federal government. The government takes in more than 2 trillion dollars in revenue annually even with the “low” tax rates that we currently enjoy. Sorry Mr. President, but math can be a bitch sometimes. Now, I’m not a degreed economist but I can add and subtract like the wind.
What the President is doing can only be termed economic terrorism. The truly disgusting part is that he’s doing it to senior citizens. He’s lying to the least among us as a means to an end. The end is tax increases on anyone making more than $250,000 a year and he’s willing to look your grandmother in the eye and tell her that her monthly check is in doubt to get what he wants. He’s more like a petulant child being told no so he’s going to hold his breath until he gets his way. The trouble is, too many people would believe him because most of them don’t think anyone would tell a lie that big and expect us to believe it. Still others would believe because they have no understanding of how money works in the federal government.
Let me ask another pertinent question. If Obama couldn’t get a tax hike done during the 2 years he controlled the White House and the Congress, why does he now expect Republicans to hand him their certain doom and his imminent reelection now? If raising taxes back in December of last year was so potentially injurious to the economy as to be out of the question, why would he think it’s a good idea now? Is the economy any better? Are the unemployment numbers any lower now as opposed to then. Not really. He’s insisting on tax hikes now only as a way to shatter the confidence that the republican base has in it’s new members in the House and Senate which he knows will ultimately hand him a victory in 2012. Not only his but a victory in the House as well. If Boehner or McConnell cave on the issue of tax increases they can kiss any hope for a majority in either house goodbye for at least 4 more years. Let’s read that quote one more time:
“I cannot guarantee that those checks go out…if we haven’t resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be money in the coffers to do it.”
Are we really supposed to believe that he would allow senior’s checks to stop before he’d consider shutting something nonessential off first? He does, after all, have the power to designate what gets paid and what doesn’t in the event the debt ceiling isn’t raised. The country would still be able to pay it’s bills for quite a few months before the effects of our current spending and taxation levels made it impossible to stay above water. I ran into a similar problem with my own personal “economy” recently due to increased healthcare costs and rising food and fuel prices. I’ll set the scenario and then let you judge who is the better economist, Obama or me.
Within the last few months, my hours at work had been reduced slightly due to what we call the “seasonal slowdown” It happens every year but with the economy the way it is, I found myself spending more on things like healthcare and food. Part of my own personal economy was unemployed so revenues had taken a dip accordingly. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? I sat down with my Treasury Secretary, my wife, and asked for ways to boost revenues or reduce spending. She came up with several very good ideas and we set about implementing them to prevent reaching our own “debt ceiling” and seeing our economy collapse. We looked at discretionary items that we could cut back on until the revenue crisis passed and came to the conclusion that there were several things that we spent too much money on and could ill afford to continue like…our addiction to cable TV and our DVR. We restructured our healthcare plan to reflect our actual needs and decided to forego the fancy cell phones and home phone plan we had always had. We got a Magic Jack as a gift and our cost for home phone dropped from $40 per month to $2 per month. A few minor cuts later and after looking at the balance sheet, our current revenue far exceeded our monthly demands. As I said, I’m not a degreed economic professional but even I know when I can and can’t raise revenue(taxes) and when and where I can cut out the pork spending to achieve the same net effect. By cutting the fat from my budget, I have effectively increased my revenue stream.
Is the President not smart enough to see this? Or is he just so inured with the idea of taxing the evil rich that he simply will not see how easy it is to trim the fat? The Federal Government spends more than $300,000 every year to study the effects of marijuana on monkeys during their menstrual cycles. Is that more important than paying social security benefits? We annually spend more than 1 million dollars to study the effects of mercury on fish and this is somehow more important than sending checks out to our disabled veterans?
That’s why I find his lie about checks not going out to be so offensive. First and foremost he’s using the politics of fear in such a way as to needlessly frighten millions upon millions of senior citizens, like my mother. Secondly, he’s insulting the intelligence of those of us who can actually add and subtract.
I am smarter than the President. I am also smarter than everyone at MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times and NPR. I am in fact, smarter than Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist and I have just proven it. Well, I’m either smarter than all those vaunted denizens of the media…or I am simply telling the truth where they are not.
You be the judge.
President Obama in an interview with CBS News’ Scott Pelley
Politicians lie. We all know it. Congressmen, Senators, Cabinet Members even Presidents lie. The truth is that prevarication knows no party lines. It’s not more prevalent on one side or another nor does it only happen once in awhile, it happens constantly. They lie about things great and small, important and inconsequential. They’ll even lie about the color of the sky if it becomes politically expedient to do so. They lie about each other, they lie about their records in the public and private sector and they lie about caring what you and I think, hope for and feel.
We’ve come to accept this sad truth as a nation and even begun to categorize lying for them. We’ve decided to arbitrarily call some lies worse than others so we can better accept the fact that we never know when they’re telling the truth. Thanks to Bill Clinton, we now have a new category of lies. Lies about your private life are suddenly out of bounds and cannot be held up as evidence of poor character or a possible fault in leadership. Lying in your private life no longer matters when put into the context of your job performance. That’s fine if you live in a vacuum.
The media is complicit in helping us categorize lies told by politicians. In fact, they’ve led the charge in defining what constitutes a big lie and what constitutes a lie that doesn’t really matter. Republicans tell big lies, Democrats lie about things that don’t matter for the most part. Case in point: Anthony Weiner. The mainstream media by and large saw no problem that Weiner lied about the scandal that eventually forced him from office. Conversely, the lies told by Mark Foley were egregious and unforgivable according to Newsweek. Foley faced an unrelenting media barrage that sought to expose him for the creep he truly was yet did everything they could to minimalize the exposure of what a creep Anthony Weiner was. When hiding the truth was eventually unattainable, they changed their tactic to downplaying the severity of the scandal saying instead that it was his personal life and we had no right to stick our noses in it. It became a lie that didn’t really matter.
I started this piece with a quote from the President as a way to highlight the kind of lies that I’m talking about. The everyday, garden variety lies that politicians spew with amazing frequency. We have all become so jaded by the lies they tell that we hardly raise our eyebrows when a true whopper comes along. That quote is not just a lie. It’s a true whopper. More than being a lie, it’s a threat and that ventures into a whole new category of lying done by politicians. This particular lie though is of the variety that most often comes from the left. More often than not it comes from desperate Democrats trying hard to scare the right people into believing them. President Obama leveled the “lie laser” at seniors, the disabled and veterans and pulled the trigger hoping to singe as many people as possible.
It is, quite honestly, the most despicable lie that I have heard uttered by a politician in a very long time. Two that spring to mind are;
“I am not a crook.” Richard M. Nixon
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” Bill Clinton
Not since Alexander Hamilton call John Adams a hermaphrodite has the political lie been so egregious, so obviously false and so easily refuted. Before I go into too much detail about the lies told by this man let me share some facts with you first.
During the period of May 12 - June 7, 2011, the federal government took in 296 billion dollars. That’s less than a month when you look at it. Interest payments on our debt totaled 14 billion dollars during the same period. Basic math tells me that there’s about 282 billion dollars left over for all federal spending during that period. Despite what the President may say, there is more than enough money to cover both the debt and the day to day operational costs of the federal government. The government takes in more than 2 trillion dollars in revenue annually even with the “low” tax rates that we currently enjoy. Sorry Mr. President, but math can be a bitch sometimes. Now, I’m not a degreed economist but I can add and subtract like the wind.
What the President is doing can only be termed economic terrorism. The truly disgusting part is that he’s doing it to senior citizens. He’s lying to the least among us as a means to an end. The end is tax increases on anyone making more than $250,000 a year and he’s willing to look your grandmother in the eye and tell her that her monthly check is in doubt to get what he wants. He’s more like a petulant child being told no so he’s going to hold his breath until he gets his way. The trouble is, too many people would believe him because most of them don’t think anyone would tell a lie that big and expect us to believe it. Still others would believe because they have no understanding of how money works in the federal government.
Let me ask another pertinent question. If Obama couldn’t get a tax hike done during the 2 years he controlled the White House and the Congress, why does he now expect Republicans to hand him their certain doom and his imminent reelection now? If raising taxes back in December of last year was so potentially injurious to the economy as to be out of the question, why would he think it’s a good idea now? Is the economy any better? Are the unemployment numbers any lower now as opposed to then. Not really. He’s insisting on tax hikes now only as a way to shatter the confidence that the republican base has in it’s new members in the House and Senate which he knows will ultimately hand him a victory in 2012. Not only his but a victory in the House as well. If Boehner or McConnell cave on the issue of tax increases they can kiss any hope for a majority in either house goodbye for at least 4 more years. Let’s read that quote one more time:
“I cannot guarantee that those checks go out…if we haven’t resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be money in the coffers to do it.”
Are we really supposed to believe that he would allow senior’s checks to stop before he’d consider shutting something nonessential off first? He does, after all, have the power to designate what gets paid and what doesn’t in the event the debt ceiling isn’t raised. The country would still be able to pay it’s bills for quite a few months before the effects of our current spending and taxation levels made it impossible to stay above water. I ran into a similar problem with my own personal “economy” recently due to increased healthcare costs and rising food and fuel prices. I’ll set the scenario and then let you judge who is the better economist, Obama or me.
Within the last few months, my hours at work had been reduced slightly due to what we call the “seasonal slowdown” It happens every year but with the economy the way it is, I found myself spending more on things like healthcare and food. Part of my own personal economy was unemployed so revenues had taken a dip accordingly. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? I sat down with my Treasury Secretary, my wife, and asked for ways to boost revenues or reduce spending. She came up with several very good ideas and we set about implementing them to prevent reaching our own “debt ceiling” and seeing our economy collapse. We looked at discretionary items that we could cut back on until the revenue crisis passed and came to the conclusion that there were several things that we spent too much money on and could ill afford to continue like…our addiction to cable TV and our DVR. We restructured our healthcare plan to reflect our actual needs and decided to forego the fancy cell phones and home phone plan we had always had. We got a Magic Jack as a gift and our cost for home phone dropped from $40 per month to $2 per month. A few minor cuts later and after looking at the balance sheet, our current revenue far exceeded our monthly demands. As I said, I’m not a degreed economic professional but even I know when I can and can’t raise revenue(taxes) and when and where I can cut out the pork spending to achieve the same net effect. By cutting the fat from my budget, I have effectively increased my revenue stream.
Is the President not smart enough to see this? Or is he just so inured with the idea of taxing the evil rich that he simply will not see how easy it is to trim the fat? The Federal Government spends more than $300,000 every year to study the effects of marijuana on monkeys during their menstrual cycles. Is that more important than paying social security benefits? We annually spend more than 1 million dollars to study the effects of mercury on fish and this is somehow more important than sending checks out to our disabled veterans?
That’s why I find his lie about checks not going out to be so offensive. First and foremost he’s using the politics of fear in such a way as to needlessly frighten millions upon millions of senior citizens, like my mother. Secondly, he’s insulting the intelligence of those of us who can actually add and subtract.
I am smarter than the President. I am also smarter than everyone at MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times and NPR. I am in fact, smarter than Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist and I have just proven it. Well, I’m either smarter than all those vaunted denizens of the media…or I am simply telling the truth where they are not.
You be the judge.
On Our Behalf
Let me first preface this little missive by stating categorically and for the record that I am NOT a constitutional scholar, a constitutional lawyer or a constitutional expert. I'm what would be more probably called a constitutional maven, aficionado...or more simply...an admirer. It is believed by most people who understand it to be the most brilliant declaration of human rights ever penned by the hands of men. It made clear that freedom was the natural state of men on Earth and that that freedom was bestowed not by other men, but by a creator whose intention was that all men would live free regardless of race, creed or religious belief.
I've viewed this document with my own eyes as well as the Declaration of Independence in the National Archives. It was a strange set of events that led me to the spot where those documents were housed but that is another story for another day. Long story short, I convinced my former wife to take our annual anniversary trip to Washington D.C. in November so that I might stand on the steps of the Supreme Court like some groupie trying to get Antonin Scalia's autograph. I can be very persuasive it seems. Having been a history buff since high school, a trip to DC was like going to Disneyland to me. I wanted to see it all but I wanted the trip to culminate with a trip to the National Archives to see the founding documents.
I bought the replicas of the Constitution and Declaration in the gift shop and proudly displayed them in my den back at home. I felt a sense of pride as an American for having journeyed to DC to experience what many never do. I felt prouder still to have been born in the country that essentially set the entire world free with it’s founding. Freedom is not a uniquely American thing really. It is what the entire world should be but is not.
In recent weeks, there has been a lot of talk about our constitution and what it means to modern men. The rise of the Tea Party has brought our need to adhere to it more strongly to the fore but there are always voices on he other side who seek to cast aspersions on it and call it a dry, dusty document with little meaning in today’s world. Most on the right see the constitution as a starting point for all discussions on policy and procedure, to be followed closely with precious little interpretation unless by the high court. Some on the left, however, see the constitution as an impediment to social change, as a roadblock to be skirted around at every turn. President Obama described the constitution this way:
“It’s a charter of negative liberties. It says what the federal and state governments can’t do to you but it doesn’t say what the government MUST do on your behalf.”
(emphasis mine)
As one who actually is a constitutional scholar, Mr. Obama should understand that that was the whole point of the constitution. It was to provide a limit on the power of government. It is a charter of negative liberties to one who sees the government as all powerful. It’s a charter of positive liberties to those of us who see it as a weapon against a tyrannical government seeking to do what MUST be done on our behalf. Never has there been a more slippery slope than allowing government to decide what must be done on our behalf. If mandating an American to buy health insurance MUST be done, what lies in store next? How deep does that rabbit hole go before we discover that we have no rights anymore? Let’s play a little game and see how it turns out.
Problem: Fatty foods cause obesity and health problems later in life. Some people will not change their eating habits though.
Solution: Government MUST step in to disallow the consumption of fatty foods. Either through taxing the food itself at a much higher rate or disallowing medical care based on diet choices.
Problem: Modern life dictates the need for ever growing energy needs and consumption. Some people will not change their behavior though.
Solution: Government MUST step in and force Americans to lower their energy requirements through higher costs or less access to usage.
At this point some of you have decided that I may be getting a little paranoid but ask yourself, when was the last time you saw an incandescent light bulb on the shelf of a Home Depot? The death of Edison’s brilliant invention at the hands of well meaning but poorly misguided government bureaucrats is only the beginning though. That too, is a story for another day however.
What prompted this note was a story I read recently in Time magazine titled “One Document: Under Siege” by managing editor Richard Stengel. In it, Mr. Stengel makes clear that the constitution is merely a blueprint. According to him, the Founders saw the constitution “as a set of principles, not a code of law.”
Is the constitution not the foundation upon which all law and the ability to govern is held up? Without a constitution, there is no law, no just governance and no liberty for the people. Liberty and freedom do not come from the constitution any more than they come from government. Freedom is bestowed at birth by virtue of birth itself. No man can make another man free. Men can only take freedoms away from other men. The constitution makes certain that men can be governed by other men but only so long as all men adhere to a set of laws and principles.
Stengel goes on to talk about the “kinetic military action” in Libya and the President’s apparent disregard of the War Powers Act and describes it this way:
“The War Powers Resolution is a check on presidential power, but the President seeks to balance this by, well, ignoring it. That’s not unconstitutional; that’s how our system works.”
Really? The President can choose to ignore the constitution when it suits a political or other goal? I wonder if Mr. Stengel would be so flippant if it were the first amendment being ignored and his paper was shut down. He is right in one respect though. This President, more than any other, has chosen to ignore the constitution in a wide variety of cases and each time he does it, he weakens the document irreparably.
Obamacare aside, flouting the War Powers Resolution is perhaps the most grave abuse of presidential power. There have been three Presidents who have abused the War Powers Resolution in modern times; Harry Truman in Korea, that wasn’t a war, that was a police action…sound familiar? ; Bill Clinton in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo and most recently, by Barack Obama in Libya.
So, from it’s ratification in 1789 to 1950, every president, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the rest, Polk, they all went to Congress either for authorization or a declaration. That is until Democrat Presidents’ saw it as an obstacle to be avoided. The resolution allows the President to repel sudden attacks, e.g. the attack on Pearl Harbor or 9/11, but in any other case, only Congress has the power to declare hostilities on another nation.
President Bush spent more than a year seeking approval to invade Iraq to oust a vicious dictator. It was a year of listening to Democrats call his request a rush to judgment and not in the best interests of the country but strangely, I hear none of those cries from the left about Libya. What national interest is served with military action there? The left’s argument for action there is eerily similar to Bush’ arguments for invading Iraq. There’s a bad man there who abuses and harms his people and he must be removed. The main and very important difference is that President Bush made his case to Congress until he got approval and THEN he acted. Not as the “cowboy” he was called and certainly not unilaterally as Obama has done. Hell, Obama wasn’t even in the country when he authorized the use of force in Libya.
For those of you about to say that the UN or NATO initiated this action, the constitution also makes plain that no treaty, charter or other agreement between nations can supersede the power of the Congress to declare war.
I’ve strayed a bit from the Time article and from my point so let’s return.
In what can only be described as extreme short term memory loss, Mr. Stengel then proceeds to tell the reader whether America “defaults on our national debt is not only reckless; it’s probably unconstitutional.”
I see now. I think I understand how this works after all. The constitution should only be adhered to strictly depending on your party affiliation and who’s in the White House.
Recently I’ve heard everyone from Fareed Zakaria to Chris Mathews and Ed Schultz calling the constitution outdated, almost irrelevant and in desperate need of an overhaul.
Well, there is also a well defined process by which changes can be made to the constitution but in modern times, that process is too complicated to be bothered with so we’ll just let the courts do it instead. We’ll appoint activist judges who also see the constitution as a document that has fallen behind the times and must be ignored so that government can do what it MUST do…on our behalf.
I've viewed this document with my own eyes as well as the Declaration of Independence in the National Archives. It was a strange set of events that led me to the spot where those documents were housed but that is another story for another day. Long story short, I convinced my former wife to take our annual anniversary trip to Washington D.C. in November so that I might stand on the steps of the Supreme Court like some groupie trying to get Antonin Scalia's autograph. I can be very persuasive it seems. Having been a history buff since high school, a trip to DC was like going to Disneyland to me. I wanted to see it all but I wanted the trip to culminate with a trip to the National Archives to see the founding documents.
I bought the replicas of the Constitution and Declaration in the gift shop and proudly displayed them in my den back at home. I felt a sense of pride as an American for having journeyed to DC to experience what many never do. I felt prouder still to have been born in the country that essentially set the entire world free with it’s founding. Freedom is not a uniquely American thing really. It is what the entire world should be but is not.
In recent weeks, there has been a lot of talk about our constitution and what it means to modern men. The rise of the Tea Party has brought our need to adhere to it more strongly to the fore but there are always voices on he other side who seek to cast aspersions on it and call it a dry, dusty document with little meaning in today’s world. Most on the right see the constitution as a starting point for all discussions on policy and procedure, to be followed closely with precious little interpretation unless by the high court. Some on the left, however, see the constitution as an impediment to social change, as a roadblock to be skirted around at every turn. President Obama described the constitution this way:
“It’s a charter of negative liberties. It says what the federal and state governments can’t do to you but it doesn’t say what the government MUST do on your behalf.”
(emphasis mine)
As one who actually is a constitutional scholar, Mr. Obama should understand that that was the whole point of the constitution. It was to provide a limit on the power of government. It is a charter of negative liberties to one who sees the government as all powerful. It’s a charter of positive liberties to those of us who see it as a weapon against a tyrannical government seeking to do what MUST be done on our behalf. Never has there been a more slippery slope than allowing government to decide what must be done on our behalf. If mandating an American to buy health insurance MUST be done, what lies in store next? How deep does that rabbit hole go before we discover that we have no rights anymore? Let’s play a little game and see how it turns out.
Problem: Fatty foods cause obesity and health problems later in life. Some people will not change their eating habits though.
Solution: Government MUST step in to disallow the consumption of fatty foods. Either through taxing the food itself at a much higher rate or disallowing medical care based on diet choices.
Problem: Modern life dictates the need for ever growing energy needs and consumption. Some people will not change their behavior though.
Solution: Government MUST step in and force Americans to lower their energy requirements through higher costs or less access to usage.
At this point some of you have decided that I may be getting a little paranoid but ask yourself, when was the last time you saw an incandescent light bulb on the shelf of a Home Depot? The death of Edison’s brilliant invention at the hands of well meaning but poorly misguided government bureaucrats is only the beginning though. That too, is a story for another day however.
What prompted this note was a story I read recently in Time magazine titled “One Document: Under Siege” by managing editor Richard Stengel. In it, Mr. Stengel makes clear that the constitution is merely a blueprint. According to him, the Founders saw the constitution “as a set of principles, not a code of law.”
Is the constitution not the foundation upon which all law and the ability to govern is held up? Without a constitution, there is no law, no just governance and no liberty for the people. Liberty and freedom do not come from the constitution any more than they come from government. Freedom is bestowed at birth by virtue of birth itself. No man can make another man free. Men can only take freedoms away from other men. The constitution makes certain that men can be governed by other men but only so long as all men adhere to a set of laws and principles.
Stengel goes on to talk about the “kinetic military action” in Libya and the President’s apparent disregard of the War Powers Act and describes it this way:
“The War Powers Resolution is a check on presidential power, but the President seeks to balance this by, well, ignoring it. That’s not unconstitutional; that’s how our system works.”
Really? The President can choose to ignore the constitution when it suits a political or other goal? I wonder if Mr. Stengel would be so flippant if it were the first amendment being ignored and his paper was shut down. He is right in one respect though. This President, more than any other, has chosen to ignore the constitution in a wide variety of cases and each time he does it, he weakens the document irreparably.
Obamacare aside, flouting the War Powers Resolution is perhaps the most grave abuse of presidential power. There have been three Presidents who have abused the War Powers Resolution in modern times; Harry Truman in Korea, that wasn’t a war, that was a police action…sound familiar? ; Bill Clinton in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo and most recently, by Barack Obama in Libya.
So, from it’s ratification in 1789 to 1950, every president, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the rest, Polk, they all went to Congress either for authorization or a declaration. That is until Democrat Presidents’ saw it as an obstacle to be avoided. The resolution allows the President to repel sudden attacks, e.g. the attack on Pearl Harbor or 9/11, but in any other case, only Congress has the power to declare hostilities on another nation.
President Bush spent more than a year seeking approval to invade Iraq to oust a vicious dictator. It was a year of listening to Democrats call his request a rush to judgment and not in the best interests of the country but strangely, I hear none of those cries from the left about Libya. What national interest is served with military action there? The left’s argument for action there is eerily similar to Bush’ arguments for invading Iraq. There’s a bad man there who abuses and harms his people and he must be removed. The main and very important difference is that President Bush made his case to Congress until he got approval and THEN he acted. Not as the “cowboy” he was called and certainly not unilaterally as Obama has done. Hell, Obama wasn’t even in the country when he authorized the use of force in Libya.
For those of you about to say that the UN or NATO initiated this action, the constitution also makes plain that no treaty, charter or other agreement between nations can supersede the power of the Congress to declare war.
I’ve strayed a bit from the Time article and from my point so let’s return.
In what can only be described as extreme short term memory loss, Mr. Stengel then proceeds to tell the reader whether America “defaults on our national debt is not only reckless; it’s probably unconstitutional.”
I see now. I think I understand how this works after all. The constitution should only be adhered to strictly depending on your party affiliation and who’s in the White House.
Recently I’ve heard everyone from Fareed Zakaria to Chris Mathews and Ed Schultz calling the constitution outdated, almost irrelevant and in desperate need of an overhaul.
Well, there is also a well defined process by which changes can be made to the constitution but in modern times, that process is too complicated to be bothered with so we’ll just let the courts do it instead. We’ll appoint activist judges who also see the constitution as a document that has fallen behind the times and must be ignored so that government can do what it MUST do…on our behalf.
AMNESTY NOW!
The Pacific northwest has been a breeding ground for liberal lunacy for many years, so what I’m about to tell you now may not come as a surprise. We all remember the plight of the northern spotted owl in Oregon back in the early nineties, right? The poor creature had been pushed to the point of extinction by the overly aggressive development of mankind and was placed on the endangered species list. All commercial logging was halted in an area rich with timber and hundreds of jobs were lost in the local timber industry as well as an economic stagnation due to those jobs disappearing. The radical greenies and the government then set about bringing the poor bird back from the brink.
It was a cause you could really get behind and the bird soon became the symbol for the conservation movement as it railed against the never ceasing demands of human industry.
Well, fast forward to today and that majestic bird is once again under attack from an aggressive species that seeks to force it from it’s protected territory The attack isn’t coming from who you think it is though. It’s coming from another species of owl, the barred owl, that is better suited to the environment, able to nest in a wider area and has a diet that includes much that the northern spotted owl will not touch. Also, the barred owl is not a outside species introduced to the environment, it’s native to the pacific northwest area to begin with. The two species have coexisted alongside each other for hundreds of years but the barred owl proved to be the stronger of the two.
In simple terms, the barred owl is a hardier species more aptly suited to the environment and thus, is pushing the spotted owl down the evolutionary ladder and back to the brink of extinction. This is natural selection at it’s finest. This is not man encroaching on yet another defenseless animal and destroying it’s habitat, this is the way of nature. When nature selects a species for extinction, there is no Supreme Court appeal process. There is no legislation or “feel good” policy that can deny the inevitable. When you are selected for extinction, that’s it. Ask the dinosaurs how they fared in the “natural selection lawsuit”.
I read this story with gusto for two reasons. First and most importantly, it points out the folly of the green movement when it seeks to limit man’s progress for the sake of an animal that will die out anyway, and secondly because it brought to mind another issue that once again rears it’s ugly head in our pre-election season.
Immigration.
Yes, I said immigration. How do the two link you might ask? I’m glad you asked. Let me expound on my point and you will see the wisdom of this connection.
Let’s put this in terms that everyone can understand.
The barred owl just wants to come into the spotted owl’s land and raise it’s little owl family. It just wants a better way of life and besides, it’s just there to do the job the spotted owls won’t do. Why should some imaginary boundary keep the barred owl out? After all, does the spotted owl own the land in which it resides? No, I say. The earth belongs to no one species alone and I say we should immediately pass legislation providing immunity for all the barred owls so that they can stay. They’ve been there so long, they don’t know any other land. The term “anchor egg” has been bandied about by the spotted owls, racists that they are, and this must stop.
Oh yes, what are they going to do about the barred owls to further protect the spotted ones?
They’re going to hunt and KILL them for heavens sake. Thousands upon thousands of birds will be slaughtered mercilessly every year to control their breeding and encroachment. This is simply barbaric, I tell you. Look, we can’t simply deport every barred owl, that would be far too costly so I say instead that we offer amnesty and bring the noble barred owl out of the shadows. Free to pursue the American Owl dream, to live in the freest territory on Earth
Besides, it IS the backbone of the environment of the Pacific Northwest…isn’t it?
It was a cause you could really get behind and the bird soon became the symbol for the conservation movement as it railed against the never ceasing demands of human industry.
Well, fast forward to today and that majestic bird is once again under attack from an aggressive species that seeks to force it from it’s protected territory The attack isn’t coming from who you think it is though. It’s coming from another species of owl, the barred owl, that is better suited to the environment, able to nest in a wider area and has a diet that includes much that the northern spotted owl will not touch. Also, the barred owl is not a outside species introduced to the environment, it’s native to the pacific northwest area to begin with. The two species have coexisted alongside each other for hundreds of years but the barred owl proved to be the stronger of the two.
In simple terms, the barred owl is a hardier species more aptly suited to the environment and thus, is pushing the spotted owl down the evolutionary ladder and back to the brink of extinction. This is natural selection at it’s finest. This is not man encroaching on yet another defenseless animal and destroying it’s habitat, this is the way of nature. When nature selects a species for extinction, there is no Supreme Court appeal process. There is no legislation or “feel good” policy that can deny the inevitable. When you are selected for extinction, that’s it. Ask the dinosaurs how they fared in the “natural selection lawsuit”.
I read this story with gusto for two reasons. First and most importantly, it points out the folly of the green movement when it seeks to limit man’s progress for the sake of an animal that will die out anyway, and secondly because it brought to mind another issue that once again rears it’s ugly head in our pre-election season.
Immigration.
Yes, I said immigration. How do the two link you might ask? I’m glad you asked. Let me expound on my point and you will see the wisdom of this connection.
Let’s put this in terms that everyone can understand.
The barred owl just wants to come into the spotted owl’s land and raise it’s little owl family. It just wants a better way of life and besides, it’s just there to do the job the spotted owls won’t do. Why should some imaginary boundary keep the barred owl out? After all, does the spotted owl own the land in which it resides? No, I say. The earth belongs to no one species alone and I say we should immediately pass legislation providing immunity for all the barred owls so that they can stay. They’ve been there so long, they don’t know any other land. The term “anchor egg” has been bandied about by the spotted owls, racists that they are, and this must stop.
Oh yes, what are they going to do about the barred owls to further protect the spotted ones?
They’re going to hunt and KILL them for heavens sake. Thousands upon thousands of birds will be slaughtered mercilessly every year to control their breeding and encroachment. This is simply barbaric, I tell you. Look, we can’t simply deport every barred owl, that would be far too costly so I say instead that we offer amnesty and bring the noble barred owl out of the shadows. Free to pursue the American Owl dream, to live in the freest territory on Earth
Besides, it IS the backbone of the environment of the Pacific Northwest…isn’t it?
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