Saturday, October 5, 2013

This Is The Stuff Of Revolution

Source: Warning Signs
The Face of Tyranny
By Alan Caruba
The history of civilization dating back some five millennia is one of unrelenting tyranny, rapaciousness, arrogance, and stupidity. The players and the places changed, but the slaughter was unremitting, the suffering broken only by occasional brief periods of peace, good weather and crops. For most of the past, war, famine, and disease killed most people.

During the famous soliloquy of Hamlet, he contemplates taking his own life, saying “There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life--for who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law's delay, the insolence of office…”

This list of woes neatly sums up the times in which we live as Americans endure many of these same abuses from a President who seems to enjoy displaying his contempt for them. He has plunged the nation into the highest debt in its history, is using the government shutdown as a crisis to divert attention from recent failures, and is flirting with a national default that would create domestic and international havoc…all while blaming the Republicans, the real end game.

As an October 3rd Wall Street Journal editorial noted, however, “House GOP leaders also insist they don't want a default, and they've already passed a bill to prevent it—not that the media have paid any attention. First sponsored in 2011 by California Republican Tom McClintock and Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey, the Full Faith and Credit Act is essentially an insurance policy against miscalculation. Their bill certifies that U.S. sovereign debt will always be repaid, on time and in full.”

It is beginning to dawn on a lot of people that Barack Obama is the face of tryanny, a man for whom the Constitution, the democratic process and its need for compromise, exist only to be spurned.

Any President who is happy to preside over closing the White House to public tours, who authorizes placing barricades around Washington War Memorial that is normally open 24 hours a day as well as the Normandy, France D-Day cemetery where our soldiers are buried, is more than merely heartless, but represents a level of evil intent never before seen in anyone who has held that office.

The closing of the Normandy cemetery reminded me that history records that resistance to such tyrants has given rise to the rights of those they governed. The brother of England’s Richard the Lionhearted, John, had inherited the throne and through his incompetence in 1203 had lost Normandy, the last remaining possession in Western France the English had conquered.

The ill will that his barons felt, in part from the constant taxation John imposed, led them to renounce their allegiance to the crown of England. In 1215 they assembled at Runnymede, a water meadow on the Thames and presented John with the Magna Carta that spelled out their rights and those of all Englishmen, protecting them and their property against arbitrary arrest and confiscation without due process of law.

King John was actually fortunate. History records that rulers who acted ruthlessly were often assassinated or beheaded. It was commonplace.

The history of the United States records that the colonists, British subjects, had enjoyed self-rule for easily a century before the British crown, George III, seeking to replenish the treasury in lieu of having fought the French and Indian War in 1763 on behalf of the colonies, imposed the Stamp Act in 1765. It evoked such resistance that it was repealed and replaced a year later with the Townshend Acts that imposed taxes on paper, paint, glass and tea imported from England. They were followed by more resistance and led to an altercation on March 5, 1770 that killed a number of citizens and became known as the Boston Massacre.

For a list of what Americans had come to regard as usurpations of power by the king, one need only read the Declaration of Independence.

By then, the governing of the British empire had spawned a bureaucracy that was not only large, but “appallingly inefficient” noted historian Nathaniel Philbrick in his book, “Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, a Revolution.” After the Boston Tea Party, the king sent a flotilla to seal off Boston Harbor and increased the army in America. By then, George III was in no mood to negotiate.

President Obama has said he, too, does not intend to negotiate with the House of Representatives, constitutionally the body of government empowered to authorize all expenditures for the maintenance of the government.

The House has sent any number of proposed measures to keep the entire government funded, but has also expressed its wish to defund or delay the implementation of the Affordable Care Act which is widely unpopular. Against the protest of millions it was imposed solely by the Democratic Party when it controlled both houses of Congress.

Modern-day Americans have been enduring what many regard as acts of tyranny and have begun to regard the President as not merely incompetent, but bent on a course of action to destroy the nation. This is the stuff of revolution.

© Alan Caruba, 2013
_____________________________________________

Addendum To Matthew Slater's Will
compiled by Norman E. Hooben
_______________________________________

An open letter to President Obama

Dear President Obama,

You strike me as the sort of man who spends a lot of time staring at his own reflection. I wonder, what do you see when you gaze so admiringly at yourself? What image do you find in that mirror of yours? Let me guess: a graceful Greek god with a golden crown, draped in luxurious robes, perched on a giant, magnificent throne atop a mountain in the sky? You see a throng of angels singing your praises and masses of subservient peasants prostrated before you, trembling with fear and awe? You see a man who is more than a man, and a president who transcends the presidency; you see a historic figure of immortal importance?
Yeah, that’s what I thought, and I can’t blame you, Mr. President. By all accounts, you’ve always been an arrogant, haughty narcissist — and that was before you became president. Your supporters and your enemies may argue over whether you descended from heaven on the back of a Pegasus, or were birthed from the bowels of Hell to bring about a Biblical apocalypse, but they both agree on one thing: you are a figure of great significance and immense power. You are either the anti-Christ or the Second Coming, with no room for anything in-between. Surely, this talk might cause even a humble man to slip into a state of vanity and pride, so I can only imagine what it must do to a man such as yourself, already so aloof and so conceited.
That’s why I’m writing this letter. My impression of you is quite different, and it has only been solidified by your performance during this shutdown/Obamacare debate. I find you to be a very small man, Mr. President. Far from larger than life, you are petty, frivolous, pathetic; sneering and pompous but also trifling and narrow. I don’t mean to dismiss or underestimate the damage you have done to this nation — it has certainly been profound and lasting — but I want you to know that your legacy will not be one of grandeur and brilliance; it will be the legacy of a shameless, desperate bully. Both your opponents and your proponents hoist you up as a world leader with a grand vision, whether benevolent or malevolent. I, on the other hand, believe you have the vision of a temperamental two year old. You simply want to feel like you’re in control; you want to “win,” you want everybody in the room to pay attention to you, and you’ll stomp your feet and whine until you get your way. You govern like a coddled toddler; it’s inappropriate to pejoratively refer to you as a “dictator,” but only because it lends you a certain unwarranted credibility. I think you wish to be a dictator, but instead you’re just a bumbling bureaucrat; easily replaced and even more easily forgotten. You have the ethics of Genghis Khan, but the leadership skills of Michael Scott. This is why we are forced to witness the spectacle of, for instance, our president brazenly threatening to invade another nation for no reason, only to clumsily abandon the idea after being publicly spanked by Putin.
Your legacy, Mr. President, will be defined by small, shameful things, as your presidency has been primarily a succession of small, shameful things. The platitudes you spouted during your campaign — the theatrics, the pomp, the hype — have all faded. Replaced by the scheming partisan machinations that have come to define your tenure.

Every president has a moment that encapsulates their time in office; your moment, Mr. President, happened this week. Sure, future generations will look at you with mockery and scorn because of bigger scandals — Benghazi, the IRS targeting conservatives, Obamacare, the birth control mandate and your attacks on religious liberty, spying on journalists, arming terrorists overseas, Fast and Furious, the green energy scams, the bailouts, your support for infanticide, the billions you’ve given to the abortion industry, your cowardice in refusing to address the Gosnell murders, your reckless exploitation of the Zimmerman trial, the out of control deficit spending, your refusal to enforce immigration laws, the massive expansion of the Welfare State, the lies, the broken promises, etc — but I think, in an understated way, what you’ve done this week is a better microcosm of your entire reign.
I’m not just referring to the fact that you are peddling the lie that “Republicans” have “shutdown the government,” when, in fact, they have attempted to pass several bills that would fund the government. Mr. President, you tell these fables to the trained seals in the media and your voting base, but you know damn well that any American with a capacity for critical thought will roundly reject this absurd narrative. YOU have chosen to “shut down” the government because you have made Obamacare the ultimate priority. You have said, “Obamacare or nothing,” and then accused Republicans of being the “hostage takers.” They are holding the government hostage by trying to fund it? What a silly idea. But then, you are a silly, ridiculous president. Speaking of which, this takes us right to your defining moment: barricading memorials and monuments in a ploy to win an argument.
Comparatively insignificant when stacked up against your war crimes and constitutional infringements, but it is nonetheless an apt illustration. The Lincoln Memorial is just a giant statue. There isn’t any reason why people shouldn’t be able to look at a statue during a government shutdown. In past shutdowns, the memorials were open, with only the information centers closing down. The Lincoln Memorial has never been completely closed off from the public until now. You have decided to spend money to block and guard open-air monuments, when it would be cheaper, require less staff, and be less onerous to simply leave them be. Is this some sort of bizarre punitive measure against the American taxpayer?

Infamously, you even attempted to stop WW2 veterans from visiting the WW2 memorial. That memorial is mostly privately funded, and is open 24 hours a day. You SPENT MONEY to physically guard the monument from a group of elderly war veterans. This is truly unprecedented. We have had horrible presidents in the past, but none quite so shallow, cheap and contemptible. You tried to close down Mt. Vernon, which is privately funded, but had to settle for closing its parking lot — even though the parking lot requires no immediate on-going maintenance or surveillance from any federal workers. Did you have to shut down the Normandy cemetery and memorial? Are we saving money that way? I doubt it.
It’s the same game you played during the sequester, and it comes as no surprise to those of us who pay attention (which means it came as a surprise to a large number of people). Rather than leading like a statesman, you hide in the shadows; scheming, conniving, exploiting. You emerge only to make hyper-partisan speeches, with rhetoric best left to Democratic talking heads on afternoon cable news shows. Far from being a “new kind of politician” (as you were advertised), you are the most political politician this country has ever seen. You are political to your core, in your essence, at an atomic level, and so you are unable to offer any direction or clarity when the nation needs it most. Sometimes, Mr. President, the affairs of this nation require a man, not a politician, and it is during those times that you are especially useless. You don’t have any interest in fixing our present crisis because you’re too busy finding ways to keep a busload of 90 year old war veterans from looking at a memorial.
Closing down parks, monuments and memorials just to score political points is hardly your most insidious deed, but it’s certainly one of your pettiest. That’s why it stands, ironically, as a monument of its own. If we ever build a statue of you, Mr. President, you won’t be triumphantly holding a flaming torch like Lady Liberty, or standing authoritatively with a look of determination, like the MLK memorial. No, it will be a statue of you pulling the wings off of a fly, or spitting in someone’s orange juice. It will show you in your essence, as monuments are meant to do. It will show you as a petulant, skulking, juvenile bully. It will you show you as you are.
And we’ll make sure it’s always open, especially during a government shut down.

Sincerely,
Matt Walsh
_____________________________
 
The following by Storm'n Norm'n
_________
 

 
 

No comments: