For those of you over 70, how often did you hear the “f” word before Hollywood taught us that it was cool?  For 50 years, we have allowed the media and Hollywood to subvert values and mold irresponsible behavior.  Over the last 100 years we have allowed the federal government to impose more and more of its mandates on communities, mandates that undermine the institutions that instill good character: marriage, the family, and churches. We have lost community control of our educational system.  (I admit.  I was complicit.)  Our country is 17 trillion dollars in debt and we are adding 1.5 trillion in debt every year. And Obama thinks that failing to deal with climate change is the problem that will “betray our children and future generations”? Considering unfunded mandates, we are actually 70 trillion dollars in debt.  Our parents were remembered as the greatest generation.  How will we be remembered?

I was really impressed with Secretary Clinton’s opening remarks at the beginning of the senate hearing.  I thought, “I could vote for that woman.”  But then during the questioning period she said something that absolutely blew me away.  “What difference does it make if it was a riot or just a couple of guys wondering the street feeling like killing some Americans? What difference does it make?”  It makes a whole lot of difference.

She also said she knew immediately that it was a terrorist attack, so why, as the flag draped coffins were being unloaded, did she blame the video.  Why did the president blame the video?  What were they trying to hide?  

Why was the rescue mission called off?  We know a rescue mission was planned because the Ex-Navy Seal would never have endangered his life by painting the enemy compound with a laser if he didn’t think help was on the way. He gave away his position for no reason.  It was intentional suicide unless he thought help was in the air.

According to Admiral Lyons, the national security team watched and listened to the assault, but did nothing.  “We had very credible military resources within striking distance, a military base in Sicily, a C-130 gunship available, and a fully equipped special forces unit prepositioned and waiting.” They were ready to leap at the opportunity, but they were told to stand down, and after fighting for seven hours, four Americans were dead?

Who called off the rescue mission?  Admiral Lyons said, “Somebody high up in the administration made the decision that no assistance would be provided, and let our people be killed. The person who made that callous decision needs to be brought to light and held accountable.”

And then the next question:  Why?  Why did they choose to let them die?  What were they hiding? And why didn’t the Senators in that room not dare to ask the really hard questions?  Are they all complicit?

The Hillsdale College lecture on “The Roman Legacy” illustrates the extent to which our form of government was based on those features of government that made Rome great.  Our founders created a government of divided, carefully balanced powers; and they recognized the importance of personal virtue as well as the importance of religion in maintaining those virtues.

 There are basically three types of government, monarchy, the rule of one; aristocracy, the rule of few; and democracy, the rule of the many.  The government of Rome was a combination of all three, and our government was designed to reflect that balance, part aristocracy, part monarchy, and part democracy.  Their government was not the result of a constitution convention, or based on the ideas of a certain or a few men.  It was a government that resulted from political and compromise over many years,

 First were the Councils, two of them, the commanders, the administrators, in charge of law and order.  They served only one year and each of them had veto powers over the other.  Next was the senate made up of ex-councils or magistrates or retired generals.  They had the power of the purse and they served for life.  Their opinions had no legal standing.  Their edicts were phrased in the form of recommendations, but they were respected. 

 Then there were the popular assemblies, the populous, and the people.  They could declare war, ratify treaties.  They could make the councils account for their actions.  They came to the defense of the people against the power of the state.   And they had the power of veto over the council and of the senate. Only another of the three assemblies could overturn the veto of an assembly.  According to historians, they were “The fountain of honor and punishment.” The assemblies also elected the councils.

 Mixed government combined status, interest and rights, a regime that could project enormous power abroad.  Although complicated, it was a perfectly balanced constitutional order where no one had power over the other.  After their year of service, the council, the commander, would likely join the senate.   The senate was made up of the very seasoned ex-councils or military men.  The people respected the senate, but they had safeguards through the assemblies and could assert themselves when they felt there was something wrong. 

 At its height of power and influence, the whole people, both public and private, were even more heavily governed by their much lauded virtues that perhaps grew out of the ethic of farmers, working the land. First manliness: the willingness to do their duty.  A farmer would leave his plow at a moment’s notice and return to battle.  That’s what men do.  Second faithfulness: the willingness always to act in the public good.  Third “Mos Maiorum”: reverence for the custom of the ancestors.  Romans looked backwards toward the profound wisdom of the way their ancestors had done things 

 One of the most prestigious offices was that of the censor, ex-council who censored moral behavior that was so basic to the life of the republic. When the extravagances of the East began to consume the people, the censor passed laws to reign in the extravagant licentiousness that began to invade the populous.  Their aim was to keep their fellow Romans from getting soft.  Rome’s purging of all luxury and protecting manliness explains in large part their victory on the battlefield.

 Religion was also important to Romans.  Their scrupulous fear and awe of the Gods kept them in line.  They performed many rituals and ceremonies to placate Gods.  Their final virtue, Pietas, piety, was a composite virtue: devotion to duty, to god, to fathers and fatherland, love and affection mixed with reverence. 

 

Our founders, deeply schooled in the wisdom of their ancestors,  created a government of divided, carefully balanced powers; and they recognized that it would only work with a well educated, virtuous and god fearing citizenry.  Had we insisted on the office of the censor, perhaps we could have avoided the reality show trash that has inured us to evil.

Another of those "Gee, I should have posted this" finds.

 

Rush Limbaugh lambastes the left daily for what he considers disingenuously spinning his “I hope he fails” comment making it seem anti-American.  “If you hope the president fails, you’re hoping the country fails.”  According to Limbaugh, those on the left know full well that the reason he wants Obama to fail is that he wants his socialist agenda to fail.

Both our president and our vice-president scoff at the notion.  “Our policies are socialistic?  You’ve got to be kidding!” (Biden)  “When you suggested I was a socialist, I thought you were joking.” (Obama)   I responded physically to both those comments.  Something crawled up my spine.  Absolutely Orwellian.  Our country has been steadily on the path toward socialism since 1933, and the present administration has said openly that they see the present crisis as an opportunity to move their agenda forward.  Spreading the wealth?  Spending $800 billion dollars as a down payment on a federal health care system?  Incidentally, that’s more than we spent on both war Iraq wars.  Extending unemployment benefits?  Strengthening unions?

That kind of ad homien scoff  (Silly you! You’ve got to be kidding) is effective, however.   It simply avoids the argument which they both know they would lose hopelessly.  It’s a strategy concocted, I suppose, by James Carvill, the operative who has been working the back room for the Dems since before the Clinton era.  He was the one who, panicked by Bush’s popularity after 9/11, began immediately feeding politicians talking points to “destroy him at once” or they’d never reclaim the White House. You can be sure that Carville feeds talking points to every Democrat in Washington.

He is probably the one who has made certain that the liberals keeps repeating “the carnage of the last eight years,” hoping we’ll all blame Bush’s silly war for our economic problems.  They are educated people.  They know right well that our economic problems result from the fact that the chickens spawned by FDR’s new deal and LBJ’s War on poverty are coming home to roost. In 1955 entitlement spending totaled 12 per cent of the budget, in 1965, 30 percent, in 2008, 55 per cent.  As a percentage of the budget, discressionary spending, including military spending, has remained almost stable since 1965.  The per cent spent on entitlement spending has tripled.  The deficit rose sharply over the last few years largely because the boomers, that large group of wage earners who have been supporting the FDR and LBJ entitlements, are beginning to retire. You can be sure that every liberal in Washington is fully aware of this problem.

I have certainly benefited from that socialistic gamble.  Social security makes my “retirement” years quite comfortable and adequately looks after my disabled daughter.  An inexpensive supplemental insurance policy covers those Medicare gaps.   Farmers love being paid not to farm, especially those millionaire owners of American farms who live in France and Quebec and Saudi Arabia and Germany.  However, I do fear for my grandchildren, indeed, my great-grandchildren.  Mandatory government spending has increased by 769 per cent since1965, and the baby-boomers have just begun sucking at the federal teat.  We may not be as openly socialistic as Sweden or say Great Britain, but if Obama gets his way, we will be by 2012, and his recent stimulus package included every wet dream a socialist ever had.

Those rising costs would pose no problem if we could make the conservative give up their anti-government ideologies.  We can learn that much from European Socialism, countries that have achieved a kind of socialist utopia. Sweden is often seen as a model of a compassionate, healthy, caring country.  To support their socialist state they tax car purchases, for example, at 100 per cent of their cost, and that’s good, because the Swedes opt to ride bikes.  Good exercise and good for the environment. 

It is true that they have a 17 per cent unemployment rate. One has to consider how that rate is calculated.  Great Britain, for example, boasts an 8 percent unemployment rate, but according to The Mail, the officials don’t count the 8 million people classified as economically inactive, 21 per cent of the working-age population. I guess it’s great to live in a country willing to subsidize “discouraged workers,” those just not interested in finding a job.  I can’t say that I understand.  I’m 70 and I still work simply because it seems satisfying.  My siblings, all in their 70’s, also work.  I guess we’re still plagued by that silly Puritan ethic.  We simply convince ourselves that work is rewarding.  Or perhaps Phillip Hammond is right:  that that “21 per cent of the working age population in Great Britain represents a huge pool of wasted talent.”     

So why do liberals, knowing full well what our move toward socialism is costing our country, want to lead us down that path.  Power.  They learned in 1933 that if they put out a trough, we will feed at it, and the more of us they can get feeding at their troughs, the more power they have.  They keep building the troughs and pouring in the slop and we keep lapping it up.   

What puzzled me for a long time was why so many of our billionaires were supporting this madness?  Warren Buffet and George Soros are the ones most commonly linked to the radical left, but the list includes others: Hollywood producer Stephen Bing; Peter Lewis, chairman of Progressive Insurance Company; Herbert and Marion Sandler of Golden West Financial; Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs; Citigroup’s Robert Rubin; Edwin Janss, founder of the leftwing Janss Foundation; and Aris Anagnos, a Los Angeles real estate magnate and a rabid Marxist-Lenonist.  It’s important to note that none of these billionaires are directly involved in an enterprise that actually produces something.  Mostly they just play with money.  If they are simply committed to service to their fellow man, they certainly have the assets adequate to funding their charitable enterprises on their own.

 I have to conclude that charity is not their goal, so there must be another reason for their interest in promoting some form of a fascist-socialist-Leninist state. To Insure their power base?   

The content of this diatribe now veers toward one of those crazy conspiracy theories.  First a fact based question:  Why is it that 80 per cent of America’s very rich are self-made men and that 80 per cent of wealthy Europeans have inherited wealth?  Perhaps because socialism has managed to destroy the talent and initiative of “21 per cent of the working age population.”   Soros and his cohorts Bing,Sandler, Blankfein, Janss, and Anagnos are enjoying the power their wealth affords them and are probably  threatened by our talent and initiative, so they want to get us in the habit of feeding at federal the trough.

Now the really wild theory.  Could it be that our recent stock market collapse was created by those rich Marxists who, perhaps under cover of anonymous sources, pulled huge amounts of money out of the market to create a panic?  They have admitted openly that this decline is an opportunity to advance their agendas, that our system needs to be dismantled brick by brick, that the new order must be accomplished either by the power of persuasion or the persuasion of power.  Chilling, isn’t it?

We are missing the point.  The fact that taxes are too high or not high enough is not the point. The fact that our deficit is outrageous or is manageable is not the point.  Debt is only a symptom of the real problem.   We think that if we can put the right person in the driver’s seat, he or she can save the country from its woes.   Wrong.  Wrong.  Wrong. 

The founders knew one basic fact that makes all the differences.  We are imperfect beings who make mistakes; we stumble.  If we manage our own lives we can get up, “brush ourselves off, and start all over again.”  However, if we put our faith in another to manage our lives, all 300 million of us, and he stumbles we’re in for a rough ride. Thomas Jefferson said, “A constitution should be structured to permanently protect the people from the human frailties of their rulers.” 

 That’s why God confused the languages and disbursed the people when they built the Tower of Babel.  He didn’t want them consolidating power.  That’s why God didn’t want the Israelites to have kings.  He knows that power corrupts.  That’s why God wanted the Israelites to organize themselves into families and clans.  He knew that people can take care of themselves if left alone.  We were designed to be free, to walk our walk and stumble and learn and walk again with a “little help from our friends.”

Our Tower of Babel is our federal government.  We have built a leviathan to pay homage to.  Our founders set up a limited government to serve the people.   The egomaniacs in DC have lost their sense of humility.  They see themselves as Gods able to solve our problems, but their solutions are invariably toxic, creating more problems to be solved until we have this colossal tower of government that is not so much interested in protecting the interests of the citizenry as it is interested in making sure that the citizens serve the interest of the state.

Like the Israelites we have yielded to the will of an earthly king trusting that he’ll take care of us rather that remembering the lessons of the past.  Thomas Jefferson’s letters are filled with references to past histories. He understood what destroyed the great empires of the past, the Greeks, the Romans, the Anglos and the Saxons:  centralization of power, towers of Babel.  He said, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.  In vain would man…subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.”  

Repealing the 17th Amendment

I have resisted the early voting trend, having enjoyed the nostalgic notion of going to the polls on Election Day, but after the chaos of November 6, I agree with Mike Gorman. “Something’s gotta give.”  There’s got to be a better way.

I disagree however, with his suggestion to split the Electoral College to represent proportions of the total vote.  It’s one more step in the emasculation of the 10^th Amendment. The founders had studied history and recognized that other attempts at democracy had failed because pure democracies become “tyrannies of the majority” and eventually morph into totalitarian regimes. Our government was designed with complicated sets of checks and balances designed to prevent that.

Part of that design was the creation of a republic, a collection of sovereign states united under a federal government with very few and limited powers: to secure the peace and the blessings of liberty. In the 20^th century we have seen a continuous assault on state sovereignty beginning with the passage of the 17^th Amendment.

The two houses of congress were also a part of the checks and balances design. Members of the U.S. House of Representatives were to represent the will of the people and be elected by popular vote.   Senators were to be elected by the State Legislatures and so would be able to bring reason to the table.

In Federalist 49, Madison explains how The House would represent the passions of the people and the Senate would act as a check on those passions, be more deliberate, taking into considerations the problems of the whole. Senators, not reliant on popular vote, would not bend and sway to the winds of popular opinion and could take a more detached view of the issues coming before congress.   It was also thought that senators would prevent members of the house from dipping into the National treasury to buy votes.

The passage of the 17th Amendment destroyed that balance. The states have been reduced from being an equal partner with the Federal Government to being common lobbyists.  Senators too must run expensive election campaigns and, instead of checking the problem, they are now part of the problem. Special interests from all over the country get involved in bankrolling senatorial campaigns and senators no longer represent their states, but the passions of the whole.

Now here is the part I can’t really explain, but something in me says that if our electoral college vote were to be cast proportionally, that somehow exacerbates the problems of state sovereignty.  I don’t know if it’s possible, but what we need to do is draw back about 90 per cent of the power we have ceded to the federal government and retake our state sovereignty, county sovereignty, city sovereignty, neighborhood sovereignty, personal sovereignty. 

  Obama invested another $5 billion of our money to achieve his goal of having 1 million electric cars on U.S. roads by 2015. It makes me feel so good, warm and fuzzy all over to think that he cares so much about our environment. The first requirement of a good leader is that he shows us that he cares.

        Do you think he might know where we get the electricity to run the cars?   From burning coal!  From burning petroleum! From nuclear power plants!  I expect he does, but his friends like Al Gore have invested their fortunes in alternative energy industry, so he’s obliged to pay them off by throwing our tax dollars at them, indenturing our grandchildren to his grand legacy.

       He destroys the jobs of the coal miners, puts the kibosh on pipe lines and oil drilling, adds 1.5 trillion in new debt every year of his presidency, and we, we exult him, “our Lord and Savior, Obama.” We are such idiots to fall for such schmaltzy, emotionally driven policy.

           But, you’ve gotta praise him for stopping the military from waterboarding terrorists.  That was so inhumane.  It’s so much more humane to kill them with drones, and if a few non-militants of the population happen to be taken out as well, well, you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet.

          He’s ratcheting up the attacks in Pakistan, six already this year.  I wonder.  What is the psychological impact of the terrifying American death machines flying into your neighborhood and taking out your neighbors? Would the general population be more easily co-opted into anti-Western extremist groups? Do you think the Nobel committee might regret their hasty decision to give him the Peace Prize so early into his presidency?  Nope.  Norwegians have mush for brains, too.

James Sefcak is right.  Those stupid conservatives need to quit crabbing (Sore losers keep up Obama attacks, December 3, 2012).  All the president wants is 1.6 trillion in new taxes, a new stimulus package, and the right to lift the debt ceiling without congressional approval.

Good grief.  You know he’s going to watch out for us. He was a constitutional professor after all.  Ok, so he has made himself judge, jury, prosecutor, and executioner of anyone in the world he thinks is an enemy of the state. He’ll do us right.  Like Jamie Foxx says, he is our Lord and Savior. 

And quit your crabbing about Benghazi.  So the president told Susan Rice to lie.  He had to do it to secure the election.  Anyone would have done it.  Everybody lies when it’s necessary.  I was glad to see CBS ran a follow up on Watergate this morning.  Maybe that’ll get those jerks to quit harping about the guys who got killed.  After all you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

And for goodness sake quit picking on Susan Rice.   That's mean. She doesn’t know anything.  She just did as she was told. . We have to protect our little ladies from those racist rednecks.

Yeah.  Like I’m going to shut up?

Members of the media sneer at people who are concerned with the Islamic Brotherhood’s influence on Capital Hill, but the Egyptian magazine Rose El-Youssef bragged about the manner in which six Brotherhood operatives were able to influence American foreign policy.  Shawki listed six men, Arif Alikhan, the assistant secretary of Homeland Security for policy development; and Mohammed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. He also listed Rashad Hussain, the U.S. special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, as well as Salam al-Marayati, co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, Imam Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America and Eboo Patel, a member of President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships, all of whom are avowed jihadists. 

Written shortly after the massacre, but I forgot to post it.

You can’t watch the news these days without burning tears. Nothing could be worse than the slaughter of innocent children. I cannot fathom the world of pain in Newtown.

But the ensuing gun control hype brings me back to reality. When citizens are deprived of their right of self-defense you get the Katyn massacre, Mongolian massacres, Bleiburg and Foibe massacres the Ma'alot massacre, the Armenian massacre, and the many utopianism inspired massacres in the Soviet Union killing nearly 70 million.

Saddam Hussein slaughtered an average of 80,000 a year for each of the 23 years he was in power. Castro, 100,000; Idi Amin, 500 thousand. Pol Pot's slaughtered nearly 1/3 of his entire population.

The absolutely horrific wars of the 20^th century don’t seem so bad when you compare the 35 million left dead on the battlefield (J. David Singer COW Project) with the hundreds of millions killed by their own governments.

Think I’ll go out tomorrow and buy me a gun.

The American media were outraged, when after 9/11 Bush pushed through congress the original National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). And to a certain extent, we agreed.  Our collective argument:  “If you give up your freedoms for protection, you lose both.”   But now we are appalled that President Obama, through executive order, without consent of congress has granted the U.S. military the right to kidnap U.S. citizens, detain them indefinitely,  with no jury, no trial, no legal representation and no requirement that the government produce evidence. Our military cannot water board foreign terrorists but they can and did under Obama’s authorization, take out an American citizen abroad with drones.  This is all conducted completely outside the protection of law. And the media is silent