Monday, January 21, 2013

Republicans: Obama's Power

By Douglas V. Gibbs

President Barack Obama is like no other liberal progressive democrat we've seen before.  Before he was inaugurated in 2009 conservatives recognized the danger to this country he posed.  Obama has not been interested taking actions beneficial to the economy, nor pulling the federal government back in the interest of moving us closer to the limiting principles that founded this nation.  In truth, today's Democrat, lead by people in line with Obama's hard left version of the liberal ideology, hates America as it was founded.  They are deconstructionists bent on changing the system, manipulating public opinion through the education system, the entertainment industry, and the media, and altering the United States at its very foundations.  Barack Obama has no interest in a better America as was envisioned by the Founding Fathers. His goal is for his legacy to be one that is not about America remaining a free country, but about being the first President in American history to finally do what Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson couldn't. . . make the United States of America a socialist country not just in line with what we are currently seeing in the struggling nations of the European Union, but in line with what we saw in the Eastern Bloc, behind the Iron Curtain.

The only opposition that has emerged against the concerted effort to invade the United States of America from within has been conservatism, embodied by the TEA Party, and a handful of representatives serving in the Grand Ol' Party.  As a whole, however, I don't believe the Republican Party can still get its mind wrapped around what we are up against.  The GOP does not understand who Barack Obama is, or what he wants to do to this country.

Statist philosophies like the ones festering through the Democrat Party are older than the entire history of this nation.  The goals of the hard left are denied by the perpetrators,  The conjurers of the political sorcery to bring down America will do anything to deny the charges by both those who seek to expose them, and those who have left the fold and claim to have once been a part of it.  The ultimate purpose is power, a power beyond the material bounty of riches, and a power beyond personal status within ones community.  The power of government drives these people.  The opportunity to become members of a ruling elite, leading a system that controls the very lives of individuals through a collective system of regulations and control, is the gold that these people seek.  They lust for power of a kind that is beyond having money, for the power itself has become the corrupting influence on those who seek it.

As Lord Acton said, "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

To establish themselves as the powerful ruling elite in America, Barack Obama, and his current crew of liberal democrats, are willing to do whatever it takes.  They are willing to further depress our economy, destroy jobs, slaughter the personal fortunes of the producers in this nation, fight wars, regulate lives, and destroy this nation as it was founded.  Your God-given rights are not sacred to these people.  Their morality is being pushed as superior to your own.  Only your misery serves their proclaimed greater good.

The liberal left is becoming successful at this push because more voters are dependent upon the government than ever before, providing a perpetual voting bloc, and those that are not yet enslaved by the government are not willing to accept the conclusion that these individuals would actually wish to create incredibly destructive acts against their fellow citizens for the sake of power, and creating a system where the government is involved in all of our personal decisions.

Today's liberal left operates on a philosophical foundation similar to the one that led France into their own bloody French Revolution.

During the dawn of America as a nation, in the Old World the worst tyrants were consolidationists, adhering to a philosophy of collectivism that was a stark contrast to the system of federalism and State Sovereignty that was emerging in the New World.  The rulers of Europe believed that all political power must be consolidated in the hands of the all-powerful government, and it was the responsibility of the people to trust the power of the centralized government.  The government claimed to be providing for the common good by serving the "general will."

James Madison saw differently, writing that "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."

Americans like Alexander Hamilton, and French philosopher Jean-Jacques Reousseau viewed government differently than Madison.  Their ideas supposed the existence of a "general will."  The general will is not necessarily expressed by the general public in any way but it is presumed to be known by the ruling elite.  The Statists believe that all aspects of your lives are subject to the general will, and if you refuse to obey it, the body politic has the obligation to restrain you for the common good.

This kind of view of government collides head on with what the Founding Fathers originally intended.  The philosophy that birthed the general will, and fuels the liberal democrats of today, is one that wishes to dissolve the American people into a homogeneous mass, abolish decentralization, and remove representative institutions (which explains the "Congress is broken" comment that Obama constantly makes).

The followers of Thomas Jefferson hated and feared the French Jacobin concept of a general will, as does today's TEA Party members, and more conservative members of the Republican Party.  The GOP may be largely ignorant of the danger we face in today's Democrat Party, but not all of them are completely clueless.

Freshman TEA Party Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has come out and said that Barack Obama is "high on his own power" with regard to the president's announced efforts on gun control.  "This is a president who has drunk the Kool-Aid."

"He is feeling right now high on his own power, and he is pushing on every front, on guns. And I think it's really sad to see the president of the United States exploiting the murder of children and using it to push his own extreme, anti-gun agenda. I think what the president is proposing and the gun control proposals that are coming from Democrats in the Senate are, number one, unconstitutional, and number two, they don't work. They're bad policy."

"I think he's going to pay a serious political price, and I think the price that's going to be paid on this is going to manifest in Senate races in 2014, in some red states," Cruz said. "And there have got to be some Democrats who are up for reelection in 2014 who are very, very nervous right now that President Obama is picking this fight."

Marco Rubio, a U.S. Senator from the State of Florida, says that Obama doesn't have the guts to admit he is fully opposed to the 2nd Amendment.

Rubio also said, "Let's remember what the impetus for all this was. It was this horrible tragedy in Connecticut, which, by the way, all of us were outraged by, all of us are sad about, and all of us would want to see never happen again. And by the own admission of the White House what they proposed today would do nothing to have prevented what happened in Connecticut, or Colorado before that, or any of these other places where this has occurred. The issue America faces is not guns; it's violence. I'm gonna let you in on a secret. I mean, the president is a liberal. He sees this as an opportunity to get some of these things done. This is what he's wanted to do his entire political career. He sees an opportunity to do it, and he's gonna utilize every rhetorical device to get to that point. I actually think the president -- and he just doesn't have the guts to admit it -- is not a believer in the Second Amendment, although he states that he is. If he wants to reform the Second Amendment, then have the guts to admit that."

Congressman Jeff Duncan of South Carolina has also been willing to fight for the Constitution, and I believe he may understand what we are up against when it comes to Barack Obama. He said a week ago, "The White House will announce their 'gun control' proposals tomorrow afternoon. I'm ready and prepared to rescind any executive order that President Obama might introduce that restricts our Constitutional rights. No President has the power to unilaterally make law. This is about a lot more than the second amendment, this is about freedom."

The Republican Party as a whole, I believe, is not fully prepared, or in full understanding, with what we are up against. . . but the battle is not over.  There are a few in the GOP that do get it.  The question is, "Are they enough to stop Obama's Power Grab, and the Democrat Party's goal to fundamentally transform this nation?"

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary

The Unseen Hand by A. Ralph Epperson, Tucson, AZ, Publius Press (1985)

Hamilton's Curse by Thomas J. DiLorenzo, New York, Three Rivers Press (2008)



No comments: