House of Eratosthenes

The America that has flourished for more than two centuries is being quietly but steadily dismantled by the Obama administration, during the process of dealing with particular issues.
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When a President can ignore the plain language of duly passed laws, and substitute his own executive orders, then we no longer have “a government of laws, and not of men” but a President ruling by decree, like the dictator in some banana republic.
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ObamaCare imposes huge costs on some institutions, while the President’s arbitrary waivers exempt other institutions from having to pay those same costs. That is hardly the “equal protection of the laws,” promised by the 14th Amendment.

John Stuart Mill explained the dangers in that kind of government long ago: “A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement.”

I’m afraid that’s the vision: Vote in the guy who likes “us,” and “win,” over those other people who are trying to take our “rights” away…it’s rather ironic when you think about it. For generations, the rule of good manners has been, don’t discuss politics or religion, talk about sports instead. Here, after all the water has flowed under the bridge, we find our politics have been taken over by little people who seem to see all of life as some kind of a football game. Win. Beat. Rout. Trounce.

They babble away with incoherent but obligatory bromides about “level playing field” and “building a society that works for everybody.” But when pressed to give reasons why everyone else should do what they say, it always leads to some lecture about some hated person, or hated group, or class, which should rightfully not be deciding things…in any way at all…and has to be neutralized. The irony.

So I suppose it should not be surprising that these people vote for laws, the same way they vote for people — they do not come from a world in which one thing counts for as much as another. They’re voting on weights. If so-and-so won, then these people become more important than those people…and these laws become more important than those laws. And they are prisoners of such thinking, because if the other guy wins then, from out of nowhere, they conjure up this thought that they, and theirs, have been somehow diminished, and may be on the way toward extinction. “We offered our ideas and the electorate said no” is a thought that never penetrates the ol’ cranium.

Would a return to high school civics class fix this? Perhaps. Perhaps not. We will always have the ignorant. But the politician who panders to this, seems to me to be an avoidable pestilence; perhaps, therefore, a curable one.

Update: Jodi Miller gets it: At 0:54, “In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, President Obama said he doesn’t think anyone would suggest He’s tried to divide the country; at least, not anyone from the half of the country that matters.”

That’s a good way of summing it up.

[…] “Every Major’s Terrible” “Hot Girls in the Middle of Nowhere” “‘Issues’ or America?” Little Lies For Little People The “How Dare You Not Believe Blah Blah Blah” […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 08/30/2012 @ 13:53

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“‘Issues’ or America?”Sunday, August 26th, 2012

“‘Issues’ or America?”
Sunday, August 26th, 2012