Mark Alexander really let loose with yesterdays column. When will all eyes be opened as they are at the Patriot Post. (See sidebar)
Alexander’s Essay – December 17, 2009
The Time Has Come
“It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth — and listen to the song of that syren, till she transforms us into beasts. … Are we disposed to be of the number of those, who having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not?” –Patrick Henry
The 2008 presidential election was much more than a referendum on the two candidates; it was a referendum on the ability of a majority of Americans voters to discern between one candidate who possessed the character and integrity of a statesman, and one who did not.
A year ago, a majority of our countrymen were hoodwinked into electing a charlatan with dubious credentials to the highest constitutional office in the land. Since then, millions of Americans who had become complacent about the Leftist threat to our liberty have begun to realize that our Constitution is now suffering an unprecedented assault.
There were those of us who realized in 2004 — back when Teddy Kennedy and John Kerry let him take center stage at the Democrat National Convention — that Barack Hussein Obama was a Marxist. Nonetheless, too many of our countrymen were lulled into believing that no leftist politico with such abhorrent extra-constitutional views on the role of government could rise to be president of the United States.
The awakening that has occurred since November of ’08 is like nothing I have witnessed since the first election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980. After the economic and foreign policy disasters created by the Carter administration, Americans were stirred to action. Yes, the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 resulted in a conservative takeover of the House two years later, but Clinton was far more moderate than Obama, and his election didn’t inspire millions of Americans to arm themselves for the first time.
That Obama’s election inspired a wave of conservative activism is good news.
The great news is that since last November, millions of Americans have joined our ranks.
And the momentum continues unabated.
I knew we were turning a corner a few months back, when an establishment Republican, typical of most such Republicans, told me that Obama’s health care proposal “amounts to socialism.” This same fellow told me a year earlier that calling Obama a Socialist was just too severe. When I reminded him of his earlier admonishment, he said simply, “My eyes are now open.”
If Barack Obama has given us one thing of value, it is the opportunity to clearly discern between Left and Right, between rule of men and Rule of Law. He is the quintessential socialist, and his domestic and foreign policies present a contrast between tyranny and liberty that has rarely been so apparent. Many who have been hitherto reluctant to rise on behalf of liberty or have been too comfortable to be concerned by such conflict, are now making an ever-louder stand.
Benjamin Franklin aptly noted, “They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Indeed.
Obama is the personification of Leftist philosophy and dogma, and in a turn of irony, for the clarity he has provided to that end we owe him a debt of gratitude.
Despite the fact that the Leftists in media and academia have had a stranglehold on public opinion, seating one of their own as president, which they believe is a great prize, may well be their undoing.
The once noble Democrat Party is now led by those who have turned the wisdom of their iconic leaders upside down.
Then: “My fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” –John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 1961
Now: “Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for you.”
Then: “I have a dream that my children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” –Martin Luther King, Address from the Lincoln Memorial, 1963
Now: “I have a dream that my children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the content of their character but by the color of their skin.”
Today, Democrat Party Leftists deride the notion of individual rights. Instead, they advocate the supplanting of individual liberty with statism.
They promote the notion of a living constitution rather than the authentic Constitution our Founders established.
They despise free enterprise and advocate socialist redistribution of wealth, the ultimate goal of which is to render all people equally poor and dependent upon the state.
They loathe our military and our national sovereignty, and they propose to replace it with treaties that establish supranational governmental legal and policing authorities.
They detest traditional American values, and they support all manner of behavior resulting in social entropy.
Being debated right now is whether an additional 17 percent of the U.S. economy is going to be nationalized under ObamaCare, and whether the rest of the economy is going to be shackled by cap-and-trade taxes in addition to a plethora of other job-eliminating taxes on private sector employers.
Would it surprise you to know that, while Democrat impositions on lending practices are largely responsible for the fact that millions of Americans are now out of work, the number of government “workers” making over $100,000 per year has increased 30 percent since the beginning of the current recession? There are more than 10,000 bureaucrats earning more than $150,000 annually, and the average federal salary is $71,206, not including generous government benefits, while the average private sector salary is $40,331.
Obama and his Democrat Congress have endowed future generations, unless soon reversed, not with liberty but with historically unprecedented levels of debt, which will enslave them to hyperinflation.
Conservatives and liberals can argue various policy points ad nauseam, but the question Americans are asking in greater numbers is this: Are we a nation governed by Rule of Law or the contemporaneous opinions of men?
History provides us with repeated evidence that the terminus of nations that are governed by men rather than laws is tyranny. In the last century alone, hundreds of millions have been enslaved under statist dictators such as Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Mao, Kruschev, Pol Pot, Ho Chi, Idi Amin, Castro, Hussein, Mugabe, Kim Jong-Il, Chavez, Hu Jintao and others. Who might be next?
Surely not us?
Obama has clearly delineated the difference between individual rights and statism, between free enterprise and socialism.
Alexander Hamilton said, “In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend.”
Today, more and more Americans are returning to the core principles upon which our nation was founded, which made it the freest and most productive in history. There is a renewed commitment to support and defend Essential Liberty.
John Adams wrote: “Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions are the ‘latent spark’ … If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?”
I believe that a supermajority of us are fully capable of understanding the truth, if given the right information and opportunity.
As Thomas Paine noted, “Such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.”
Of course, Barack Obama and his liberal lawmaking brethren have done us great harm this past year, and it may take several election cycles, or a revolution, to turn that around. But, the fields are being plowed and seeds sown.
Ronald Reagan delivered an enduring challenge to conservatives entitled “A Time for Choosing“: “You and I are told we must choose between a left or right,” Reagan said, “but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man’s age-old dream — the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.”
Patriots, the time has come to choose.
Reagan also outlined a plan for “The New Republican Party,” stating, “The principles of conservatism are sound because they are based on what men and women have discovered through experience in not just one generation or a dozen, but in all the combined experience of mankind. When we conservatives say that we know something about political affairs, and that we know can be stated as principles, we are saying that the principles we hold dear are those that have been found, through experience, to be ultimately beneficial for individuals, for families, for communities and for nations — found through the often bitter testing of pain, or sacrifice and sorrow.”
If Republicans want to regain majority status, the RNC must purge those who have forsaken the first principles of conservatism for power. In their stead they must lift up those who are devoted to the Rule of Law and Essential Liberty, those who incorporate Reagan’s charge, and that of generations of Patriots before him. They must back real conservatives instead of arrogant pretenders (see Toomey v. Specter). Short of bold new leadership, what remains of the Republican Party will end up on the trash heap of political irrelevance.
Patriots take heart: Do not wither during these difficult times. For as George Washington advised, “We should never despair, our Situation before has been unpromising and has changed for the better, so I trust, it will again. If new difficulties arise, we must only put forth new Exertions and proportion our Efforts to the exigency of the times.”
Indeed, the next several years will be a vital test for Patriots and our countrymen. Let us choose to persevere, to make our cause that of all men, to make no peace with oppression.
In 1776, Peter Muhlenberg delivered a sermon, concluding, “There is a time for all things, a time to preach and a time to pray, but those times have passed away. There is a time to fight, and that time has now come.” He removed his clerical robes and set out to command the 8th Virginia Regiment of the Continental Army.
Patriots, we have great opportunity before us, and once again the time has come to fight for it.
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Mark Alexander
Publisher, PatriotPost.US
Conservative Libertarian Outpost 