Sunday, May 02, 2010

It's always someone else's fault.

First it was Bill Clinton saying it, and now it's Barack Obama...

In a blunt caution to political friend and foe, President Barack Obama said Saturday that partisan rants and name-calling under the guise of legitimate discourse pose a serious danger to America's democracy, and may incite "extreme elements" to violence.
Fuck him. Fuck him right in his arugula-munching ear. Those extreme elements are in their own damn echo chamber and they will just have to be held responsible for their own shit. I only speak for myself here, but I will be damned if I am held responsible for acts that are not my own. This is nothing more than Chicago-style thuggery dressed up in the flowery rhetoric that empty suit's so famous for.

And how about that straw man? Who, pray tell, is saying that all government is inherently bad? I don't see the tea partiers clamoring for no government, just smaller government. I don't see them calling for the disbanding of the military or anything else authorized by the Constitution. (Which, of course, brings another thing to mind -- it's not government agencies that build and maintain those roads. And what Constitutionally-authorized role does government have in funding those researchers?)

As for government being painted as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, yeah, well, people started doing that long before 2009. Why in the hell did the Constitution put so many limits on it? Because the people who wrote that document knew that government as an institution was not a benevolent entity. Hell, they had just fought a menacing, threatening foreign entity! Of course one could argue the government we have now is different, but I don't see how, considering the people who purport to represent us in Washington spend our money like there's no tomorrow on things it never should have been spent on.

With that in mind, ponder these words from Thomas Jefferson:

"This is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering... And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."

As for the vaunted democracy...

"Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death."--James Madison

We have the public debt now, and a shitload of it, thanks to the democracy championed by Dear Leader. The taxation's here too. How long till the wretchedness and oppression? And as for those opposing ideas? Heard 'em a thousand times, found 'em to be lacking very single time. What now?