The Evil that Men Do

Fellow North Carolina blogger Randy Dye has more on the outrage perpetrated by Governor Bev Perdue this last week over at Randy's Right. In turn, Randy points to a Canada Free Press article entitled "Warning: The Threat of Suspended Elections is Real" in which the author makes the same point that I did, namely that Perdue put up a trial balloon for the Administration. Randy has a segment from the Rush Limbaugh show that claims that if the election were held today, Obama would lose in a landslide.

I had a brief time to talk to an elderly gentleman Friday, to see what he thought. He is a retired practicing attorney, so has some familiarity with the Constitution. His first thoughts were that it was impossible. But I pointed out that if you had an administration that did not care about the law, that might even be considered lawless, was it really inconceivable? He pondered that a while, then said that he didn't like that our politics had become so polarized that both sides see the other as evil. I asked if he believed Obama was a socialist? He agreed that Obama was a Marxist of some stripe, but said the theory behind socialism was not evil. I pointed out that in the twentieth century Marxists of various stripes had killed an estimated 100 million of their own people. Wasn't that evil? We both agreed that Socialist theory ignored human nature, and that was its fatal flaw.  I pointed out that even if the theory is not in and of itself evil, that those who lust for power over all eventually rise to the top in these countries, and great evil is done in Socialism's name.  We ended up agreeing that this will be the case until Christ comes again.

Judi McLeod, in her Canada Free Press article, makes a point that unless patriots act now to stop the administration by all legal means, the President will likely ensure his re-election by suspending elections.  I had a post on 25 October 2008 in which I highlighted Laura Hollis' article in Townhall.com that outlined the very situation we are now facing. A catastrophe is conjured up, doesn't matter what as long as it can get the people panicked, and so for the good of the nation, the President is suspending elections.  But what do we do to stop it?  First of all, this is not the time to hand the administration a ready made emergency, although that is exactly what the Left is trying to accomplish with things like it's Days of Rage.  But you can be prepared.  Have your food and water stored.  Have ammunition for defense of yourself and family, and your neighbors.  If you can afford it, have some of your cash in the form of gold or silver in small enough denominations to be readily tradeable should our economy turn in that direction.  Unplug as much as you can.  If you have a law degree, consider joining with others to find a way to harass the administration in the courts.  There may be other things we can do.  But, as Mike Vanderboegh has said, "No Fort Sumter's."

May God bring us safely through the mess we have created.

NC Governor Perdue Shames Us All

I sure am glad our Governor, Bev Perdue, was joking when she made her remarks to the Cary Rotary Club the other day, as reported in the Raleigh Views and Disturber. Ms. Perdue called for the suspension of Congressional Elections, just this once mind you, so that Congressmen wouldn't have to worry their little heads about getting re-elected, and then maybe they could honestly go about the business of ignoring their constituents wishes. Sipsey Street Irregulars is a good place to start. Fellow NC Blogger Randy's Right has more. Or, if you can stomach it, here is Think Progress's take.

You will remember that our President, several months ago, at a La Raza rally, mentioned that unnamed people had urged him to take dictatorial powers, and that he was tempted. The Virginian has the story. Now, I don't for a minute believe that Ms. Perdue was joking. A Governor doesn't joke about ignoring the Constitution in front of a group of constituents, even if she might joke about it among her staff. And I don't believe for a minute that the members and guests of the Cary Rotary Club took Ms. Perdue's comments as a joke either. Some of them were no doubt appalled. Coming on the heals of the Sleasly administration, this embarrassment to North Carolina must be replaced with someone who has at least an ounce or two of integrity. But Ms. Perdue doesn't appear to have any real motive for wanting to suspend Congressional elections.  So, what was she up to?

Ms. Perdue is yet another Progressive, running as a Democrat.  There are many conservative Democrats in North Carolina.  I meet them all the time, and they and I have much in common.  But to a man, or woman, their politicians have all been taken over by the Pod People and are governing as Progressives. Progressive, if you recall, is another name for Communists, Socialist, or Fascist, and sometimes Liberal.  Now, I can't prove this, but what I believe is that Ms. Perdue is carrying water for the Obama administration.  They are testing just how much of a fuss we might put up about this.

So, let's discuss that shall we?  The most likely scenario for taking dictatorial powers is a massive economic event, which the administration has done everything in its power to exacerbate all along.  Of course the looters would riot since they would no longer have their "free stuff" taken from the productive.  Union thugs would work to get people riled up and would in all likelihood initiate the violence as agents provocateur did at Kent State University.  Police at the local and State levels would be overwhelmed.  I am sure the MSM already has the editorials and opinion pieces written to call for a decisive Federal response.   Say the Congress gives him such powers.  The fact is that a substantial portion of the Republican leadership is as "Progressive" as the that of the Democrat leadership.  Our now President for life, would in turn use those powers to declare martial law and suspend Congressional elections.  Now the fight to keep our government accountable turns to the courts, where some are probably going to find, in the emanations of penumbras, or behind the walls of the Courthouse, or...well who cares where they find it, certainly they don't...that the declaration, and suspension are, surprise, Constitutional.  Now it goes to the Supreme Court where I can already count 4 votes in favor, and 4 votes for the original meaning of the Constitution.  So, it will come down to one man...ONE MAN...Mr. Justice Kennedy, to decide the fate of the nation.  Let us hope he did not eat a plate of bad oysters the night before.

If Mr. Justice Kennedy decides the case for giving the President extraordinary powers is more powerful than the Constitution, then, as Mike Vanderboegh has said, we all get to vote one more time.  I pray the President knows the dangerous game he is playing, and the horrible consequences of it.  Americans will not stand still for this.  Meanwhile, that wretched Governor Perdue shames everyone living here.  She should be impeached.

May the Lord yet deliver us.

Speaking with a Liberal, if you must

Yesterday, I was having a conversation with a co-worker over lunch about how much better cars are today than in the 1960s. For instance, I remember that in the 1960s, living in the snow belt, it was not uncommon to see a 5 year old car with rusted fenders flapping in the breeze as it tooled down the road. Today, with greatly improved paints and corrosion protection, that is a rare sight, even for unprotected cars in the rust belt. My co-worker mentioned that cars also last longer. In the 1960s, a car was pretty much used up by about 100,000 miles. Today, it is not uncommon for a car to last 200,000, or even 300,000 miles. The conversation shifted to fuel economy. He mentioned that the 15 passenger van he was driving got 16 miles per gallon (mpg). I mentioned that in the 1960s, 16 mpg would have been a good mileage for a 5 passenger sedan. He said it was even worse than that-between 8 and 10 mpg. Turns out he was right.  The average fuel economy was apparently 13 mpg.

About that time, the resident Leftist in the group asked if I thought the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) fuel standards might have had anything to do with forcing car companies to raise gas mileage. There followed this exchange, paraphrased because I can't remember well enough to quote:

Me: "Well, I think market forces should have been tried instead."

Him (frowning): "Market forces! How would that work?"

Me: "Consumers would have demanded higher mileage as gas prices rose."

Him: "Aw, that's just ridiculous. There is no hammer to force companies to build higher fuel mileage vehicles!"

Me: "True, but it works in other areas of our lives." Realizing that again, he was looking to pick a fight, and this being work after all, I tired to close the conversation peacefuI and said, "but we will never know. The government chose to regulate, and thus foreclosed any market based solution that might have come about.  What might have developed never did, and we have instead a more powerful EPA."

It occurred to me later that if I could show that average mileages were trending upward in the years before the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards took effect, that would add weight to my contention. I know, for example, that in 1975, I traded in my Plymouth Fury for a new, 1975 Volkswagen Rabbit, a horrible mistake, but one driven by increasing gasoline prices. The closest I have come to finding an answer is a 2006 article from Freeman magazine by Michael Heberling entitled Government Mandated Fuel Efficiency Standards. While somewhat dated, it is a pretty good overview of the CAFE and the unintended consequences of its passage.  The article says that indeed, the average mileage of automobiles during that period was getting higher, in no small measure, because of purchases of foreign made vehicles.  But at the same time, there were several experiments in producing an American made car that got good mileage, such as the Corvair.

Francis Porretto spoke about a similar incident he had with a liberal here.

Now, I truly don't know whether or not market based solutions would have worked or not. But as I said at the time, it has often worked in the past, and I think leaving it up to each individual, it would in time have found a balance between fuel economy and the other factors in selection of a car. The price of gasoline is only a small factor in purchasing an automobile. Other factors include size of your family, or the need to haul stuff, the image one wants to convey, the price one can afford, and so on.  By letting individuals make their own decisions, everyone would be happier with the choices and government would be smaller by at least the amount required to administer the CAFE.  Of course, this situation would not have made our betters happy, since no doubt some Americans would have made the "wrong" choices. 

On the other hand, I was stunned by the utter surety of my co-worker that regulation was the only way. Regulation has had unintended consequences that have not been good for Americans. The family station wagon has been replaced by the SUV and the minivan. The SUV, being built on a truck frame, has looser CAFE requirements than the station wagon had, which is built on an automobile frame. Many green types decry the SUV, but they have only themselves to blame. The Japanese auto giants gained a foothold in the American market as a result of imposition of CAFE, and have exploited that foothold for everything it is worth (and I don't dismiss the mistakes that the Big 3 made along the way either.)

Now, imagine the government imposed a one size fits all healthcare solution...oh, wait.

The Road to Hell is a Compromise

I once had a young man, who obviously had not been through the war on guns, and who had heard only one side of the story, ask me why we couldn't just compromise on a few "reasonable" restrictions on guns. My first thought was to simply laugh in his face, but I thought better of it. I then went through the long effort to restrict our rights, and showed how it was we, not those who wished to control guns, who had compromised all along. Now, we were standing our ground. Not one inch more.  As Jesse Helms said, "Compromise, hell!  If freedom is right, and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as a roll of roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?"

But it is not only on gun control that we have compromised. Most of us in the gun rights movement are not the single issue voters we are made out to be. We don't just want our Second Amendment rights, we want them all. Most of us also have jobs and responsibilities such that it is impossible to keep up with the thousands of ways every day that governments at the local, State and Federal levels violate not only the Constitution, but their own statues. Guns, thus, are a convenient short hand, for how a politician thinks about guns will almost always indicate how he will think about the rest of the Constitution. Make no mistake, every politician, and every judge knows the real purposes of the Second Amendment. Hint: it ain't about hunting.

So, it was good to read in the American Thinker the other day a piece by Jay Huag entitled Why Liberals Love Compromise. It explains how the Left has used the claim that we on the right do not compromise, to slowly frame the debate ever more leftward.  They offer a proposal that is somewhat left of the status quo, and then invite us to "compromise."  We lose every time.  Today, we have Republican candidates for President talking about saving Social Security, an Unconstitutional law, and a Leftist ponzi scheme that threatens to drive us all bankrupt.  Most times, the Left poses some change to the status quo. Suddenly, the debate is framed in such a way that those who are defending the status quo are...well...defensive.  I understand why this is, even if I don't understand how so many can be taken in so consistently. It has been said that a lie will go around the world while the truth is pulling its boots on. It is, first of all, often an emotional issue, or it is made to seem so.  In the case of gun control, innocent victims are sometimes gunned down in horrific crimes.  The Virginia Tech massacre is a prime example.  We feel empathy for these people, and wish we could do something.  The Left often plays on these emotions while offering up its favored solution.  Meanwhile it takes time, effort, and money to marshal the facts to counter the lie. Even so, the lie will often have become such common wisdom that a sizable number of the public will believe it. Thus, gun control is thought by many to control crime, when the opposite is true. In John Lotts formulation more guns, less crime.

So, what do we do to pull the culture back towards a Constitutional understanding of the proper role of government?  Mr. Huag's view:

Part of the reason liberalism has appeared so inevitable is that "compromise" has replaced "reform" as the game that is played. What I say is this: stop playing their game and start playing ours. Conservative reform is what America needs. Their game has bankrupted the country, ruined our schools, hamstrung our economy, and confused our foreign policy. Their game failed in the '70s and is failing again now. We conservatives cannot win until we change it at every level of government, local, state and federal.

Part of reforming is to stand our ground. No compromise. Never. Why should people "treat freedom as a roll of bologna to be bartered one slice at a time?" Yes the Leftists will wail and scream. They will protest, and perhaps get violent. But we have the guns, remember. Let them. It is no different than when your child throws a tantrum, and it is for their good as well as our own. We must take back the school boards, take back the churches, take back the city councils, take back the State houses. In short, we must march through the institutions. It will be a generational fight, but freedom and liberty are at stake. We must win.

If the recent debt ceiling deal did not teach anything else, it should have taught everyone on our side that there is no compromising with the Left.

Taking a Good Look at Ron Paul

Jonah Goldberg makes several excellent points, points that are quite libertarian, today in his article at Townhall.com entitled Tyranny of the Typical. Since Mr. Goldberg says it much more elegantly than I can, instead of making a hash of things let me just quote a couple of graphs. However, to set up the first quote, Goldberg is at pains to describe Murray Rothbard's "bias of the status quo." He does so by introducing a story that Mr. Rothbard had told in his Libertarian Manifesto called the "Fable of the Shoes.":

It's worth keeping this fable in mind as the reaction to last week's CNN-Tea Party Express debate hardens into popular myth. Moderator Wolf Blitzer had asked Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) what should happen if a man refuses to get health insurance and then has a medical crisis. Paul -- a disciple of Rothbard -- explained that freedom is about taking risks. "But, congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?"

First, why is the extremely liberal CNN moderating our first televised debate with a leftist moderator? Fox News has much higher ratings than CNN, and we could certainly find a neutral, if not friendly moderator. Brit Hume would be a good moderator, and would ask the kind of questions we really wanted to know the answer to, without the "gotcha." I am concerned that once again the media, and the Republican "establishment," whoever they are, are going to select our standard bearer. Dr. Paul is already being dismissed as not electable, and we haven't even held our first primary! It is in no small measure to the kind of questioning he got at the hands of Wolf Blitzer. Dr. Paul's message is not easily reduced to sound bites, so this style of debate does not show him well.

I will make a confession here. I got to see Ron Paul in October of 2007 at the Gun Rights Policy Conference held across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio. He was the only candidate then running, from either party, that bothered to show up. While his message was the same as it is now, I was turned off by the cult of personality that his supporters affected. Most of them were young people, kids to me at my age. Of course, they had no real experience, but they had tons of energy and enthusiasm.  I have since reread Washington's farewell address. I have reread Eisenhower's warnings about the military-industrial complex. I have been working my way through Glenn Beck's Original Argument. And I have lived with as close to a fascist dictatorship as I care to get. In short, I am a convert to small "L" libertarianism, thanks in no small part to my friend, Francis Porretto.

Frankly, Dr. Paul's message is as close to the original ideas propounded by the founders as anyone today running for President. His foreign policy, often dismissed as "kooky" would be met with general approval all around. The founders' view was that we should trade with all countries, but be absolutely neutral in their affairs. To that end, we should have a strong military, especially a strong Navy, to defend our neutrality. But, we should back out of all entangling alliances. We should get out of the hundreds of places where our troops are now stationed such as Korea, Japan, Germany, and who knows where else. America's greatness is not that she can overwhelm any other force on the planet. That role, if it was ever thrust upon us, is no longer needed. America's greatness is in the freedom and liberty she provides to her citizens. We should be a shining city on the hill, an example to others, and a rebuke to petty tyrants and dictators everywhere. 

Second, there is an unspoken assumption built into Blitzer's question "... are you saying that society should just let him die?" That assumption is that our stricken man does not in fact own his own life, that society has at least a partial ownership of him, and therefore it is up to society to see that he gets the proper care, or dies, based on its interests at the time. That is the whole, unspoken truth behind ObamaCare. It is a foreign idea that has insinuated itself in our culture that says we can not do for ourselves.  But we did for 141 years.

Paul calmly replied that he's not in favor of letting the man die. A physician who practiced before Medicare and Medicaid were enacted, Paul noted that hospitals were never in the practice of turning away patients in need. "We've given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves and assume responsibility for ourselves," he observed. "Our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it."

Just so.

If our republic is to survive, we must change ourselves, and our neighbors. Health care is not a "right," desirable as it may be. It is a good. Someone has to go to some expense to provide it. Socializing the provision of any good, be it health care or shoes, creates moral risks and unintended consequences. The unintended consequences include a scarcity of providers, and the eventual rationing of care because prices have been taken off the table. When that happens, one wonders which situation Blitzer would find moral: Letting the man die, due to his own decisions, or denying him the care he has been forced to pay for, thus letting him to die because government can not deliver on its promises?

Update: Steve McCann has an excellent summary of the steps the Obama regime has taken to bring us fully under a Fascist government over at the American Thinker today. The article is entitled Obama's Fascist Economy. It may be a good idea to keep this one close to hand when discussing the situation we find ourselves in with friends and neighbors.

Restaurant Turns Back on TSA at Lunch Counter

A while back I had a post about the TSA called Dominate. Intimidate. Control in which I advocated humiliating and embarrassing TSA agents as a way of changing policy. Of course you should only do this when they are away from work. Now I read that a Seattle area restaurant refuses to serve TSA agents here.

Good.

If I lived anywhere near Seattle I would eat lunch at this place every day to support him. He has the right idea. TSA agents should shunned like the Jewish collaborators who collected taxes for Rome were shunned. They should be humiliated as the French collaborators with the Nazis were humiliated. Our government has, in some ways, become a foreign invader using home grown collaborators to carry out their agendas. But those agendas trample all over our rights, and take away from the citizen the responsibilities that should be his. Get mad citizens, and begin to resist. Here you have a blue print for how to resist.

Postmodernism and the Democratic Party

I was in the middle of a discussion with a Leftist on the Constitution when the conversation turned to, apropos of nothing at all, Scooter Libby and whether or not he should have been convicted. I was flabbergasted, as the Scooter Libby affair, and Valerie Plame had no place in the discussion. But understanding the connection between Leftists and Postmodernists helps to explain why my erstwhile debating partner pulled this particular rhetorical trick at that juncture of the debate: I was winning. But what is postmodernism, and one of its offshoots, deconstructionism? For that you could do worse than to read the American Thinker today as Paul Jacobson gives the layman a quick overview of The Postmodern Party.

I will just quote this one passage, and then let you, dear reader, ponder the entire article by clicking above:

It would be hard to find a more perfect example of the fashionably foolish nonsense of postmodernist "deconstruction" and other putative postmodernist "thinking" than the utterly bogus, deceitful model of constitutional interpretation, so worshiped by "critical legal theory" proponents and their deluded Democrat janissaries, that says the U. S. Constitution is somehow a "living, breathing document." Read: the Constitution is a wax nose to be pummeled into any shape radical-left Democrats desire at the moment to advance their tyranny. Who says we can't know what the founders meant when they wrote the Constitution? Those patriots were some of the most prolific writers in human history. Yes, there was some disagreement among them but vastly more agreement; otherwise, they wouldn't have bequeathed us our Constitution. Every one of them would surely be scandalized to learn that some citizens today imagine they know better than the founders themselves what they, the founders, meant.

The "living Constitution" theory is like playing a game that asks "What would James Madison and the other founders say if they were alive today?" But the answers to such a question say more about the one answering than they do about the Founders. Jacobson is correct that to find out what they intended, all one has to do is read what they wrote. Unlike sifting through an archaeological dig of an illiterate civilization, these men wrote much material for posterity explaining what they meant. But the founders also recognized that they were mortal men, prone to all of the failings that have plagued man from the start. So they also gave us a way to amend the Constitution should we see the need. That process, though difficult, has been successfully accomplished on twenty seven occasions, so it is not impossible. But Leftists, in their rush to create their own version of hell on earth can't be bothered with going through the hoops needed to get an amendment passed. Instead, they employ the notions of deconstructionism to make the Constitution say whatever the latest Leftist fad says it should say. 

Postmodernism needs to be rooted out of our culture and our politics. It is a childish way of thinking where something is so because the child wishes it to be so. It is an adolescent chafing at the hard rules of reality. But those hard rules, rightly understood and practiced, actually permit a great degree of freedom. Conversely, when one has no rules, one finds only tyranny. Postmodernism is the lazy man's approach to all problems, and we must find it within to return to rigorous thinking about reality as it is, if our country is to be saved.