This is, of course, only a PERSISTENT failing in people who are motivated by vanity and not a sincere concern for the real world, which is to say actually existing people. Anyone who claims to value idealism over efficacy is either a novice, or a self absorbed asshole.
My point: our system depends on hundreds of millions of people interacting with their fellow Americans with honesty and integrity. Northern Europe “works” because people are on balance honest. South America does not “work”, on balance, because people are NOT honest. Had countless people not tried to get something for nothing–or power by promising something for nothing–their economic progress would have been vastly greater.
Mexico could be just as wealthy as the United States. They lack a culture, however, in which fidelity to principle is valued over fidelity to family and personal self-aggrandisement. That is why the losers in their zero sum system come here, if they can.
The IRS consists, one hopes, in largely honest people. It has consisted, over the last 3 years at least, in a few people eager to do Obama’s political dirty work, and many who perhaps did it with a vague sense of nausea, and perhaps some who left because they were unable to do it at all. Some, of course, either knew nothing about it, or were able to unsee in their memories what they had in fact seen, but not participated in.
Everywhere ones sees both rumors and evidence of efforts to fundamentally redirect our government agencies from positions of being non-partisan professionals, to being antagonistic to Obama’s political enemies, who to be clear include everyone who values American history, values, and our Constitution.
Will this work? Are there enough principled people to either block illegal activities outright, or at least bring them into the public sphere for discussion and–when warranted–prosecution.
Part of our present problem is that whistle-blowing goes for investigation to Eric Holder. This is quite clearly unacceptable if our goal is any kind of truth. Holder took a month to get the FBI to Benghazi. Holder more or less gave Mexican drug cartels weapons that gunshop owners did not want to sell them, seemingly to increase violence sufficiently to make gun control easier.
Even now, Holder has seemingly told the FBI to more or less ignore the IRS abuses.
This should be obvious enough, but if you want people to stick their necks out to report orders they are being given which are patently illegal, but which come from the President, you need to protect them. We can’t protect them if the people investigating the abuses are complicit in them.
What would have been the effect of a Converso reporting graft in his diocese to the local archbishop? Likely a trip to the Inquisition, and being burnt at the stake. This is not fair, but it is history. It has happened more times than can possibly be calculated.
Congress needs an Independent Counsel, or whatever the legal equivalent is now. What Obama is accused of–and to all appearances thoroughly guilty of–extends so far beyond what Clinton was ever accused of that to NOT appoint some pathway around Eric Holder would constitute a GROSS dereliction of duty on the part of Congress.
Kenneth Star was appointed, allegedly, to investigate illegal real estate dealings that had happened long before the Clinton’s took office. There was NEVER any indication that Clinton had abused his power while in office (although one did see the same accusations of the use of the IRS to target some specific individuals), and like most I viewed the Star Tribunal as little more than a partisan witch hunt.
The case of Obama is quite different. Has he provided the Syrian Islamists with chemical weapons and training? Was he complicit in the kidnapping of Christopher Stevens? Why should Holder not be prosecuted for Fast and Furious? Has Obama made political use of NSA wire-taps? How far up does the IRS abuse go, and when are arrests going to be made? Why shouldn’t the NSA chief face perjury charges for claiming that the NSA was selective in its information gathering?
These are just a small selection of questions that in a sane Republic would be pushed until they pinned somebody to the wall. Our system is complex, and it depends entirely for its efficacy upon trusting one another. Obama quite clearly has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt he cannot be trusted. Neither can most of our media. Neither, at this point, can our Congress as a whole.
Our system is failing. There is no necessity for this. What is needed is what I am going to call a “Retesticulation”. Our so-called leaders need to find their balls and start taking risks based on PRINCIPLE.
Who among our children is going to listen sympathetically to some old politician talking about “political necessity” when their legacy is abject failure, and the cessation of our freedom?
Bottom line: in my view, the talk should not be of Impeachment, but of first getting to the bottom of Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the IRS scandal, the efforts to intimidate journalists, and of figuring out how to stop the NSA abuses. Congress can and should lead in this. They need to start with a permanent person or institution empowered by law to demand information and–if blocked–to arrest anyone and everyone involved, up to and including the President and Vice Presidents themselves.
Our President is not above the law. We do not elect kings.
2 replies on “Principle, what I meant to say”
According to current political calculus, since our President is black he most certainly *is* above the law.
No one in DC is about to go anywhere near any action that might smack of "persecution" of a black man.
The Left has checkmated us where this is concerned.
Anyone who's agitating to see Obama tossed out on his tuchus needs to direct their energy elsewhere.
I wouldn't think in terms of "checkmate". What I would propose would be a more useful metaphor is that the Left has created so much fog and haze that rational, principle based discussion–one oriented around building the best possible future for all Americans–has become very difficult. Their use of race at all levels of discussion is simply one aspect of this.
And increasingly I am seeing persons of African ancestry–you know, Nigerian-Americans, Ivory Coast-Americans, Senegalese-Americans–questioning just what they have gotten from their 40 year partnership with the Democrats.
Is it not ODD that less than ten years after the Democrats overwhelmingly voted to block civil rights legislation that they were able to court the black vote successfully?
And is it not ODD that after 40 years of broken promises and abject failure–after taking world class cities like Detroit and turning them into shit-holes–that blacks continue to support Democrats, and Oreos like Obama, who was never raised a day in his life by a black father or mother, and who went to an elite prep school, and overwhelmingly white universities?
Never give up is a good general principle. But it is particularly good when the facts of the matter are overwhelmingly in our favor.
Yes, we are surrounded by liars, fools and thieves. But this merely means difficulty, not failure.