If not us, who? If not now, when?
Now It's Up to Us
ELECTION MADNESS
Never mind the voting machines many states never fixed after the year 2,000 fiasco; or the Motor Voter fraud, or the absentee ballot fraud, or the gerrymandering, or all the ineligible voters left on state voter registration lists, or the shafting of military voters, or the Acorn violations, or the lack of voter fraud prosecutions, or the New Black Panthers lack of prosecution for voter intimidation, or the post-election recount scams. Author John Fund, and others, have written extensively about these very serious erosions of our election system. And there’s always the attempt to rid us of the Electoral College established by the Constitution. No. What I’m talking about right now is Federal.
In addition to the items above which can often be addressed at the state level, we need to free ourselves of the madness surrounding our presidential elections. Way too much time; way too much money; primaries that make no sense, and a media influence that borders on the criminal. In addition, we’ve allowed congressional districts to be created that are drawn by race and party, such that there is guaranteed incumbency, and no input from broader constituencies that live in the same area.
CONGRESS TRAPPED
No point in criticizing Congress at this point; they’re a bit like some medieval armies which, after any given war was over, wandered about the countryside, looting and pillaging towns at random, even those of their own countries. Or at least that’s the perception, which explains the abysmal congressional public-approval ratings (currently at 12%). I have bigger fish to fry. Since 435 Congressmen and 100 Senators have been in some form of disapproval for years, regardless of party affiliation, and despite the heroic efforts of some of their members to behave honorably, it’s past time to wonder if we couldn’t devise a different set of incentives.
What’t the point? Isn’t that just rearranging the furniture? If they’re stupid, incompetent or corrupt, you might say, no system will change it. Not at all. This seems to be a dilemma that can be created, over time, in one form or another, in nearly any human organization. Ambition,competition, finessing the rules to create advantage, feathering nests, pandering to contributors, lying to the benighted, the ill-informed, the groupies.
TEA PARTY TRIGGER
For whatever the Tea Party has become, or is evolving into, only those tied to a set of outworn prejudices can deny that the movement started out of the spontaneous outrage of ordinary citizens who felt that the Federal government had violated the social compact. Everyone, myself included, was inured to deceit and incompetence; buffoonery and bluster, unwarranted spending and manipulative posturing. Those became routine, and we went about our lives as if it would somehow never get worse. Then…it did. A line was crossed.
Spending that was already insanely out of hand got ignored for fresh spending. The reason provided was shocking – a complete reordering of society. A new economy that would replace the old, fourteen-trillion dollar economy with one that would be devised by a government convinced that America was an unjust society. Henceforth, honest employment would consist of making “green” cars, building fields of huge wind turbines, covering acres of land with solar panels and putting food in our gas tanks. Massive entitlement programs were to be created, oil and coal eliminated, our financial system captured.
Those who pay nearly all of America’s taxes would have their burden increased so that the money could be distributed to non-taxpayers, in the form of “refunds,’ as promised by Senator Obama – and ignored by the electorate – during his presidential campaign. The discussion regarding how these changes would impact the lives of individuals from all walks of life was confined to vague “hope and change,” references, as well as even vaguer references by the candidate to “difficult times ahead.” Maybe because explicitly stating that our society had supposedly failed its people and it was time for the government to fix that by creating a new society — would not have been as winning a campaign speech.
It didn’t really matter whether you believed our new President and his entourage to be Socialists, Statists, Fascists, Radicals or Revolutionaries; it was outrageous with any label. Way too much spending; way too much federal government. Instant Tea. The fossils who run the Republican Party clearly didn’t get it, and their opponents reflexively lashed out at a spontaneous movement that appeared to them to be another dirty trick by conservatives.
TEA PARTY BURDEN — PATRIOTS’ DILEMMA
If I haven’t made the point already, I apologize. If the people, independent of political party, or with heavy influence on a party, are the last bastions of preservation of our founders’ ideology, acting on the local level will be imperative — and the most important act will be to clean up the elections systems in each state, followed by a push for federal legislation that removes the current money chase. Whatever you might think of John McCain, he at least identified an existential problem for our nation when he campaigned for election reform. And that without taking up the current practice of micro-cheating on post-election challenges.
This cannot stand.
