Skip to main content

From the Incompetent to the Incomprehensible

Change has come to the offices of power. Nothing more.

We see off a horrow show presidency and welcome one from fantasy land.

My fellow Delaware Libertarian, Brian Miller, embodied the heart of the matter behind the obscene monarchical pomp, gushing self-indulgence, and orgy of self-congratulation we see with the quasi-coronation of a new (better!) Dear Leader (for some of us, anyway).

Well done, Brian. Our country was founded on throwing off the chains of heredity, official excess, institutional stagnation, personal megalomania, and abusive force attendant to an all-powerful central state dictated by the whims of men rather than guided by the rule of law.

In a diverse world of individual dreams, one man's messiah can become another man's tyranny - one man's utopia another man's hell.

Call me a wide-eyed skeptic, but I'm not buying the idea that our country should have more of the same messianism that George W. Bush brought to Washington D.C. with his detestable overseer/interventionist national government.

But that is exactly what Messrs. Obama and Biden will continue, only with their own renditions of exuberantly over-self-confident grandiosity and paternalism.

Their answer to : "ENOUGH!" is "MORE!"

Transcendent elitists, they sincerely believe in their own moral, social, and political superiority such that we should all join their "cause"...because they know what's best for all of us. Hail Caesar!

I don't need to wait around to know that what we will see will be serious exertions to force upon this country a nationalistic redux of essentially what we just saw for 8 years : all roads lead to Pennsylvania Avenue, where the Solons have it ALL in hand.

If our Constitution and this country endure, it will not be because but rather in spite of the denizens of all those heavily-armored, excessively-but-necessarily-secured marble palaces in that gleaming insulated bubble on the Potomac.

I, for one, will not be cowed nor bludgeoned into accepting the inevitability of our country's slide further towards crushing collectivist mediocrity and blundering national socialism...disguised and paraded as "change".

I will not stand by silently while my rights and liberties are the subject of social experimentation and economic engineering, thrust on us all through the (black) "art of politics" masquerading as reason acting upon necessity.

God save us all.

UPDATE : Mat Marshall writes an optimistic statement that could be the flip side of my own harsh skepticism. Perhaps I should note that I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong about what I expect will really happen under our new president and the grandiose designs at hand.

But Obama would have to move away rapidly from what he has already been pushing hard (planning, controlling, and manipulating our economy through massive central government intervention) for me to believe he isn't already running afoul of the constitutional limits of federal power.

Nonetheless, I cheer Mat's optimism, even if my own is quite muted and severely tempered these days.

Comments

Delaware Watch said…
Feeling bitter, are we? Your post oozes w/ it. Not even the inauguration of a new president and the good will of the day restrains you from spilling bile.

McCain lost. Get over it.

You're just making yourself seem sad.
Tyler Nixon said…
Come come, Dana. You're just angry over my Chavez post.

I will question power as I see fit.

Sorry I don't want to take a day off to join in on your premature and rather pie-eyed triumphalism.

No offense, no one's better off today except a differently-aligned set of power elites...and handsomely so.

I'd rather stick with being a revolutionary when it comes to power.

Obviously you think we should all kneel before it.

I think you need to get over it.
Brian Miller said…
The irony is that Obama is largely picking up where the prior administration left off.

They're going to spend another $350 billion of TARP money just like Dubya did -- to the same effect (continued losses and even more debt for our grandchildren).

They're already pandering to social conservatives, and there's every indication that will continue.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will continue apace for some time, yet.

There will be more money spent on a bailout of irresponsible mortgagees.

Taxes will increase long-term due to deficit spending.

Government will get bigger.

Ironically, the whole "get over it" rhetoric is even borrowed from the Bush people -- it's the same line they used to address Gore supporters in 2000.

Factual criticism is "bitterness." Policy disagreements are "ruining the good will of the day." (Ironically, these arguments were also used by Republicans in both 2000 and 2004.)

Pardon me, but I'm just not feeling the "unity" here. I'm not even feeling much "change" -- it's just smug Democrats who are using 50 cent throwaway criticisms now rather than Republicans. Hell, even the anti-gay shit is identical.
Bowly said…
Brian, that was beautiful.
Bowly said…
What Dana fails to realize is that most of us would still be highly pessimistic if McCain had been elected.
Mike W. said…
"I'd rather stick with being a revolutionary when it comes to power.

Obviously you think we should all kneel before it."

Yup. We haven't elected a Messiah. All we've done is replace one power-hungry authoritarian who liked to wipe his ass with the Constitution and installed another "dear leader" with a different set of priorities but the same propensity for ass-wiping.

At the very least Obama's not a fan of the 1st or 2nd Amendments.

And Dana - somehow I don't think Tyler's a big McCain fan.

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?