{"id":8775,"date":"2013-05-20T05:24:01","date_gmt":"2013-05-20T05:24:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2013\/05\/20\/we-are-the-government\/"},"modified":"2013-05-20T05:24:01","modified_gmt":"2013-05-20T05:24:01","slug":"we-are-the-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2013\/05\/20\/we-are-the-government\/","title":{"rendered":"We are the Government?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Obama assures us<\/a> that the government is us. Do you believe that nonsense?  (And it is, literally, nonsense and not merely a falsehood.)  Then you you need to inform yourself for your own good.<\/span><\/p>\n

IRS and AP Scandals Cast a Big Chill on Free Speech<\/a>  (Little Boomer allusion there, to The Big Chill<\/a>, 1983)<\/span><\/p>\n

Four Federal Agencies Targeted the Tea Party<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

VDH, It Can<\/em> Happen Here<\/a>.  Excerpt:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Living in Oceania<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

And now?<\/span><\/p>\n

Suddenly in 2013, what was once sure has become suspect. All the old referents are not as they once were. The world is turned upside down, and whether the government taps, politicizes, or lies is not so important if it subsidizes the 47%. Does anyone care that five departments of government are either breaking the law or lying or both (State [Benghazi], Defense [the harassment issues], Justice [monitoring of phone lines], Treasury [corruption at the IRS], Health and Human Services<\/a> [3]<\/sup> [shaking down companies to pay for PR for Obamacare])?<\/span><\/p>\n

The National Rifle Association is now supposed to be a suspect paramilitary group, in the way the Boy Scouts are homophobes. One day we woke up and learned that by fiat women were suddenly eligible to serve in front-line combat units\u2014no discussion, no hearings, no public debate. We had a \u201cwar on women\u201d over whether upscale Sandra Fluke could get free birth control from the government, but snoozed through the Dr. Gosnell trial. The latter may have been the most lethal serial killer in U.S. history, if his last few years of snipping spinal cords were indicative of the his first three unmonitored decades of late-term aborting.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Obama administration had decided to shut down as many coal plants as it can, stop most new gas and oil drilling on federal lands, and go after private companies ranging from huge aircraft manufacturers to the small guitar concerns<\/a> [link added by BV]\u2014based not on law, but on certain theories of climate change and labor equity. As in the case with the IRS, the EPA is now synonymous with politically motivated activism designed to circumvent the law. The president in his State of the Union address assured us that cap-and-trade will be back, given, he says, the atypical violent weather that hit the U.S. in his term\u2014even as global temperatures have not risen in 15 years, and hurricanes are now occurring more rarely than during the last administration.<\/span><\/p>\n

The government, we were also told, would not enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, and would grant de facto amnesty for large numbers of illegal aliens as the election approached. Enforcement of existing law now is a fluid idea, always up for discussion For the first time in my life, I can not even find rifle shells on the store shelves\u2014amid rumors that the Department of Homeland Security, at a time of national acrimony over the Second Amendments, believes it is an opportune moment to stockpile gargantuan amounts of ammunition\u2014again, a sort of force multiplier in ensuring panic buying.<\/span><\/p>\n

Are You a Correct Citizen? <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

So we are in unchartered territory. The IRS has lost our trust, both for its rank partisanship and its inability to come forward and explain its crimes. Eric Holder wants us to believe that he has no idea why his office was monitoring the communications of journalists, and yet now warrants the renewed trust of the president. Susan Rice serially misled on national television about Benghazi and so will probably be promoted to national security advisor. Even the Washington Post<\/em> has decided that the president was lying in his defense about Benghazi (albeit with the funny sort of childhood rating of \u201cfour Pinocchios\u201d) after the president\u2019s team serially blamed the violence on an internet video, while the president simultaneously claimed that he also identified the crime immediately as a terrorist hit.<\/span><\/p>\n

On campuses, the Departments of Justice and Education have issued new race\/class\/gender guidelines that would effectively deny constitutionally protected free speech in universities, a sort of politically correct idea that proper thinking is preferable to free thinking.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you oppose \u201ccomprehensive immigration reform\u201d you become a nativist or worse\u2014and apparently are one of the \u201cenemies\u201d the president wants to \u201cpunish.\u201d The president just condemned American guns that wind up in Mexico\u2013implying right-wingers opposed his own remedies of new gun control and neglecting to mention that his own Fast and Furious operation sold thousands of lethal weapons to Mexican drug cartels.<\/span><\/p>\n

The end of the revolving doors, lobbyists, and non-transparency resulted in Jack Lew\u2014recipient of a $1 million bonus from Citibank as it both lost money and gulped down federal bailout money\u2014taking over from the tax-dodger Timothy Geithner as our new Treasury secretary to oversee the new IRS. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is now pumping corporations for money to help spread the gospel about how eager we are for the implementation of Obamacare, as the government now sort of freelances on its own\u2014the federal equivalent of California Highway Patrol officers suddenly ubiquitous along our roadsides ticketing in a frenzy, in fear of their bankrupt state pension funds.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now What?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

What happens to a corporation that says \u201cnope\u201d to Sebelius? An IRS audit? Phone monitoring? Presidential denunciation as a \u201cfat cat\u201d? Talking points? Harry Reid taking to the floor to claim it had not paid its fair share in taxes?<\/span><\/p>\n

Government has become a sort of malignant metasisizing tumor, growing on its own, parasitical on healthy cells, always searching for new sources of nourishment, its purpose nothing other than growing bigger and faster and more powerful\u2014until the exhausted host collapses. We have a sunshine king and our government has become a sort of virtual Versailles palace.<\/span><\/p>\n

I suppose that when a presidential candidate urges his supporters to get in someone\u2019s face, and to take a gun to a knife fight, from now on you better believe him. And, finally, the strangest thing about nearing the threshold of 1984? It comes with a whimper, not a bang, with a charismatic smile and mellifluous nonsense\u2014with politically correct, egalitarian-minded bureaucrats with glasses and iPhones instead of fist-shaking jack-booted thugs.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nRelated articles<\/legend>\n
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\"\"<\/a>The Government Is Us?<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Dems: "Government is the Only Thing We All Belong To"<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Makers and Takers: "You Didn't Build That!" Revisited<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Obama assures us that the government is us. Do you believe that nonsense?  (And it is, literally, nonsense and not merely a falsehood.)  Then you you need to inform yourself for your own good. IRS and AP Scandals Cast a Big Chill on Free Speech  (Little Boomer allusion there, to The Big Chill, 1983) Four … Continue reading “We are the Government?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-decline-of-the-west","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8775\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}