Acres of “He’s Not My President” bumper stickers.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThese were many of the same people, by the way, who tearfully demanded that conservatives “stop questioning their patriotism”, by the way.<\/p>\n
But I digress.\u00a0 The vacuous snivelling hamsters got their president finally.<\/p>\n
It’s the other side I’m concerned about now.<\/p>\n
We got a call on the show last Saturday from a guy who’s question echoed one I’d heard from not a few people on blogs, on Twitter, and around about in recent months – itself a reprise of something I heard a lot back in the seventies and, just a bit, in the early nineties.<\/p>\n
“When should we stop talking and start the active resistance?”<\/p>\n
I often ask these people – why?<\/p>\n
“It’s never been worse than this!”<\/p>\n
I’m starting to lose patience with some of them.<\/p>\n
Whenever anyone says anything <\/em>is “the worst ever”, they’re almost always wrong.\u00a0 They almost always really mean “the worst I’ve <\/em>seen”.<\/p>\nPolitics is not the dirtiest and nastiest it’s ever been (that’d be the Jackson\/Adams contest in 1828, or any election where the Hearst papers uncorked their <\/em>smear machine); this is not the worst unemployment since World War II (not even close, not yet)…<\/p>\n…and if you’re a freedom-loving American, the Obama administration is shaping up to be a bad one, perhaps a horrible one.\u00a0 But it’s by no means the worst we’ve seen on any count.<\/p>\n
Spending?\u00a0 Roosevelt’s New Deal was worse.\u00a0 So far.<\/p>\n
Gun control?\u00a0 While Obama’s record is bad, he hasn’t done anything yet; Democrats from FDR through Clinton all took their swipes at the Second Amendment,\u00a0from Roosevelt’s prohibitory taxes on automatic weapons (which eliminated gang warfare!) to Clinton’s “1994 Crime Bill”, which did for many less-fashionable liberties what Bigfoot does to junked cars.<\/p>\n
Civil Liberties?\u00a0 Three words; J. Edgar Hoover.\u00a0 FDR, Truman, Kennedy and LBJ got away with things that’d make any of the ofay gerbils that were protesting George W. Bush’s “Abuses” gag up their skulls.\u00a0 Nixon invoked executive orders that gathered unprecedented “emergency” powers unto the executive – which has had libertarians chattering amongst themselves for almost forty years.\u00a0 Obama bears watching; the Dems in Congress bear even more of it.\u00a0 But so far, the threats are minimal (while still intolerable).<\/p>\n
Repackaging vacuity as “change” and “audacity?”\u00a0 OK, there Obama’s in a league of his own.<\/p>\n
Overall demoralization of the parts of this country that matter?\u00a0 The seventies were worse.\u00a0 They had everything we have today and more\u00a0– instability, out-of-control government, the Middle East going nuts, stagflation, Jimmy Carter – and <\/em>a nation that was coming off of Vietnam, which, if you don’t remember it (and I only do through the prism of a 12 year old’s memory) was the most demoralizing thing to happen to this nation since the mid-thirties.\u00a0 I don’t know if anyone ever ran the numbers, but Carter’s “Malaise Speech” must have prompted more population-wide suicides than any other single event in American history (shaddap about Oberlin undergrads popping too many Valium after Kerry lost).<\/p>\nAnd even that wasn’t the worst it’s gotten.\u00a0 In my father’s lifetime – well within my grandparents’ early adult lives – there were those in the mainstream<\/em>\u00a0who seriously considered socialism, communism, even pre-war Naziism viable models with much from which we could learn, even much to emulate for our own good.\u00a0 There were those in positions of great power who actively sought to incorporate “the best” of these ideologies into our own.<\/p>\nThe point being that, so far, the Obama Administration isn’t the worst thing our constitution, our economy and our society\u00a0has faced – yet.\u00a0 And while the price of liberty is <\/em>eternal vigilance, and the Founding Fathers well-recognized the possibility that Americans might need to throw off another tyranny someday, this isn’t it<\/em>.<\/p>\nNot yet.<\/p>\n
It’s a big government, and it’s getting bigger.\u00a0 It’s a not-ready-for-prime-time government, run by a lot of very canny people who buffaloed a lot of our nation’s not-too-bright with a lot of breezy platitudes, and which rode to office on an almost-but-not-quite-unprecedented wave of discontent with the status quo<\/em>.\u00a0 It’s a government full of poltroons and ideological three-card-monte sharks.\u00a0 But it’s not a communist dictatorship.<\/p>\nIt was <\/em>elected, for better or worse.\u00a0 And we have three years and eight months to make the case that it should be thrown out of office and – this is the important part – nobody’s changing that.<\/p>\nIf they do<\/em>?\u00a0 Well, get back to me then; it’ll be then <\/em>you should think about putting on the camo and grabbing Grampa’s Garand and heading into the north woods.<\/p>\nUntil then?\u00a0 It’s still America.<\/p>\n
As Douglas Adams said, “Don’t Panic”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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