Feel the Fetters
Posted on 12/01/2014 2:12:04 AM PST by Jacquerie
No topic beats the frequency of politics at Free Republic. Since the national government has become ubiquitous in our lives from beginning to end, it follows we should pay attention to what our masters are doing.
Yes, masters. On November 20th, 2014, Obama made clear the midterm trouncing of Hisself and his party would have no effect on his approach to governing. Nearly as disappointing, but not shocking was the limp GOPE response to Obama’s declaration.
In a speech designed for all North America, (minus Canadians and Americans) Barack Hussein Obama crossed America’s Rubicon and decreed his lawmaking powers. Dressed in the drag of our mostly forgotten republic, Obama pretended to be just like presidents of yore, whose only purpose was to perform their constitutional duties, then go home to live quietly under the laws they passed.
Wherever you file important dates, in long term memory, on a yellow sticky note as I do on my desk, don’t misplace 11/20/14, for that’s when Obama finished off a bedridden republic. He formally proclaimed what he had been angling at for years, outright repeal of Article I Section 1 of the Constitution, that which established the American Republic.
As for fetters and politics, it is immensely difficult to avoid the sporting event aura of American politics. The media consists of endless analyses of polls, the latest fumbles, who is up, who is down and how the next player’s draft looks for whomever.
That is all well and good as sporting events go, for their effect, their impact doesn’t go beyond their participants or those who make their living analyzing sporting events. For the average fan who camps out on his sofa with friends for a few hours, the outcome of an afternoon game has no effect on their lives. Fun and exciting to watch, irrelevant to their future.
It is exactly what even year elections have become, fun to watch, yet destined to have no impact on the restoration of our freedoms. Every time congress sits on its hands, the power they relinquish to Obama becomes precedent, precedent which is his and will be found in the hip pocket of future presidents, no matter who replaces Obama. Elections matter in republics, not in arbitrary systems, and on 11/20/14 America became just another failed free state, one of the many in western history.
Where the law is self-serving, crony, amorphous, subject to wild swings, and determined by one man, freedom has been replaced with fetters. That is tyranny, it is America.
The middle class could vote to stop this while it still exists, but they won't. That is job 1 for Jeb.
>> Every time congress sits on its hands, the power they relinquish to Obama becomes precedent
Exactly. And for that reason, both McConnell and Boehner are the facilitators George Washington would have done without.
It is why, if we are to have a chance at freedom, the senate must be returned to the states.
BUMP
Welcome to Acirema, where the guilty are rewarded and the innocent are punished. And its dictator for life is the half breed Emperor BHO. Caesar ended the Roman republic and began the downward spiral of consecutive emperors who were murdered. So too does the half breed Emperor BHO end the republic by rendering the Constitution and the Congress obsolete.
Will history repeat itself? It usually does for man is truly stupid not to learn the lessons of history. May God help us.
From the moment that the Romans lost their liberty, their spirit was gone, and their valour scarce ever after appeared.
In the beginning of Augustus’s reign, the best and bravest of them perished by the sword, either in the civil war, where, Romans fighting against Romans, multitudes were slain, with Brutus and Cassius, the last brave men that ever drew a sword for the commonwealth; or in the bloody proscriptions that followed, in which all the excellent men and assertors of liberty, who escaped the battle, were gleaned up and murdered by soldiers and informers, and, amongst the rest, the divine Cicero.
Afterwards, when Augustus had got the world to himself, (jura omnium in se traxit;) flatterers were his only favourites, and none were preferred to magistracy, but the servile creatures of his power; liberty was extinct, and its spirit gone; and though there was a universal peace, yet the power of the empire continually decayed. Augustus himself was so sensible of this, that the loss of two or three legions under Varus in Germany, frightened him, and had almost broke his heart; not from any tenderness in it, for he had butchered myriads, and enslaved all; but he knew that now Roman legions were hard to be got, and scarce worth getting. Having destroyed so many brave Romans, and made the rest base by slavery, and by the corruptions which support it, he knew the difficulty of forming a Roman army.
His successors were worse; they went on in a perpetual series of slaughters, dreading and destroying every thing that had the appearance of virtue or goodness; and even so early as Tiberius’s reign, that emperor, says Tacitus, knew (magis fama quam vi stare res suas,) that his empire was supported more by the reputation of Roman greatness, than by the real strength of the Romans, who grew every day more and more weak and wretched; and though they had now and then a little sun-shine in the reign of a good emperor, yet the root of the evil remained: They were no longer freemen, and for far the most part, their government was nothing else but a constant state of oppression, and a continual succession of massacres. Tyrants governed them, and soldiers created and governed the tyrants, or butchered them if they would not be butchers.
As to military virtue, it was no more: The Praetorian bands were only a band of hangmen with an emperor at their head; Italy and the provinces were exhausted; the Roman people were nothing but an idle and debauched mob, that cared not who was uppermost, so they had but a little victuals, and saw shews; The provincial armies were foreign hirelings, and there was not a Roman army in the Roman empire. (Inops) (Italia, plebs urbana imbellis nihil in exercitibus validum praeter externum).
This was said not long after the death of Augustus; nor do I remember an instance of one great Roman captain after Germanicus and Corbulo; the first murdered by Tiberius, his uncle and father by adoption; and the other by Nero, for whom he reconquered and settled the East; and after Vespasian and Titus, every Roman emperor of remarkable bravery was a foreigner, and every victory gained by them, was gained by foreigners; who, being all mercenaries, were perpetually setting up and pulling down their own monarchs.
At length, being possessed of the whole power of the empire, they took it to themselves; and thus it ended, and became dismembered by several nations, and into several governments, according to their fortune; and it is remarkable, that though those nations had frequent wars amongst themselves about the countries which they invaded, yet they had nothing to apprehend from the Romans while they were seizing Roman provinces.
It is man’s behavior that repeats itself. History is the recording of said behavior.
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