Book by Vince Flynn "TERM LIMITS"

synopsis from back cover of book: Taking America back....one politician at a time. What if America's leaders were held accountable for their broken promises--and made to pay for their corruption? Vince Flynn brings to life a chilling scenario of Washington under siege--in the provocative, edge-of-your-seat political thriller that stormed onto national bestseller lists. TERM LIMITS. In a night of shattering brutality, three of Washington's most powerful politicians have been executed with surgical precision. Their assassins, vanishing without a trace, have delivered a shocking ultimatum to the American government: set aside petty, partisan politics and restore power to the people, or be held to deadly account. No one, they warn is out of their reach--not even the president. A joint FBI-CIA task force reveals the killers are elite military commandos, but no one knows exactly who they are or when they will strike next. Only Michael O'Rourke, a former U.S. Marine and freshman congressman, holds a clue to the violence: a haunting incident in his own past with explosive implications for his country's future....In a tour de force of action and suspense, Vince Flynn takes the ultimate American ideal--a government of the people--to a devastating extreme." A MUST READ, states katyinhawaii.

In this novel of the post James Bond genre, Vince Flynn explores the use of murder as a legitimate expression of politics.

Dramatic necessity requires the author to create context which lends a degree of sympathy to those who would murder to advance political ends. In the context created for this novel, I am uncomfortably predisposed to accept the rationalization advanced to justify political murder: the elites in Washington are deaf to the pleas the people and rule by spending the country into ruin. The murderers are ex-servicemen, seals, men whom we on these threads would be predisposed to accept as patriots. Inevitably, the murders spawn reactions involving unintended consequences and even more righteous and more innocent players themselves become murderers.

Of course I am giving this action novel a great deal of license in seeing it as an exploration of what happens to a Republic when the elites become too removed from the interests of the people. More, I am wary of my own reactions to it because of the predispositions I have described.

I do not think that Vince Flynn wrote a good novel from a philosophical point of view, although as a spy vs. spy work it is okay. The problem is that he does not adequately create the context which would justify going outside the democratic system in a representative democracy such as we have to commit crime, even murder, to restore the system to something good. The novel is remarkably timely coming as it does during the excesses of spending by the Obama administration, but it does not establish the requisite degree of criminality in the administration necessary to justify the criminality of revolution or murder.

This is not a novel written by Dostoevsky.

If the tree of liberty is periodically to be watered with the blood of patriots, we must somehow show that the tree is being hacked down by tyrants.

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