Posted on 04/09/2020 5:28:15 PM PDT by MtnClimber
What's extraordinary is Constitutional liberty, based on biblical truths. (snip) Last week, American journalists took a brief moment to express its shock and surprise. The brutal Philippines dictator Rodrigo Duterte had threatened his own people with mass murder. As reported at CBS News: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte took to the airwaves with a chilling warning for his citizens: Defy the lockdown orders again and the police will shoot you dead. (snip) You know all the names of these 20th Century pharaohs. They will live in infamy. They oversaw the greatest mass murders of their time, and carved their names into our history books.
Same Old Thuggery
But these villains were not extraordinary men. They were, like Duterte, quite normal. The great political philosopher Hannah Arendt famously described the small-minded motives of tyrants and thugs as “banal.” What set such men apart? Something quite simple. There was nothing to hold them back, no enforceable constitutional code. No institutions existed to defend the moral law or the rights of their people. Historically and globally speaking, few have had the privilege of constitutional guarantees against orders like Duterte’s: “Shoot them dead.” (snip) Like a primitive highway robber, Cuomo is taking thousands of dollars from private citizens who disobey his new “social distancing” protocols. De Blasio, meanwhile, threatens to permanently close down New Yorkers’ churches if he catches parishioners defying his lockdown.
Red Counties: Drop Dead
Perhaps most alarmingly of all, Gov. Cuomo has deployed the National Guard to seize ventilators from hardworking hospital workers in rural (Republican) districts. Why? To transfer the equipment to urban (Democratic) districts that represent his political base. (snip) President Donald Trump’s medical advisers are unanimous. Like the media, they want Trump to focus single-mindedly on fear of the virus, and containing it at any cost. But for my part, I hope President Trump considers this perspective as well: What if our fear of a passing plague is blinding us to a greater, more persistent danger. What if something could prove more deadly in the long run than even the most pessimistic of COVID-19 death toll projections?
I’m talking about the danger of becoming ordinary — like the careless ordinary men who trampled countless human lives in Europe and Russia in the 20th Century. Like Xi Jinping and Rodrigo Duterte.
As U.S. President, Donald Trump knows his power is circumscribed. What hems it in is the wisdom the Hebrews learned after their Exodus from slavery in Egypt. Governments are just as fallen and fickle as the human beings who operate them. Their saving grave? Constitutional limits based on the framework of the eternal moral law.
I think President Trump will prove himself to be extraordinary.
Could you picture the Kenyan putting himself out there every day to answer questions? They would be softballs and pulling punches.
When did Duterte become a dictator? The Phillipines still have elections. The next presidential election will be on May 2022.
“Those who cast the vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.” - Josef Stalin
Yes they would... they would be about his optimism, his family and his leadership and nothing that would expose his fallibility of their Messiah. Of course he would return the answers laced with selfish egocentric labels and words/phrases such as... Me, myself, I, If not for me, by my hand, I am King, and you must all bow to me you groveling lemmings.
I believe in no small part the media deliberately ginned up panic to discredit Trump even to the point of killing the econmic gains of the last three years of Trumps leadership.
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