Anyone who reveres the name Reagan shouldn't want Kean taking a committee seat away from a real Republican.
ML/NJ
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Better to have melendez take a senate seat away from Kean so after the house votes the articles of impeachment the senate can vote the President out of office. But you'd be happy because Dick Cheney, a real republican, would then be President. Who cares that the dems would control the congress and pelosi would be a heartbeat away behind an older guy with a bad ticker. One man's principles are another man's kool-Aid when principle becomes self-destructive stubborn adherence to petty self-righteousness.
Any vote for a third party in the main election or any lack of vote is totally enabling the fire breathing communist Democrat.
Makes no sense to me no matter how much a Rino upsets us.
Why enable a cancer when a pimple bothers you?
"In short, the pragmatic, practical reality is that national politics works to make absolutely totally sure that the citizen has as little actual representation as possible while maintaining the fiction of representative government."
A quote from Alexis De Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," found at:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ch4_06.htm seems appropriate here. I apologize for the length, but I believe it is well worth the read. It appears to me that this is EXACTLY what is happening, right under our noses, while the majority of the electorate is blissfully unaware and easily distracted by all of the Dem v. Pubbie blather.
The reality is that we're losing control of our country, even under Republican control of all houses. The Dems will drive us off the cliff faster, but the Republicans are leading us down the same road. I can't and won't give them a pass for simply taking us down the path a little more slowly. Back to De Tocqueville.....
"...I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power,
which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. [The nanny-state is quite prevalent, and the Republicans have expanded it.] That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances:
what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? [The feds have no business meddling in our medical care, the education of our children, our retirement planning, etc. I find no Constitutional authority for ANY of it, but they do it, "For our own good."]
Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;
it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. [The Internal Revenue Code comes to mind as a perfect example of this. This is the primary tool used to shape and mold each member of the community; to provide for their medical care, retirement, and education.] The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting.
Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.[!!!!!]
I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.
Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government,
but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain.
By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. [How do I make the following sentence RED and BOLD!!!]
This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience. I do not deny, however, that a constitution of this kind appears to me to be infinitely preferable to one which, after having concentrated all the powers of government, should vest them in the hands of an irresponsible person or body of persons. Of all the forms that democratic despotism could assume, the latter would assuredly be the worst.
When the sovereign is elective, or narrowly watched by a legislature which is really elective and independent, the oppression that he exercises over individuals is sometimes greater, but it is always less degrading; because every man, when he is oppressed and disarmed, may still imagine that, while he yields obedience, it is to himself he yields it, and that it is to one of his own inclinations that all the rest give way. In like manner, I can understand that when the sovereign represents the nation and is dependent upon the people, the rights and the power of which every citizen is deprived serve not only the head of the state, but the state itself; and that private persons derive some return from the sacrifice of their independence which they have made to the public.
To create a representation of the people in every centralized country is, therefore, to diminish the evil that extreme centralization may produce, but not to get rid of it.
I admit that, by this means, room is left for the intervention of individuals in the more important affairs; but it is not the less suppressed in the smaller and more privates ones.
It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without possessing the other.
Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated; whereas that obedience which is exacted on a few important but rare occasions only exhibits servitude at certain intervals and throws the burden of it upon a small number of men.
It is in vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.
I add that they will soon become incapable of exercising the great and only privilege which remains to them. The democratic nations that have introduced freedom into their political constitution at the very time when they were augmenting the despotism of their administrative constitution have been led into strange paradoxes. To manage those minor affairs in which good sense is all that is wanted, the people are held to be unequal to the task; but when the government of the country is at stake, the people are invested with immense powers; they are alternately made the play things of their ruler, and his masters, more than kings and less than men.[Think about the way the two parties try to manipulate the voters. Republicans tell you the Dems will eat your young, scare you into voting for them simply because they're not Dems. The Dems promise a handout to every underprivileged group, and yes, for those who are anti-war, promise to "do something." Each party tries to appear bigger than life, and suggest they can do the impossible. Neither party is focused on truly following the Constitution or simply doing what is right for the country. It's all about power and manipulating the electorate.] After having exhausted all the different modes of election without finding one to suit their purpose, they are still amazed and still bent on seeking further; as if the evil they notice did not originate in the constitution of the country far more than in that of the electoral body.
It is indeed difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people.2
A constitution republican in its head and ultra-monarchical in all its other parts has always appeared to me to be a short-lived monster. The vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of a single master."
Again, I apologize for the length, but I really think De Tocqueville's words were prescient and prophetic. We need to step back and take a breath and take a look at the proverbial big picture....and to hold our elected officials to that musty old document that is supposed to constrain all government action: The Constitution.
Impeachment is just talk to rally the rat base. They don't have the votes to impeach or to convict.
Stop and think.
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Just stretching a point to make a point. To spell out the obvious. Rinos are infinitely more preferable to dems where national security and congressional effectiveness are concerned. Would you rather have Rudy or Hillary? He's a rino she's a commie. Who would be the better alternative for chief executive.
Additionally, regarding impeachment. if the dems were to pick up 40 or so seats in house they would have the votes to start impeachment proceedings, and a lot of other absurd dangerous things. Why flirt with disaster by smugly thinking these aren't possibilities. Just like in Iraq, you've got to defeat the enemy. We should be looking to pick up seats by electing as many republicans as we can. Have we forgotten the Ross Perot lesson?