Posted on 12/26/2004 8:19:36 PM PST by CHARLITE
The founding fathers never envisioned direct election of the president by the people. In the beginning the people voted for state representatives and congressmen. State legislatures selected two men to represent the state in the Senate.
Each state legislature selected a man (from anywhere in the country) to be president and another (not from the same state) to be vice president. There was no campaign and no presidential candidate to select his own vice president. These names were given to electors who journeyed to Washington to meet with the electors from the other states. This was the original electoral college. They would then count the names and the presidential nominee who got the most nods became president. Same for vice president.
It was not until communications became more rapid and travel from the frontier faster and more reliable that it was decided people knew enough about what was going on in Washington to elect senators and presidents directly. It was assumed those who were informed would do the voting.
But now we have what amounts to a combination of a lottery, horse race fixing, the super bowl and world series, with a beauty pageant and Madison Avenue advertising blitzes thrown in to 'help' us decide.
And today, after the 2000 election debacle, lawyers and law suits have become part of the mix. When I was a boy in school our teachers used tell us anyone could grow up and run for president. Try telling that to Ralph Nader.
This is the natural outgrowth of a system that depends largely on uninformed, ignorant, and generally non-caring voters whose emotions are aroused every four years by the best and most believable liar and his entourage. Professional politicians have become a ruling class.
To my mind the Democrats are by far the worst because they are so good at it. I have often remarked how the Democrats are arrogantly corrupt while the Republicans are benignly inept.
But both parties are sliding to the left. The Republicans are where the Democrats were a two generations ago. The Democrats are dangerously close to Europe's secular socialism that depends on the United States for it's security.
Bush's re-election will keep the slide fairly slow paced. But to win elections Republicans still have to promise entitlements and safety nets, stopping just short of the Democrat's goal of providing their constituencies with the living they think the government owes them for their vote.
It will take a major catastrophe to make us hit the reset button. A civil war or another world war in which our own borders become undefendable and our own citizens suffer 9/11 type casualties at a rate at which they are not soon forgotten like 9/11 was.
We are too fat and rich and have too much leisure time to even think about making some sacrifices that will pull the country together for a common cause. The people are not involved in this war as we were in World War II. Very few people know someone who has a son or daughter or brother or uncle serving in the military. It's just something we see on TV like Fear Factor or Cops.
I remember World War II. I was just a youngster but I can tell you about the home front. About rationing where meat and butter and eggs were luxuries we were treated to once, or maybe twice a month. Where cars sat in driveways because you couldn't get a needed tire or you had run out of gas rationing stamps. Where you would walk down the street and see little flags in the windows with blue or gold stars on them. A gold star meant someone in that household had given his life. My father and my uncle ached for war news. They would listen to Gabriel Heater or Edward R. Murrow or Lowell Thomas broadcasting 15 minutes of week old news and consider themselves well informed. They didn't become so sated and bored with 24 hours of live news coverage from Iraq that has little more meaning than movie where John Wayne crawls up a beach in The Sands of Iwo Jima.
Since the beginning of the Cold War we Americans have been accused of becoming fat and lazy and little more than paper tigers. Nikita Khrushchev once boasted, "We will bury you." We all thought he meant they would overthrow us militarily. Now I think he meant they would just wait around until we were a corpse waiting to be buried. The liberals will do their best to provide that corpse so the UN can bury the spirit of America so it's body can be joined to EU and become just another mediocre socialist country hoping the Muslims will wait until after the weekend to attack us again.
Comments:judge@zianet.com
The liberals will do their best to provide that corpse so the UN can bury the spirit of America so it's body can be joined to EU and become just another mediocre socialist country hoping the Muslims will wait until after the weekend to attack us again.
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Well this part is for sure -- if the far-left socialists in our country get control of the U.S. -- it will happen. A scary percentage of the people in this country are complacent and weak and pay little attention to what their government is, or could do to them. Like Karl Marx' "USEFUL IDIOTS", the U.S. has theirs too and they will be useful in burying this country -- hell, they would have put a Marxist like Kerry in the White House, and would put another, JUST AS BAD AND IN FACT WORSE, the royal black Marxist queen, Hillary in their too, if her name had been beside the word "DEMOCRAT" on the ballot.
They just don't care. Fools.
The Libs' birthrate is lower than red state America. We'll overtake them in a few years.
Mr. Sivertson would be well-advised to realize that, even if the electors were once again creatures of the state legislature, Pat Buchanan still ain't gonna be elected President.
Moreover, so long as one insists on insulting the intelligence and slurring the instincts of ordinary Americans, rather than respecting them, one's candidate will not rise above third party status.
Mr. Sivertson would be well-advised to realize that, even if the electors were once again creatures of the state legislature, Pat Buchanan still ain't gonna be elected President.
Moreover, so long as one insists on insulting the intelligence and slurring the instincts of ordinary Americans, rather than respecting them, one's candidate will not rise above third party status.
Well said, we need to reshape the debate from ad hominem diatribe to the issues of right and wrong and good against evil.
That we are unchallenged due to our excesses is a BFO, so let's find and/or remind our fellow americans of what matters.
Bush won because he touched some of this, and he is trying to deliver, SOCIAL Sec Reform, etc. if we yawn and fail to support these things then who is the toad in the road?
RW
Sivertson's insufferable snootiness points up the need we share to be careful who self appoints themselves as spokesmen for the cause. He may speak for thee but certainly not for me.
The radical left is already talking about how we should have proportional representation by party. (ie the greens would have a percentage of reps in the house and senate)
These are the same nutjobs who want to do away with the electoral college to create flyover country.
They eat their young.
Rubbish. The author doesn't know our history.
1 generation ago under President Reagan, Republicans were *afraid* to put government jobs up for bid by private industry (thanks, GWB!) and were afraid to privatize Social Security...both of those issues are already being tackled by President Bush.
2 generations ago it was illegal for Americans to own gold, and Republican President Dick Nixon was giving us Affirmative Action (opposed by President Bush and all modernday Republicans), the EPA (President Bush is opposed to the EPA's opposition to drilling for oil in Alaska and is opposed to the EPA lawsuits that are holding up the progress of further expanding our 12 foot tall steel fence along our border with Mexico), implimented wage and price controls into our economy (compared to our free market system viewpoint today), were registering the owners of machine guns (today's Republicans have passed 46 statewide Concealed Carry laws and allowed the Assault Weapons Ban to expire, in contrast), and were opening up China at the expense of Taiwan.
So clearly the Republicans have moved to the *Right* over the past two generations. Republicans under President Bush have passed the *first* federal law to ban Partial Birth Abortions, for instance...hardly the position of the GOP in 1973.
Yet the author of the tripe for this thread thinks that we've moved to the Left.
That's just laughable. You'd have to be uneducated on the history of Republicans (and that's being kind) to think that going from wage and price controls under Nixon in the 1970's was somehow more conservative and capitalistic than President Bush's 3 income tax cuts, dividend tax cut, elimination of the estate tax, and bidding out federal jobs to the private market.
Such a lack of historical education is yet another reason why 3rd Party fringe candidates aren't paid attention to by the more educated American population at large.
Sadly there are a lot of "conservatives" that think moving to the right of Pat Buchanan is the only thing that will save this country.
Getting "to the right" of Pat has become an odd exercise, as Pat has rounded the bend into a leftish syndicated populism.
His immediate right would now be occupied by, what, Fascism?
Well, politics is more of a circle than a line and Pat leaned so far to the right that he is now leaning left.
His immediate right would now be occupied by, what, Fascism?
Fascism is about as far to the right as one can go but just like its cousin Nazism, it isn't purely a politically right philosophy. It had plenty of elements that are far left too.
And Pat went right through it, on his way around the back side of the circle.
Yes he did and sadly too many people still worship him as a god.
Horozontil bop alert!
Great column, great writing, every word right on the money.
I have to remember the name "Noel Sivertson".
He knows what his audience wants to hear...and how to separate them from their money. He pushes the buttons, they pony up the bucks.
Pat has turned his political philosophy into a thriving little cottage industry. That it is no longer a valid (or consistent) political philosophy is beside the point.
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