Use Ike's Test: Is It Good For America?

Having been so thoroughly duped in the last election, and already frightened by what Mr. Obama is now up to, most Americans have had it with Washington and both political parties as well.

If the citizen uprising succeeds, the next president will not be yet another political entrepreneur — Democrat or Republican — seeking power and privilege for self and party at the expense of others.

Instead, the next president will, in the words of Dwight Eisenhower, have only "one yardstick by which (to) test every major problem — and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?"

What a revolutionary difference he and his yardstick will make — given that nearly the entire federal government presently fails the "good for America" test by a wide margin.

Among Washington's accomplishments are high taxes, profligate spending, big deficits, mounting foreign debt, an endangered dollar, ruinous unfunded entitlements, a hollowed-out manufacturing sector, a burst housing bubble, a worldwide banking and credit crisis, chronic trade deficits, energy shortages, overpriced health care and college tuition, an over-regulated economy, jobs destruction, the current recession and the prospect of skyrocketing inflation.

Also on the list are dumbed-down schools, declining skill levels, mass illegal immigration, disintegrating cultural unity, reverse racial discrimination, increasing inequality before the law, interference with the free exercise of religion, restrictions on political speech, election fraud and tampering — and a tax code designed to do the maximum amount of collateral damage to the economy per dollar of revenue raised.

If not stopped, government bureaucrats will soon be running hospitals, telling doctors how to practice medicine and deciding who gets what treatment, when or perhaps not at all.

This is precisely this sort of rubbish that has brought down the Republican Party and put the Republic into the Straits described by the author in his own article.

The threshold question is not, "what is good for America?" But, "is this constitutional?" Especially, is this constitutional when done by the federal government. Only when this question is answered should we ask whether the nostrum is good for the country.

As good and great a man as Eisenhower was, he was not doctrinaire conservative. He was instinctively conservative but his conservatism came from his military experience in which integrity was the cornerstone upon which everything depended.

You see this phenomenon in John McCain who does not ask whether a matter is constitutional but whether it is right or wrong. So, to John McCain it is wrong for special interests to dominate elections with their campaign funds and therefore it is quite right and good to restrict their constitutionally protected free speech to eliminate the wrong.

The Constitution as it was written provides plenty of scope within the federal system for us to ask, "is this scheme good for the country? "Most of what we do today could be very well handled by the states. There is no reason why the states can not provide for the good of the country. Where the problem is truly national, for example one airline regulation, the Constitution usually provides scope enough for federal regulation. When not, there is a prescribed method to adapt the Constitution to a new age.

Where the new scheme conflicts with the rights of the people, such as John McCain's law to restrict free speech at election time, the Constitution has already weighed the cost and the benefit and it is not for politicians, no matter how well-intentioned, to substitute their judgment for our original deal.

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