Of course, that was the title of the article. It was the Palin part of it that got me a bit worked up.
My apologies if I violated a posting guideline here.
You don't have to apologize to me. I'm not a moderator or the proprietor.
And it probably won't matter anyway. It's apparently open season on Dr. Keyes on FR these days, sadly.
All I would ask you to do, once you calm down, is to put the personalities aside, those of both Keyes and Palin, and give serious thought to the actual words of that article. Because what he said is incisively true about the condition of this republic. And he's saying things few others even seem to understand and therefore have the ability to articulate.
In every respect the American body politic is wasting away. We see this in the reality of crushing national debt and imminent bankruptcy that threatens to collapse our economic system. We see it in the malaise of dysfunctional behavior that threatens to collapse the vital structures of our social life. We see it in the heedless self-indulgence that wrecks the lives of individuals and families. The moral and spiritual understanding, resources and habits that are the key to forestalling this collapse are everywhere under assault, and almost always that assault comes from some self-serving elements of the elite, seeking to maximize their profit, power or personal ambition by inducing or encouraging vices and addictions (dependencies) they can profitably exploit.At its inception, the American political system was devised by leaders who intended its constitutional provisions to limit the harm that could be done by such exploitative elites. But those provisions implicitly relied on a certain moral understanding and character. The key elements of the requisite moral understanding are articulated in the ideas and reasoning epitomized in the American Declaration of Independence. The key elements of the requisite moral character were supported by religious and educational institutions (beginning of course with the God-endowed natural family) that conveyed and built upon the moral understanding.
If, as many grass-roots conservatives now proclaim, we truly aim to restore and perpetuate the constitutional, democratic republic, we must discard the destructive syndrome of self-serving elite ambition characteristic of the present so-called two-party system. We must discard the masquerade of mutual negativity through which its manipulators seek to herd us toward a totalitarian socialist future under their domination. The American republic represents a positive idea of justice and decent community that begins from the simple premise of God's creation and concludes in the insistent expectation that the exercise of human power must conform to its moral requirements.
-- Alan Keyes