Where we've gone really wrong!

I was thinking about why I will be voting how I've decided to vote and could not really justify it to myself.  After all, we don't have any real good choices and the United States is heading very badly in the wrong direction.  Do I think Obama can right us?  No, he's part of the problem.  Do I think Romney can right us?  No, but he might slow down our own demise.  How do I figure this?  Well, the below might help.  It is my response to the statement that they couldn't vote for McCain in 2008 because he had a clown for VP and they can't vote for Romney because he has an ideologue.  I'm not going to argue with either statement, because they are true.  However, I urge you to read the below response and hopefully you'll gain some insight into just how much trouble I think we are in if we don't start stopping some of the stuff we are doing.

I, personally, don't think a VP candidate is relevant when voting.  They shouldn't have any real power at all.  Of course, if we bothered to follow the Constitution at all, that wouldn't be a problem.  In fact, the President should not have anywhere near the kind of power he exercises if we bothered to follow the Constitution.  I think that being opposed or afraid to vote for a candidate because their VP is an idiot or an ideologue shows just how far afield we've gone as a nation from where we are supposed to be constitutionally speaking.  So, I completely understand your reluctance on that basis.  All the more reason you should support true limited government.  I also don't think being an ideologue is necessarily a bad thing.  We are all ideologues about something.  So, it isn't that he is an ideologue, but about what he is an ideologue about that bothers you, I suspect.  People told me they wouldn't vote for McCain because Palin had no experience, which always gave me a chuckle because Obama had 0 years of executive experience.  He was never mayor, nor governor anywhere.  His biggest experience was 2 years in the U.S. Senate.  Palin had at least been mayor of a city and governor of a state.  While one of the smallest in population, it is the largest in land area, so I’d argue her experience far outweighed our current President’s at the time of the last election.  Also, there isn’t a much truer long serving idiot member of the Senate than Joe Biden.  We can agree to disagree on his competence, but I’ve questioned it often, even before he became VP.  Now him as President is also a scary thought for me for probably the same reasons you disliked Palin.  Of course, I also see Obama as the ideologue of that ticket, so …

What I mean by that is simple.  His philosophy and policies are clearly defined by one statement he made during a radio broadcast back in 2001.  I use this statement because nearly every action he has taken as President shows he truly believes it to be true.  Here is the quote: “as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted it in the same way that, generally, the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties -- says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf, and that hasn't shifted.”

So, his entire ideology is based on the belief that the role of government is to “do something for you on your behalf”.  That is clear through Obamacare, through ignoring the will of Congress on multiple occasions and creating regulations to carry out parts of his agenda even though Congress specifically voted down the act.  In other words, Congress said no, but he figured he’s the President so he can just do it anyway.  Also, his speeches all sound good, but they tend to betray this underlying philosophy every time.  You can’t be more ideological opposed to me, but you also can’t be more ideologically opposed to the Constitution.  OF COURSE the constitution is a charter of negative rights that states what the government can’t do to you.  That is what the founders believed in.  They specifically argued about the need for the Bill of Rights on the grounds that they were afraid of what the government would do to, or for, them.  This is the essence of freedom.  While we can vote ourselves a “social contract” all we want, since we are a Republic (not a Democracy as Democrats love to spout), we technically can’t do it constitutionally because we never changed the document.  We just decided to ignore it.  Unfortunately, Obama betrays his own philosophy that we didn’t ignore it enough.  That we have to move the government into a position where it can do “for us”.  That is not liberty, but, historically, always results in tyranny of some form or another.  And no, I’m not someone who believes it can never happen here. 

After all, we’ve ignored the Constitution to this point.  We ignore the 10^th amendment entirely, we ignore part of all of many of the amendments, which make up the essence of liberty.  And how did we decide what parts we can ignore and what parts we can’t?  Well, in the past, it was solely based on the opinion of 9 judges who, right or wrong, were considered sacrosanct.  I now believe that to be bull.  A study of Supreme Court decisions showed that when the court had to decide a case involving the expansion of federal power, they decided on the side of the government 90 percent of the time.  That’s outrageous!  The government can’t, statistically speaking, be right 90 percent of the time.  So, in essence, we allowed a system to grow that relied on the federal government to police itself.  Jefferson and Madison may have been right, as it turns out.  We further weakened federalism by making the Senate elected by the people.  The Senate was supposed to be the house of the STATES.  To represent the interests of the STATES.  The House was the People’s House, thus how it got its nickname.  We destroyed that and in the process have pretty much destroyed any vestiges of states rights.  In other words, we’ve flipped it on its head.  Instead of the states establishing a unifying compact, they created a  beast that now dictates to the states.  This was never meant to be how things worked.

So finally, why does this philosophy annoy me so much that I call Obama an ideologue?  Well, I think Alexis de Tocqueville said it best.  First, he said this: “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”  He also said this: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”  Well, we are 100 years into voting ourselves largesse from the public treasury.  That does NOT bode well for our future.  This is what I believe the philosophy the President has leads to.  He’s not the only one.  In fact, it is a rampant problem throughout both parties.  They both want to destroy our freedoms, they just have different ways in mind of doing it.  So, I will hold my nose and vote for the guy whose policies will destroy the Constitution slower, because I think it would be nice for America to continue to exist past 2130 or so…of course at the rate we are spending money we don’t have, it won’t make it that far.