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Wednesday, January 21, 2009
David Harsanyi :: Townhall.com Columnist
No More Kings
by David Harsanyi
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Was the Copenhagen Global Warming Summit Walk-Out a Win for the U.S.?


Liberals, rightly, recoil at the prospect of conservatives dictating which morals they should live by. Obama, though, has spent the past year preaching his own brand of morality -- with a list of demands. Everyone, you see, "must" sacrifice. As Michelle Obama recently explained, "Barack Obama will require you to work. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

Those of us who refuse to buy left-wing orthodoxy will remain "uninformed" and, inevitably, "selfish."

To be fair, I'm uncertain what Obama is going to require of me during these next four to eight years. I do know, right off the bat, that if he passes his centerpiece trillion-dollar ideologically driven government expansion (in the guise of a "stimulus" plan), he will be demanding my grandchildren work overtime to pay it off. That's after they're done paying Bush's tab.

Obama challenges Americans to have "a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves." So if you find massive concentrated power in Washington a turn-on, you've found your higher purpose.

But surely, most of you found meaning in something greater than yourselves long before some politician demanded it.

To require such fealty to power in the name of patriotism was once repugnant to the left. Now, with the right guy in charge, apparently, it can be embraced once again.

Change, indeed.

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Re: lilly
I found another article in that same "Atlantic" issue that should give everyone pause: "Silenced Majorities," about the filibuster. Our Founders had no intention of setting up a pure democracy for the simple reason that a pure democracy would permit the majority to "freely and democratically" vote to enslave any minority. So we were given a Republic with safeguards to protect minorities from a "tyranny of the majority." The filibuster is part of that protection. The Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority from 1964 - 1968 and even leading Democrats were worried; when **Democrats** are worried about having too much power then everyone should sit up and take notice.

The article about the Founders "Big Mistake" did not impress me at all. The Executive Branch was designed to be weaker than the Legislative and Judicial Branches but with a different set of priorities. Foreign policy, e.g., was put in the hands of the Executive Branch because quick decisions will be necessary; the President, as Commander-in-Chief of the military, also needs to make decisions quickly. We haven't won a war since WW2 because Congress has usurped those powers. Then they blame the President for the results.

Our government was not founded with efficiency in mind; it was founded with the purpose of preventing any person or branch from getting too much power. The fact that Executive Orders have made undesirable changes is because Congress failed to apply the brakes. The Founders laid out the framework but it is up to the voters to keep tabs on its operation.

Voters have tolerated this
Having read Harsanyi's book "Nanny State" and observed what happens at the polls I am not surprised at what happened in November. For decades, voters have supported seemingly innocuous issues that were supposedly "for our own good. We have "no smoking" laws, laws governing the content on our TV's, seat belt laws, ad nauseum. We have "Child protection" laws (and officials who are more interested in breaking up families than in protecting children) and should be demanding why that is.

Locally, six boys who were abused by a lesbian couple escaped from that situation but Children's Services wanted to hand them back!

As to why there is such an effort to destroy families, a look into modern history will give the reason. During the periods of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union government wanted children to spy on their parents and report anything said against the government; however, families were sufficiently close-knit that they stuck together.

All of the "Nanny State" laws voted into place have served one major purpose: more power for Big Brother. When I was in grade school the teacher read us the fable about the Arab and his camel and we discussed it in class. For the uninitiated, first the camel wanted his nose in the tent, then his head etc. At dawn the camel had the tent all to himself. That is the ultimate purpose of all the "feel good" legislation that is passed "for our own good."
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