Guest Editorial
BY LAWRENCE SELLIN, PHD | FEBRUARY 19, 2014
2014: Last Chance to Save America
The United States is now facing an existential crisis due to executive tyranny, legislative malfeasance, judicial complicity and journalistic partisanship.
The Obama administration is corrupt, authoritarian and antithetical to the principles upon which the country was founded, and there are precious few in Congress, either party, who are willing to step forward and stop the violations of the Constitution.
As Ayn Rand noted, we are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
Contrary to the official narrative, Barack Obama is less a champion of democracy and leader of the free world, than a reincarnation of the petulant, self-admiring King Richard II of England (1367-1400) who, trapped in an adolescent fantasy of indestructability, mistook himself for a messiah. By issuing royal decrees Richard II bypassed parliament and went out of his way to lavish favors on his closest friends and advisors.
But all such narcissism-induced national "transformations" do not happen in a political vacuum or occur without willful negligence. The English Parliament facilitated Richard II by approving the 1380 tax in the same way the US Congress and America's politicized courts facilitate Obama's own worst instincts.
Equally, the American establishment media, shedding their pretense of objectivity and succumbing to their left-wing dispositions, both enthusiastically support and aggressively defend Obama's radical policies. Rather than restraining the power of the federal government, they have become an extension of it and serve the interests of the status quo, which primarily benefits greedy and ambitious ruling elites. The media enable tyranny by misinforming and misleading citizens. It is not a democracy that the media wish to foster, but what Edmund Burke described as a liberal "mobocracy," dedicated to the absolute authority of King Obama and his government of one-world progressives.
What real kings like Richard II and presumptive kings like Obama often forget is that, in the end, power depends not just on coercion, but on the consent of the governed. Without regard to its consequences, Richard II, in November 1380, initiated his version of wealth redistribution in the form of a tax, which the medieval middle class suspected was meant, not to benefit the realm, but to extract the loyalty of the nobility. It was an early form of crony capitalism. The outrage it generated among ordinary English subjects led to the Peasants' Revolt in 1381, which precipitated a rebel assault on the capital city of London.
Nearly four hundred years later, the same autocratic blunders drove English colonists to violent rebellion and independence from a mother country with whom, as John Adams noted, they shared the same language, religion and kindred blood.
Because our national political system has failed to preserve representative government and prevent federal tyranny, a county by county political battle must be fought by the American people to restore the Constitution, establish responsible fiscal policies and take back control of the political process.
Fundamental to this effort is a strict constructionist interpretation of the Constitution, particularly the 10th Amendment:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Each county should establish elements of an organized and disciplined militia with sufficient arms and ammunition to safeguard individual liberty from any entity that might attempt to abuse it.
Members of Congress should be limited to a total of twelve years' service either in the House of Representatives or the Senate or a combination thereof. Special benefits and legal exemptions available to government officials beyond those of ordinary citizens should be eliminated.
Our borders must be secured and our current immigration laws enforced before any additional legislation should be considered.
A simplified flat tax system for individuals and business should be enacted to limit both the misuse of the Internal Revenue Service and the impact of lobbyists.
We should remove constraints for energy and financial independence, freeing our foreign policy from overseas control.
With the exception of defense, a yearly across-the-board 10% reduction in the funding for the federal government should be established with the immediate elimination of the Departments of Homeland Security, Energy, Education and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Social issues should include: strictly applying Equal Opportunity against the discriminatory practices of affirmative action and diversity policies; recognizing that the enforcement of religious laws are incompatible with the U.S. Constitution; declaring English as the only official language of the United States; and rejecting political correctness and multiculturalism as an infringement of the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment and contrary to the American principle of E Pluribus Unum.
As President John F. Kennedy said in his October 22, 1962 address to the nation during the Cuban Missile Crisis:
"The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission."
Like then, the way forward is full of hazards, but the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired colonel with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. Colonel Sellin is the author of "Restoring the Republic: Arguments for a Second American Revolution ". He receives email at [email protected]. Visit http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/2014-last-chance-to-save-america?f=must_reads.
