Voters exchange liberty for complacency

“These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote pamphleteer Tom Paine. My soul is troubled, too. The news is grim, and the prospects for liberty slim.

We now have a two-year contest to choose the next emperor for eight years. Most countries don’t electioneer for more than two months. We have become a constitutional monarchy, with competing dynasties spending fortunes for the opportunity to be the leader of the “free” world, even though they have to step down after two terms—at least for now.

We are in the thrall of the unspoken Clinton-Powell-Bush-Cheney-Wolfowitz doctrine. We have decided that we will not tolerate any competition, never mind a threat, from any other nation. We have no respect for any other countries’ claims to a legitimate sphere of interest. Our goal has been for decades now to topple Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran, and to weaken or topple Moscow and Beijing.

The Republican presidential field is, as former CIA analyst Philip Giraldi said, “batshit ignorant” of the world. But so is the nation. Almost 50 percent of America believes we should put another country’s interests before ours. Republican candidates pray for a religious revival in Iowa, then kiss the ring of a vice lord in Las Vegas. Our Congress invited the prime minister of a favored nation to denounce in their assemblage a sitting president’s negotiations to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. A freshman senator authored a letter signed by half the Senate behind the president’s back to the nation we are negotiating with saying they will not implement the agreement. This from the party of patriotism!

We aspire to control the world through a single financial and monetary system and a series of satraps and lackeys. We claim that right because we are so exceptional, our awesomeness so brilliant, that the world will surely acquiesce to our benevolent hegemony.

If they resist, of course, we will bomb them until they do acquiesce.

Yet, the same people who constantly remind us how exceptional we are, when it comes to immigration, then suddenly say no, no, we are just like other nations! Every other nation, you see, has tough immigration laws, so why don’t we? They sound just like those who argue that all civilized nations have socialized medicine. They yearn for socialized borders. They want to build walls along a 2,000-mile border to secure it from the invading hordes of children, workers and sellers of contraband. They will never secure the border. Even the Berlin Wall was breached over a thousand times a month.

The Democrats are led by their dynastic queen who travels among us eating our commoner food and listening to supplications from carefully chosen local petitioners. Meanwhile, rumors swirl around her of corruption and underhanded dealings against our interests. She struggles to feign indifference to the charges, because she must appeal regal and yet approachable at the same time. After all, she is a woman. For her devoted followers, that in itself is enough. If she falls, they have no one to replace her. They rally around her because history demands, not peace, not prosperity, not freedom, but gender equality.

Three years ago, the recently deceased Cardinal Francis George of Chicago brilliantly pointed out the problem is the nation states themselves. All these conflicts, wars, and corruptions are done by rulers of nation states. It is nation states that kill while espousing ideals like democracy and national greatness. Perhaps they have reached the zenith of their power, and their influence will wane. The young will decide. If so, they should start now—before the old decide their fate for them.