Yesterday's post brought us the kookie talk regarding the filibuster, the Senate, and the electoral college. The problem, as the left sees it, is that Obama's failures are not due to the man, but simply systemic problems in our government. The new meme we will be that the problems are simply too large for one man. It's an old meme.
In the latter days of the Carter presidency, it became fashionable to say that the office had become unmanageable and was simply too big for one man. Some suggested a single, six-year presidential term. The president’s own White House counsel suggested abolishing the separation of powers and going to a more parliamentary system of unitary executive control. America had become ungovernable.
As Krauthammer points out, both Reagan AND Clinton overcome these insurmountable obstacles.
It’s 2010, and the first-year agenda of a popular and promising young president has gone down in flames. Barack Obama’s two signature initiatives — cap-and-trade and health-care reform — lie in ruins.
Desperate to explain away this scandalous state of affairs, liberal apologists haul out the old reliable from the Carter years: “America the Ungovernable.” So declared Newsweek. “Is America Ungovernable?” coyly asked The New Republic. Guess the answer.
The rage at the machine has produced the usual litany of systemic explanations. Special interests are too powerful. The Senate filibuster stymies social progress. A burdensome constitutional order prevents innovation. If only we could be more like China, pines Tom Friedman, waxing poetic about the efficiency of the Chinese authoritarian model and complaining that America can only flail about under its “two parties . . . with their duel-to-the-death paralysis.” The better thinkers, bewildered and furious that their president has not gotten his way, have developed a sudden disdain for our inherently incremental constitutional system.
This dovetails nicely with what I quoted from Doug Ross yesterday. I repeat that quote, because it's so dang good:
History teaches us that the decline of a society and the demise of a government comes with the institutionalization of corruption and a wanton disregard for the written law. Such is our situation today, wherein the states have become puppets of an all-powerful federal government that confiscates more and more private property while exerting increasing control over every aspect of our lives.
The greatest bulwark against tyranny in America has always been the Constitution, which instantiates our carefully designed system of private property, God-given individual liberties and free enterprise.
Yet today the Speaker of the House can’t articulate why a federal takeover of the entire health care system is constitutional. And mainstream Democrats seriously debate the destruction of the U.S. Senate.
This crowd of leftists are literally advocating the overthrow of the United States government. Tossing aside thousands of years of human experience and advocating a return to a centralized, authoritarian form of government that can’t work and has never worked.
What these Democrats offer is nothing less than treason.
Now, if our commenters could stay focused and refrain from "But Bush" and "You're Racits" and "Teabaggers!" crap, perhaps you folks could explain to us your position regarding the issues presented HERE. In THIS POST.
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