I remember taking a class in British Literature of the 18th Century, and contrary to the narratives of American historical perspective, King George III was a very popular King in Britain at the time.  Many in Britain thought the Americans were over-reacting to a series of taxes that were meant to pay for debts incurred for Britain fighting wars that secured American interests such as the French and Indian War.

I have written in past posts on the 4th of July, that underlying the stated motives of Independence, Americans fought because they knew they had something good.  You don’t risk everything to fight against something as mutable as a tax code.  If you read the literature of the founding generation of Americans, you find that their motivations ran far deeper than merely protesting what they considered to be tyranny.  Their self image consisted of  of a belief that they were engaged in a moral project commensurate to that of ancient Israel.

When Moses ascended Sinai for the first time, he did so with the assumption that the law to be forged would match the moral strength of character of the people it would govern.  Sobered, he ascended the second time to forge a law for a group whose moral strength he had over-estimated.  He returned with a law that matched the moral discipline of its subjects.

Recently, in England, a controversy has arisen about their school lunch program.  After revamping the program to meet more nutritious guidelines, government leaders are suggesting that forcing nutrition on kids is causing less of them to eat meals.  On one side you have the argument that kids should be able to choose what you eat .  On the other side, you have the argument that government should close down businesses that sell junk food close to the premises of schools and the schools should force kids to eat healthy food. In a recent editorial a frustrated Brit, said this, “Sure, only four in 10 primary school kids and one in three secondary pupils currently eat school meals, but that is largely the fault of the misguided notion of free choice.”  Of course, this editorial cites the impact that unhealthy eating habits has on the healthcare system as part of the reason that the government should force eating habits on its citizens.

Regulating eating habits isn’t something that only modern politicians with their government-run health care systems have to worry about.  You will be hard-pressed to find more oppressive legislation to control what people eat than what you find in Leviticus.  What is certain is that when a government sees the need to micro-manage the eating habits of its populace that something more than liberty, choice, or freedom has been lost.

The lack of internal control by individuals breeds external control by governments.

In their zeal to pass a health care bill that would empower the government to micromanage just about every aspect of our lives, Democrats constantly taunted Republicans and conservatives to offer a better alternative.

I have a question for them to consider.  What is the correlation between the declining nutritional value of a school lunch and the banning of prayer in public school?

Special Toilet Paper for Democrats

Maybe quilted 2-ply softness will make democrats appreciate the Constitution more

As democrats have relentlessly tried to pass their healthcare disaster they have had many hurdles.  At first they were opposed by right-wing nuts, like myself.  Then the more Americans learned about the plans, the more of them opposed it.  It didn’t take too long for a solid majority of Americans to become opposed to Obamacare.  Then a round of special elections, not the least of which was the loss of the Kennedy seat in Massachusetts, sent a resounding message to Obama and the Democrats that Americans do not want what they are trying to pass.  Now they can’t decide which of the two monstrosities they should pass, and members of the democrat party are starting to defect.

Since they can’t muster the votes from within their supermajority in the House of Representatives, democrats are looking to find ways to pass their last and final hurdle to get this passed: The Constitution.  Of course, we know representatives like Nancy Pelosi have abandoned any deference to the constitution eons ago.  Who knows if she has even read it.  A while back a reporter asked her what was the Constitutional basis of a health insurance mandate, and her answer was “Are you serious?”  Pelosi’s disdain for the constitution has only accelerated as of late, as she is becoming desparate to pass a bill that no one wants.

I started ignoring the health care reform discussion a while ago.  I just got sick of it.  It seems that lately this discussion has moved from a discussion of policy to one of procedure, where House democrats are exploring the possibility of abandoning all Constitutional precedents to get their bill passed.

Here are two quotes from two articles I read on the topic in the WSJ:

Democrats are, literally, consuming their own majority for the sake of imposing new taxes, regulations and entitlements that the public has roundly rejected but that they believe will be the crowning achievement of the welfare state. They are also leaving behind a procedural bloody trail that will fuel public fury and make such a vast change of law seem illegitimate to millions of Americans.

The concoction has become so toxic that even Mrs. Pelosi isn’t bothering to defend the merits anymore, saying instead last week that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Or rather, “deeming” to have passed it.

We have to pass the bill so we can find out what is in it?  Are you serious?

Here is the second quote:

In ramming through an unpopular 2,700-page health care bill using brute force tactics, Democrats are in danger of passing what amounts to the longest suicide note in history. Their own pollsters are telling them the public has rebelled against their tactics. So their response is to press their foot down even harder on the gas pedal. We’ll see how that works out for them.

For this debate to have devolved to the point where it is about procedures rather than policies indicates two troubling developments.  First, that the policy is crap.  If it wasn’t then it would have sold itself.  Second, if these people look desperately incompetent as they try to perform a job they were elected to do, crafting legislation, imagine how bad they will be at performing a job they weren’t elected to do, managing your health care benefits.

This Tuesday I am going to my local caucus to run to become a delegate to support Mike Lee in Utah’s Senatorial election.  His platform in a nutshell: I have read and will follow what is in the Constitution instead of try to see what I can get away with.  Not surprisingly, this message is resonating everywhere he goes.

On another note, if your congressional representative votes for this piece of crap (no pun intended) then I suggest you purchase a roll of Constitution toilet paper that you can give them as they are out campaigning this summer with a simple note that says, “you’re fired!”

Anyway, since the comment thread from Attack of the Clones is going in several different directions, I figured I would do a series of small posts and schedule them to publish periodically to stay focused on specific points.

I am going to start by writing about the boycott of Whole Foods Market that Chuckles mentioned, because I was going to write about this when the story broke.

In short, I read Mackey’s op-ed and I thought it was decent in that it actually proposed solutions, which is something liberals are expecting conservatives to do despite the fact that they spent 8 years whining (redundant I know) about Bush without offering solutions themselves.  Now they belittle conservatives for deploying the same tactics that they use.  Whether Mackey’s ideas would really solve any problems is debatable, however, one thing is not debatable: that politically motivated business boycotts are stupid.

Assumption alert: Chuckles seems to be tacitly condoning these boycotts – if not participating in them – and I have to wonder what thought processes motivate this behavior.  It seems kind of like playground activism to me.  It also seems like this form of activism is about as mindless and childish as people getting in a shouting match with their elected representatives.  It certainly does little to encourage informed or educated debate.

I don’t really care for Whole Foods much.  I don’t shop there.  I think the whole organic food movement is just a successful marketing campaign, so I have nothing at stake in ridiculing this boycott.  I have a hard time imagining an argument for participating in these kinds of boycotts that ever makes it out of the realm of reactions to base emotions to a realm of reflective reason.

Yes Master!

Conservative blogs are under attack.  In my previous post, A Good Mob is Hard to Find, Paul decided to make a comment.  Now I don’t know Paul, and I don’t want to deter people from commenting on my blog, but Paul has some explaining to do.  Here is his comment, so we are all on the same page.  Notice how his comment does nothing to engage with the point I was making in my post:

 

It’s funny we hear Republicans say that they do not want “faceless bureaucrats” making medical decisions but they have no problem with “private sector” “faceless bureaucrats” daily declining medical coverage and financially ruining good hard working people. And who says that the “private sector” is always right, do we forget failures like Long-Term Capital, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Enron, Tyco, AIG and Lehman Brothers. Of course the federal government will destroy heathcare by getting involved, Oh but wait, Medicare and Medicaid and our military men and women and the Senate and Congress get the best heathcare in the world, and oh, that’s right, its run by our federal government. I can understand why some may think that the federal government will fail, if you look at the past eight years as a current history, with failures like the financial meltdown and Katrina but the facts is they can and if we support them they will succeed.

How does shouting down to stop the conversation of the healthcare debate at town hall meetings, endears them to anyone. Especially when the organizations that are telling them where to go and what to do and say are Republicans political operatives, not real grassroots. How does shouting someone down or chasing them out like a lynch mob advanced the debate, it does not. So I think the American people will see through all of this and know, like the teabagger, the birthers, these lynch mobs types are just the same, people who have to resort to these tactics because they have no leadership to articulate what they real want. It’s easy to pickup a bus load of people who hate, and that’s all I been seeing, they hate and can’t debate. Too bad.

 

As a former writing instructor, I know that Google can be an invaluable tool for exposing intellectual dishonesty.  In Paul’s case you can google search any random part of his comment, and you will find a screen that looks like this:

comment spam

You will see that I am not the only blog where Paul has copied and pasted his brainless ideas.  You might say comment spam is part of blogging, so why make a big deal out of this.  Well, this is more than a simple case of comment spam.  

For another example of this kind of comment spam, you can check out the post, Congress won’t take the medicine they prescribe, on Harrison Price’s blog.  Check out the comments on this post and you will find another comment spammer named Jacksmith.  I called jacksmith on his bluff in my own comments – I am Burro by the way.  Once again you might justifiably say, “So what.”  Ultimately, Paul’s comment is evidence that a claim I have been making since May of last year is correct.  Read Obama’s Biggest Weapon for some context and a great quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  My claim is that Obama’s biggest weapon is an army of witless supporters who will do whatever their master tells them.

Obama’s army of Storm Troopers is called Organizing for America, and he recently sent an email to this army of 13 million clones to engage in activities that support his healthcare proposal.  I imagine that Paul and jacksmith are members of this mindless herd.  Liberals are whining (redundant I know) that the massive protests by angry Americans are “astroturf” protests as opposed to authentic “grassroots” movements.  This is a stupid claim on their part that is backfiring dramatically.  On the other hand, I remember watching a documentary about the development of CGI technology in movies.  One of the defining moments of CGI was when they were able to develop programming that was sophisticated enough to create an image of a grass field where every blade of grass was moving independently.  Grass generated by CGI programming is a good metaphor for describing this new form of activism pioneered by Obama and Howard Dean where you can just send an email to your 13 million shills and they will go spam websites with manufactured comments.  We can call this form of protest “technoturf.”  Nancy Pelosi has said that the protesters of the healthcare bill are un-American, I would have to say that it is hard to argue that Obama’s army of mindless supporters are even human.  Just as a marionette without strings, or Obama without a teleprompter, Paul, wouldn’t be able to debate if he didn’t have a message from his master that he could copy and paste all over the internet.  While I am opposed to the shouting matches going on at town hall meetings, I am at a loss at how else you might get someone like Paul to acknowledge their humanity.

Paul was quick to disparage faceless bureaucrats in his comment, but I would take an army of faceless bureaucrats over an army of faceless apparatchiks any day.

Paul, if you want to debate, come to my blog and make a real comment.  I predict that he doesn’t.