Obama strikes again
Tuesday, January 03, 2012
The cold came today, finally making winter seem like winter again.
Perhaps for the first time, weather and the calendar have conspired to reflect the same sense of change I often feel with the turn of a new year.
Half blind from recent surgery, I finally begin to feel old, and this coupled with computer problems, I find my senses begin to contract, as I prepare for that last lap on this track we call life.
The world politics should not surprise me since we simply repeat again what we have gone through many times, that expansion and contraction that eventually leads to global conflict and possibly a new dark age.
Homer’s great poems were part of a recovery from one such period of time, when a blind man was forced to memorize verse in order to preserve a living memory of the rules that govern civilized behavior.
Society tends to forget its foundations and that life as we know it is only possible by the subtle aspects of polite society.
When manners vanish, so does civilization, and all the laws passed to force people to comply only leads to resentment and revolution.
This year begins on the sobering note that President Obama signed into law legislation that would allow the American government to imprison American citizens without formal charges for as long as the government wants.
This is aimed at curbing home grown terrorists, although who and what a terrorist is, changes with the times. To the British, who had similar laws, George Washington was a terrorist, as were those who signed the Declaration of Independence, some of whom British soldiers hunted through the swamps of New Jersey with the aim of imprisoning or worse murdering them for their crimes against the state.
This startling news that the American government has violated again the basic principles upon which we were founded is less startling than the fact that a so-called liberal president did the signing, although some of the worse crimes against humanity started under Democrats – such as the roots of the Vietnam War and the abuses the CIA wrought in the name of Democracy.
I once interviewed a helicopter pilot who flew the CIA into Laos and elsewhere for murderous deeds and to pick up supplies of Heroin bound for US cities (the apparent backroom deal to help curb the spread of violence resulting from the race riots.)
Ironically, the front page of The New York Times on Jan. 1, 1984, announced Reagan’s signing into law permission for the CIA and others to monitor activities of Americans – living up to Orwell’s notion of Big Brother.
What makes Obama so disappointing is that this is routine. Obama Care -- as it is called – further emphasizes the mistrust government has for ordinary people.
EB White once pointed out that once the government starts withholding money from a man’s paycheck, it is displaying a distrust of its own citizens. People never see money they worked hard to earn.
Obama Care furthers this concept by putting a gun to every person’s head and forcing him to buy health insurance, in the guise of making certain that all Americans are covered.
Armed robbery is hardly the same thing as Universal Healthcare.
What we get is a president who is robbing the poor in order to live up to a campaign promise. It helps no one – except to get more business for insurance companies.
Obama did something similar with the two-month extension of the federal tax cut. Instead of finding money within the government to pay for it, he attached a new fee to mortgages. So that people already struggling to buy a home now have a new fee imposed. This fee doesn’t vanish even after the two months, but goes on and on, long after the benefit has passed.
This concept of robbing the poor to pay the rich has become a mantra for the Obama administration, part of his so called socialism that dumps even more on the backs of working people, disguising each move as something helpful instead of the odious things they are.