Murder on the Acela Express
"Who done it?" is a question that goes unanswered in Washington - unless you are an enemy of the Deep State.
I'm intellectually zapped.
And quite frankly, a bit disheartened.
I'm sure it will pass but in a way, that is the problem. Maybe it shouldn't.
As I watch every Biden scandal die in slow motion, I get the overwhelming feeling of unfairness.
Over the past months we have gone from Trump is a traitor because he possessed classified documents and it is the end of democracy if he doesn't go to jail (even though he had the power to declassify anything) to "This is just "classified spillage" and government employees mishandle classified documents and materials every day and that many of the instances are completely accidental.”
Then, yesterday, Hercule Poirot Roberts announced he just can't figure out who leaked Alito's draft Dobbs opinion.
Both of those situations are total bullshit - a dump truck load of it.
When are any of these people going to be held accountable?
The first time when there are no consequences for an act, the perpetrator feels as if they escaped but when they realize there are never going to be consequences, the perpetrator acts with impunity because they know they will not be stopped.
Look at the stores in cities where petty theft has been virtually decriminalized.
They are stealing the stores out of existence and the stores that aren't going out of business have every inch of inventory behind lock and key - even diapers. The stores must raise prices to compensate for the losses.
Where does the burden fall?
It falls on the patrons of that store who are not thieves. It falls on the law abiding patrons who still operate within the law. These George Soros funded District Attorneys are focused on allowing criminals to reap their own "reparations" from society while forgetting about the people who always pay.
Is that fair?
No, it isn't.
People of conscience and good faith know it isn't.
So why do we put up with it?
But there is more to the story.
It is no secret that we get less of what we disincentivize and more of what we incentivize.
When you think about America as a big convenience store and the federal government as the shoplifters, you begin to see my point.
No consequences. None. No bad act can't be spun or shoved down the memory hole.
And the more they get away with, the more they try to get away with.
Then the law-abiding American citizens, the people who just want to work, make a living, take care of their families, and have a little peace are the ones who pay. These are the good folk Yale University professor William Graham Sumner identified in an 1876 essay as:
“As soon as A observes something which seems to him wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or, in better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X… What I want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. He is the man who never is thought of…. I call him the forgotten man… He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays…”
That “forgotten man” is the taxpayer.
We don't have to put up with this.
We are getting it good and hard because we allow it.
This is a post-truth, post-fact culture because we allow the thieves to take our truth and facts away. Our culture can be reclaimed if those who are silent begin to speak.
There was a report this week about a regular citizen, a young man in San Francisco who witnessed a vagrant shoplifting and even though the staff just stood by, the young man stopped the shoplifter and forced him to leave the stolen materials in the store.
Government does not have exclusive ownership of what is right and wrong.
We the people own that - it is just that from time to time, the thieves in public and in government must be reminded of that fact.
We have reached the point where vigilantes provide the only security for law-abiding citizens. The government is aiding and abetting the lawlessness and anarchy in the streets. America has become hopelessly corrupt and fascistic. Along with NATO (which will be discarded if the USA manages to put a puppet in control of Moscow), the USA and its vassal Ukraine challenge China as the world's worst totalitarian enemy of freedom. If there is any future for Christianity, it lives within the Russian Orthodox Church.
The idea that lies beneath what Charles Clemens wrote 5 hours ago is one I agree with wholeheartedly. Our society, for whatever reason and by whomever, is being pushed into a corner. We're becoming de-civilized. Literally. Civilization is a structure for life, and the structure is being dismantled.
Our civilization is the result of thousands of years of trial-and-error. It is what has historically been found to "work." What we have now is a situation which is testing whether the nearest approximation of democratic government can stand up to an attempt to destroy it by proving it no longer "works." We, and it, may fail the test.
The last such challenge was not the Civil War, but the attempt to recover from it. Reconstruction was official policy from 1865 to 1877. It was the biggest failure of the Grant administration. One of the agents that defeated Reconstruction was the Ku Klux Klan, which saw itself as protecting southern life from the federal government. There was a basic disconnect between the way those living in the South saw reality, compared to what was reality to the philosophers who were in control.
The Klan itself was defeated not by force, but by time. I don't think anybody wants the formation of another Klan, but the radical Left, which is in charge of the government today, seems determined to create a situation where those who disagree with them are on the way to being intolerably oppressed by the government that is supposed to protect them. Civil rights for many are being trampled in the name of civil rights for the few.
American democracy has always depended on overriding good will among citizens, an official support for tolerance of disagreement about policies, and upon an unspoken agreement with the belief that individual rights, tempered by reasonable laws, are paramount. When those in charge no longer recognize that dependency, they place those who do in an untenable position. The result won't be good.