Alan Keyes
Today's system: assisted suicide for America
Budget deal, GOP debate symptoms of betrayal
By Alan Keyes
Whether in our own personal experience, or by way of things we have read about or seen in the media, all of us have had occasion to ponder the pathetic spectacle of people who have repeatedly suffered brutally damaging betrayals at the hands of someone they chose to trust. Yet, from whatever cause of fear or passion, they continue to resort to that person, again and again, until all their resources are exhausted, their lives are overturned, and they themselves are destroyed.
Such are the abused spouses; the faithful friends faithlessly deluded; the parents blinded by their affection for their offspring; the children unable or unwilling to acknowledge the failings of beloved parents who won their hearts with fond indulgences, even as their self-indulgence ended by ruining their children's upbringing, with consequences that permanently burdened their lives.
Yesterday offered a juxtaposition of events that put me in mind of all such self-betraying victims of misplaced trust and confidence, as I pondered what now more and more appears to be the very nearly accomplished fate of Americans as a free people. From Capitol Hill came news that the GOP's quisling leadership in the House of Representatives has agreed to a budget deal with Obama intended, as one report put it, to "take budget showdowns and government shutdown fights off the table until after the 2016 presidential election, a potential boon to Republican candidates who might otherwise face uncomfortable questions about messes in the GOP-led Congress."
Many Americans see through and reject the delusion that the people of the United States can spend their way to renewed prosperity with funny money obtained by piling up a mountain of bad debt that destroys the faith and credit of the American people. A "bipartisan" deal that takes the budget/financial issues off the table deprives voters of the opportunity to vote their rejection of this delusion. I put the term "bipartisan" in quotes because the deal actually confirms the fact that these supposedly opposing parties slavishly serve the advantage of the elitist faction, which now firmly controls them both. Therefore, the entrenched elitist faction leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties have no intention of ending the debt/spending frenzy. It is the basis for maintaining the political and bureaucratic empires all of those leaders now serve.
To deprive the voters of real choice – this is not the whole reason the two-party sham continues. In previous generations, leaders like John Kennedy, the Democrat, and Ronald Reagan, the Republican, were sincerely committed to defeating the right- and left-wing socialism that despised constitutional liberty as an obstacle to the totalitarian power both wings aimed to achieve. Thus on one side and the other of the American partisan divide, there were leaders who awakened from the socialist delusion. They became warriors against the left-wing socialists' pursuit of totalitarian cultural and bureaucratic dictatorship, and the right-wing socialists' pursuit of totalitarian financial/corporate dictatorship.
For his choice against the latter, President Kennedy may have paid with his life. On account of the (to them) unexpected success of Reagan's lifelong battle against the former, the extinction of the moral character and middle class that made his success possible became the elitist faction's paramount strategic goal. The destruction of both is meant to assure that there will never again be national elections in the United States that offer American voters any real choice to stand (much less prevail) against the supremacy of their factional will.
The distinction without a difference, in this regard, between John Boehner and Paul Ryan is a case in point. But so is the charade now being offered as "primary elections," in which every candidate has been pre-screened for "viability" according to measures entirely in the power of the elitist faction powers that be, and in which all have in one way or another "made their bones" by signaling their subservience to the elitist faction's agenda on some issue or decision vital to the perpetuation of the constitutional sovereignty and rightful liberty of the America people.
Because, in the end, all of them have signaled that they will toe the elitist faction line; their rhetorical posturing at election time is irrelevant. On this or that issue, they may be sincere. But when push comes to shove, they will push the ship of America's free state over the falls (to borrow a metaphor from the statement in which Ben Carson signaled his factional allegiance) to its destruction. That's why no matter what indispensable principle of American justice and liberty their primary opponents have betrayed, each of the "viable" GOP candidates less than candidly takes pains to make it clear that any one of them would "make a great president."
From the viewpoint of voters still sincerely committed to "government of the people, by the people, for the people," the slogan of the elitist faction's sham two-party system would accurately be "Choose you poison." "Viable" candidates may offer to "champion the cause" on some issue in which a voter takes a special interest. But when it comes to the fate of the free people of the United States as a whole, each of them stands in the lineup of the firing squad selected to be the nation's executioners. One aims at the heart, another at the liver, another at the head, but each is openly or tacitly committed to firing a fatal shot with deadly accuracy.
Since this is true, it is vitally important to the success of the sham that there should be no real and substantive debate on any issue of fundamental importance. If there were, the GOP lineup would be a circular firing squad, in which each candidate would prove beyond doubt that each of the others aimed to strike a fatal blow against the nation. So previous debates have focused on ultimately inconsequential personal fisticuffs – what amounts to name-calling or personal denigration. Last week's debate, however, staged a more sophisticated distraction.
The story of the moment pitted all the GOP candidates against "the liberal/leftist media." On the shrewd sounding but stupidly self-betraying premise that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, this puts all of the GOP candidates, whatever their fatal flaws, in the same boat. Like passengers in the ballroom of the Titanic cheering the band as the ship went down, voters are invited to cheer the players in the GOP's rhetorical band as each sounds the note that accords with the elitist's faction's skillfully composed danse macabre marshalling our nation toward its doom.
This is not at all what America's founders intended our elections to be. But it is what we make of them by surrendering to the lie that we have no choice but to trust in those who betray us, who betray us in the very moment of their treachery for the vote that will signify our consent to self-destruction. These parties appear to promise America a way out of danger, war, poverty, and confusion. But what they are really offering is assisted suicide. That is the best they intend to do for us. But is it the best we can do for ourselves if we have the guts to try?
November 2, 2015
Whether in our own personal experience, or by way of things we have read about or seen in the media, all of us have had occasion to ponder the pathetic spectacle of people who have repeatedly suffered brutally damaging betrayals at the hands of someone they chose to trust. Yet, from whatever cause of fear or passion, they continue to resort to that person, again and again, until all their resources are exhausted, their lives are overturned, and they themselves are destroyed.
Such are the abused spouses; the faithful friends faithlessly deluded; the parents blinded by their affection for their offspring; the children unable or unwilling to acknowledge the failings of beloved parents who won their hearts with fond indulgences, even as their self-indulgence ended by ruining their children's upbringing, with consequences that permanently burdened their lives.
Yesterday offered a juxtaposition of events that put me in mind of all such self-betraying victims of misplaced trust and confidence, as I pondered what now more and more appears to be the very nearly accomplished fate of Americans as a free people. From Capitol Hill came news that the GOP's quisling leadership in the House of Representatives has agreed to a budget deal with Obama intended, as one report put it, to "take budget showdowns and government shutdown fights off the table until after the 2016 presidential election, a potential boon to Republican candidates who might otherwise face uncomfortable questions about messes in the GOP-led Congress."
Many Americans see through and reject the delusion that the people of the United States can spend their way to renewed prosperity with funny money obtained by piling up a mountain of bad debt that destroys the faith and credit of the American people. A "bipartisan" deal that takes the budget/financial issues off the table deprives voters of the opportunity to vote their rejection of this delusion. I put the term "bipartisan" in quotes because the deal actually confirms the fact that these supposedly opposing parties slavishly serve the advantage of the elitist faction, which now firmly controls them both. Therefore, the entrenched elitist faction leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties have no intention of ending the debt/spending frenzy. It is the basis for maintaining the political and bureaucratic empires all of those leaders now serve.
To deprive the voters of real choice – this is not the whole reason the two-party sham continues. In previous generations, leaders like John Kennedy, the Democrat, and Ronald Reagan, the Republican, were sincerely committed to defeating the right- and left-wing socialism that despised constitutional liberty as an obstacle to the totalitarian power both wings aimed to achieve. Thus on one side and the other of the American partisan divide, there were leaders who awakened from the socialist delusion. They became warriors against the left-wing socialists' pursuit of totalitarian cultural and bureaucratic dictatorship, and the right-wing socialists' pursuit of totalitarian financial/corporate dictatorship.
For his choice against the latter, President Kennedy may have paid with his life. On account of the (to them) unexpected success of Reagan's lifelong battle against the former, the extinction of the moral character and middle class that made his success possible became the elitist faction's paramount strategic goal. The destruction of both is meant to assure that there will never again be national elections in the United States that offer American voters any real choice to stand (much less prevail) against the supremacy of their factional will.
The distinction without a difference, in this regard, between John Boehner and Paul Ryan is a case in point. But so is the charade now being offered as "primary elections," in which every candidate has been pre-screened for "viability" according to measures entirely in the power of the elitist faction powers that be, and in which all have in one way or another "made their bones" by signaling their subservience to the elitist faction's agenda on some issue or decision vital to the perpetuation of the constitutional sovereignty and rightful liberty of the America people.
Because, in the end, all of them have signaled that they will toe the elitist faction line; their rhetorical posturing at election time is irrelevant. On this or that issue, they may be sincere. But when push comes to shove, they will push the ship of America's free state over the falls (to borrow a metaphor from the statement in which Ben Carson signaled his factional allegiance) to its destruction. That's why no matter what indispensable principle of American justice and liberty their primary opponents have betrayed, each of the "viable" GOP candidates less than candidly takes pains to make it clear that any one of them would "make a great president."
From the viewpoint of voters still sincerely committed to "government of the people, by the people, for the people," the slogan of the elitist faction's sham two-party system would accurately be "Choose you poison." "Viable" candidates may offer to "champion the cause" on some issue in which a voter takes a special interest. But when it comes to the fate of the free people of the United States as a whole, each of them stands in the lineup of the firing squad selected to be the nation's executioners. One aims at the heart, another at the liver, another at the head, but each is openly or tacitly committed to firing a fatal shot with deadly accuracy.
Since this is true, it is vitally important to the success of the sham that there should be no real and substantive debate on any issue of fundamental importance. If there were, the GOP lineup would be a circular firing squad, in which each candidate would prove beyond doubt that each of the others aimed to strike a fatal blow against the nation. So previous debates have focused on ultimately inconsequential personal fisticuffs – what amounts to name-calling or personal denigration. Last week's debate, however, staged a more sophisticated distraction.
The story of the moment pitted all the GOP candidates against "the liberal/leftist media." On the shrewd sounding but stupidly self-betraying premise that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, this puts all of the GOP candidates, whatever their fatal flaws, in the same boat. Like passengers in the ballroom of the Titanic cheering the band as the ship went down, voters are invited to cheer the players in the GOP's rhetorical band as each sounds the note that accords with the elitist's faction's skillfully composed danse macabre marshalling our nation toward its doom.
This is not at all what America's founders intended our elections to be. But it is what we make of them by surrendering to the lie that we have no choice but to trust in those who betray us, who betray us in the very moment of their treachery for the vote that will signify our consent to self-destruction. These parties appear to promise America a way out of danger, war, poverty, and confusion. But what they are really offering is assisted suicide. That is the best they intend to do for us. But is it the best we can do for ourselves if we have the guts to try?
To see more articles by Dr. Keyes, visit his blog at LoyalToLiberty.com and his commentary at WND.com and BarbWire.com.
© Alan KeyesThe views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
