Thursday, October 10, 2013

Stand firm, Mr. President

Our President, standing firm against seditious,
extortionist, blackmailing, democracy-hating traitors.
It really isn't surprising that Republicans have shut down our government. Republicans, especially the nihilist quasi-libertarian extremists infesting the House of Representatives thanks to the gerrymandered monster factories throughout Red State America, hate government. Especially democracies.

The present government shutdown is their latest attempt to destroy our government completely.

They hate the democratic form of government that voted in the Affordable Care Act, re-elected the ACA's champion, and declared it Constitutional.

And make no mistake, if Obama were to break the solemn oath he swore on his inauguration, to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America" by caving into these evil freaks we can all kiss democracy good-bye. It will be a government by crises, designed to bring about a plutocracy to serve the Koch-led overlords.

The Koch brothers, craven weasels to the end, have the utter shamelessness to deny their ultimate responsibility for the shutdown.

A commenter on this NYTimes article makes an excellent historical analogy:
Abraham Lincoln nailed Mr. Boehner's stance in his speed at Cooper Union in 1860:
"In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, 'Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!'"

And even Thomas Friedman calls it what it is: "blackmail." He also appears to have identified the very worst Fringe Festival ever.
President Obama is leading. He is protecting the very rules that are the foundation of any healthy democracy. He is leading by not giving in to this blackmail, because if he did he would undermine the principle of majority rule that is the bedrock of our democracy. That system guarantees the minority the right to be heard and to run for office and become the majority, but it also ensures that once voters have spoken, and their representatives have voted — and, if legally challenged, the Supreme Court has also ruled in their favor — the majority decision holds sway. A minority of a minority, which has lost every democratic means to secure its agenda, has no right to now threaten to tank our economy if its demands are not met. If we do not preserve this system, nothing will ever be settled again in American politics. There would be nothing to prevent a future Democratic Congress from using the exact same blackmail to try to overturn a law enacted by their Republican rivals.