Weeds & Freedom
When I was growing up, a good portion of my time was spent in the garden pulling weeds. From my grandfather, I learned that weeds, if allowed to grow unchecked would siphon the nutrients from the soil that the corn and tomatoes, potatoes, beans, pumpkins and watermelons needed in order to thrive. It was hard, neverending work. An entire Saturday’s worth of daylight spent pulling and hoeing weeds simply meant there were a few bushel baskets less to have to pull next week and missing a week only served to allow those not pulled to develop a stronger root system, making it much more difficult to uproot the ineradicable crop destroyers and allowing them to spawn even more of their ilk.
We have allowed the garden of Freedom to become infested with weeds. For too long we have ignored their steady creep, the continuous infiltration, the unchecked spread of their ruinous determination. This administration continuously reveals its intent of controlling every aspect of our lives, of insisting on compliance and agreement with directives from "our betters". Our current president, more and more, is proving himself to be at best, incompetent and uniformed, or at worst, malignant and tyrannical toward America and our way of life. There are no other conclusions possible given the revelations of the last several weeks and months.
When the consulate in Benghazi was attacked and four Americans murdered—on a day that should have indicated the need for increased security simply because of the anniversary it represented—our president was apparently unconcerned with the situation in Libya and felt a good night sleep prior to his campaign fund raising trip to Las Vegas was his highest priority. For weeks afterwards, officials in his administration, and he, himself, insisted the attack was nothing more than a spontaneous, understandable reaction to an offensive to Muslims video. The creator of this heretofore obscure video was arrested in direct violation of his First Amendment rights.
Further and continued investigation into these events has revealed the spontaneous protest meme to be a lie; a lie willingly perpetrated on the American people given the evidence now assembled through Congressional hearings on the multitudinous revisions to the talking points and the desire to protect reputations and further political careers and agendas. Yet the president denies any culpability in the lie, insisting that it was underlings and unconstrained officials in several different government departments that were responsible for the dissemination of misinformation. They were not intentionally misleading the public, he adamantly states, but were acting on the basis of the best information they had available at the time.
Under Eric Holder, Mr. Obama’s appointed head of the Department of Justice, in violation of their own rules and established legal precedence, the DOJ has tapped the phone lines and communications of news agencies and their reporters in an attempt to squelch reporting of stories not favorable to the administration, the president and his policies.
Mr. Holder tells us he does not know how many of these politically motivated (and First Amendment violating) wiretaps he has approved. His testimony reads as a litany of excuses: "I do not know…" "I am not aware…" "I was not involved…" "I recused myself…"
Were those answers coming from our kids on any subject, the interrogation into unacceptable behavior would be rather intense. We would immediately become suspicious of wrongdoing. So it should be with the Director of the Department of Justice. You, sir, are supposed to be in charge. If you don’t know what is happening in your department then you are unfit to be at its helm. The delaying, deflecting, dissembling tactics used in answering pointed, pertinent questions should be grounds to begin impeachment hearings on Mr. Holder. Incompetence is as valid a reason to remove someone from a position of authority as malfeasance.
We have recently learned that the IRS actively targeted groups opposed to the president’s agenda and philosophies – except that those in charge "knew nothing of it" until after the Inspector General’s report. We are told it was just hyper-aggressive, low-level agents responsible.
The pattern is clear. This lawless administration has no tolerance of opinions that differ from theirs, no compunction against willingly subverting and knowingly breaking the law and then, either lying about it until caught in the lie or claiming ignorance of the action and blaming it on uncontrolled underlings. Either they are completely incompetent or blatantly out to destroy the country.
Scandal is the wrong word to use for these issues. Blatant disregard for the law, a seeming hallmark of this administration, would be a better description. In the case of Benghazi, the term dereliction of duty comes immediately to mind.
The weeds have become an infestation. Time to break out the hoes. And the pitchforks.
Consent of the Governed
It is the deepest held philosophy of the American that that the government of the united states is subject to the will of the people and that the powers of the government are granted by the people. The united states is not a monarchy, we are not the subjects of a king. The united states is not a dictatorship, no one man or woman has the ultimate authority over the people.
We the people have allowed our interests to be lost to special interest groups with fundraising power beyond that of the average citizen. We are to be represented by elected officials in congress who serve at the will of the electors yet political lobbies have overstepped their bounds and bought off our representation. The American people should be outraged at this invasion, yet we remain passive.
All men are created equal but not represented equally. The house of representatives is anything but representative. Laws have been passed without the consent of the people based on secret deals and promises of re-election funding by interests that represent corporations and contractors not the public at large. We are given a selection of candidates to choose from not based on their desire to serve their constituency, but based on their amount of campaign finance. These same “representatives” allow or ignore the fact that massive information is and has been collected on the people that they serve, we the people. They have allowed for the unfair treatment of those who disagree with their political ideology and subjected them to scrutiny by the agency tasked with collection of taxes. Soon we will have the efficiency of the government and the compassion of the IRS controlling our healthcare.
I withdraw my consent.
“My reading of history convinces me that most bad government, results from too much government.”
Thomas Jefferson