Thursday, July 12, 2012
I would vote for anyone that I think could better the USA in a way that doesn't violate the constitutional rights of others. They have to have a healthy respect for American business cause that's where most of us make our livingI doubt the person who posted this comment on my FB page has ever voted for a Democrat. Putting Nixon aside as the uniquely demonic personality he was, the first time I seriously thought about "constitutional rights" in comparing candidates at any level was 2000, & not so much on account of George W. Bush as for the evil troika of Cheney, Rumsfeld & Rove standing behind him.
Yo, Justice John Roberts doesn't believe the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.
A lot of people on the right seem to believe the Constitution is wonderfully, simply self-explanatory. If that were the case, we could dispense with a system of Federal courts, not require lawyers to study the Constitution, bring our disputes to Madam Marie's Temple of Knowledge, & "stand your ground" with a surface to surface missile. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton & John Jay would not have considered it necessary to write the expository Federalist Papers.
Having a Constitutional right to believe what one wants about Constitutional rights doesn't mean those beliefs are true or that one has the right to act on them. Simpletons think it's 1789 & their puny weapons can protect them from the government. In 1789, when the government had pretty much the same weapons as the people, those weapons were no protection. The National Security State loves gun rights - they distract us from the really effective weapons - high tech surveillance, government agencies hidden within agencies, secret American funded prisons outside the reach of American jurisprudence.
President Obama - the so-called "leftist" in this election - inherited the Cheney / Rumsfeld Homeland Security construction (which is like an iceberg - we can't see 80% of it), decided it would come in handy, & didn't do anything to dismantle it as he had promised he would. We're supposed to believe Mitt Romney is even more concerned with the integrity of our privacy? As far as he's concerned, the great assault on our freedom is the individual health insurance mandate he himself endorsed in Massachusetts.
The Constitution was a huge annoyance to my two favorite presidents, Lincoln & Franklin Roosevelt, & both were always looking for ways to circumvent it. Lincoln was faced with an entire treasonous region of the USA claiming the Constitution wasn't an enforceable contract. Roosevelt understood that economic hopelessness was fueling antidemocratic far left & far right radical movements capable of installing themselves through democratic processes. No such threat to the existence of the United States was shown to exist after the 9/11 attacks. I must admit to being a bit embarrassed by our fearful reaction, given what Great Britain had endured in WWII, & through decades of I.R.A. terrorist bombings. But it was an opportunity to place the United States in a state of permanent undeclared war against various enemies - as many as possible - the National Security State, which we came so close to having in the 1950's. We had a president then who had faced down the armies of Hitler as a commander of our armed forces & was innately suspicious of ideological fervor & overreaction, so the Cheneys & Rumsfelds of his time couldn't get him entirely with the program.
