This was related to how people were personally attacking me for asking a question and asking for a civil debate.
I introduced myself, I shared my views, I asked questions and asked people to share their opinions if they wanted to join -- and the first few pages are filled with people making comments and personally coming after me. Taht was the reason for this post. Though the founders had passion, I'm sure they wouldnt instantly attack and accuse a new person with being part of a conspiracy theory without first talking with them, or at last taking a moment to intoduce their points.
Please excuse us for being paranoid. One reason is that we've been inundated with people trying to talk us into this lesser of evils business, and not being nice about it. Some of them are indeed trying to get responses from us that they can take to die-hard Republicans and say, look these aren't team players (as if they were being team players when they denied the delegates a voice at the convention). Another is that we've been preaching this for some time now (some of us longer than others). Maybe we don't have lives, or don't seem to. I won't argue that. But with so much at stake, isn't this kind of a late date to bone up on this stuff?
They've kept us so tied up in knots with their divide and conquer game that we've let them incrementally stuff us with corporatism. Somewhere, sometime, we have to set abortion and gay marriage and this and that aside and get together to push the reset button. It must be done, or our children will grow up in something that has no resemblance to the United States at all.
The Ninth and Tenth Amendments guarantee the states a lot of leeway. They could do most of the stuff the federal government does. We sold independent voters and even disaffected Democrats on this. If Paul had won the nomination, Paul would be thumping Obama right now. He was enormously electable, but all the Fox talking heads were saying just the opposite. Fox set the Republicans up to fail by talking the Republican rank and file out of nominating a principled conservative. It's what Republicans should have expected from the yellowcake uranium journalism of Fox, but you know...
The corporations go to a powerful Washington and do one stop shopping. If the federal government left everything to the states that it should, according to the Constitution, leave to the states, then these corporations that want to buy influence would have to buy fifty state legislatures. That would be far more difficult and expensive, and we could get a nation that isn't run by corporations. If you want to fix problems with your local fire department, you don't want it run out of Washington. Then you have to convince twenty million people that
your fire department is more important than abortion, gay marriage, and their local fire departments combined. You can laugh at that, but Homeland Security pays local fire departments to jump through their hoops these days, and I'll bet your local fire department has half a dozen federal grant proposal writers on staff. This
should scare you.
Thomas Jefferson said that if one central government were ever to gain control over this nation, it would be the most corrupt government on the face of the earth. This is why the Ninth and Tenth Amendments reserve much of what Washington does to the states, or counties, or cities, or to the people themselves. They are ignored, and that's a very bad thing.
At some point, Americans have to draw a line in the sand, and say that these side issues are
not more important than cutting Washington down to size. We get worried about this silly thing one party is doing, and that silly thing that the 'other' party is doing (as if there were only two parties), and we don't get to the core of the problem. So, the problem just grows.
We have a line in the sand, and here we stand. Not all of us; not yet. But more of us every cycle. Maybe at some point you'll see what I'm saying, and help us get at the
heart of the matter. Then we might do something other than just slow half the rampant corruption down a little, no?
