Posts Tagged → self rule
Democratic self-rule is not supposed to be easy
Up until Congressman Mike Johnson was unanimously elected as the next Speaker of the US House of Representatives last week, political watchers, news reporters, and insiders were in a state of panic, panic I tell ya.
The Epoch Times described the US House of Representatives scrum for selecting a Speaker, after China-owned RINO Kevin McCarthy was ejected by hero Congressman Matt Gaetz, as a time of “paralysis.”
The unreliable and constantly discredited New York Times called the blessed time without a Speaker of the House as “weeks of chaos.”
Conservative talk radio was filled up to puke-on-your-feet levels of “Gaetz should have had a plan,” and “You only remove the Speaker when you have a plan,” and similar Conservative Inc. mistrust of the essential democratic process and worshiping of the unnaturally smooth “normal” process that just has to be corrupt. Sean Hannity, Clay and Buck, Glenn Beck, and the rest of you radio guys, you know who you are.
The rest of the press/media/ political outlets, both establishment/legacy and new alike, were of a common mind: Washington works best when it works perfectly smoothly, efficiently, and there are no hiccups, apparently. And thus we conclude that apparently democratic processes of debating and voting and disagreeing are uncomfortable to political insiders. Isn’t that reassuring?
Thankfully, when Speaker Mike Johnson was eventually coronated, we had the Babylon Bee in the room to shed the most accurate light on the situation: Their headline “Smoke Rises Over Capitol Indicating Congress Has Resumed Setting Taxpayers’ Money On Fire” wasn’t really funny, because the truth is painful.
That Babylon Bee humor was an updated version of Mark Twain’s observations of Congress: “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
And his “There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
But wait, there’s more of how Americans then and now really feel about Congress when it is working properly:
“This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when a baby gets hold of a hammer.” (Will Rogers)
“The taxpayers are sending congressmen on expensive trips abroad. It might be worth it except they keep coming back.” (Will Rogers)
“I love to go to Washington, if only to be near my money.” (Bob Hope)
“Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.” (Ronald Reagan)
“Members of Congress should be compelled to wear uniforms like NASCAR drivers, so we could identify their corporate sponsors.” (Caroline Baum)
The truth is that self-rule by a group of citizens, by way of their elected representatives, is not supposed to be easy, or smooth, or efficient, or painless, or without occasional hiccups. To expect nothing but easy, smooth sailing when power and money are being fought over would be a childish fantasy. Or an evil wish.
Think about some of the total brawls we have witnessed in recent years from South Korea’s parliament, or Japan’s parliament. Chairs flying, punches thrown, martial arts kicks landing on unhappy faces! Likewise in a few European parliamentary democracies in recent years, where policy disagreements were settled with fist fights. Vive le human passion for truth, I say.
Well do I recall first seeing 18th and 19th century drawings and political cartoons of fisticuffs, cudglings, and canings in the US Congress, as well as accurate pictures of fatal duels among elected officials. These old drawings showed the true inner workings of representative government – members beating the snot out of each other. The other good side of these bloodlettings and drawn-out disputes is that when responsible people feel strongly about freedom vs tyranny, about slavery vs abolition, about fair taxation vs taxation without representation (which Americans are living under right now), they have strong disagreements. Government commensurately slows down and waits for the disagreements to get resolved. Good, this is natural and healthy.
You know what scares me in politics? Bipartisanship. Yep, that old let’s–reach-across-the-aisle crap means only one thing: Both political parties have reached agreement on mutually beneficial ways of wasting and pocketing our hard-earned tax money that the government coerced out of our pockets at gunpoint.
I was glad to see Rep. Kevin McCarthy ejected from the Speaker’s seat. Smoooooth McCarthy was an embarrassment in so many ways (not the least of which his evil role in covertly delaying and unnecessarily drawing out the selection process in the hopes of being re-installed as Speaker), and he smells of corruption.
I was glad to see Rep. Matt Gaetz and others (where was my US Congressman Scott Perry in all this?) demand that McCarthy be held accountable for breaking the promises he made to attain the Speaker’s seat. I was glad to see Rep. Gaetz eventually widely recognized and appreciated for having toppled the DC Swamp’s man in Congress and replacing him with Rep. Mike Johnson, who appears to be a decent person from East Succotash America and not yet familiar with greasy handshakes.
Overall, the shut down and gridlock in Congress during the struggle for the Speakership was a big gain for the US citizenry, and I would like to know what Mark Twain would have said about it. Whatever Mark Twain would have said about those glorious weeks of Congressional inaction, we just know he would have hit the nail on the head.
The Real Crisis at Davos is WEF’s Tidal Wave of Bullsh*t
Some people are addicted to adrenaline, to crisis, and to being always on the move, hopping from one phone call to the next to nonstop meetings, followed by the inevitable “Gosh I am so crazed and busy, I am soooo stressed.” As if they did not do it to themselves, victims of their own bipolar, egomaniacal, or cutthroat competitiveness.
These people may be Michelin Man full of peanuts, but at least they are trying to be productive, in their own way. They may bother everyone around them, try to hijack most projects and processes around them, and be the kind of person you try hard to avoid in the parking garage at the end of the day, but they are probably a net-positive force. Maybe by a slim margin, but they are still on the positive side of the equation.
Then there are people for whom shouting “Crisis!” from the rooftops is a purposeful scam. So they can be in control, of the rest of us. These people use the latest manufactured fake so-called “crisis” to make end-runs around collective decision making processes and procedures that would normally bog down over or outright reject such a claim of “crisis” due to a lack of evidence.
In the past sixty years there have been a bunch of fake crises, most of them some shade of environmental or another. Paul Ehrlich (see below) was predicting the end of the world (really, like the entire world would come to a cataclysmic halt) back in the 1960s and 1970s. And when the world did not end in the 1970s, he predicted its demise in the 1980s, 1990s and even in the 2020s! He is still at it, saying pretty much the same thing.
Obviously, the world has not ended and Paul Ehrlich has been wrong the entire time. His crisis is fake.
Paul Ehrlich may be wrong, but nevertheless he is persistent. To his credit, he is not persistently crazy, but rather consistently smart. Like another “the end of the world is nigh!” false messiah, Al Gore, Ehrlich has learned that a foolish soup of the intellectually gullible and the politically mal-aligned reward him whenever he steps up to a podium to declare that capitalism, Americans, gas stoves, cars, whatever the false issue du jour is, are all going to result in the end of the world.
Today the Neo Nazi League World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland has assembled a who’s-who of villains, career politicians, fakirs, weirdos, sycophants, coelacanths, investors, psychics, and actual real Nazis who want to own your body and your soul. The literal Nazi skinhead of the WTF WEF, Klaus Schwab, has declared 2023 to be a year of “polycrisis.”
According to WTF head Klaus Barbie Schwab, there are now so many crises attacking us all at once that the entire Western democratic system of self-rule and self-decision making and self-problem solving must be ended, so that he and his little cadre of Neo Nazi technocrats can fix everything. Yes, Herr Fuhrer Schwab is sounding the alarm on a whole array of (utterly fake) crises that demand America come to a screeching halt. No more gas cars, no more gas stoves, no more meat…”You will own nothing and you will be happy” he says, meaning it more now than ever before.
Herr Schwab’s fake climate and gas stove and environmental alarmism is obviously fake, but his cadre’s lust for power and control is not fake. It is real. Within the WEF WTF’s tsunami of bullshit crisis is a very serious threat to humanity, and this is a real threat and potential crisis that we have seen over and over before: Mass murderers Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, the Democrat Party in 1860-1865 and again now, Julius Caesar, the Pharoah, Nebuchadnezzar, and a thousand other violent tyrants who have claimed the right to govern us absolutely because of some “crisis” or other.
The WTF WEF people may be a bunch of evil thugs who we must resist at all costs, but they do get credit for unabashedly living a pimped out high end lifestyle in broad daylight. Like high and mighty feudal princes of old, they don’t listen to a word of their own demands that they place on the rest of us. They have hundreds of jet airplanes taking individual members to Davos, some of the flights being only twelve miles, with enormous outsized plumes of carbon emissions to each member’s sole ownership and credit. And they have the highest price prostitutes possible (I am not talking about the CNN, NPR, BBC staff, but actual hookers), the best alcohol and the most exotic real meat and shellfish food possible.
There may be a tsunami crisis of BS at the WTF WEF World Economic Forum, but wow, those people nonetheless know how to live high on the hog! Without an apology to anyone…
They must think We, The People are a bunch of idiots.
August 13, 1970 edition of the Orlando Sentinel citing grand environmental fakir Paul Ehrlich. In the intervening fifty three years, none of Ehrlich’s dire predictions have happened. But Herr Klaus Schwab, Al Gore and yes, even Herr Ehrlich are still peddling the same b*llshit
