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The Price of Freedom

Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein opposed the draft. The reason, he wrote, was that any society that had to force its people to fight for it wasn't worth preserving. I suppose that goes for a society that won't pick its leaders wisely, too. In the last few elections we've had some sorry choices. Try as I might, I can't just blame the news or special interests. People didn't want to take the time to understand what each candidate stood for, if anything, and what his record really was. They either trusted their opinionated friends, or the cool guys on radio or TV, or they just figured they could determine whom to vote for based on how they looked or how they shook hands.

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Politicians are people who are good at making you like them. They are people who are good at sounding as though they hear your concerns and agree with them. Most people just assume that when a politician feels a certain way on an issue he'll vote that way. Often times, he won't. Joe Lieberman made fools of such people during his last election for the Senate. He said he wanted the Iraq War to end. People who voted for him were shocked to find out that he hasn't voted that way once since. To know that Lieberman was lying, all you needed to do was look at his voting record, but they figured he was just such a nice man that he wouldn't lie to them. Idiots.

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What freedom means is that your fate is in your hands. It's your country, but only if you make it your responsibility to stay informed about what's happening in your world. If you leave it to your bigmouthed friends, the cool guys on radio, or even the earnest blogger, you leave your fate in their hands. Which means you really leave your fate in the hands of whoever controls or manipulates them, people who should never be trusted, because they don't give a damn what happens to you. The sort of people, in short, who are running thingsscrewing things up right now.

Via:Slobber and Spittle
I stand for liberty

Where we see injustice, we must stand and fight it. Where we see a law that needs to be changed, we must stand and demand that change, and truly do the work necessary to make it happen. Where we see a need to lift up our fellow man, we must band together to do that, whatever it may take. Because we owe it to ourselves and to future generations to live up to the better angels of our natures -- and to require that those elected to represent us do the same.

And if they do not? We work to elect representatives who will do the work correctly. And we will.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories.
- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 14, 1781

The best disinfectant for corruption of government is an informed populace -- for it is in the knowing of the facts and the issues, as well as knowing the character of those who are elected to government, as John Adams once pointed out so well, that we see where a change in course must be made. And where we hold those elected to represent our interests to the facts as we know them, and to doing the things that need doing for the greater good of us all, that is where the strength and power of a collective action from "we the people" can be most powerful.

And where they are not doing so? It is incumbent upon all of us to hold them to account for their failures. We cannot sit by and wait for someone else to do the work, for it will not be done. We must stand together -- for justice, for liberty, for these truths which we hold to be self-evident, and"[t]hat to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." The power that those who govern us hold is only such power as we the people give them -- and I refuse to allow them to subvert the Constitution and the nation's laws without speaking out when they overstep the boundaries of what is legal and right

The American Electorae: I'm voting for stupid

America has to wise up. Somehow, we have to convince our fellow citizens to stop treating elections as popularity contests and start treating them as job interviews. The presidency is the most important job in America: it's vital it doesn't go to the dumbest candidate. We need a super-intelligent person in the White House, someone capable of running a complicated, dangerous, and threatened country. We need someone in charge who can think his way out of a brown paper bag.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: WELCOME TO The Carnival of the Elistist Bastards #2

(Don't worry, its not all politics.) Go Thou and READ!!!