The Nanny (State) Needs to Be Fired!
"Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" (Lk. 12:56)
The Obama Administration hit a new low two days ago. Under the Briefing Room on the White House website they posted a blog that said:
"There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can't keep track of all of them here at the White House, we're asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.org."
The White House is asking us Americans to become snitches -- to spy on each other! The only difference between this and Communist East Germany is that the government is not ordering us to do it -- at least not yet. Notice that they are not only asking us to monitor each other's emails, but to report "casual conversation" that "seems fishy" and might constitute rumors about Obama's healthcare program. I suspect the White House would call "rumors" anything critical we might say about it.
Of course they would hotly protest that all they are seeking to do is to correct the "misinformation" abroad in the land, that there is absolutely nothing sinister in the suggestion that we report on one another. Yet, I would suggest that Obama's word "stupid," which he applied to the quite legitimate actions of Cambridge police officer Crowley last week, really need to be applied to his own White House team for that blog posting. What kind of public relations blunder is it for an administration that is already grabbing power every way it can to ask Americans to spy on one another? Stupid, indeed. But very revealing.
It is characteristic of totalitarian governments that they spy on their citizens. Why do they do this? Because they are not so much interested in serving their people (the true function of government) as controlling them. That is the only way they can stay in power.
I am not calling the Obama Administration totalitarian, but what I am pointing out is that they are very interested in control. They are committed to growing the government's power and control over the American economy. Already they are exerting ownership of banks, financial institutions, and General Motors (new name: Government Motors?), and Obama is now after the biggest prize of them all -- healthcare. Obamacare would directly or indirectly take control of an additional 20% of the nation's economy.
The American people are getting angry. Good! High time. The White House flaks, including Press Secretary Gibbs, are accusing those who protest -- those who accost their Senators and Representatives -- of being a mob. It's interesting to note that that is exactly what the tyrannical government of Great Britain said about the Patriots in the months prior to the Revolution: that they were a mob.
For months I have been calling for a new grass-roots rising up of the American people -- a second American Revolution, if you will -- to stop the Federal Government from bankrupting the country. And I predicted in last week's commentary that as the Senators and Representatives got back to their districts and states in the August break and held meetings with their constituents, they were going to get an earful. It is starting to happen, and people are voicing their anger about the government, particularly the senior citizens. Keep it up, folks. Let 'em have it! They need to hear from us.
What is appalling, though it's predictable, is what the government is saying about those of you who are showing up to protest in these meetings. Here's White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs: "I hope people will take a jaundiced eye to what is clearly the Astroturf nature of grass-roots lobbying. This is manufactured anger." Yes, it's manufactured all right -- by the Obama Administration! Everything they've been doing has created much grass-roots anger, and rightly so.
And then we have this off the wall reaction by Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) to a meeting with his constituents. He referred to them as "a mob," saying, "This mob. . . did not come just to be heard, but to deny others the right to be heard." Or, maybe they were really just patriots reacting to government tyranny?
The latest poll, from QuinnipiacUniversity, shows conclusively that the American people do not want government-run healthcare. Fifty-two percent of American voters disapprove of the way Obama is handling the health-care issue and only thirty-nine percent approve. Even more telling is the fact that by a huge 72%-to-21% margin, voters don't believe President Obama when he says his plan will be paid for or is "deficit neutral." Additionally, by a 20-point margin, 57%-to-37%, voters say healthcare reform should be abandoned if it adds to the deficit. The people coming to these town hall meetings are no mob -- they are patriotic Americans who represent the 72% and 57% referred to in this poll. When the President and his fellow Democrats attack their fellow citizens they are speaking for the 21% and 37%.
What is really going on here is that the majority of the people running our Federal Government (symbolized by Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid) actually believe that the government, or the state, is the solution to everyone's problems. We can call them statists. They are committed to the idea that government is the chief caretaker and provider for the people. We conservatives, and especially those of us who are Christians, believe that God is the source of our welfare, and our provider.
The statists reject that last sentence in practice (though they might pay lip service to it in theory), because true statists cannot abide the idea that people would have an allegiance that supersedes their relationship with the state, or government. Hence they attempt to regulate and control everything from marriage (the campaign to support homosexual marriage through the courts) to healthcare. It is always about power and control for statists, in contrast to the conservatives, who believe with Thomas Jefferson that the best government is that which governs least.
The big government advocates will attack anything that threatens their control. That is why they reject the reliance on a traditional and strict interpretation of the Constitution in the legal system, preferring to manipulate the Constitution through the courts into a "living" document that can be twisted to mean whatever they want it to mean. At the same time they vigorously fight against any expression of the Christian faith in the public square. Why? Because the Constitution is based on the belief that people possess natural rights that precede government, and that these rights are the gift of God. These bedrock beliefs of the Founding Fathers constitute the foundation of American government. Their understanding of government was that its only proper function is to protect and defend the people in the exercise of their God-given rights. And that is a total threat to a government looking to be everyone's Nanny (Nanny always knows best, and is not to be disobeyed!).
The statist believes that government bestows rights. The most recent illustration of this is Obama's insistence that the people have a right to healthcare (and Nanny is going to make sure you get it, dear!).
Of course, the people have no such "right."
Because for statists it is always about amassing power and control, they tend to magnify a problem into a great crisis, and then use this to scare the public into surrendering yet more control of their lives to the state. The statists know that in a crisis the people look to the government to do something. Case in point: The cries that came from New Orleans during Katrina: "Where's the government? Why don't they do something?" Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel gave the game away when he commented: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
The statists will use junk science, outright lies, and fear-mongering to convince the public that we are in a crisis of gigantic proportions. This is precisely what Al Gore did in his hysterical global warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." There was little truth in it. But the enviro-statists, to borrow author Mark Levin's term, will scream that the sky is falling to justify their imposition of new Federal regulations on carbon emission from cars and power plants and refrigerators and cows and everything else you can think of. Power and control. The worse the people think the threat is, the more they will surrender their freedoms.
Of course, the government environmental police and their supporters always hurt the poor the most -- the very people they claim they are trying to help. There are 600 million poor in India who have no electricity. Yet Greenpeace campaigned against the incandescent light bulb there, calling it "a hazardous product to everyone." It would be easy to laugh off these Greenpeace agitators as insane, if there weren't so many people in Washington who think just like them. (Nanny always knows best). For example, the Congress passed a law in 2007 that phases out incandescent light bulbs completely by 2014. But, it now turns out that if you break one of the new CFL bulbs that are supposed to supplant incandescent bulbs, you release mercury -- a powerful neurotoxin very poisonous to children and babies. Most landfills will not even take these bulbs, with the result that if government persists in this program we are going to have to come up with separate disposal facilities just for these mercury-laden bulbs. But, remember, Nanny always knows best.
Very important to the statists is the control over our children's minds. The government school minions (the National Education Association et al) fight viciously against Christian schools, the burgeoning homeschool movement, school vouchers, and anything else that threatens their control over our children. They have succeeded in turning public schools into a laboratory for their court-assisted programs of homosexual indoctrination, which if successful will produce legions of young voters to keep the big government folks in power for years to come.
The struggle between the statists and the conservatives is heating up. Is there any hope to limit big government -- to roll back its increased power and control over our daily lives? Well, was there any hope of throwing off British tyranny in 1775?
Absolutely. But, it was a hope visible only to the eyes of faith.
On the morning of March 23, 1775, at the Virginia Revolutionary Convention in St. John's Church, Patrick Henry made one of the most famous speeches in American history. Admonishing the delegates that "if we wish to be free . . . we must fight" he went on to say "they tell us, sir, that we are weak, unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? . . . Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? . . . We are not weak. . . Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us."
It is still true.
And we will find that it is still true, if "we the people" prayerfully and actively rise up in a grass-roots movement to change things.
The Nanny (State) needs to be fired!
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