http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/03/moral_ignorance_cripples_obama.html
March 10, 2015 Moral Ignorance Cripples Obama By Alexander Grass <http://www.americanthinker.com/author/alexander_grass/> To govern Americans, it is helpful to understand them. In our country, there is an abiding faith in not only in the culture of liberty, but also in the protection of personal rights provided by the Constitution. President Obama respects none of these principles, and has at the same time been successful in denigrating them. In expanding a welfare state that had previously been rolled back (rather modestly), in placing the healthcare sector of the economy under the corrupt administration of the federal bureaucracy, and in receding from the role of promoter of freedom in an increasingly volatile world, Obama follows the thought process of his leftist academic forebears. In the long run, it matters less to the President whether or not he achieves tangible legislative or political victories right at this moment. More so, it is the object of Obama’s maneuvering that he should change the American political culture in such a way as to cause a fundamental shift in attitude amongst the electorate later on. In that sense, Obama is achieving everything he has every dreamt of, and more. Mitt Romney -- now quite infamously -- said at a fundraiser in Boca Raton "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what...who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims. ...These are people who pay no income tax. ...and so my job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." Well, then. Was he wrong? Are those members of the entitled mega-plurality of the population voting for anyone but themselves? The fact that the media was able to skewer Romney over that quote, despite the stark truth of his assessment of the benefit addiction of lower and lower-to-middle-income taxpayers, demonstrates how successful Obama and the left has been in shifting the alignment of the political spectrum so completely that any common observation pointing out the excesses of entitlement is repainted as elitist rambling. There used to be a contingent of non-leftist liberals teaching in higher education -- for instance members of the civil rights movements, or Keynesian tax-and-spend economists -- but now the vast majority of current university faculties are made up of religiously devoted adherents to the discredited ideology of Marx, humanities departments at least as dedicated to enforcing gender codes as they are to teaching the classics, and administrations all too eager to enact speech codes and sound the Muslim call to prayer in an act of self-effacing pandering to the victims of “Islamophobia”, a topic with which the left is bizarrely fixated considering the near absence of enmity towards Islam on campus. Obama is a product of higher education’s schizophrenic faith. There are three important ideas, political devotions that most Americans subscribe to, that I will lay out here. The President, coming from the leftist incubator of the American university, rejects all of these principles. 1. The force that works to unite the American people is not the geographic boundaries of the United States. Instead, it is universal admiration for democratic liberty. That is why in the struggle against what Ronald Reagan aptly described as the “Evil Empire,” Soviet Russia, America set itself in a strong defensive stance against the encroaching darkness of tyranny in the world. That is why we can be proud to have fought with South Korea, now seeing the self-inflicted starvation and manic insanity of the North Koreans. That is why we can be proud to have stood with a *free* Berlin, and not with the communist police apparatus that became the Stasi playground of East Germany, satellite of the Soviet Union, transporters of political prisoners to the USSR, an operation that tortured and exported to the gulags of Siberia. East Germany sucked. 2. Where else in the world exists an almost religious respect for national founding documents, those being both our Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution? There is good reason that the historian Pauline Meier titled her book on the Declaration of Independence *American Scripture. *Even if the American people do not always have a thorough comprehension of the Constitution and its moving parts, they understand that it is inviolable (or at least should be). Even advocates of a broader, more activist interpretation of the aforementioned sacred texts view our government’s founding document, the Constitution, as being the final authority on law in American society. Even liberals like Akhil Reed Amar and Lawrence Tribe devote their energies into *interpreting *that scripture, not towards refuting it. Amar himself has come out in favor of the Originalist interpretation of Second Amendment gun rights, despite his personal political proclivity for modern liberalism. We revere our first political testaments. 3. Moral choices are difficult to make. It is usually the case that winning the larger war in the fight for moral goodness requires smaller, less savory efforts that are potentially anti-democratic. That is why Abraham Lincoln suspended *habeus corpus *during the Civil War. That is why the NSA’s metadata program was instituted. In the Civil War, the Union was bloodily reconciling an existential conundrum: How should the Union promote liberty and the promise of freedom with the legal sanction of slavery existing as it did? The point is not that the United States achieves perfection in its moral rightness. The point is rather that the United States always strives for moral good, and that that striving is encouraged by the immutable principles present in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Respect for the Constitution is the faith of patriots. At the moment, however, we are at risk of tumbling into the simple-minded and despotic majoritarianism of European countries and their continental radicalism. Europe is filled with teetering nations that justify government heavy-handedness, ginormous bureaucracies, and oppressive regulatory systems with the imprimatur of a 50%-plus voting threshold. Actually, most times, it is not even 50%. Reviewing history we can see that it isn’t inevitable or even likely that a society will develop in such a way as to promote and encourage moral right. Quite problematically, Obama acknowledges none of the incredible strengths that America possesses. In America, we have been lucky enough to have leaders who saw the promise of a republican future from a far distance. That many slaveholders saw the incoherence of promoting liberty while denying freedom to human chattel is important, and that many of the Founders saw the terror and tension of slavery having the capability to tear us asunder was prescient. Call it moral foresight. Now, not recognizing the domestic peril of ballooning entitlements, or refusing to acknowledge the international peril of a Nazi-like Islamist ideology, are the preeminent threats to our fragile democracy. Like all democracies, ours is perennially vulnerable. The glory of America’s political promise is not that every important figure in our history has been perfect. Far from it! Rather we should rejoice in being the inheritors of a society that tilts towards liberty and tends towards self-improvement. I hope thatour fellow citizens will see fit to elect a leader that will guide us from the wilderness back towards the path of enlightenment __._,_.___ ------------------------------ Posted by: "beowulf" <[email protected]> ------------------------------ Visit Your Group <https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/grendelreport/info;_ylc=X3oDMTJmY2w4bGJtBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzIwMTk0ODA2BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTMyMzY2NwRzZWMDdnRsBHNsawN2Z2hwBHN0aW1lAzE0MjYwMDk3MDk-> [image: Yahoo! Groups] <https://groups.yahoo.com/neo;_ylc=X3oDMTJldW01aTVpBF9TAzk3NDc2NTkwBGdycElkAzIwMTk0ODA2BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTMyMzY2NwRzZWMDZnRyBHNsawNnZnAEc3RpbWUDMTQyNjAwOTcwOQ--> • Privacy <https://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/groups/details.html> • Unsubscribe <[email protected]?subject=Unsubscribe> • Terms of Use <https://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/terms/> __,_._,___ -- -- Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. 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