Legislation Without Representation (at the Treehouse)

art credit: britannica.com

Many people I know think everything in America today is just hunky-dory; they just shake their heads if I bring up any of the critical issues involved in this election (see e.g., The Flight 93 Election blog here). Many people I know who plan to vote for Hillary don’t see anything wrong with anything she does, even when her actions clearly violate the law. Hard to know where to go sometimes. 

It’s especially discouraging to have to try to counter the corrupt mainstream media narratives, day in day out, especially on television. Media bias, media malpractice, propaganda – whatever you call it, the corrupt media is carrying water for the corrupt political class. 

Sundance/Conservative Treehouse is one of my daily stops online. His essay today on “Legislation Without Representation” is a sobering sanity check. Here’s a short extract:

There are many who use a frame of reference about ‘saving a constitutional republic‘; while I do not mean to be dismissive of this benevolent sensibility — in case you have not been paying attention, we’ve long since passed the threshold of that possibility.

The architecture of our own U.S. government is now operating independent of the electorate (Obamacare, Omnibus, etc.).  Congress is consistently passing legislation without appropriate representation (PR [Puerto Rico] Bailout, Omnibus, Corker/Cardin [link added] amendment, Fast-Track Trade Authorization, etc.), and the various operational constructs, divisions, and agencies within the DC UniParty are now fully weaponized against us (IRS targeting, FBI Comey/email non-finding, etc.).

Whether we like to admit it or not, just like the futuristic Skynet, our government has become self-aware, risk adverse and is intent on sustaining its UniParty agenda against any threat, risk or voice that might rise in opposition.

Read the whole thing here. It's not as pessimistic as you might think.

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Last chance for Gas? The Flight 93 Election

photo credit: flickr.com

The Flight 93 Election

Is this year’s election just another in the endless series of election cycles, or is it a do-or-die election, a sort of Last Chance For Gas? Do you have a sense of urgency, or are you looking askance at those who do?

One of the most thought-provoking essays that may be of interest to Tea Party people with any conservative values, whether economic or social, is a piece by the pseudonymous Publius Decius Mus at the Claremont website here. A couple of short extracts: 

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic. The stakes can’t be that high because they are never that high . . .

. . .

To simultaneously hold conservative cultural, economic, and political beliefs—to insist that our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature and must undermine society—and yet also believe that things can go on more or less the way they are going, ideally but not necessarily with some conservative tinkering here and there, is logically impossible.

Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second, of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with conservative assistance. And, third, the whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all understand as conservatism.

Read the entire thing here. Especially if you find it difficult to jump on the Trump Train, as it were.

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