Letters to the Editor
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One clarification to my last post
Personally, I don't care.
I'm headed into the twilight of my years. Once you hit a certain birthday with a zero in it, the inevitability of The Big Dirt Nap is no longer an abstract concept.
In fact, there's a nasty little voice in the back of my head telling me that I'm lucky to be alive to witness the end of this grand experiment called The United States of America. It's lasted some 237 years and even with all its flaws, it's been a pretty good run. But the so-called "Founding Fathers" never could have imagined a complicit press, owned by corporations, who manipulate the public every day, around the clock.
They never could have imagined that the very institution of Congress that created this system of government would be populated by men and women so frail and cowardly that they would appease and cringe in fear as a semi-secret cabal of special interests bullies and threatens and bribes them into submission.
I'm lucky to watch this incredible phenomenon that has taken place over the last six and a half years: The systematic destruction of the checks and balances of our government. I've really got to hand it to them. They've won. It's a fait accompli.
In the long view of the history of civilization, this is not so unusual. Every empire, every state, eventually collapses in on itself from corrosion within. So in order to keep perspective and not let myself bubble over with outrage, I now prefer to look at these events the same way I would observe radical, violent change in the natural world.
Volcanoes erupt. Tectonic plates are on the move. Climate changes. And why should I be surprised that our republic would always be here the way it was? Political upheaval and the rise and fall of governments are just as inevitable as a river bed changing its channel according to the occasional flood.
I look outside and the sky is still blue. The mountains still have glacial snow adorning their flanks (albeit much less than when I was young). I know a place where I can go and coax a trout out of a rushing stream and there is no unnatural sound, just the timeless rushing of water over rock. More and more, I want to be there, not here in front of a computer screen, scribbling out my emotional nonsense, providing anonymous morons with endless sport.
It's time for me to turn away from all this crap. This political crap. I had my turn at trying to defend what I believe worth defending. If it's really not worth it for the young and able-bodied to actually put their physical selves in harms way, to risk their lives and their treasure as our founders once did, then they are going to get exactly what they deserve.
But for me, it just doesn't seem important any more. It's not my world, if indeed, it ever was. I'll just continue to journey on until I don't.
(Whew, that felt great! Now anonymous morons, I've handed you enough ammo to excoriate me anew. Let's see what you got.)
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Fine amount
I believe the fine is 100,000, not 1,000.
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Hear! Hear! and a Bronx Cheer!
I listened to most of the House Judiciary Committee hearing, and I have to say that Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) wins the gold star for getting right to the point and sticking to his guns on this clash between branches, and for stalwart defense of the Republic-in-name-only that our country is fast becoming. I wish we had more representatives like him -- if we had, Bush/Cheney(Rove) might never have happened.
Honorable mentions go to Brad Sherman (D-CA), Maxine Waters (D-CA), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), and Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) for fairly eloquently putting this rogue regime's feet to the fire, and for politely excoriating the GOP minority and trying (even if futilely) to remind them of their Constitutional duty.
And speaking of the other side of the aisle...
A big, fat Bronx cheer to GOP Representatives Randy Forbes (R-VA), Chris Cannon (R-UT), James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), Lamar Smith (R-TX), and Louie Gohmert (R-TX) for doing yeoman's service for the Unitary Executive/Dictatorship principle of government, and for their repeated, dilatory amendments intended to derail debate and confuse the issues at hand, offering what cover they could for their overlords at the White House.
Randy Forbes was the worst of the bunch, the most shamelessly partisan of the Unitary Executive's defenders, although Cannon and Sensenbrenner surely win the Neville Chamberlain Award for appeasement in the face of tyranny, both riding hard on the "we can't win this fight, so let's not have it" line of argument -- which, to my layperson's mind, is a waving a white flag of surrender to the Executive Branch, one step worse than the rubberstamped disgrace of a Congress the GOP had before the 2006 elections.
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Mr. Owen,
Your words are very thoughtful.
Often times we in our neck of the woods think along the same lines. The Republic seems so hopeless at this point. Yet sometimes we let ourselves believe it may survive.
You speak of what is most valuable in life, IMHO; a sense of humanity.
Many human beings have lost that. Which is tragic; in the end, it may be all that we truly have. Life without it, again, IMHO, isn't worth living.