By Kurt Schlichter
Monday, February 17, 2014
If you’re a conservative, you don't need to silence the
opposition.
In fact, we conservatives want liberals to talk, to make
buffoons of themselves, to prove their folly. We want liberals to expound upon
their ridiculous ideas, to show the world exactly what they're about. Nancy
Pelosi? Give that tiresome woman a microphone. Chatty liberals are the best
advertisement for conservatism.
But liberals just can’t have conservatives speaking.
We’ll tell the truth, and that’s why liberals need to shut us up.
Their traditional intimidation tactics are wearing out.
Calling someone a “racist” used to be a devastating moral indictment. Liberals’
promiscuous employment of the word first turned it into a cliché and then into
an ironic punchline.
I know, saying that out loud is racist. And sexist. And
cisgender heteronormative, whatever the hell that means.
So now liberals have stepped up to formal governmental
repression. Take the IRS scandal – or ex-scandal, in the eyes of the mainstream
media. The Obama administration, at the urging of red state Democrat senators
who are about to lose their seats because of their track records of failure,
are doing everything they can to turn the taxman loose on the organizations
that are pointing out their track records of failure.
Sure, the liberals come up with excuses, with
justifications, with rationales for this prima facie oppression. But understand
that the left was never against political repression. The left is only against
being repressed itself.
It’s open season on everyone else. Don't dare bow down to
god whose name isn’t spelled "G – O – V – E – R – N – M – E – N – T."
Today’s heretic hunters work for Kathleen Sebelius, ready to burn you at the
stake for expecting grown men and women to come up with the dough for their own
contraceptives. No one expects the HHS Inquisition!
The Federal Communications Commission just floated a
trial balloon about going out to radio and television stations to evaluate
reporters on how they cover the news. There was a time when journalists'
response to a government inquiry into how they did their job would be "Go
to hell, you goose-stepping bureaucratic flunky."
Not anymore. Now, their response is slavish submission to
their progressive governmental dominatrix. When supposedly independent,
iconoclastic liberal journalists let themselves to be dominated by the feds,
their safeword is “Hillary.”
Liberalism has to muzzle the truth because it operates on
lies. It is built on lies, fueled by lies, and creates an empire of lies.
Look at the Obamacare scam. Liberals don't even blink at
the fact that its foundational premise that if you liked your health care, you
could keep it, was a lie. They’re not even offended by the lie. They’re
offended that we point out that it was a lie.
Now the same people who got us into this mess are telling
us we should go along and trust them to fix the same damn problem that they
created in the first place. Liberals are the Lucys of American politics,
holding the football and promising that this time it’ll be different. We need
to stop being the Charlie Browns.
In the Senate, liberals toss traditions like the
filibuster out the window for political expediency. The president creates his
own laws or changes ones that are already in place on a whim. There are no
norms, there are no standards. Everything is a short-term political gambit, and
little things like the Constitution are just obstacles to progress.
How does all this end well? It doesn't. It can't. That
is, unless the American people come to their senses and demand that the
Constitution, as it is written, be respected. That change come through the political
process, through persuasion rather than diktat.
But if that doesn't happen, what then? What becomes of
our system? How do we act when we take power again? Should we also ignore those
same principles that we seek to reaffirm in order to reaffirm them?
Does the next Republican president simply announce that
he's repealing Obamacare by executive order? Does he simply refuse to implement
other laws we dislike? Does he refuse to collect foolish taxes? Does he use his
prosecutorial discretion to decide to refuse to prosecute his allies? Is that
what we want?
No, it is not what we want, but it may be what we get. We
are not ones for unilateral disarmament. Our constitutional system is not a
suicide pact, as many have observed. The liberals aren't going to like it when
we apply the same ruthlessness to them.
If the rules of the game are now that there are no rules,
then the only political currency is raw power. But we know what happens when
there are no rules, where pure power is the sole measure of right and wrong. I
served in countries like that. They are full of mass graves
The American system’s strength is not that everyone
always wins. It is that the system cultivates our ability to lose gracefully,
to understand that you were heard, that you had your say, that there was a
process, and that you lost fair and square. It sustains itself by reinforcing
its own legitimacy.
But if your losses aren’t fair, if you haven't been
heard, if the rules have been bent or broken or ignored, that crucial
legitimacy is gone. And then there are no rules to respect.
What keeps this grand experiment in freedom going is that
we honored, at least until now, our Constitution’s boundaries. Sure, we pushed
at the edges, nudged the envelope, sometimes fudged the line, but what is
happening now is different. What's happening now is that the line is being
erased.
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