Our liberty, or their elevated positions and ego?

Krakatoa blogs at Ace of Spades,

Aside from rote lip-service, the Left, and the quislings on the Right, are not interested in your health, your lives, or your liberty. Their only truly animating interest is in their own elevated positions and ego.

Nothing strokes one's ego more than forcing someone else to do something they don't wish to do, except maybe forcing someone to do something they don't want to do and then get endless flattering press for it.

As always in our country and throughout the history of civilizations, the ratchet driven by activists grinds almost unfailingly in the direction of empowering the State to dominate its people.

Curtailing first non-enumerated rights such as the ability to simply speak plainly via the creation of cultural stigma for holding opinions or manners of speech that only yesterday were commonplace and common-sense; and then turning that stigma into mob retaliation vis-a-vis getting people fired from their jobs, or outright violence in the streets aimed at people attending political rallies.

Once certain thoughts and often seemingly insignificant liberties have been essentially criminalized, they move on to attacking those concrete rights that were once presumed unassailable, but have entered the realm of "polite debate" by a compliant populace too interested in maintaining some level of nonconfrontational comfort to strenuously object to every inch requested by the so-called "moderates". Inches that in the rear-view mirror turn out to be miles and miles of forgotten or forsaken liberties.

Make no mistake: The never-ending litany for "compromise" requested on gun control does not come close to masking the goal of gun prohibition. They want you disarmed, and cultural inertia has made them less and less reticent to proclaim it.

Assuredly, every step away from our Founder's intentions is framed by its proponents in terms of saving lives, or ensuring some liberty for some defined cohort. Their duplicitous nature is revealed when those exact arguments are dismissed when offered in service of a liberty or cohort the Left isn't championing, such as the rights of the unborn, the health concerns of a populace whose borders are overrun with the non-vaccinated and/or no small number of violent criminals, the freedom of a landowner to manage one's property, et cetera.

And so it goes: Yet another mass murder that could have been prevented simply by maintaining the the laws on the books and the remedies at hand, all ignored or torn down like Chesterton's theoretical fence without truly comprehending the consequences. Or worse, with full comprehension of the consequences, but utilizing a brutal calculus that values the creation more voters for the next election more highly than the long term health and security of one's nation & citizens.

Never trust any legislation proposed in response to the acts of the madman or the thuggish practitioner of a 7th century violent religion.

I would go further: If in response to a situation like this our government should pass legislation that rolls back such an essential liberty of otherwise law-abiding citizens as the right to keep and bear arms, those reasonable people have the inherent right to refuse to comply and to resist as peaceably as possible. And if it becomes impossible to resist peacefully, any blood spilled will be on the hands of those who decided by any rationale to trade said liberty for peace in the first place.

A people whose only powers, liberties & remedies are those strictly defined by the State is not a free people at all.

Scandals, the family, transmitting culture

Jonah Goldberg on scandaleclipse:

Have you noticed that basically the only way this White House can get out from under one scandal or controversy is by getting crushed by another? The White House was reeling from the VA scandal, which is why they rolled out the Bergdahl news. They didn't expect that the Bergdahl story would become so controversial; fortunately they were rescued by the June 6 news of thousands of immigrant children showing up at the border. Hey, quick question: I can't get my kid out of an airport without her getting messy. Isn't it strange that all of these kids seem to show up, after a 1,000-mile journey looking so spiffy? Anyway, the immigrant-kid story was pretty brutal for the White House; fortunately they were rescued three days later by the news that ISIS had taken Mosul. The "Who Lost Iraq?" narrative isn't great for the White House either, which is why it might have been a relief when the IRS announced on June 13 that they lost Lois Lerner's e-mails.

Jonah Goldberg on the family:

No institution transmits culture more effectively than the family. We learn language, dialect, and accents in the home (we learn grammar at school). We get most of our religion and morality at home. We learn from our parents how citizens behave in a society and what they should expect from society and government. It's important to keep in mind that while parents teach their kids by telling them things, the real learning comes from watching what parents do — or don't do. Kids are wired to emulate their parents. They see how we divide our time. The habits of the heart are formed in the home.

And this is why progressives of all labels have had their eye on the family. It is the state's greatest competition. As I've written a bunch of times around here, if you listen to Barack Obama's vision of America, it's one where there's the state and the individual and pretty much nothing in between. Civil society, mediating institutions, and other "islands of separateness" are problems in Obama's eyes. Well, the family is the truest island of separateness. In the Life of Julia, the state is her family.

Please read more at The Goldberg File.