Unprecedented intolerance
A nation's anxiety deepens when it is manipulated by a demagogue, and especially so when the demagogue is a dilettante. As the incremental loss of American freedoms metastasize from perception to reality, American citizens are coming to realize that freedom and tyranny -- tyranny no matter its label or velvet-gloved disguise -- cannot co-exist.
Americans have taken note of Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Frank, Schumer, Waxman, Boxer and their ilk forswearing their constitutional oaths and abrogating the rule of law. Politics and political hatchet jobs no longer stop at the doorsteps of governance; They have been extended into the personal lives, businesses, and associations of any and all who oppose.
Ham-fisted rule
Worst of all, private citizens with no political affinity or affiliation, at any station in life, who now dare to dissent run the risk of being tracked on a presidential enemies list or government extremist watch index.
They are publicly attacked and libeled by state-controlled media lackeys, financially audited, or have"Until today, no president or Congress in the modern era -- not one -- has committed such vile acts of political and personal assault." their businesses set upon by bureaucratic regulators. Their spouses, children, colleagues, and friends are impugned and personal lives laid bare.
Americans are witnessing an unprecedented, cleverly-crafted display of ham-fisted government intolerance of those who voice concern as they see liberties they once took for granted eroding away.
Until today, no president or Congress in the modern era -- not one -- has committed such vile acts of political and personal assault. No president or Congress in the modern era -- not one -- has worked so diligently to foment racial and economic divisiveness on a national scale.
Until today. No clearer examples are required than the:
Public attacks by the Obama administration on an entire news organization that refuses to submit to lapdog status; Non-stop charges of racism by Obama stooges against any and all who simply ideologically disagree with Obama's hair-brained policies; or Promised retribution against private-sector businesses opposing the Democrat Congress' Government-run Health Care Rationing scheme.
Tyranny in any form is still tyranny
If a candidate shows up in your front yard and you ask him the wrong question, your tax records will be made public. If you answer a pageant question about gay marriage in a displeasing manner, you'll be stripped of title and have every detail of your life distorted. If you are a conservative candidate, you will be bludgeoned as will everyone dear to you -- especially if you are female and not of the Beltway.
Such tyrannical behavior is now the norm, but until recently it was not so. Just a few years ago President Bush, addressing the world about the despotic regimes of Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea, stated that "without democracy and freedom, there can only be tyranny."
His words, clearly understood by all, ring just as true today, but today it seems they must also encompass the growing despotism within our own nation.
The embedded state
Noted columnist David Warren, in an essay entitled The Regime about his native Canada's downward spiral and consolidation into a Nanny State, credibly lends itself to what is now occurring in the United States:
The term "The Embedded State" comes down to us from the title of a paper by Alan Cairns, one of Cooper's several impressive teachers in earlier life at the University of British Columbia. It refers to the scale of the modern state, which has come to eat as much as half of the economy. From its very size it becomes the principal source of demand for new government services. It is the elephant in the room of our little lives.
The great transformation, in Canada as throughout the west since the Second World War, has been from the old arrangement in which a relatively small civil service served the people, under the direction of their elected government, to the new one in which the people exist chiefly to serve a civil service grown vastly too large for elected officials to oversee.
The people themselves have adapted to its way of doing business and, in the course of satisfying the ever-growing bureaucratic demands of government at all levels, "civil society" (the Hegelian term for social institutions neither governmental nor familial) has also become bureaucratized.
Clinical Professor William Jacobson of the Cornell Law School observed that "Creeping federal regulation of every aspect of the economy now is being used as a justification for federal regulation of every aspect of our lives. And the example of regulation of banking salaries sets a precedent for regulation of our personal behaviors once Obamacare passes."
Indeed.
Hype and Chains.