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Freedom and the "Obamanation"
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Activism; Posted on: 2009-04-01 17:54:00 [ Printer friendly / Instant flyer ]
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Obama's real agenda slowly unfolding
by Alex Lee
The US president, together with his Secret
Service protection team, is holding up traffic in the UK capital as the
leaders of the G20 gather to discuss the state of the world in the
London Docklands. This piece submitted by a Maryland based Civil
Liberty supporter is a timely pointer that President Obama represents
the same global elite and vested corporate interests as his hapless
Texan born predecessor.
As an American, I find myself lucky to have witnessed (and survived)
the recent presidential election. As far as I can tell, no other
election in the relatively brief history of my country has caused such
a worldwide stir. To be honest, I suppose most of the presidential
elections that I’ve witnessed have been interesting. I was old enough
to remember the election of President Bill Clinton, but beyond that, I
was just a toddler. So I’ve lived through eight years of Clinton and
eight years of Bush. The era of Barack Hussein Obama has begun.
I am a conservative American. I’d bet that the image which comes most
immediately to mind is that of an evangelical Christian, since that’s
the image which is painted most often by the mainstream media.
“Hardcore conservatives” as the media portray them are often just very
religious people, usually of European descent.
I, however, am not that particularly religious,
although I am of European descent and care deeply about my culture and
heritage. This naturally means that my politics lean to the right on
the American political scale, and on some issues, even farther to the
right than those “hardcore Christian conservatives” that the media love
to talk about. This means that I did not support Barack Obama for the
US presidency. This does not mean, however, that I voted for John
McCain, for reasons that I’m about to describe.
I would wager that most people, both in the United States and abroad,
would assume that I support the Republican Party because of my
conservative viewpoints. However, any serious educated conservative
will tell you that the Republican Party has lost almost all of its
credibility for true conservatives. It has pandered nearly exclusively
to the religious demographic in the past decade with issues such as
abortion and gay marriage, and upon the nomination of John McCain and
following the election of Barack Obama, has tried to “broaden its
constituency” by pandering to typically leftist demographics, such as
minorities and college-aged people.
This means that conservatives like me in America who want a limited
federal government based on our Constitution and an end to both
economic and social engineering by the government essentially have no
party. I personally voted for Chuck Baldwin for President. Chuck
Baldwin was the presidential nominee of the Constitution Party, and was
endorsed by Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. Ron Paul was
the Republican Party’s last chance to revive its traditional American
conservatism. Now most conservatives like me admit that it may be time
for a new political party.
What we want is mind-bogglingly simple. We want to shrink our bloated
central federal government back to its Constitutional limits. The
United States Constitution outlines the few large, important things
that the Federal government is allowed to do, including (but not
limited to) the right to wage war, defend the citizens of the United
States, and levy taxes and tariffs. Such was the vision of America’s
founding fathers, direct descendants of the first British colonists;
such was the goal of the world’s first constitutional republican
democracy.
Federal expansion
My fellow conservatives and I believe that America’s founders would
balk at our government today. Ron Paul, a Congressman from Texas,
maintains that the level of expansion undertaken by the US Federal
government, especially in the past fifty or sixty years, has done more
harm than good for society. Social Security is a good example. Social
Security, which was intended as a temporary measure for President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal program, remains in effect today,
and according to government sources, is the world’s biggest government
welfare program on the planet and costs more than the US military in
federal government expenditures. And are the American people at large
really benefiting from this program? Some experts claim that the
decline of the so-called “baby boomer” generation from the Second World
War will mark the beginning of the end for sustainable Social Security
because the size of the generations claiming Social Security benefits
is much larger than the younger generation supporting the Social
Security pot. It’s important to note that the United States government
automatically takes a portion of one’s paycheck for Social Security in
addition to an income tax for those earning more than a certain amount
of money each year.
Social Security is just one example of the United States Federal government’s actions of questionable constitutionality.
Another example which is perhaps more alarming is the steady
encroachment of the federal government on the private lives of
Americans. This comes in many forms, but the most recent and prominent
form was in the USA PATRIOT Act, signed into power by President George
W. Bush shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001.
This legislation was created supposedly to combat terrorist threats to
the United States. Critics and opponents of the bill, however, claim
that it gives the federal government much leeway to essentially spy on
law-abiding American citizens. As of right now, this seems to be an
unlikely scenario, but the successful implementation of the PATRIOT Act
could set a precedent for future presidents to infringe further on
Americans’ civil liberties, especially considering the steady swing
leftward seen in American politics today. And in the United States,
that shift to the political left indicates a larger, overactive federal
government. A large, overactive American federal government’s enemy is
the traditional American conservative, who wants to rein in that
government.
Criminalizing thought
So what does this all mean? It would not surprise me if Barack Obama
decides to approve hate crime legislation, which would criminalize
thought. Period. There are no ifs, ands or buts about this: hate crime
legislation criminalizes thought. The United Kingdom should know this
fact well, as would people in most of Europe. In both the UK and the
EU, people to the right of the political scale’s centre constantly find
themselves victims of everything from harassment by members of
parliament to state-sponsored harassment and the criminalization of
free speech, all because of the war against so-called 'hate'.
As an American, I am aghast at the treatment of the political right in
the UK and in Europe. The First Amendment of the US Constitution
guarantees every American’s right to free speech and association;
without such pivotal legislation, Britons and Europeans simply cannot
speak freely. I’m especially flummoxed by the fact that radical Islamic
imams can preach martyrdom, rejection of the British way of life, and
stir up hatred and disdain for Europeans and Christianity with
impunity, while people who are trying to save Great Britain and her
native population from literal destruction such as the British National
Party (BNP) experience the aforementioned persecution. The radical
Muslims want nothing to do with democracy or English Common Law,
whereas the BNP and patriotic Britons are considered a threat to
British national security? Sounds like backwards insanity to me.
It’s still too soon to determine exactly how President Obama will
further erode Americans’ civil liberties. When it comes to governance,
though, Obama’s motto (along with Congress, which is now dominated by
leftist Democrats) is “more government equals better government.”
Anyone who has lived in one of the many failed socialist or communist
countries can tell you otherwise, though. It’s the same reason why so
many Cubans in Miami vote conservatively: they’ve experienced a
government-saturated existence, and they don’t care for it one bit.
They know what the steady expansion of leftist government powers means
for the future. They know what it’s like to have their every move
monitored by government agents who will arrest and harass them if they
step outside the official party line, and they no longer want any part
of such a society.
I’m not Cuban, and I may not have lived in a socialist, communist, or
fascist state, but I know my history, and I know that freedom almost
always trumps government control and oppression.
Thankfully, there is still hope for all freedom-loving people, be they
in the United States, Britain, or on the European continent. There are
still plenty of democratic institutions through which we can elect
political advocates of freedom; all of what has been done can still be
reversed. That’s what I fight for; that's what we all must fight for,
before we are no longer able to do so democratically.
Source
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News Source: author
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