George Rebane
The collectivist of whatever hue avoids reasoned debate wherever he encounters it because he quickly finds that his cherished arguments are but baseless slogans that will not even support a conversation thread let alone serve as a riposte to reason. Moreover, he also discovers that attempts to seek refuge in history, science, or economics are denied him, for what he holds dear is simply foreign to those fields of knowledge. His desperate search for support culminates once more in the warm embrace of familiar emotions which defiantly and reliably repel reasonable access. All’s well that ends well.
Having experienced and lived through the last eight years, I inevitably come back to the stark reality that President Barack Hussein Obama has been our most divisive leader since Honest Abe lived in the White House. President Lincoln was divisive because he sought to preserve the Union under conditions that half the country found unacceptable. President Obama is divisive because he seeks to sacrifice the Union for a global governance that half the country again finds unacceptable (the other half has no clue about what’s going on). And in that he is the Great Divider of our age.
The country’s liberals and socialists vehemently reject this notion, which in an absurd manner adds one more reason to conclude we indeed are divided – ‘I’m not anything like you.’, ‘Oh yes you are!’ is a very odd argument to buttress unity. The fault lines run through many major institutions of governance. For example, we hear recently that 40% of Californians believe our justice system is unjust and doesn’t work. This is a serious division in which people of the Left and Right participate, each citing their own reasons to make their case. At the federal level we have seen many pieces of evidence in the actions of the Department of Justice, FBI, SCOTUS, and the administrative courts that hide in the folds of large federal departments and quietly wreak unreported havoc on thousands of helpless citizens on the wrong side of political agendas.
When I raise these divisions on RR, the Left sings its usual chorus of my being a member of a small calcified contingent of conservatives who refuse to march with the times – their times. That populism now has reared its ugly or refreshing head (depending on your perch) gives lie to how small the group of my fellow travelers really is. Their Plan B counter is to play the race card and accuse us of injustice and prejudice against our first black president who ascended what quickly became a throne by declaring himself to be the Great Unifier. Well, to begin with Obama’s not black, but he is a mulatto which gives me just as much reason to call him white if I’m left with just two racial boxes. And besides, his divisiveness has nothing to do with race, but only his being raised in a communist Kinderstube which markedly colored not only his ideology but also the manner in which he does his political business.
Those who decry his identification as a divider, they all share the Left’s iconic ‘mark of the devil’ – the active suppression of opposing speech. Since the Left does not do well in reasoned debate, the only alternatives left are to tuck tail and run or seek to silence the opposition. In journalism the Left’s media leave entire fields of ideas, revelations, celebrations, and atrocities in silence when it does not easily fit with the socio-political narrative on which their communications are based. This suppression takes many forms from stealing election signs on one end, to the regular attempt to pass laws and regulations that abrogate the First Amendment in making its practice a government monitored and metered privilege, and no longer a right.
In the latter case the practice by the Left is felt at the grass roots level. All communities today have auto-anointed progressive censors who can be paired with likeminded politicians (readers to these pages are acquainted with our arbiter of goodness, truth, and beauty). Many of these individuals seek to be the untrammeled voice of the community through their practice of what may generously be called ‘yellow journalism’. When an opposing voice gains traction, they immediately accuse it of dangerously rending the community, and argue not for its defeat in a competition of ideas, but simply its silence and banishment from the public forum. Their kind will find ready employment in the promised new ‘fundamentally transformed’ world.
In the meantime, let’s pay attention to how the current regime seeks to hand the baton to its rightful successor, Crown Princess Hillary who is definitely cut from the same cloth as demonstrated by her record and the daily outpouring of her revealing emails.
[Addendum] So what to do? as we have been discussing here for some time now while watching the country roil as Americans find more reasons to identify themselves with different factions holding different values and views for our common future. My own tepid response has been to lean toward Trump for reasons primarily prophylactic as these pages have witnessed over the past months.
Yesterday I read a well-argued piece by Dr David Gelernter, prominent system scientist and Yale professor, who also counseled a vote for Trump. His ‘Trump and the Emasculated Voter’ resonated with me, perhaps, because he is a kindred spirit (in technology and ideology), speaks my language, and echoes my arguments. His piece is definitely worth a read. And for those who share such a worldview of today’s goings on and are comfortable with a bit of decision formalism, it is not hard to see oneself as a resident in the basket of irredeemable deplorables this coming November.
