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POLITICS Updated 9-3-08

We have ourselves to blame for the lack of honesty and leadership from politicians, because we insist on having a politically correct society. Leadership, like truth - as much as we need both - hurts. And acting on what's right is difficult, by definition. Okay, let's use the word "necessary" for those of you who are squeamish about the word "right" (btw: you just proved my point). It is our own discomfort that causes us to vilify people who talk straight, as you will see if you bring up talk radio types around the water cooler. That's an example of what happens to people who do talk straight, which makes doing so expensive for politicians who now are expected to be populists in order to get elected (another reason we are not supposed to be a democracy).

Quick Bytes - Short, to-the-point, common sense bullets that some politicians would say if they could. If more people understood these things, our country and the world would be a far better place.

ELECTION 2008 The Obama Nation

My Political Articles Here (by topic)

What the Media Isn't Telling You

Helpful Links like "Who's My Congressman?" and where to "Read the Constitution for Yourself"

Russia Invades Georgia: We will never "evolve beyond" having bullies in the world who get control of countries and pillage their neighbors for resources and control. Putin is not unique, I can name dozens of recent despots off the top of my head who have come and gone. That's why reality forces us to deal with them, and not "wishful-think" them out of our world view - and we should not look to blame those who have the responsibility of dealing with them for the problems they cause.

What's your World View?: No one is objective. Our world view is the lens through which we see things. This is not necessarily a bad thing. If your world view is based upon cause-and-effect observation, logic, and reason (as it was for the Sophists, and people like Socrates and Aristotle who introduced the world to logic) then it becomes useful to have a world view, because it gives you a context, for clear analysis. By contrast, if you are unaware of what your world view is, then you don't understand yourself, much less the world around you (politics); and you should not vote till you can define your mind. Then it's time to train yourself to understand politics, as we are not born with that understanding. Politics is a discipline like any other, so it requires some education. Having the right to vote doesn't mean you should, any more than having the freedom to buy climbing gear means you should climb Everest tomorrow.

An even worse picture than ignorance is if you discover that your world view is based on emotions; or envy of those more successful than you; or religious-like, unquestioning devotion to an ideology or political party; or on the kind of wishful thinking that allows you to ignore historical facts and logical cause-and-effect analysis. No offense, but if this is you, then you are at risk of being part of the problem when you pull the lever at the voting booth.

The two main World Views that have dominated politics / society-building for quite some time are Capitalism and socialism. Most of the issues we face today - and even some that you would think to be above political considerations - continue to have at their root the push-pull of these two world views. Even the motivations behind Global Warming and modern Environmentalism are not immune to the bias.

Have you ever wondered what happened to all the openly communist and socialist demonstrators in this country? They didn't go away, and they are not an irrelevant part of McCarthy-esque paranoia. They have merely shifted their focus and their language in this country because America is too populated by hard-working, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-it-done personality types to find their rhetoric palatable outside of New York City and San Francisco, et al. In other countries - like in Europe - many parties openly call themselves socialists. And we do have a party in America that - while they try to avoid the label - transparently espouse the same socialist policies.

That party (you already know which one I mean, and that's more proof that I am correct about them than if I merely told you my opinion) will have a footing, and we will continue degenerating into the classic welfare state, as long as we encourage people to vote based upon their group identities, or their natural envy of people who are more wealthy or capable than they are, and as long as we keep telling people that they have the right to have the things that are supposed to be worked for. This cycle is human nature, and it takes education to sidestep. But in the way of that honesty are politicians who use our natural but base class envy to buy votes and to justify policies that will lead us to bankruptcy if we don't wake up and return to our Constitutional roots.

Our Founders warned us against these tendencies - and against democracy - stringently. You have probably heard people say that we are a republic, not a democracy, but when was the last time anyone explained just what that means? It means, in part, that we are a nation ruled by laws - not by the mob (a.k.a. "the majority") as happens in a democracy. The word "democracy" was a dirty word to our Founders and remained so in public understanding until FDR started to use the term in his "Fireside Chats" during The Great Depression when he formulated The New Deal that fathered our modern welfare state. Why was democracy despised? I think Alexander Tyler said it best when he wrote over a hundred years ago about the self-destructive cycle of democratic societies. He said:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage."

Where would you say we are in that cycle right now?

So why don't you hear this more? Well, actually you can but you have to be willing to go beyond the agenda-laden network news for that content, and to hear a lot more that they don't want you to understand. Why? Because (even by their own statistics) the media are 95% left-leaning, and thus, sympathetic to one side. They will tell you this openly. There is no such thing as objectivity - on any side. That's not a bad thing...it's natural...we all just have to balance where we get our info from between all the various subjective sources, always framing our understanding of what they say with where they are each coming from. You will hear the other side on talk radio, and in the blogosphere but the networks and Nancy Pelosi really don't like that you still can and are trying to undermine and curtail that free speech every day on The Hill through what they call "The Fairness Doctrine." Haven't ever heard about that either? Again, you wouldn't on CNN or NBC...but then, that's why those media sources are losing their monopoly on information, going more by the wayside, and becoming less relevant every day.

You can find pretty much all the talk shows (even the ones I disagree with) and listen live at http://www.talkradiotime.com