Like the first knife-thrust into Julius Caesar, the awful era of President Barack Obama came to a crashing end last week with Republican victories in the House and Senate. But the ongoing celebration over Obama’s political death is utter nonsense.
In ancient Rome the body politic and the spirit of liberty came to a crashing end when Caesar led his army across the Rubicon River to Rome. It was, in fact, the climax because Rome had already suffered decades of decadence. That Marcus Junius Brutus and much of the Roman Senate murdered him didn’t change Rome’s trajectory towards ruin, although it was said to be well celebrated. What the conspirators didn’t understand was that Rome was already imploding.
Liberty was slipping away long before Caesar and would not be reimagined by man for 1,000 years with the birth of the Renaissance. That America would be the nation to fully reap the libertarian ideals espoused and planted perfectly in 17th century France is a cruel irony in the 21st century where American presidents and Congress have stripped away any veneer of privacy or any semblance of personal liberty. In fact, it began decades before the 2008 election of Obama.
I loathe the presidency of Obama; but I also loathed the presidency of his predecessor, George W. Bush, the Republican who began National Security Agency spying on and illegal wiretapping of American citizens. The Bush administration ran up record federal debts, began a war in Iraq over lies about weapons of mass destruction and helped spur the worst financial meltdown since 1929.
Yet the roots of that meltdown date back to the Clinton administration, which deregulated investment markets with derivatives, thus creating a global casino wherein the doormen and waitresses were on the hook for trillions of dollars in bets that went bad.
We know that no one in the Clinton administration understood derivatives because nobody — and I mean no single individual — fully understands them. They are as Richard Feynman, the late Cal Tech Nobel laureate, once described physics: “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”
So this current economic and debt morass can be dated back three presidencies to Clinton. But the man in the Oval Office before Clinton, George H.W. Bush was no peach either. Forget the “Read my lips, no new taxes” promise that he broke. The real tax on Americans is fear, and it is because of his administration’s incursion into the Middle East to stop Iraq’s Republican Guard from bayonetting Kuwaiti babies in incubators. His administration knew full well that was an outright lie.
In truth, the George H.W. Bush administration had at first given President Saddam Hussein the green light to invade Kuwait because of contested oil reserves. It is interesting that still today many people claim that Saddam had a legitimate claim on them.
While the ashes of the Iraqi army had to be scooped up with snow shovels, America accomplished its goal of providing freedom and liberty for Kuwait. It seems the word “liberty” can mean pretty much anything, especially if you can apply it to the Middle East and countries like Kuwait.
Kuwait’s gain turned out to be Saudi Arabia’s loss. Bowing to American pressure to put giant military bases on kingdom soil deeply angered the clerics — especially the important ones in the Muslim world. You know what you get if you make 10,000 clerics mad? You get a jihad.
Oh, well. Who cares if a few Hajjis don’t like us, right? Yet the truth 25 years later is that we are rightfully worried because tens of millions of Muslims want to see Western democracies disappear.
Such is the case because that Rubicon was crossed in a few hours by one man, Osama bin Laden. With few assets and even fewer soldiers, he terrorized America and took our political leaders on a mission that may eventually destroy the Constitution.
Millions still trust the way children do
I was taught that protecting the Constitution was the most important goal of any elected representative. Not so. Protecting the homeland from real or imagined threats trumps all. Obama said so in June 2013 at a press conference in California.
Here is part of his response to a question he took on blanket spying. (Yes, spying is such an ugly word; but I cannot think of another.)
When I came into this office, I made two commitments that are more important than any other.
No. 1: to keep the American people safe. And No. 2: to uphold the Constitution and constitutional rights to privacy and to civil liberties.
Is it me, or did he just get the order of his obligations wrong? I thought the No. 1 obligation was to uphold the Constitution.
But what Obama said next is even more shocking:
In the abstract you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok…
You can complain about Big Brother? Complain!? Complain is what I did last week when Canadian Tire mounted the wrong winter tires on my car. Take away the liberties I am guaranteed as an American, plus the liberties of family, friends and readers, and I am way past complaining.
That said, Obama is the last in a long line of presidents who have erased much hope within me of a better future.
And, Mr. President, I hope I am not being too damned “abstract” for you, but there is a big difference between countries that don’t have Big Brother and countries that do. It is in magnitude the difference between the America my grandfather, Amil Myers, lived in compared to the Kenya where your grandfather, Onyango Obama, lived.
As for protecting Americans, what Obama is saying is tantamount to locking your kids up in the basement because a child molester might get them on the street. Small children probably wouldn’t argue against such treatment. They would probably be too afraid of the molester. And millions upon millions of American’s don’t much argue against it either.
Do we need what the NSA calls “The Program” to keep us safe? Sure, go ahead. The logic typically runs as this: They can see and hear whatever I write and say because I am not doing anything illegal.
The de-evolution of America
It isn’t illegal now, but how about in the future? How legal will your life be 20 years from now? Nobody knows. Nobody has ever known. Even the Founding Fathers dared not hazard a guess. That is why we have our Constitution. But more than 200 years later, not only does the technology exist but it can be used against us and with almost the full support of Congress.
My big fear is that if you believe that we are going to revert back to less government and a return of liberties because of one election like we had last week, you are going to be bitterly disappointed.
It seems to me that watching the federal government evolve is like compressing 500 million years of evolution of the Tyrannosaurus Rex into a century. Eons before its final incarnation, T-Rex would have been no bigger and probably not more dangerous than a chicken. But the fates for T-Rex were set. And so, too, may be America’s, unless we are prepared to engage in real protest (nonviolent revolt) and demand real change.
The controversial evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins once remarked that changes in living organisms involve incredibly long periods of time. He then told a story I could relate to, that people come to an age where they no longer consider themselves middle-aged but rather old. He added this is not a sudden awakening, that nobody goes to bed one night feeling middle-aged and wakes up in the morning feeling like an old person.
The de-evolution of the United States is the same way. There is no exact date on when the Rubicon crossing commenced and liberty became expendable.
Thus, the initial crossing of the Rubicon in America may have begun with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. I believe it was underway with President Lyndon Johnson and the crossing was greatly accelerated by President Richard Nixon, not so much because of the criminal nature of his administration but in his full removal of the dollar from the gold standard. That left the U.S. Treasury free to print money carte blanche. And not one president since has turned his back on this political opportunity.
So I will make a deal with my critics. If someday a newly elected Congress and a future president decide to again back the dollar with gold, I will take back all that I have written here and pronounce that America is, as President Ronald Reagan declared, “that shining city on a hill.”
Yours in good times and bad,
–John Myers
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