The Patriot Post - Alexander's Essay 5-9-2013

________________________________________
The Patriot Post - Alexander's Essay 5-9-2013
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
________________________________________

Tyranny? What Tyranny?
Liberty Lesson 101 for the Class of 2013

By Mark Alexander

May 9, 2013

"The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered." --Thomas Jefferson (1781)

In commencement remarks to graduates sparsely convened in the Ohio State University football stadium in Columbus last weekend, Barack Hussein Obama1 offered the following observations and advice:

"Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted. We don't think the government is the source of all our problems ... we understand that this democracy is ours. And as citizens, we understand that it's not about what America can do for us, it's about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but absolutely necessary work of self-government. And class of 2013, you have to be involved in that process."

Clearly, Obama's absurd and overtly partisan assertions were aimed at young constituents whom he hopes embody the future of his Socialist Democratic Party2. After all, an effective speechmaker knows his audience, and Obama knows that most of these youthful citizens are indoctrinated in government institutions3 since they were weaned.

Indeed, the socialist protagonist, Karl Marx, wrote, "The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions at state expense." Marx's disciple, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, concurred: "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted."

From the days of Woodrow Wilson to those of Barack Obama, and encompassing all the "progressives" in between, taxpayer-funded academic institutions have been the breeding ground for generations of socialists. For most leftists, the crucial years that cemented their worldview were the ones they spent in our nation's colleges and universities.

Given that some substantial number of the adoring, bright-eyed beneficiaries of Obama's rhetoric have no concept of Essential Liberty4 and its antithesis, tyranny, let me take apart the selected excerpt of Obama's oration and provide those graduates with an introductory lesson in Liberty.

After all, most of the class of 2013 will have plenty of time to contemplate this lesson, as more than half of college and university graduates entering the "Obamanomic" job market will be either underemployed or unemployed until the primacy of free enterprise5 is restored.

Obama claimed, "Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner."

I'm not sure what incessant voices those might be -- certainly not those of our Founders -- because a growing number of college graduates can't name but a few if any. And they're certainly not the voices of a majority of government schoolteachers and professors, who are little more than useful idiots6 in the service of socialism.

Obama might be talking about the handful of courageous young American Patriots7 on campuses across the nation -- those who stand in the face of peer and professorial ridicule in order to speak in defense of Liberty. Or maybe he's referring to that rarest of creatures, the conservative professor whose lone voice extols the virtues of Liberty amid the academic statism desert.

Or perhaps the voices Obama alludes to are those of the current generation of grassroots Patriots, who gave rise to the Tea Party movement8 a couple of years back. They fortunately "gummed up the works" in the 2010 midterm elections when they sent more than 70 Democrats packing and replaced them with grassroots conservatives to retake the House of Representatives. That provided a gauntlet to Obama's socialist agenda, one that notably crushed the crown jewel of that agenda last month -- his so-called "assault weapons9" ban (known in our humble shop as the defensive weapons ban.)

Obama continued, "You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted."

Well, not quite. It is Obama and his statist cadres who believe that "we, the people" can't be trusted, and thus he has perpetually campaigned since 2006 to implement his plan of "fundamentally transforming10 the United States of America." Obama's objective is to reject the voices of those who support Liberty and the Rule of Law4 over the rule of men11, the terminus of which is always tyranny. As Lord Acton famously wrote, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."