Taking Action to Heart

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I don't know if any other conservatives feel this way, but for several months, I come home from work and rather than turn on the news to hear the latest, I just skip it. It all seems so predictable (or should I say predicted?) that I can hardly stand to watch it unfold.

For decades America has complained about "gridlock" in D.C., but let's face it... it is gridlock that helps prevent a lot of stupid things from happening; it is gridlock that thwarts "change" that is not for the better. It's gridlock that allows "inaction" to impede ill-advised action. And, yes, I'm including ill-advised action of past Republicans, too, back when they had a little more say in Washington.

Both parties have managed to prove what Lord Action said more than a hundred years ago: "The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern: every class is unfit to govern."

The problem we now face in America is that there is no gridlock, no checks and balances. Obama and his liberal hacks are free to force their agenda on the country even as his rating plummet. In fact, I think it is because of his falling numbers that the Democrats will act with all the more urgency. As I said a few posts ago, "Get it done now. Who cares if we get it right."

So I say Here's to gridlock! Here's to standing in the way. Here's to inaction. And who better to quote on this topic than Lord Action himself?

It was Lord Action who said:

"And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Lord Action had several other thoughts that speak to the heart of this post. Such as: "There is no worse heresy than the fact that the office sanctifies the holder of it.” Have there ever been so many millions of blind Americans who have proven that heresy as now?

Here's another of his famous lines: "The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.”

Wisdom from the past is welcome seasoning for the present. This would be a good time to take many of Lord Actions words to heart, but I'll stop with "Socialism is slavery." Still true over a hundred years later.

So yes it is depressing to watch the news these days. Not because of the natural ebb and flow of politics as usual but because of what is grossly unusual, the gaudy parade of audacity dressed up in false hope, of "actions" that are more ill-advised than inaction.

I do not feel as though we are watching the strategic redirection of a great country but rather irreversible changes that will undo that country. Obama is not "building" with Lego blocks; he is playing with dominos and seems to be putting them in place for purposes that perhaps even he does not understand.

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