You Can Lead a Horse to Water . . .
Last night I posted a link to the excellent yet depressing essay How Democracies Become Tyrannies at American Thinker. Then, just for the fun of it, I poked at perennial commenter Markadelphia:
(Just a note, but I fully expect Markadelphia to either ignore it, or go off on a really entertaining tangent or twelve.)
Well, he took the bait:
I would be curious as to who you define as a tyrant…President Obama or the entire government?
So, in a horrible mixture of metaphors, it’s time to beat the dead horse some more!
Now, despite the fact that the rabid left vociferously accused George W. Bush of being a tyrant throughout most of his term, neither G.W.B. nor B.H.O. are or were tyrants. At this point, neither is the federal government.
The point of the essay is that it’s coming, and it was predicted by a philosopher – based solely on his understanding of human nature and his ability to reason (something Markadelphia has shown a distinct lack of capability for) – some 2400 years ago. Worse, the book in which this prediction was made is still available today – in the original Greek and in translation into nearly every modern language. And yet the majority, acting in precisely the way predicted, ignores the predictions and goes blithely on.
But does Markadelphia recognize this?
No, he wants to know, “Who you callin’ tyrant?”
One of my favorite (for want of a better word) quotes, one I’ve repeated here on numerous occasions, comes from the Rev. Donald Sensing:
I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free.
I could be wrong in my understanding, but I did not interpret that comment – made in 2003 – to mean that Rev. Sensing believed that George Bush was a tyrant, or that the .gov was (yet) tyrannical. It meant that he too saw the progression that Socrates predicted.
And the timetable was short.
The election of Barack Obama is just another stepping stone on the path, another symptom of the decline Socrates predicted in detail. But that observation does nothing more than part Markadelphia’s hair.
Once again, the key point of the entire Tyrannies piece, with emphasis:
Flash forward fifty years to the election of Barack Obama and a hard left leaning Democrat Congress. What Americans want today, apparently, is a government that has no intention of leaving any of us alone.
It isn’t about (more than peripherally) Barack Obama, or Nancy Pelosi, or Harry Reid, or the rest of the Left-Liberal-Collectivist-Progressive-Nanny-State members of Congress. It’s about the fact that the voting public put them there.
Just as Socrates predicted they would.
For the reasons he predicted they would.
Could Bush have become the tyrant Socrates predicted? It’s possible. Could Obama? It’s possible. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but who knows what could happen in the next four years? As Rahm Emmanuel said, “Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things.” And we all know that passing the “Stimulus” package narrowly averted the turning of our current economic crisis into a catastrophe!
If crisis provides the opportunity to “do big things,” what does catastrophe provide?