Separation | Ol’ Remus & The Woodpile Report for 2/26/13

DC has always been distant from the people. Apart from the IRS and the draft, they were “the other” we read about in the papers, running gangsters and spies to ground, getting the interstate built, fighting wars and generally looking out for the Little Guy. We believed they were the Big Picture People doing things on the largest scale on behalf of all who worked hard, lived responsibly and stayed right with the law. DC was the captain and crew of our mighty ship, alert and sure, cutting cleanly through heavy seas and turgid morass alike, while their grateful passengers shuddered at the hardship and horrors beyond the delights of the endless buffet on the promenade deck.

DC has separated itself from the people, and it shows. Public funds equal to that which built the interstate simply disappear with nothing in return. Literally nothing. While the populace is being relieved of firearms it “doesn’t need” even the Department of Education has its own SWAT-style police units. Surveillance once used against gangsters and foreign agents is now used against shoe salesmen and librarians. The unalienable rights DC is charged with defending have become grounds for prosecution . DC has grown fond of writing laws in secret and enacting them in the middle of the night. They get away with this because they’ve created a favored client-electorate using corrupt dispensations, and they aren’t the voters who work hard, live responsibly and stay right with the law. When Americans speak of “the government”—what used to be our government—they mean our would-be masters in DC and their captive electorate, the activist misfits who run their agencies and schools, and their fawning news media.

There isn’t one concrete ministry that decides how the nation thinks—there are many such entities. America’s many Ministries of Truth include the education system, most churches, the self-anointed ‘intellectuals,’ the ruling duopoly and their attendant TV bobbleheads… This ‘dark art of rule’ demands obedience. Choose to disobey, and you risk public shame, libel, and loss of livelihood.
Ilana Mercer via Joseph Cotto at communities.washingtontimes.com

Because DC is paranoid, with cause, qualified honest voters are being openly disenfranchised. One Ohio poll worker admitted voted twice in her own name and four more times in other people’s names. She insisted it wasn’t voter fraud but fighting for Mr. Obama’s right to sit as president. Who knew the presidency was anybody’s by right? Nineteen others in the same County are under investigation. In one Florida precinct, 140% of the turnout voted against Allen West. Several districts in Philadelphia turned in a 100% vote for Obama, to the astonishment of statisticians everywhere. Armed Black Panthers enforced voter discipline at one polling place, at others the poll workers trashed opposition ballots and sometimes the voters themselves. While illegal aliens wait for “back door” amnesty they get driver’s licenses, all-expenses-paid medical care , welfare, food stamps , schools, housing and catered bus rides from poll to poll to vote again and again. Meanwhile, absentee ballots for military personnel are delivered late, if at all, and those received in time are often held up or lost.

In Reno Nevada, a battleground state, I personally saw a big foodbank truck handing out food on voter fraud day. Truck was situated such that voting place was between free food and about 2000 low income apartments. The streets and sidewalks were chock full of obviously no income women with multiple kids and pushing strollers carrying bags of goods.
tenpanhandle, comment 3265603 at zerohedge.com

Disenfranchisement doesn’t end with state-sponsored voter fraud. Politics itself has been deligitimized. Elections are all but innocent of political content, they’ve devolved into palace intrigues and personality clashes with the media as theatre critics. Unmanaged dissent has become resistance and resistance has become criminal. The populace knows it’s cornered and feels helpless. Its irrelevance is flaunted when laws running to thousands of pages are written behind closed doors, presented at a late hour and passed in minutes, unread even by their nominal authors. And so the voter keeps to himself—but not too much to himself—and goes through the motions of good citizenship while DC tracks him as if he were a child molester on parole. In a republic, wiretappers and video surveillance and drones would be watching the politicians.

The process has been reconfigured as a check-valve to ensure power flows one way. Some leakage is tolerated but outright dissent is taken as a design flaw. In practice the people’s “representatives” represent DC and report DC’s initiatives to their constituencies . Their newsletters reveal this underlying assumption, they read as if ghost-written by a personnel manager. Bank bailouts, Obamacare and subsidies for the automobile companies were universally despised, they wouldn’t have survived genuine debate and an honest legislative process, and so there was a dishonest process. DC didn’t displace Silicon Valley as the wealthiest zip code in the country by accident.

Elections have all the gravitas of primitives dancing ’round a bonfire, entertainment for what are, in practical terms, spectators. The intent of national elections is to lend a gloss of legitimacy to the illegitimate. For one, amnesty for illegal aliens, rejected soundly by the electorate , is being done on the quiet by non-enforcement of existing law. DC recognizes no loyal opposition here, no contrary opinion, they paint dissent as the ill-willed work of supremacist bigots and xenophobes. Again the voter is insulted, threatened and dismissed. Again those who don’t “share the vision” are culled and their fellows warned against them. They can’t win on facts and so they impugn the motive.

Use the “undeniable” as a buttress for engineering resource allocations. Most of the major tenets of statism anchor to some “undeniable” veil, “educating our children”, “caring for the sick”, “feeding the poor”, “taking care of our seniors”. No one dares to challenge these veils for fear of being labeled discompassionate.
mayhem_korner, comment 3267000 at zerohedge.com

We know what happens to nations where the productive populace is treated as a dangerous adversary. The Soviets purged successful farmers during collectivization only to discover they were successful because they knew how to farm, and did so. It resulted in one of the worst famines in history. Detroit and Zimbabwe purged its most capable citizens with the same results. And now, DC. How else are we to think of, say, mandatory hiring quotas for the demonstrably unqualified? The responsible citizen is right to see DC as something less than a partner in securing his liberties and realizing his legitimate ambitions. The prudent choose how to treat an entity as powerful as DC. They follow the evidence. Misconceptions aren’t common among them.

Some suggest DC has devolved into an agency offering one-of-a-kind services to ideologues and fraudulent ventures, or said succinctly, a criminal enterprise. DC’s only asset is the future earnings of the populace, all else is borrowed against it. Elections are an auction of those earnings. Delivery must be reliable if is to present itself as a dependable supplier. As for the political parties, they’re franchises of the same parent company competing for the same resource to serve the same clients and both rely on advertising to create an imagined difference in the same product.

By way of evidence, the Washington Post reports, “A bipartisan group of senators is on the verge of a deal that would expand background checks to all private firearms sales.” A deal is when both sides get something. What do the people they ‘represent’ get in return for making private sales of used guns a felony? The article says, “Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, who has a solid A-rating from the influential National Rifle Association, could provide political cover for lawmakers of both parties.” How clever of him. The Post opines, “an agreement would be a bold first step toward consideration of legislation to limit gun violence.” A bold first step. 20,000 gun laws later and we have another bold first step. The Post is apparently unaware how this reads outside the beltway: Senator Coburn, using cover from his A-rating by the NRA, is limiting how many of our civil liberties he’ll trade for acceptance in the Georgetown cocktail circuit, part of a bipartisan sellout that makes DC glow with pride and sets the legs of WaPo activists a-tingling.

DC has well and truly separated itself from the people. They chose to do it, openly and with gleeful arrogance, which reveals much about their intent.

Separation of state and people has non obvious consequences that defy prediction but the principle is simple: mutual fear is the destructive cousin of mutual respect. And too bad for the Washington Post et al, they’re the Bull Connors of our time, on the wrong side of a profound civil liberties movement. There will be embarrassed silence when future generations ask them what part they played. Not that they’ll be asked very often, embittered losers make unpleasant company.