Image by Skibum415 via FlickrBy Alan Caruba over at Warning SignsWhen asked why someone said something idiotic or some group is advocating something moronic, I am apt to wearily reply that there is no defense against stupidity.
There is a defense and it works over the long run. It is called the truth.
It is interesting to watch how “the truth will out” as they say in detective novels. In our society, so in thrall to the mainstream press and media, the truth circulates swiftly through that portion of the population that first suspects something is amiss and then outward to the general population that can no longer ignore it.
That long, slow process occurred with the Watergate scandal that ultimately forced President, Richard Nixon to resign in 1974. It began with a 1972 break-in at the Democrat headquarters in Washington, D.C. and then just unraveled a little bit each day. It enshrined two young reporters from The Washington Post in journalism’s pantheon of heroes and probably caused a goodly number of college kids to change their major to journalism.
The Founding Fathers who fashioned a federal government after the Articles of Confederacy proved a failure for the new nation not only knew history, they were an unusually brilliant collection of scholars; even if self-taught as was common at the time. What they knew well was human nature and they knew that men were inclined to criminality and stupidity. Thus, the Constitution deliberately divides the powers vested in the legislature, the judiciary, and the executive. It also deliberately slows down the legislative process.
The system largely worked until eleven southern slave states became so incensed over trade laws passed by northern states and the growing abolition movement that they decided to secede from the Union in 1860. Abraham Lincoln said no. Then he sent a huge army to back it up.
If they had had a crystal ball, all would have known that technology would replace slave labor in a remarkably short time. If they had any sense, they would have worked out a compromise, but the stupidity factor interfered. Even the Founding Fathers “four score and seven years” earlier knew that the issue of slavery would threaten the new republic.
Big problems and big issues cannot be ignored forever.
To give you an idea how big the problem is, a CNSnews story reported that “Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner oversaw the largest increase in the national debt of any Treasury secretary in American history, presiding over a $3.7 trillion increase in debt…In fact, the debt accrued under Geithner is greater than all federal debt accrued in the first 204 years of the nation’s history.”
The United States now finds itself less than a month away from defaulting on its loans because, in just two and a half years, the current President has allowed the debt to increase to $14.2 trillion, an amount that equals the entire annual Gross Domestic Product. That’s not break even. That’s broke.
