How It Happened Here...

Just thinking on it, as I read the headlines screaming that Barack Obama will force through a huge entitlement program - the de facto socialization of the world's best health care system -defying the will of a large majority of the American people, by using arcane Senate rules designed for entirely different purposes.

And all of our lives will be changed, for the worse, permanently. And there is nothing we can do about it.

How did we, the ultimate democracy, wind up putting into power a government that rules like proto-fascists, ignoring the pleas of the people and rejiggering American society to create a welfare state, a state that empowers them but disenfranchises us?

Well, perhaps we are not so exceptional after all. We had the benefit of seeing totalitarianism rise across the world, from Nazism to Socialism to Communism, and we always watched it with unbelieving eyes, comfortable that it could never happen here.

"What rubes!", is what we all secretly thought, as we watched nations fall under the spell of charismatics from Hitler to Chavez, who promised wealth and glory but delivered nothing but impoverishment and despair to their peoples. We, the exceptional Americans, were too smart to fall for the charlatan's bag of tricks.

Only we weren't. Barack Obama came on the scene as a man unknown and unaccomplished, but with a mesmerizing speaking voice which delivered words of hope and change and new beginnings. There were precious few specifics, of course, but we decided to indulge each our own personal fantasies about what it might mean, as opposed to pressing for details. And when details came out - about his unsavory cohorts, his anti-Semitic mentors, his hard-left ideology - we ignored it, lost in our own daydreams about how our lives (and souls) would be improved by the well-spoken man who promised he could make it so, with a wave of his hand.

And the media helped, of course - using their power both to smear the enemies of Obama and to hide the ugliness that was bubbling under the surface. No discussion was held on what it might mean to the nation to live under one-party rule; a party that was becoming more and more radically leftist. They acted as a salve over the fears of the doubters, using the power of their medium to spread the words of the One, bolstered by positive reviews by what accounts for an intellectual elite in this country. This too, a slavish devotion to party and power by a media that was supposed to keep both honest, was, to this extent, new to America...

In retrospect, it was a Midtown three-card-monte game, with Obama as the dealer and the media as his partners. We were the patsies, and like the dumbfounded tourists staring blankly at the card table, we have been parted from our money.

Unfortunately, we are about to be separated from much more. Our choices over our very lives are about to be limited by, and distributed through, the government. Generations will be enslaved by its debt, and forced into lower living standards than their parents. And we the people now see that, but we are powerless, as we chose to take the route of rubes everywhere - closing our minds to rationality and reason, and putting our lives into the hands of people who swore they'd take care of us.

And maybe that's it. We've avoided the fascist trap for so long because we were a self-reliant people, never needing or wanting to exchange our freedom for temporary security. But in 2008, we took flight from our heritage, and today, we see the result.

We'll never make the same mistake again. But it will take more than my lifetime to bring ourselves back from the horrible place Obama and the Democrats are dragging us to....

....this is in some way the epitome of the modern Left: impervious to public opinion, indifferent to fiscal reality, and willing to operate through brute political force.