Posted on December
30, 2014
The Mystery “Our”
Whose values are the Dems talking about?
by
Daniel
Clark
The Democrats have been lecturing us a lot about “our
values” lately. When they issued their
so-called “CIA torture report,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein called the interrogation
techniques “a stain on our values and on our history.” President Obama agreed that “these harsh
methods” were “inconsistent with our values as a nation.”
While announcing that he was easing sanctions against
Cuba, Obama repeatedly claimed that this new policy of “engagement” with the
Castro brothers would promote “our values.”
In a recent interview on CNN, he reiterated his promise to close the
terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, on the basis that, “It is
contrary to our values” – whatever he imagines those to be.
Obama
once criticized the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties” that only
enumerated restrictions on federal power, and did not empower the government to
redistribute wealth. He said this as if
he thought the omission was a mere oversight, and not the natural exclusion of
something that’s antithetical to the very concept of America. Values our founders might have described as
enterprise, industry and self-reliance are what Obama and his party often
deride as a “you’re on your own society” in which people must “fend for
themselves.”
The Democratic Party’s two most significant
accomplishments of the past century have been to dismantle the family unit, and
stomp the American work ethic into submission, and they did it through just the
sort of redistributive system that Obama seems to think the men who wrote and
ratified the Constitution simply neglected to establish. This system has diminished the role of genuine
charity, and has instead corrupted millions of Americans into an existence
characterized by ingratitude, unaccountability and sloth.
For all of Obama’s vacillations about whether or not
he believes in American exceptionalism, he either fails or refuses to grasp its
meaning. The United States is unlike any
nation that had previously existed because it is based on the principle of
government by the consent of the people – or, as Ronald Reagan put it, “We are
a nation that has a government, not the other way around.” This principle is wholly incompatible with
the “living Constitution” theory that is embraced by the Democrats and their
judicial appointees.
To perceive the Constitution as “living” is to say
that judges may deem the document’s meaning to have amended itself
spontaneously, without any input from the elected representatives of the
people. In other words, the
self-appointed guardians of “our values” believe that the American people
should have no role in shaping the fundamental law under which they must live.
If
the Constitution can just evolve away from the plain meaning of its language, then
the value it places on the rights of the people to life, liberty and property
is no longer necessarily valid. It’s no
wonder, then, that Obama wants to end our embargo against Cuba, since it was
imposed in retaliation for that country’s expropriation of American-owned
businesses. So the Castro government
seized the property of U.S. citizens without compensation. And?
Both Obama and presumptive presidential candidate
Elizabeth Warren have argued that all successful enterprises are communal
properties, of which the government is entitled to a cut. According to their “you didn’t build that”
theory, if you employ people who have been educated in public schools, or if
your business makes use of public roads, then the government has a preemptive right
to your earnings. By their figuring,
none of your income ever really becomes yours, other than through their
benevolence.
If the Democrats were honest, they’d admit that
they’ve discarded our values and embraced those of our ideological
adversaries. They’d acknowledge that the
whole concept of American values offends them, perhaps calling it “jingoistic”
or “xenophobic” for good measure. They’d
probably even blather about how supposedly unrealistic Leave It to Beaver is. Because
they can never afford to be honest about who they are and what they believe,
they’ve chosen instead to redefine “our values” by re-categorizing the “we” who
hold them. Out goes James Madison, in
comes Karl Marx.
Elected Democrats seldom if ever cite “our values” in
order to celebrate America. Whenever they
mention them, they do so only ironically, for the purpose of accusing America
of hypocrisy. It’s well past time that
America turned that accusation around on them.
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