Politicizing Liberty

Politicizing Liberty If Obama has demonstrated anything in nearly seven years of a chaotic and incompetent presidency, it is that he despises Western principles and ideas, and would like nothing better than transform our carefully crafted and noble republican experiment into a third-world-like autocratic, socialist kleptocracy, not unlike Indonesia, where he spent many of his formative years.  When President Obama emphatically declared, in the wake of the recent Oregon shooting, that he intended to politicize his campaign to implement “common sense gun control” (which in his mind means Australian-like confiscation) my mind turned to a man most unlike Obama, the Greek philosopher Socrates. Socrates died because his fellow citizens politicized everything, and did not recognize individual liberties. So when Obama calls on Americans to politicize “gun control” he is deliberately and mischievously using the language of democracy to promote tyranny, just as Athenian “democrats” tyrannized their nation two millennia ago. In 399 B.C. the citizens of Athens convicted Socrates of corrupting the city-state’s youth and for impiety. For this he was sentenced to death, compelled to drink a potion of hemlock until he expired.  In reality, the public “gadfly” (in his student Plato’s words) had run afoul of the state’s elites by questioning their intelligence, probity, and competence. Athens was a democracy, but not one that guaranteed individual liberty. It was in fact, a tyrannical democracy that politicized (and by extension criminalized) any activity that the elites could convince a majority of the citizenry was improper or inconvenient.  (The Full Wonderdfulness) Sent to our attention by the Tarlow-Skoonj Trust; "A brilliant (and scathing) essay") I'm afraid I've become a "truth elitist;" that is, I've found it impossible anymore to argue politics with people who get their news from The Daily Show; their history from books written by Howard Zinn, and are whom Cloward & Piven would travel with.  Hey, I did say elitist.  Anyway, my way will not win battles, so active word warriors, and the nation needs you, will do well to read and inculcate stuff like this while proselytizing the crap out of  the stupid bastids (whose lazy answer to problems is wearing pastel colored ribbons) USA UAS USA