The American Crisis: Our Continuing Plight
A Brief Interlude
An Observation on the Recent Election
Journal Entry #28

In their inscrutable wisdom, the majority of American voters have returned Barack Obama to the Presidency to serve a second term. I have no doubt that the Americans who voted thus are sincere people and upstanding citizens who, given the limitations inherent in any candidate seeking high office, nevertheless desire by their vote to achieve hope and change, and a better day in America. This is what they desired; I’m compelled to tell you what they will, in fact, receive.

Before the first day of his new term, before he does anything great or small, President Obama will arrive- like the proverbial blind date- encumbered with a great deal of baggage from the previous engagement. Chief among this encumbrance is that eight-hundred pound gorilla so sweetly overlooked by his erstwhile opponents, done certainly in the spirit of patriotism and magnanimity. This gorilla is what they call nowadays a “done deal”. And like the blind date, we are forced to take all of him or none of him, and that includes his “family”.

That gorilla’s name is the Affordable Health Care Act which, with Mr. Obama’s reelection, has received a guaranteed four year stay of execution- definitely a long enough period of time to graft itself onto the national body politic. And from there, to inextricably intertwine its powerful tendrils with the otherwise necessary nerve-system pathway traversing the spinal column so wisely devised by the original thirteen colonies and codified by the U.S. Constitution.

The Affordable Health Care Act will achieve several things- none of which are good, insofar as good governance is concerned. This Act will, in one mighty stroke, reduce health care quality and availability, dramatically increase health care cost with a reciprocal decrease in the citizen’s overall material standard of living, and enormously increase the power of the STATE- done always at the expense of personal liberty- with the promotion of the STATE’S ability to coerce any and all arbitrarily (thanks to the Supreme Court) in order to force compliance. If that’s not Tyranny, I’ll eat my hat. If we were living in the Islamist regions of the world, this Act would be called a Fatwa.

Montag