The Old Jarhead: I'm Tired

(Hat Tip to John 'BigDawg" )

The Old Jarhead: I'm Tired

I received a (slightly changed in a few words) in an email today. It's an editorial on the Robert A. Hall blog from February of 2009. Briefly, Hall is a retired Marine (4 years, Vietnam, Khe Sanh) who served in the Massachusetts State Senate.

It's a commentary from the conservative viewpoint of current U.S. Liberal policies.

It took only 5 minutes to track down the original, so I'm including the link to his exact words for the sake of accuracy, and to give him credit (and the traffic).

Links to this article include The Infidel Blogger's Alliance (March, 2009), Mommy Life (February, 2010), and a short rehash in an extended article ("Political Digest February 23, 2010") by Hall himself.

While I don't exactly agree with everything Hall says, I certainly sympathize with his growing concern for the direction in which the current administration is taking this country.

Actually, not everything he has to say is specifically directed to the administration per se, but rather to the increasingly liberal trend of the people whom we have chosen as America's Leaders. My personal take on the article is that the trend is disturbing; Obama has only served to spark an increasingly sharp upturn from the path of Liberalism to the path of Socialism.

Yesterday's "Yae"vote in the House should, and likely will, be the final nail in the coffin for America's chance to see the two ruling parties work together on future policies. Even if the Senate somehow, miraculously, kill the bill (and I have no more expectation of that happening than I did that the House would kill it), there is now a deep wound in American political thought which won't heal for decades. If then; and at best it will leave an ugly scar on the body politic.

Two of the three branches of government -- the Executive and the Legislative -- have been bullied and bought to serve the ambitions of Obama and Pelossi. What you really want, and what I really want, don't mean as much as a bucket of warm spit.

That's what you get sometimes, with a Republic. And it's our fault for letting it happen. French Philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, who marvelled at America's "great experiment" (democracy), said two things about us.

• America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
• In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.

And Alexander Fraser Tyler said, speaking in 1770 of the Cycle of Democracy:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses.

Are we now in that deadly downward spiral?

I hope not. And I'm too old -- I hope -- to be around when it hits bottom. But as Hall said:

" I'm just sorry for my granddaughter."