“they are expressly prohibited from doing anything“

“The federal government has spent the last two centuries-plus willfully ignoring the Constitution. With ever-increasing frequency and intensity, the Feds have drifted further and further from their charter. There is no longer even a pretense of pretending to care whether or not what DC wants the government to do – is an expressly enumerated Constitutional thing that the government is supposed to be doing.

We are currently in the midst of the Republican wing of the bipartisan DC Establishment Party struggling mightily to keep its word to We the People – and repeal the ongoing, rolling train wreck that is Obamacare. A chief self-imposed impediment for the DC GOP – is with what to replace Obamacare. I.e.: What alternative government medicine nightmare mess should be erected – to be substituted for the current government medicine nightmare mess.

Nigh nowhere in the now-decade long DC debate about any of this – is the Constitution even glancingly referenced. So I’ll do it. I’ll posit a quite simple query to DC:

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The Fifth American War

…Progressivism.

It has an insidious appeal to human nature, offering contexts and arguments for dependency — which is defined as the consequence of some sort of prior unethical exploitation (rather than chance, bad luck, or personal pathology, perhaps in addition to exploitation) and therefore deserving of proper recompense. Progressivism promises a transcendence over nature’s limitations through superior education, proper training, and correct reasoning, as if poverty, illness, and inequality were not innate to human nature but results of selfishness and ignorance and so rather easily remedied. It confuses technological progress with a credo that human nature itself evolves in predictably progressive ways, thereby supposedly making obsolete institutions and protocols (from the Constitution itself to ancient ideas such as deterrence) that were once time-honored.

Virtue-signaling among elites

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In short, the “man of system” forgets that ordinary people are active, reasoning, creative individuals. They generally do not need government prodding to take actions that improve their lives. When they are so prodded, it is almost always to press them to take actions they would prefer to avoid. Conflict thus arises between ordinary people and those men (and women) “of system” who arrogantly fancy that they’re entitled to order others about.

Consider today’s brouhaha over repealing parts of ObamaCare, whose fans treat the typical American as a mindless, inert blob. If this American loses government health-insurance funding, he’s believed to have no ability or wish to find private insurance. And

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Emphasis mine:

The most significant revelation that came out of the most recent London massacre of disarmed British subjects was not the bloodshed itself, but the pathetic sissy whining, in the midst of throats being slashed, at the Brit who refused to adhere to the comforting lie that the Muslims doing the slashing in the name of Allah were not Muslims doing the slashing in the name of Allah.

The left would rather you lie and die than tell the truth and live.

…But for the so-called elite that seeks to rule us, it’s all lies, all day, every day, about everything, since they can’t be honest because we normals reject what they want whenever we are exposed to the truth and are allowed a say. So their go-to move to impose their sick will is to obscure or hide the truth, and try to suppress our voices.

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…The entire premise behind population control is based on the faulty logic that humans are not valuable resources. The fact of business is that humans are what the late Julian L. Simon called the ultimate resource. That fact becomes apparent by pondering this question: Why is it that Gen. George Washington did not have cellphones to communicate with his troops and rocket launchers to sink British ships anchored in New York Harbor? Surely, all of the physical resources — such as aluminum alloys, copper, iron ore and chemical propellants — necessary to build cellphones and rocket launchers were around during Washington’s time. In fact, they were around at the time of the cave man. There is only one answer for why cellphones, rocket launchers and millions of other things are around today but were not around yesteryear. The growth in human knowledge, human ingenuity, job specialization and trade led to industrialization, which, coupled with personal liberty and private property rights, made it possible. Human beings are valuable resources, and the more we have of them the better.

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“Poland and Hungary and Slovakia do not have Islamic terrorism because they have very little Islam“

In part, Mark Styn’s thoughts on the Ariana Grande concert terrorism attack and the real sickness about it.  Emphasis mine:

And so it will prove for cafe life, and shopping malls, and pop concerts. Maybe Ariana Grande will be back in the UK – or maybe she will decide that discretion is the better part of a Dangerous Woman’s valor. But there will be fewer young girls in the audience – because no mum or dad wants to live for the rest of their lives with the great gaping hole in your heart opening up for dozens of English parents this grim morning. And one day the jihad will get lucky and the bomb will take with it one of these filthy infidel “shameless” pop whores cavorting on stage in her underwear. You can carry on exactly as before, but in a decade or two, just as there are fewer gay bars in Amsterdam and no more Jewish shops on the Chaussée de Gand, there will be less music in the air in western cities. Even the buskers, like the one in Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens today serenading a shattered city with “All You Need Is Love”, will have moved on, having learned that it’s a bit more complicated than that.

I am currently reading Douglas Murray’s fine book, The Strange Death of Europe, which lays out, unsparingly, the central illusion of the last

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Just for perspective, I’ve modified NOAA’s Sea Level Rise (SLR) graph for Portland ME to illustrate what needs to happen for the scaremongering climate cult’s mythical six feet of sea level rise to happen by 2100.

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On self-reliance instead of the public dole:

Progressives like to remind us there’s more to life than dollars and cents — that people do not simply crave ever more consumption but instead want lives filled with meaning, dignity, beauty and love. In this matter, progressives are right (though wrong to presume free-market advocates do not also understand this). But progressives’ tune changes when government doles out the dollars and cents. They seem genuinely unable to grasp why many poor and working-class people do not value government handouts above all else.

Coming from a working-class family that was never fond of big government, perhaps I can help my progressive friends to better understand such voters.

First, many understand that accepting government handouts conflicts with the pursuit of dignity in making one’s own way in life — in overcoming hardship, not being an object of charity. I proudly recall my parents refusing to apply for food stamps when my pipefitter father was laid off. Being on the dole would have drained them of their dignity. They overcame hardship without handouts.

Self-reliance was more important to them than profiting materially from government.

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From a column at Townhall: “Nuke’em til they glow” (emphasis mine):

…But this is more than just about the filibuster getting filibusted. If we had a political culture that respected and expected a judge’s proper role, then we wouldn’t care so much what a nominee to the Supreme Court personally thought because we could be confident his rulings would follow the law and not the DNC talking points. But we don’t, and therefore we can’t.

Somewhere along the line, the left decided that judges were a convenient shortcut to avoid the unpleasant hassle of actually passing laws through the legislative process. To them, the Constitution is not a glorious barrier to government overreach – or, rather, the fact that it is one is a bug, not a feature. To them, our Constitution is an obstacle to be overcome, and any given law should be applied, if at all, only in the manner most conducive to what liberals want right this minute. Tell me what Democrat appointed a given judge in a political case and I will tell you how he will vote with 99% accuracy. No, I don’t have some sort of psychic ability. I just pay attention.

If you don’t believe me, read the Ninth Circuit’s decision interpreting the president’s

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