“in what sense are Americans still a “free” people, if their rulers feel free to lie to them with impunity?”
On the revelation from “Obama’s hatchet man David Axelrod” that Obama LIED about his stance on homosexual marriage (he was always for it but decided to lie to constituents to “win”) and only came out when it was politically expedient (see Anna Navarro), John Haywood at Big Government has this on Democracy and lying (emphasis mine):
Passionate advocates of same-sex marriage will argue that the ends justify the means, and it’s all for the best when compulsive force is employed to drag society towards a righteous judgment it was too slow to achieve by democratic consensus. It’s a fearsome wonder that anyone in the Western world is still willing to entertain that line of thinking, let alone Americans. Do you seriously think this will be the only “righteous judgment” your Ruling Class plans to force upon you, using the same tactics and rhetoric perfected during the push for same-sex marriage?
It’s understandably difficult to approach the matter of enforced righteousness with proper caution when you deeply believe in the cause. It’s easy to dismiss procedural objections as trivial distractions from urgently-needed social progress. Just about everyone harbors some private list of things they believe everyone should be required to do, or prohibited from doing. The humble American keeps a very short list, and reminds himself or herself on a daily basis that few ideas have visited more misery upon the human race than “the ends justify the means.” A good deal of the debate among our Founding Fathers could be described as accepting the wisdom that, with the exception of rare existential crises, the ends never justify abandoning concern for the means. It is a vital principle of what we broadly think of as “democracy” that proper respect must be paid to the means at all times, from the Constitutional machinery of divided government to the daily practices in courtrooms across the land.
To put it bluntly: in what sense are Americans still a “free” people, if their rulers feel free to lie to them with impunity? Freedom demands truth, because false choices are not free choices. If a villain tells a blind man that steady ground lies ahead for miles to come, but in reality the blind man is only three steps away from the edge of a cliff, the victim of this perfidy did not “choose” to commit suicide. When a politician lies to us about every detail of his gigantic trillion-dollar plan, lies about its very nature – concealing its vast layers of coercion and punishment beneath phony promises that it will be a largely voluntary program that persuades people to participate, by saving them tons of money and delivering superior services – and then bellows it’s too late to back out after those promises are proven false, America did not “vote for” that plan or “choose” to accept it.
…In fact, our official national reverence for the luminous power of the vote is itself a lie, because so much control over our lives has been transferred to bureaucrats we will never be given a chance to vote against. We’ve been taught to accept the loss of our freedom with a promise that we can always use our ballots as a veto against outright tyranny. In that way, we are made to forget how slippery and persistent tyranny is.
Freedom does not long survive the dissolution of respect between citizens.
A current theme that is becoming far more common in a society that says that it respects the Rule of Law. If the end justifies the means, which means subverting the Rule of Law by our officials, then why should we follow those laws Ian Underwood has the right of it – if our leaders do not respect foundational law (our Constitutions), then what gives them the right (snicker) to expect that we will live under their shackles when they have thrown theirs away?
Hypocrites, once found out, are not long followed.
