Never tell a leftist they hate America. They will correct you every time. They don’t hate America, they’ll tell you; they just want to improve it. They just want to help make it better. They just want America to live up to her ideals.

No, it’s not America per se that they hate, but rather the things that made America so spectacular in the first place. Free enterprise. Limited government. Federalism. Separation of Powers. Individual freedom.

But, while they don’t hate America, it is, according to them, racist, sexist, homophobic, ethnocentric, intolerant, and more. In addition, the Constitution is an outdated document that old racist White guys wrote, and it needs to be reimagined.

So, okay, sure, I’ll buy that leftists don’t technically hate America. Indeed, consider that, even when they have Hollywood or Silicon Valley or Wall Street type money and could live anywhere in the world…big surprise, they never actually leave!

When I tell leftists that America is the greatest nation that’s ever existed, it seems to send them over some sort of cliff. They often get angry and look at me as if I just told them the earth is flat. But the funny thing is that when I ask what nation is better or empire was better…crickets. They immediately launch into a polemic about how America is racist, sexist, homophobic, ethnocentric, etc. It’s ripe with inequality, inequity and rich White men run it. And not to be forgotten, its Constitution is an outdated document that old White racist guys wrote and, as such, shouldn’t control our lives today.

Then I suggest that even if it were the case that America was the hellscape they suggest, where should we go to escape it? Again, crickets.

Even though leftist snowflakes can’t point to a single place on earth or in history that is, or was, superior to the United States, or that had or has a more successful combination of prosperity and freedom than the US, they most certainly have an endless supply of ways to improve it:

• Bans on hate speech, which they define as anything that hurts anyone’s feelings.
• Defund the police.
• Pack the Supreme Court.
• Disband the INS.
• $15 minimum wage.
• Demonize the Founding Fathers.
• Eliminate the Electoral College.
• Cancel anyone who ever uttered an opinion that doesn’t comport with the currently favored position on any given subject.
• Eliminate bail requirements & sentencing minimums.
• Participation trophies.
• Eliminate academic requirements and standardized testing for entrance into college.
• Universal healthcare
• Free college tuition
• Green energy mandates and subsidies
• Eliminate fossil fuels
• Repeal the Second Amendment
• Eliminate capitalism.
• Eliminate the binary gender construct
• Make the Pentagon the bleeding edge for social experiments
• Tax the rich
• Forgive student debt
• Mandate vaccinations

And the list goes on, and on, and on. It literally never stops. Griswold v. Connecticut begat Roe vs. Wade which begat partial-birth abortion. Gay rights turned into civil unions turned into gay marriage. Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act turned into coerced lax lending standards which turned into the housing crash. And the Americans with Disabilities Act started out as compassion for the handicapped and mutated into a vehicle for extortion of small businesses by a cabal of pernicious lawyers. Removing the Confederate Battle Flag from state flags led to pulling down statues of Abraham Lincoln and Fredrick Douglas to canceling Dr. Seuss and Aunt Jemima.

At what point, exactly, will America cease to be the racist sexist hellhole that the left tells us it is? Must the military perfectly reflect the hue and sex of America itself? Must corporate executives be promoted based on their socioeconomic heritage?

What else needs to be reflective of the demographics of the American populace? How about the NBA and the NFL? Black men make up 74% of the NBA and 70% of the NFL. Do we fire 90% of them to hire more White men and women of every race? Would that make the games more competitive, more exciting? Probably not.

Or how about nurses? 93% of nurses are women. Should 40% of them be fired to hire men to make the industry reflective of the rest of the country? Would that make healthcare better or patients happier and safer? Unlikely.

This could go on endlessly for every area of the economy: Ditch diggers. Sanitation workers. Teachers. Barbers. Rap artists. Surgeons. Lawyers.

The bottom line is the left knows how to do one thing well, and that is to destroy what someone else built. We’ve seen that play out across America time and again. From the burnt husks of Detroit and Washington that rotted for decades following the riots of the 1960s to turning once-great American cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles into giant homeless camps strewn with needles and feces to the economic devastation wrought in cities like Minneapolis and Portland and Seattle from a year of “mostly peaceful protests.”

When the left comes to power in successful cities, the march to a real hellscape begins. And it’s not just cities. The left broke the Boy Scouts, they destroyed the NFL as a truly national form of entertainment, they’ve ruined Disney and Marvel, and they are in the process of destroying women’s sports.

Dennis Prager often says, “The Left destroys everything it touches” and he’s right. The left has never built a nation that millions of people risk their lives to enter. The left has never built a society where freedom of thought, speech, and the press have thrived. The left has never built an economic juggernaut founded on free markets or anything else.

The left can do nothing more than take advantage of the freedom and prosperity that others have created and throw stones at it for its imperfections. Voltaire was prescient when he observed, “Perfect is the enemy of the good.”

America is no doubt imperfect. It is flawed and sometimes unfair and often inequitable… but mankind is all imperfect. All of God’s creations are. The reality is, the United States is by far the greatest nation God has seen fit to grace man with and, while it will continue to be imperfect until the end of days, it is nothing like the racist, fascist hellscape the left makes it out to be.

But of course, none of that matters because, for the left, building something great is never a necessity; in fact, it’s never even a consideration. Why bother trying to build anything when it’s so much easier to throw stones at those who are too busy actually building things to notice they’re being targeted for their imperfections by those who don’t have the courage to try.

I’m not sure what the textbook definition of “hate for ones country” might be but everything the left does and says most certainly looks like it — which makes one think of the old saying: “If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck and acts like a duck, it’s probably a duck.”Vince

Vince: The product of a military family, growing up in Naples, Italy and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and being stationed in Germany for two years while in the Army, Vince spent half of his first quarter century seeing the US from outside of its own borders. That perspective, along with a French wife and two decades as a struggling entrepreneur have only fueled an appreciation for freedom and the fundamental greatness of the gifts our forefathers left us.

So why is Arizona’s Maricopa County refusing to comply with the court order and Arizona Senate subpoenas to provide the voting system logs for investigation? The clear answer is that Maricopa County is protecting the false news narrative of no electoral fraud.

The utterly corrupt “defund-the-police-Democrats” are claiming that to turn over the evidence would mean “the lives of law enforcement personnel could be endangered.” This is a false claim. Moreover, there is no excuse for not complying with a court order. Do the Democrats have enough power to get away with covering up the stolen election? They have so far.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/maricopa-county-refuses-to-provide-routers-to-election-auditors_3805624.html

People usually define “crazy” as “losing your mind”. What does it mean to lose your mind? It means to lose your REASON. It means to start substituting your common sense observations, along with your higher level, objective, independent thinking with: (1) blatant delusions; (2) the opinions of others, even if those opinions make no sense; or (3) arbitrary, random feelings or imagination unhinged from reality.

Staying sane means holding to your independent and objective knowledge even when those around you defy all reason or recognition of even obvious facts. ESPECIALLY when those around you defy all reason or recognition of obvious facts. It’s called integrity: to your mind, and to reality itself. Having integrity to what you KNOW is true is for your own sake, most of all. The world will benefit, too; because when this is all over, the world is going to need at least a few good, rational people able and willing to pick up the pieces.

A reader posted on Facebook: “Have people lost all logic and reason? This war on critical thought has too many victims. When I hear people parrot the news…. covid conscious, believe the science, safe and effective, white privilege, etc., I cringe. This is indoctrination.”

My reply: No, most still have sanity. If they didn’t, civilization as we know it would be in total collapse. But they make the tragic error of believing their media. The media consists of mostly intellectual lightweights who are polished performers, and who stare into the camera earnestly and seem believable to the majority when they spout their collectivist drivel . THIS is a big part of what’s destroying us.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

“In politics, stupidity is not a handicap,” Napoleon is reputed to have said more than two centuries ago. Boundless ignorance is also not a handicap, as Congress demonstrated last December by approving a 5593-page bill without reading it. Plenty of activists and editorial pages howled over the sloppy procedures propelling $2.3 trillion in new federal spending.Instead of being a meddlesome distant uncle who ruins a family reunion once a year, Congress is a daily taskmaster with the authority to intervene in almost every aspect of Americans’ lives.
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James Madison warned in the Federalist Papers in 1788 that “it will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.” Madison referred to the peril of excessive legislation; he may have never imagined that Congress would routinely enact thousand-page blockbusters without reading the text. But that is now standard procedure in Washington.

On the night of the day before Thanksgiving 1991, the House of Representatives approved a 1400-page highway bill — even though almost no member of the House had seen the bill and only one copy was available in the House chamber. Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.) observed at the time that congressional “bills are five times longer on the average than they were just as recently as 1970, with a far greater tendency to micromanage every area of government.” Conservatives were outraged, and a Republican Leadership Task Force proclaimed in 1993, “A bill that cannot survive a three-day scrutiny of its provisions is a bill that should not be enacted.”

When Bill Clinton railroaded a 972-page crime bill into law in 1994, Republicans saw the legislation only a few hours before the vote. That was irrelevant because Clinton proclaimed that it was “the will of God” that Congress speedily pass the bill. Clinton’s bill created dozens of new criminal offenses and opened a $10 billion subsidy spigot for local and state prison building that sent America’s incarceration rate skyrocketing in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Willful ignorance

Republicans captured control of Congress in the 1994 elections. But that did not deter House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Clinton from jamming a 4000-page, 40-pound agreement down Congress’s throat in 1998. No one had a chance to read the bill before voting. Legendary “King of Pork” Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) declared, “Only God knows what’s in this monstrosity.”

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration strong-armed the 342-page USA PATRIOT Act through Congress. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) complained that “the bill wasn’t printed before the vote.” Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, declared, “We are now debating at this hour of night, with only two copies of the bill that we are being asked to vote on available to Members on this side of the aisle.” Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), the longest-serving member of the House, said the process was “denigrating basic constitutional rights, and I find it to have been done in a sneaky, dishonest fashion.” Regardless of the legislative travesty, Bush and Barack Obama routinely invoked Congress’s passage of the PATRIOT Act to justify their anti-terrorism policies.

During the George W. Bush era, legislative ignorance became a point of patriotic pride. Shortly before the 2006 congressional elections, Congress rushed to rubber-stamp a Bush administration barbaric interrogation wish-list part of the Military Commissions Act. The Boston Globe reported that “because of the Bush administration’s restrictive policy on sharing classified information with Congress, very few of the people engaged in the debate will know what they’re talking about.” Fewer than 50 members of Congress knew what actual interrogation methods were being debated, according to the Globe. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Trump’s first attorney general, boasted, “I don’t know what the CIA has been doing, nor should I know.” Retroactively legalizing torture, as the bill did, was a non-issue on Capitol Hill. Legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick declared, “We’ve reached a defining moment in our democracy when our elected officials are celebrating their own blind ignorance as a means of keeping the rest of us blindly ignorant as well.”

After the Democrats captured control of Congress in the 2006 elections, several members, including Sen. Barack Obama, endorsed requiring that any legislative proposal be available and online for at least 72 hours before Congress voted on it. But that provision was not included in the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, which Politico hailed as “sweeping ethics reform legislation.” Nine years later, Politico derided that same law as “the lobbying reform that enriched Congress,” noting that it “created an entire class of professional influencers who operate in the shadows, out of the public eye and unaccountable.”

The Obama administration’s 2700-page Affordable Care Act was another unread Pandora’s box. The bill was almost 400,000 words long; within four years, the Obama administration would issue more than 10 million words of regulations to enforce it. This time Conyers scoffed at members of Congress who “get up and say, ‘Read the bill.’ What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?” Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) later explained, “I don’t expect to actually read the legislative language, because reading the legislative language is among the more confusing things I’ve ever read in my life.” But not nearly as confusing as the blizzard of new mandates that private companies were forced to obey.

The law sparked widespread outrage, spurring many congressmen to cancel all public meetings with their constituents that summer. At a Montana forum in August 2010, a retired nurse asked Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who boasted that he wrote much of the Affordable Care Act, whether he read the health-care bill before it was passed. Baucus replied, “I don’t think you want me to waste my time to read every page of the health-care bill. You know why? It’s statutory language. We hire experts.”

In the 2010 congressional elections, Republicans campaigned on a “Pledge to America” to “ensure that bills are debated and discussed in the public square by publishing the text online for at least three days before coming up for a vote in the House of Representatives.” Republicans captured control of the House but that didn’t stop Republican congressional leaders a few months later from cutting a deal with Obama and rushing a 459-page budget deal through Congress, leaving members time neither to read nor to digest it before approving it.

Doorstops

Three years later, in December 2014, Congress enacted a 1200-page, $560 billion National Defense Authorization Act that was available to members only 36 hours prior to their vote. When asked whether members of Congress had read the bill, Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) replied, “Of course not. Are you kidding?” Moran explained that he felt no obligation to read the text because “I trust the leadership.” Later that month, members of Congress heaved all their unfinished work into a 15-pound lump of paper which no one had time to comprehend before approving. The 1603-page blockbuster was a continuing resolution omnibus bill that was nicknamed “Cromnibus.” House Speaker John Boehner scoffed at concerns about the process: “Understand, all these provisions in the bill have been worked out in a bicameral, bipartisan fashion or else they wouldn’t be in the bill.” And never before in American history have problems resulted from the closed-door deals on Capitol Hill.

As I wrote for USA Today in 2014 (“Government by Cromnibus — Blind, Deaf, and Dumb”), “Ignorance of the law is an excuse only for the congressmen who voted for the law.” There have been plenty of “scale-buster” pieces of legislation enacted without having been read since then, usually accompanied by sporadic media whining about the process. Most politicians’ love of power will always exceed their intellectual curiosity.

“You can lead a man to Congress but you can’t make him think,” quipped Milton Berle in 1956. Or read. According to a 1977 survey of House members by the House Administration Committee, the average congressman spends only 11 minutes a day reading at work. That survey result was so embarrassing that it has not been repeated since then. Congress has its own legislative research agencies as well as instant access to more than 4000 reports regularly produced by other federal agencies. But former ten-term congressman Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) admitted that “a lot of the reports that have been mandated from these federal agencies are so overwhelming that I didn’t generally look at them.” Rather than reading the reports, one longtime congressional staffer told the Washington Post in 2014 that “we used them as doorstops.”

Legislative ignorance is treacherous in part because there is no Hippocratic Oath — “first, do no harm” — on Capitol Hill. Because politicians won an election, they often act entitled to dictate rules on anything and everything under the sun. The hefty omnibus bill that Congress passed late last year contains a blizzard of laws, penalties, and handouts that will take months to decipher. The media will be exposing horror stories from the bill long after congressional leaders finish their victory lap.

Congress would not be passing massive unread bills without a blind faith that government compulsion is inherently superior to what individual persons can do for themselves in daily life. Politicians assume their clueless decrees are better than decisions citizens make for themselves after gathering the best information they can find. Political action per se is presumptively redemptive for humanity — as exemplified by one congressman’s appeal to vote for the 2014 omnibus bill without reading it: “Hold your nose and make this a better world.”

But Congress in its routine operations is more slapdash than the vast majority of Americans in their daily lives. How many citizens routinely sign thousand-page contracts without reading them? Would anyone hire a lawyer who admitted he failed to examine settlement agreements he approved? Such an admission would spur a lawsuit for malpractice. But congressmen have legal immunity for anything they do on the floor of the House and Senate.

There is no prudent reason to expect fundamental change on Capitol Hill. Congress has always been fairly irresponsible, but the damage is vastly greater now. Instead of being a meddlesome distant uncle who ruins a family reunion once a year, Congress is a daily taskmaster with the authority to intervene in almost every aspect of Americans’ lives. Since we cannot expect members of Congress to behave more wisely or responsibly in the future, how much power should they possess over other Americans? Fantasizing about reforms that could create wiser legislators simply paves the way to bigger boondoggles down the road.

This article was originally published in the March 2021 edition of Future of Freedom.Category: PoliticsEMAILhttps://platform.twitter.com/widgets/tweet_button.06c6ee58c3810956b7509218508c7b56.en.html#dnt=false&id=twitter-widget-1&lang=en&original_referer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fff.org%2Fexplore-freedom%2Farticle%2Fcongress-is-still-unfit-to-govern%2F%3Futm_source%3DFFF%2BDaily%26utm_campaign%3D60077fde47-FFF%2BDaily%2B05-07-2021%26utm_medium%3Demail%26utm_term%3D0_1139d80dff-60077fde47-318078877&size=m&text=Congress%20Is%20Still%20Unfit%20to%20Govern%20%E2%80%93%20The%20Future%20of%20Freedom%20Foundation&time=1620407540704&type=share&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fff.org%2Fexplore-freedom%2Farticle%2Fcongress-is-still-unfit-to-govern%2F&via=FutureofFreedomhttps://www.facebook.com/v3.0/plugins/share_button.php?app_id=&channel=https%3A%2F%2Fstaticxx.facebook.com%2Fx%2Fconnect%2Fxd_arbiter%2F%3Fversion%3D46%23cb%3Df34549d4c18d4c%26domain%3Dwww.fff.org%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.fff.org%252Ff1d85c8ab5de488%26relation%3Dparent.parent&container_width=0&href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fff.org%2Fexplore-freedom%2Farticle%2Fcongress-is-still-unfit-to-govern%2F&layout=button&locale=en_US&mobile_iframe=true&sdk=joey&size=small

This post was written by: James Bovard

James Bovard is a policy adviser to The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is a USA Today columnist and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, Playboy, American Spectator, Investors Business Daily, and many other publications. He is the author of Freedom Frauds: Hard Lessons in American Liberty (2017, published by FFF); Public Policy Hooligan (2012); Attention Deficit Democracy (2006); The Bush Betrayal (2004); Terrorism and Tyranny (2003); Feeling Your Pain (2000); Freedom in Chains (1999); Shakedown (1995); Lost Rights (1994); The Fair Trade Fraud (1991); and The Farm Fiasco (1989). He was the 1995 co-recipient of the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought, and the recipient of the 1996 Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. His book Lost Rights received the Mencken Award as Book of the Year from the Free Press Association. His Terrorism and Tyranny won Laissez Faire Book’s Lysander Spooner award for the Best Book on Liberty in 2003. Read his blog. Send him email.