…we still plan to hike in Great Smoky National Park, but we have chosen a trail where we can park outside the park on private land and then hike into the park. We intend to defy any ranger we meet who tries to stop us, but by not putting a vehicle in a vulnerable position under their control, we give them less power over us in such circumstances.
Finally, I want to make one more point. This is the United States of America, supposedly “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Yet, in my essay above I describe how American citizens are either hiding from or protecting themselves from agents of our government, even though they have done nothing wrong. When I was growing up such behavior was unthinkable. Not only was no one afraid of the federal government, if a federal agent or federal elected official tried to impose such restrictions on Americans they knew they would be in big trouble, almost instantly. Thus, they were very careful to respect the rights of the citizens, and such oppressive behavior was rare.
Today, however, such behavior is becoming common. And it carries no bad consequences for the government and officials who do it. One would think this was the Soviet Union, not America.
People have to understand that they have elected people who don’t like America. They want to “fundamentally transform it.” And we’ve been letting them.
The tree looks, well, truncated, but unbowed. That’ll end soon, and there will be a brand new hole in the sky where once there were leaves. The Triangle had two old elms; the first fell a few years ago, and a spindly newcomer fills the spot now. It will grow quickly, and the replacement for the old tree will lag behind. The newcomer will be felled forty years hence, the replacement twenty years after that. It’s like a two-stroke engine, pistons rising and falling, the great chug of time pushing the earth around the star.
I’m less amazed that they do this (it’s who they are, it’s what they do) than that the media lets them get away with it.
It’s hard to say which is worse: that so many prominent Democrats believe they aren’t responsible for any of Washington’s gridlock—or that they’d say these things anyway. Not all that long ago, a presidential spokesman using this language would be talking about murderers who hijacked airplanes or drove explosive-laden trucks into the barracks of U.S. Marines—not political opponents with differing notions about federal spending.
With suicide bombs going off daily around the world and funerals for the Washington Navy Yard victims still taking place, one might expect a modicum of rhetorical restraint from inside the White House. No such luck. For five years now, such metaphors have been the cudgel of choice for administration officials, along with their fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill and journalistic fellow travelers.
It all starts with President Obama, who routinely accuses Republicans trying to thwart his spending plans by putting “party ahead of country.” Last January, when talking—as Dan Pfeiffer was this week—about GOP insistence on trading spending cuts for agreeing to raise the nation’s debt limit—the president said he wouldn’t negotiate with those holding “a gun at the head of the American people.”
Joe Biden asserts Republicans are holding the country “hostage” with their spending stance, and in a 2011 meeting with congressional Democrats the vice president agreed with the suggestion that Tea Party groups were “terrorists.”
Among Democrats on Capitol Hill, it starts at the top, too.
On This Week this morning, they were shameless about saying that the lying president of Iran was “more reasonable” than Republicans. But I guess that’s who they are and what they do, too. At least Jake Tapper called them on it.
It’s suffering from permanent paradigm paralysis, and it’s time to put it down:
Paradigm paralysis is the inability or refusal to see beyond the current models of thinking. The vast amount of scientific and political capital invested in the IPCC has become self-reinforcing, so it is not clear how move past this paralysis as long as the IPCC remains in existence. The wickedness of the climate change problem makes if difficult to identify points of irrefutable failure in either the science or the policies, although the IPCC’s insistence that the pause is irrelevant and temporary could provide just such a refutation if the pause continues. In any event, there is a growing realization of that neither the science or policy efforts are making much progress, and particularly in view of the failure climate models to predict the stagnation in warming, and that perhaps it is time to step back and see if we can do a better job of understanding and predicting climate variability and change and reducing societal and ecosystem vulnerabilities.