The Patriot Post® · The Lessons of Colorado

The Foundation

“[N]either the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt.” –Samuel Adams

Re: The Left

“It didn’t take long. Despite 12 dead and [58] injured, reckless media were looking to exploit the rampage perpetrated by alleged killer, James Holmes, as quickly as possible. ABC News reporter Brian Ross led the despicable charge, immediately attempting to politicize the issue. ‘There’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea Party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it’s Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado,’ Ross irresponsibly told Good Morning America’s George Stephanopoulos. Yet within hours, the network was forced to make a retraction. … MSNBC used the tragedy to slam the National Rifle Association (NRA), while a blogger at the Daily Kos website blames America in general, contending that real problem ‘is getting past the mental and emotional resistance of those who continue to believe that we’re the best country in the world, the best culture ever produced by human beings, and the best everything else.’ … Rush Limbaugh was blamed for the atrocity because he reviewed ‘The Dark Knight Rises,’ the movie playing in the theater at the time, and noted that the name of the lead villain, Bane, was a homonym for Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, and that it was no accident. … The essence of senseless tragedies such as this one is just that: utter senselessness. And that is exactly why irresponsible speculation, armchair psychology, and attempts to politically exploit them are so despicable. Yet the nonsense continues, led by the Associated Press, which compiled a list – of more possible parallels between the massacre in Aurora and the Batman comic book character. Perhaps, much like the current bleating for more gun control, such ‘insight’ will lead to calls for more comic book or movie controls as well.” –columnist Arnold Ahlert

Opinion in Brief

“What happened in Colorado in the early hours of [Friday] morning was not a ‘tragedy’ but a willful act of mass murder. Beyond his age, name, and ethnicity, nobody yet knows who the shooter is, or why he chose to do what he did. In my view, this is a blessing, albeit a temporary one; for, as has been the way in recent years, once his party registration, television-viewing habits, and random scribblings become known to the public, all sorts of hysterical speculation and unlettered accusations will burst forth. Whole groups will be vilified, blame will be apportioned to those many times removed, and the shooter will be partially absolved of blame by those who prefer to see fault in video games or talk radio or political rhetoric or anything else that can be conscripted to explain why terrible things happen to good people. Few will point out that unless someone commits an atrocity in the name of an ideology – Timothy McVeigh, for example – their political beliefs are wholly irrelevant. … [T]his crime was ultimately about people. It was about the shooter, the victims, and their families – and very little else besides – and we would do well to avoid breathlessly proposing radical changes to our constitutional order because a man abused his liberty.” –columnist Charles C. W. Cooke

Culture

“The responses of both presidential candidates to the horror in Colorado feel weak to me. They are characteristic of our culture, which treats each of these grotesque acts of mass killing as ‘tragedies.’ The proper response to such an atrocity is rage. It wouldn’t be out of place for the president and the man who hopes to replace him to refer to the shooter as a ‘monster.’ We don’t do that. Instead, we focus on ‘healing.’ We’ve become excellently behaved victims.” –columnist Mona Charen

Essential Liberty

“Freedom is seldom destroyed all at once. More often it is eroded, bit by bit, until it is gone. This can happen so gradually that there is no sudden change that would alert people to the danger. By the time everybody realizes what has happened, it can be too late, because their freedom is gone. … One of the tricks of professional magicians is to distract the audience’s attention from what they are doing while they are creating an illusion of magic. Pious talk about ‘giving back’ distracts our attention from the cold fact that politicians are taking away more and more of our money and our freedom. Even the envy that politicians stir up against ‘the rich’ is highly focused on those particular high income-earners whose decisions the politicians want to take over. Others in sports or entertainment can make far more money than the highest paid corporate executive, but there is no way that politicians can take over the roles of Roger Federer or Oprah Winfrey, so highly paid sports stars or entertainers are never accused of ‘greed.’ If we are so easily distracted by self-serving political rhetoric, we are not only going to see our money, but our freedom, increasingly taken away from us by slick-talking politicians, including our current slick-talker-in-chief in the White House.” –economist Thomas Sowell

Insight

“There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.” –American author and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Government

“Herbert Croly, the godfather of American progressivism, spoke for a generation of progressive intellectuals when he wrote that the ‘individual has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality has been formed.’ For the progressives, society and government were almost interchangeable terms. John Dewey, the seminal progressive philosopher, believed that ‘organized social control’ via a ‘socialized economy’ was the only means to create ‘free’ individuals. For the progressives, freedom wasn’t the absence of government coercion, it was a pile of gifts from the state. Progressives invented the idea of the ‘moral equivalent of war’ as a means of inciting citizens to drop their personal priorities and rally around the state for a government-defined ‘cause larger than themselves.’ … To the extent Obama ever speaks the language of religion, it is to justify, even sanctify, the works of government. He often invokes the Hallmark-ized biblical teaching that ‘I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper’ as a means to rationalize not personal action but government action. … The problem facing Obama is that there’s a reason the American people never fully embraced the progressive vision. The idea driving America is the individual pursuit of happiness. Just because the word ‘individual’ appears in there doesn’t make it a selfish ideal; it means it’s a vision of liberty.” –columnist Jonah Goldberg

The Gipper

“[I]t doesn’t require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property? Such machinery already exists.” –Ronald Reagan

Political Futures

“We accept the negative ads, name-calling and lies as part of the way the political game is played, then we sit back and gripe about how our politics have gone into the dumpster. But we can’t have it both ways. It’s like going to the Indianapolis 500 hoping to see the accidents – and then complaining about the accidents. It’s like going to a cage fight – and complaining about the violence. Today we no longer have political ads that tell the truth about a candidate or the issues. We have negative ads that spin, distort and take words out of context. … The politicians are giving us exactly what we want. If we really want more truth in politics, if we really want less negativity and fewer lies, we have to make it clear to the politicians that we no longer want to watch their grubby cage fight. Until we do, we’ll be fed the same old dirt.” –columnist Michael Reagan

For the Record

“Did you ever wonder why people are far more likely to become conservative in their views and values as they get older? When this rather devastating question is posed to liberals, leftists, progressives, Democrats – you choose the label or group – they answer that people get more selfish as they get older. … People get worse as they get older? If you were walking in a dark alley at midnight, which would you fear more – a group of teenagers or twenty-somethings or a group of senior citizens? Do older people or younger people give more of their time to charitable institutions? Are our prisons filled with young people or old people? The fact is that not only do people get more wise and more conservative as they get older, they get more kind and more generous, too. … If anything, we older people yearn for a peaceful world even more than young people do. We are the ones who lost friends or relatives in some war. We are the ones who have lived a lifetime of seeing and reading about human suffering. And, we, not you, have children and grandchildren whom we ache to see alive and healthy. … What the term ‘more idealistic’ really means when applied to young people is that young people are more naive, not more idealistic, than older people. … We are seduced by policies based on the awesome American value of individual initiative combined with liberty to create and retain wealth. It’s now called conservatism.” –radio talk-show host Dennis Prager

Reader Comments

“In response to Mark Alexander’s essay and Barack Obama’s comments, if government is responsible for all of the successful people out there, how does President Obama account for all of the people who DIDN’T take risks or succeed? Those people had the same roads and bridges, and most of them had caring teachers or families.” –Andrew in Gainesville, GA

“Despite his poor grammar and sentence construction, Obama’s comments about ‘You didn’t build that’ are apparently referencing things that governments build (roads and other infrastructure). Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t fuel taxes, local, state and federal taxes, consumer-bought bonds and things like that PAY for all this? Therefore, are not WE the ones who built them?” –Brian in Nashville, TN

“The writers of Friday’s Digest have it right on welfare reform. Everything this criminal in the White House does is intended to bind enough voting-age individuals to him and his corrupt party to gain their permanent loyalty and votes. Those who produce write checks. Those who fail to produce are only too willing to enslave the producers and cash their checks.” –William in Apple Valley, CA

“Barack Obama’s actions on welfare reform are totally and completely unconstitutional! This should be immediately challenged in court and overturned.” –Robert in Indiana

“I think Barack Obama is probably NOT a citizen, or qualified to be our president, but it is a losing proposition as the MSM will not give voice to the issue. We need to vote him out on his record (or lack thereof) and that should end the story.” –Helen in Westland, Michigan

The Last Word

“I’ve decided not to work today. It’s a bit of a perilous decision, because this is a job where if you don’t work, you really can’t survive very long. … But I feel comfortable not working today because I know I have help: The road outside my window. The road, which was built by Obama – or someone like him – brings me all the stuff I need to do my job. Because I’m not really responsible for my business. The road is. So I’m going to spend today with my feet up on the table – until my wife makes me take them off – and stare out the window, watching the road do its work. And then, after lunch, I’m going to go over to the sink, and run the faucet. Because I want to remind myself I don’t send the water to my house. Other people do this. These people, combining their efforts within a public utility, get me the water I use to bathe myself and make my coffee. And I know full well that without soap and caffeine, I would never have been able to build this blog. And then I’m going to go over to the computer and surf for awhile on the Internet, which was invented for me by DARPA and Al Gore. The Internet brings my readers to me. Why should I bust my back for 12 hours today when I have all this beneficence working for me? Actually, I’ve decided to spend several days doing nothing, letting all these gifts from the government work their magic. And then, after a week of this, I’m going to head to the unemployment office and sign up to start getting more gifts from the government.” –White House Dossier’s Keith Koffler

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team