That's right, you Glenn Beck. I saw you going on and on about all those good people waking up and trying to take the Country back by joining tea parties and the 9/12 project.
But Thomas Jefferson knew something else: "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."
Our government does not fear us, because they believe that they have all the power. You're small, what do you have? All you have is your voice and they're counting on the fact that you won't use it. And in the past, they've been right about many of us.
But fortunately, people aren't sitting around on their marshmallow couches, eating Doritos all day anymore. They're finding outlets like the tea parties and The 9/12 Project. They're finding their voices again.
Source
But you haven't been paying attention have you? You see we have this thing called representative democracy where people go and vote for what they want in their representation. And this time Barack Obama won and not by a little bit. Sure it wasn't a Reagan landslide but if 2004 was big enough to give GW political capital, then that means President Obama has at least ten times that political capital now.
I'm sorry your scared and that you feel so out of control but the people voted for this agenda. President Obama hasn't strayed very far from what he said he would do, raise taxes on the top 1% and attempt to put fairness back into the tax code. He also promised some form of universal health care, green jobs and to focus on the state of our education in America. All these things were outlined in debates and speeches and people were paying attention.
But you, you weren't I guess.
Millions of people worked for President Obama as candidate Obama and many more voted for him. This is how our Democracy works. And if we weren't using our voice maybe Obama wouldn't have changed direction on "looking forward" rather than "looking back". It's his job to listen to us and although many on the left are disappointed with some of his stances, he's still listening.
The enemy now is progressivism, I like how your making this the new boogie man for the right. Liberal just doesn't have the same bang as it used to so now you want to blame "progressives". Glenn Beck has this on his website...
Many on the left today call themselves "progressive," and they do so not just because it’s a nicer way of saying "liberal," but also because they very much intend to revive the political principles of America’s original Progressives, from the Progressive Era of the 1880s through World War I. Why would leftist politicians, like Mrs. Clinton, purposely identify themselves with this Progressive movement?
The reason is that America’s original Progressives were also its original, big-government liberals. Most people point to the New Deal era as the source of big government and the welfare state that we have today. While this is perfectly accurate, it is important to understand that the principles of the New Deal did not originate in the New Deal; rather, they came from the Progressives, who had dominated American politics and intellectual cultural a generation prior to the New Deal.
Oh it gets better...
II. The Progressives and their Attack on America’s Founding
As I mentioned in my last piece, America’s Progressives aimed for a thorough transformation in America’s principles of government. While our founders understood that our national government must have the capacity to be strong and vigorous (this is why the Articles of Confederation were failing), they also were very clear that this strength must always be confined to very limited ends or areas of responsibility; government, in other words, while not weak or tiny, was to be strictly limited.
The Progressive conception of government, on the other hand, was quite the opposite; Progressives had an "evolving" or a "living" notion of government (yes, we get the term "living constitution" from the Progressives), and thus wanted government to take on whatever role and scope the times demanded. The Progressives reasoned that people of the founding era may have wanted a limited government, given their particular experience with George III, but they argued that people of their own time wanted a much more activist government, and that we should adjust accordingly.
Quite simply, the Progressives detested the bedrock principles of American government. They detested the Declaration of Independence, which enshrines the protection of individual natural rights (like property) as the unchangeable purpose of government; and they detested the Constitution, which places permanent limits on the scope of government and is structured in a way that makes the extension of national power beyond its original purpose very difficult. "Progressivism" was, for them, all about progressing, or moving beyond, the principles of our founders.
So let me get this straight? Progressives don't respect the constitution and we "detest" the Declaration of Independence? Seriously?
This is the tripe coming from Glenn Beck and those he goes to to support his agenda. There is nothing about the modern progressive movement that wants to interfere with individual rights. It ultimately comes down to the balance that our founding Fathers wanted the branches of Government and the "people" to make. That balance has been out of whack for the last thirty years, especially in the last eight. The Bush Administration misused it's power to give too much weight to the Executive Branch, hey, even now Dick Cheney thinks he's still running things.
So as we attempt to get things back on track we have patriots like Beck attempting to push us further away from what our founding fathers wanted. I love how he takes quotes from whomever fits what he wants to portray like any good con artist, to sell his particular brand of freedom.
The ultimate issue that must be righted is corporatism and the fact that large corporations with profit driven motives are determining public policy and it's the everyday person who is getting screwed because of this. It has nothing to do with individual rights, unless you're talking about corporate rights, which have skewed interests away from the middle class, where making millions isn't enough and taking risks with other people's money is fine because you will be rewarded just the same.
Corporatism is what has given us a less effective health care system that continues to cost more every year and more and more people don't actually get health care because it cuts into the bottom line. Some call it murder by spreadsheet, I've been calling it corporate euthanasia, the wrong people are deciding who lives and dies.
Then we have such issues as our dependence on foreign oil as large oil companies pushed their own agenda to defend their outrageous profits. It's just another example, from why cities like LA has no decent mass transit to why they rail against high speed rail. Then we've put off dealing with environmental issues and let factory farming ruin not only our environment put our lives in danger with unethical practices and the push to create cheaper and easy to produce food.
It's not the Government that's the issue, although hell, they've been complicit with this corporate greed, but it's not tea parties and talks of revolution that are going to right this mess.
It's been what? 100 days and Obama has already turned into a fascist progressive who is going to end the American dream as we know it? Sorry, that's not the case. But you went there.
There are others who have responded to your outrageous charges.
Hey Glenn, you lost and what your tasting right now is called Democracy, not fascism.