Believing Rather than Thinking

“Delusions are states of refuge. The mind, unable to comprehend
realities or to deal with them, finds its ease in superstitions,
beliefs and modes of irrational procedure. It is easier
to believe than to think.” ―Garet Garrett

President Obama, like all our public servants, has sworn an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” To judge by his actions thus far, however, it appears he has no such intention.

Many of his supporters thought Mr. Obama would reverse the warlike policies of Mr. Bush and end the unconstitutional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They appear to be wrong on that score. Mr. Obama is pursuing Mr. Bush’s policy of "expanding freedom in all the world" as if it were his own. I’ve combed the Constitution looking for anything that would make the president think he is bound to defend any freedom at all beyond what we have right here at home. I haven’t found it. My meager memory and a Google search of the Federalist Papers turns up no arguments by Hamilton, Madison, or Jay for spreading anything throughout the world except peaceful American trade.

Justifying preemptive war, George Bush said, “We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” Many hoped Mr. Obama would be led by common sense to a different conclusion, as many Americans now are. Obama has disappointed us so far.

On the evidence, the conclusion is not only wrong, but the opposite is true. By every measure Americans enjoyed more freedom when two thirds of the world was enslaved in the socialist wastelands of Eastern Europe, Russia, and China. Now that almost every People’s Paradise has collapsed under its own weight of injustice and repression, or become sufficiently capitalist to survive, Mr. Obama is throwing the full force of his charisma at showing the world the right way to do socialism ― with liberty and justice for all.

The U.S. government under George Bush and now under Barack Obama is pumping the lifeblood of American liberty into other lands by draining it from American veins. Americans are “liberating” Islamic peasants from Islamic tyrants by destroying our own liberties at home.

It appears that presidents can fight ‘terror’ only by repudiating their oath to defend the U.S. Constitution. In response to a deeply suspicious and poorly investigated ‘terrorist attack,’ the American government, and its leaders, have effectively abandoned the Constitution.

With no constitutional support we have invaded two foreign countries, created several enormous, lavishly funded bureaucracies, expanded the powers of every police agency in the county, and shattered protections against illegal search, seizure, arrest and imprisonment.

Without evidence or charges we have thrown thousands of Islamic immigrant grocers, cabbies, barbers, and accountants into prison. Obama’s promise of justice for these victims of the WOT is glacially slow in coming.

And instead of recognizing that our debt is the problem, Obama’s efforts to fight the markets and avoid the change we need has shackled future generations of Americans to a debt the vastness of which defies comprehension.

Despite promises of "change" Obama is laboring mightily to prevent it. He has fully embraced the last administration’s imperial delusions, while adding his own utopian fantasies to the mix. Obama clearly believes, like Bush before him, that our freedom depends on everyone else being free, that our happiness lies in making everyone like us. History’s busiest routes to perdition are paved smooth with that absurd idea.

The socialist Chinese government bestowed the blessings of socialism on the peaceful monks of Tibet in 1959. Few of those monks survived.

Napoleon was sure the Russians wouldn’t be happy until they were eating escargot instead of borsht. His army froze to death eating their boots in the snow.

Germany’s National Socialist Party fielded an army with the idea of making Moscow part of the Fatherland. That army froze to death on the Russian steppes as well.

Europeans fought wars for centuries based on the idea that the joys of Catholicism were available only in a world entirely Catholic.

Crusaders from Peter the Hermit to Richard the Lionhearted pursued a murderous religious folly to rescue the Holy Land from unholy Islam and light the lamp of redemption for their Muslim brethren.

Unlike the Crusaders, we aren’t killing Muslims to convert them to Christianity. We want them to kneel before Democracy, the goddess of parliamentary whores.

The American War on Terror is a delusional folly as surely as the Crusades were.  Unfortunately, human folly and mass delusion are easier to identify than explain, easier still to see in the past than in the present. The delusion that one people cannot be content until all people are like them has led millions to destruction.

The American Empire of IOUs, under Republican and Democrat alike, is chasing that same ancient mirage of faith, believing rather than thinking. Bush and Obama are wrong believing we safeguard our freedom best by spreading it at gunpoint. Americans will remain free only by holding our leaders to their promise to protect and defend the Constitution, by refusing to be enslaved for our own good, and by thinking rather than believing.