The choice in 2016: Liberty or the yoke

“No punishment, in my opinion, is too great for a man who can build his greatness upon his country’s ruin.”

George Washington, 12 December 1778 (1)

A few weeks ago, a reader of this blog sent a comment saying that perhaps our republic is just finally “fizzling out,” as have almost all of history’s previous republic’s. I did not answer this cogent note at the time because I wanted to think about it. Little did I then imagine that so much new data would appear since the reader’s comment that, at least in my mind, makes the fizzling option seem all too real. The days pass and the picture gradually fills in, and the fuller and more complete it gets the louder the fizzling becomes. But there is a last-resort option for Americans, one that has strong precedent and sanction in the republic’s history, tradition, and founding documents.

Long ago, in 1963, America’s newest Nobel Laureate for Literature wrote a song that seems to pretty much fit this particular point in U.S. history, which is a knack Bob Dylan has demonstrated repeatedly during his remarkable if, at times, ornery and reclusive career. One verse of that song is worth quoting in full:

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’ (2)

This week’s news that Colin Powell has said he will vote for Hillary Clinton highlights the point that, as Mr. Dylan said, the old “order is rapidly fadin’. Powell is brave and intelligent man, a military officer who served his country well and was highly honored by it. And now, in return for those honors, he publicly champions for the presidency a woman who is a felon, a traitor, and a proven war lover. I must confess that I stopped respecting Powell when he supported Barack Obama for president twice. Obama is a man that, given his lack of every credential of character, experience, and personal accomplishment, General Powell would not have given the command of a squad of soldiers. I wonder what Powell now thinks about backing Obama after Wikileaks has shown that he, like Hillary, is a documented traitor for knowingly using an unsecured server to conduct the classified business of the nation.

The famous ex-General Powell has dug for his once enviable reputation a grave that would be best left unmarked. History will remember him as man who willingly and openly betrayed his oath as a military officer, and his duty as a citizen, to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution not only against foreign foes, but from domestic traitors like Clinton and Obama. The much-praised General Powell has though his own words and actions now built a permanent place for himself in U.S. history, one where he will be remembered not as a combat veteran and a secretary of state, but rather as a man who will be deservedly damned for being the callous abettor of two of the most despicable traitors in all of American history.

But Powell is only one voter. What is to be thought about the tens of millions of other U.S. citizens who apparently intend to vote for a woman whose entire career has been one of intentionally applying her lethal brand of wickedness to the body politic?

  • How will parents explain to their children and grandchildren that they voted for a woman who is congenital liar; for a woman who speaks loudly of her ardor for helping children, but has been and is the relentless champion of murdering 60 million of them, a fact that makes the history of slavery in American slavery seem a quite minor event; and for a woman who claims to be liberated and independent, but has spent 30-plus years protecting a sexual-predator husband, defaming and threatening the women he attacked, and utterly depending on that predator and dozens of other girly-whipped, criminal-loving men — think of John Podesta, Robert Creamer, James Carville, Terry McAuliffe, and all the male and semi-male reporters at ABC, CBS, NBC, and MSNBC — to do the lying, violence-making, cheating, and bribing that are responsible for winning her the offices, riches, and status that she could never have won on the basis of her own meager stores of talent, brains, character, and courage.
  • How will the parents of America’s soldier-children explain to them why they voted for a woman who loves war, cares not a bit about dead or maimed soldiers and Marines, and has helped to start, or has started, the wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, and now seems eager to start one with Russia? And if that war with Russia comes, how will those parents explain that they voted for the woman who lit the fire that led to that war by joining with George Soros and the globalist U.S. and European elites to recklessly foment the coup that overthrew the pro-Russia government of the Ukraine and then continually lied by blaming all that happened in Ukraine on Vladimir Putin?
  • As citizens, how will pro-Hillary voters justify to themselves, and to the rest of the citizenry, the fact that they voted for a woman (a) who helped deprive enormous numbers of Americans of affordable and effective health insurance, and who has promised to make that problem bigger and more expensive; (b) who intends to appoint Supreme Court justices who will complete the destruction of the U.S. Constitution by permanently entrenching rule by and for minorities, be they ethnic, racial, sexual, or illegal aliens and refugees; (c) who intends to make sure that working people get to keep only the smallest possible portion of the salaries they earn; and (d) who will use the bogey of climate change to destroy the jobs of millions of Americans — do not think coal miners are only targets — and also use Obama’s unconstitutional climate-change deal to expand the executive branch’s power, pour on ever increasing taxation and growth-killing regulations, and eradicate the 2nd Amendment so that she can cede more and more U.S. sovereignty and independence to world governance via an America-hating abomination like the UN or some even worse international institution that she, Soros, and their globalist pals have readied but for now is hidden.
  • Perhaps most important — though there is no small beer in the foregoing — how will those who intend to vote for Clinton explain that they knowingly voted for a third American civil war. The election of Clinton will leave those who did not vote for her with only the stark choice between supinely submitting to her goal of creating a country that is a republic in name but without liberty, Christianity, or a viable economy, or to do as their ancestors did and decide to risk all on the long-shot of an armed rebellion to rescue and then rehabilitate all that is politically, spiritually, historically, and economically dear to them.

It is on this last point that pro-Clinton voters ought to focus and reflect because it is their lives that will be on the line, and they will be easily identifiable. All of the republic’s enemies — Liberals, Neocons, media personalities, Israel-Firsters, socialists, teacher unions, abortionists, etc., etc. — brilliantly chose to gather together under Clinton’s tent and and loudly proclaim their support for her plans to destroy America and those they deem “deplorable” inhabitants via taxes, interventionist wars, and executive orders. It is only commonsense to say that it always is a good thing to know who and where your enemies, and the pro-Clinton folks have made that as easy as targeting apples bobbing in a barrel of water.

Historically, Americans are one for two in armed rebellions against those whom they perceived as intending to impose tyrannical rule on them. The Founder’s generation won; the Confederate-American generation lost. The Founders delayed rebellion until Britain’s tyranny was installed in the northern parts of British North America and could be seen to threaten all of it; the patience-short Confederate-Americans rebelled on the suspicion that a northern-run tyranny was coming their way.

The Founders, as noted, won, and the Confederate-Americans lost, but the latter’s defeat really provided no guarantee against a future civil war, notwithstanding the many clueless historians who have claimed that armed rebellion has been unthinkable since peace was made by two wise soldiers at Appomattox.

Why did the civil war’s conclusion fail to make a future armed rebellion impossible? Simple. The door to and duty of rebellion can never be permanently closed or denied to citizens who are armed; who sense the approach and/or have experienced the beginnings of tyranny; and who believe a failure to attempt rebellion will only yield their enslavement as serfs to the elite. This hard and ominous fact, of course, is why Clinton and her ilk are striving to neuter the 2nd Amendment.

Today, the U.S. citizens who will never vote for Clinton have been much more patient than either the Founders or the Confederate-Americans, but that patience is near to run out. For over 40 years they have watched their taxes steadily increased and even more quickly wasted; their religion vilified, ridiculed, and attacked by unconstitutional laws and undermined by federal control of education; their jobs deliberately exported, thereby blighting their communities and their own and their children’s futures; their kids killed or maimed in unnecessary interventionist wars the governing elite never intends to win; their share of equality before the law eroded by the unconstitutional legal, financial, employment, and educational preferences given to favored ethnic groups, illegal aliens, and dangerous, unwanted refugees; their civil liberties deliberately constricted by presidents using the impact of needless wars and the mad advice of Ivy League ideologues to increase the executive’s power; and their own and their nation’s history, traditions, sovereignty, and independence sold out in the name of an anti-democratic, God-less, authoritarian-cum-fascist world order.

It seems quite likely that there are many millions of nationalistic Americans who now stand only a short step or two from the enough-is-enough line, and that they may soon see little recourse save an armed rebellion while the 2nd Amendment is still operative and doing what the Founders intended. The Founders’ goal for the 2nd Amendment was, of course, to ensure that succeeding generations of Americans always have the tools with which to overturn rigged elections, protect and defend their Constitution, and, especially, to kill as many as necessary, and then a few, of their fellow citizens who are trying to subject them to the whims and wickedness of a liberty-murdering tyranny imposed — in this case — by a lying, corrupt, arrogant, power-and-money hungry, and obviously mentally disturbed politician.

Those refusing to vote for Clinton can, I think, take pride and succor in knowing that America’s Founders faced much the same situation and, against long odds, took up arms and restored their liberty. From that day to the ever-pertinent Dylan’s, no one has described the duty of rebellion better than a prominent, Boston-based Protestant divine named Jonathan Mayhew. Reverend Mayhew, a cleric when clergymen were intelligent, manly, and courageous, preceded most of the Founders by 20 years in telling to his congregants that they had no obligation — under either God or the law — to submit to tyranny. “The king,” Mayhew told his congregation in 1750:

“is as much bound by his oath of office, not to infringe the legal rights of the people, as the people are bound to yield subjection to him. From whence it follows, that as soon as the prince sets himself up above the law, he loses the king in the tyrant: he does to all intents and purposes, unking himself, by acting out of, and beyond, that sphere which the constitution allows him to move in. And in such cases, he has no more right to be obeyed, than any inferior officer who acts beyond his commission. The subject’s obligation to allegiance then ceases of course; and to resist him, is no more rebellion, than to resist any foreign invader.” (2)

If Mrs. Clinton and her supporters — that is, the criminal and her accomplices — win the 2016 election, the “obligation to allegiance” to her government ceases for those who opposed her and her abettors. As the Reverend Mayhew, and later a Virginian named Jefferson, said their is no obligation for citizens to continue to offer unlimited submission to a tyrant or to fail to resist her government’s tyranny. Under God, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and plain commonsense, the citizens’ duty and responsibility lies squarely in refusing to submit to the taking of their liberty, and a grim willingness to risk death, family, and property by seeking to preserve the republic by destroying the tyrant, her associates, and their enslaving intentions.

Endnotes

  1. George Washington to Joseph Reed, 12 December 1778. See, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-18-02-0452
  2. Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” 1963. See, http://bobdylan.com/albums/the-times-they-are-a-changin/
  3. Jonathan Mayhew, “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to Higher Powers, 1750.” See, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1044&context=etase

Author: Michael F. Scheuer

Michael F. Scheuer worked at the CIA as an intelligence officer for 22 years. He was the first chief of its Osama bin Laden unit, and helped create its rendition program, which he ran for 40 months. He is an American blogger, historian, foreign policy critic, and political analyst.