Guest Post By C.L. Smith aka “Leonidas”
C.L. Smith is a frequent, right of center commenter on The Moderate Voice and has been invited as a Guest Voice.
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Every so often I look back at an eassy/article from the past that is one of my favorites. It doesn’t really pertain to current events directly, but it always seems to indirectly. John Silveria wrote a piece for Backwoods Home and it is one of my favorite reads ever on the Internet. Not everyone I know is a fan of federalism, but even if not, this article might provoke some thoughts. It challenges us to look beyond the dogma and to the heart of things recognizing Facism without the Nazi connotation and communism without evoking Stalin. More importantly, it makes us think about evaluating a President and the government by a defined standard, one that each government official swears to uphold.
Here is a snippet:
Can you imagine if a President today started vetoing all the bills coming out of Congress because they were unconstitutional? Senators and representatives would want to know what the Constitution’s got to do with it. Special interests, both liberal and conservative, would be calling for impeachment, and the press and academia would vilify the President.
However, modern Democrats do pay lip service to admiring Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, and they often used to call themselves the party of Jefferson and Jackson—but not so much anymore.”
“Why not?” I asked.
Both were proponents of small government. If either could come back today, they would be horrified at what’s become of the Democratic Party. And they also would have no kindred feelings toward modern Republicans because the Republicans are going down the same road, albeit with about a 25 year delay.
Here is another:
Bill just shook his head, but Dave said, “When the Clintons first took office…”
“Only one of them did,” Mac said and Dave laughed.
“Okay, when Bill did, they wanted to institute a national health plan and explained it would be managed competition. Is that fascism?”
“That’s right.”
“Fascism is about zero tolerance and persecution,” Bill said.
“Fascism is just an economic theory, Bill. It’s not about concentration camps any more than communism is about gulags and Siberia. Hitler didn’t need fascism any more than Stalin or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia needed communism to carry out their atrocities.”
The rest can be found here: