If You Can Keep It

This week's Newsweek cover asks, "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" A better question, why are Obama supporters so delusional? Three years in, with one to go – what exactly is the plan? Continue a path that replaces free-market capitalism with a system that redistributes wealth to those who have not earned it, socialized medicine without choice and nationalization of private business? The housing market – which ignited the economic collapse in the first place – is still an upside down disaster, business owners still fear investing in new ventures, including job creation, due to market and regulatory uncertainty and Wall St. is still hedging its bets against another major downturn. Not to mention questions over border security and foreign policy that makes our allies nervous and emboldens our enemies.

If that is the plan, the president can keep it. 

Rather than any intellectual deficiencies, critics of the Obama Administration are aptly critical because of…THE PLAN. To say otherwise calls into question the intellect of those critiquing conservative-minded Americans. Moreover, it highlights a consistent leftist misunderstanding of the difference, and divide, between conservatism and liberalism in the United States. Of course, the liberal establishment is prone to such idiosyncratic thought, constantly demanding civility in political discourse while hypocritically hurling insults and violence against their conservative opposition. As much as liberals want conservatives to be liberals, it will never happen. Why? For one major reason: conservatives are conservatives, who disagree with liberal ideology. Duh.

Frankly, the Founding Fathers would find the current political climate unrecognizable from their vision, if not repulsive to their ideas. Even in their heated partisanship – particularly between Adams and Jefferson – none ever went so far as to threaten the very nation for which they had sworn so much and fought so hard to create. They rendered public service as a virtue to be defended and preserved by generations to come, setting aside personal differences in the cause of unity and liberty against tyranny. It would seem, 225 years later, that cause is no longer as important as the cause of our personal differences.

Perhaps that is why, at the close of the Constitutional Conventional in 1787, Benjamin Franklin prophetically stated, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

©2012 Steve Sagarra