The American Wisdom Series

Presents
Pamphlet 352

Truth or Consequences
By James N. Clymer
Constitution Party National Chairman

While listening to President Bush’s Inaugural Address and remembering the actions and policies of his administration, I was struck by the ability of politicians to numb the mind with great sounding statements that are at once frightening in their implications and without truth or Constitutional foundation.

 I was reminded of two books I read far too long ago which I need to dust off and read again, George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. In fact, I believe it’s time for us all to give these classics a reread to remind us of how we can be fooled and manipulated on the road to tyranny. Just like “All animals are created equal” gets unobtrusively changed to “All animals are created equal but some are more equal than others”, so freedom and liberty become hallmarks of an administration that has people passively taking off their shoes at airport security checks, allowing Big Brother to snoop into their homes, their bank accounts their emails and their irises, and even sending our troops to die in the desert all to protect us from the big bad enemy. Remember how there always had to be an enemy in both those books? Ah, the prescience of George Orwell.

Mr. Bush’s opening statements regarding the “durable wisdom of the Constitution” and his promise to uphold his oath, are most remarkable for their difference and distance from the reality of his actions.  The irony is that Mr. Bush broke his oath of office before he even finished his speech by promising to do a host of things forbidden by the Constitution he swore to uphold and defend. Yes, I say forbidden because any power not authorized by the Constitution is forbidden by it and by usurping such powers, Mr. Bush violates his oath.

It would be an exhaustive work to try to list the ways in which he has violated his oath but a few striking examples come to mind, starting with the right to life. “Americans, at our best, value the life we see in another, and must always remember that even the unwanted have worth”, intoned the prez. Unless of course that unwanted one hasn’t yet been born. Why the multitude of so-called pro-life conservatives believe this president is pro-life is a mystery to me.

The Animal Farm critters begin believing the falsehoods they are told (which they really know are false but can’t deal with the consequences of the truth and thus believe the lie) and the 1984 Ministry of Truth and Newspeak deludes the subjects. In like manner millions of Americans hold the president up as “the most pro-life president ever” (as one writer put it with unintended hyperbole) because they don’t want to believe the truth. Of course GW has never claimed himself to be pro-life, to desire the end of Roe v. Wade or to take any serious step toward stopping or even significantly curtailing abortions. But the pro-life perception is a lot more comforting than reality.

Of course Bush also breaks his oath with his policies that deny Americans the right “to be secure in our persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures”, and “the right to keep and bear arms” as well as when he promotes the prohibiting of “the free exercise “ of  religion and speech through his tolerance of tyrannical federal judges.

What concerns me is the propensity of virtually all elected officials to lie, distort the truth, give words new meanings and employ every manner of deception to aggregate power. It didn’t start with this administration. Clinton was one of the smoothest liars ever but I had the sense a lot of people knew he was lying and didn’t care. In the case of this administration, the Christians not only seem to have no inkling of the deception being foisted on them, they aid and abet in its proliferation.

Many times I have felt like Diogenes, out with my lantern searching for the honest man in the political realm, a perpetual search that goes unfulfilled.

But we must not despair. In our quest to restore the Republic of the Constitution, we must continually shine the light of truth, exposing the lies of those who would deceive us into tyranny. We must demand the highest standard of honesty among ourselves and our public servants from the local alderman to the president of the United States. We must expose their failure to live by their oath of office and demand their removal when they violate the trust of their office. It is the lack of outrage and failure to hold them accountable that has allowed such dishonesty to proliferate.

May the Constitution Party ever be the one to “raise the standard to which the wise and honest can repair, recognizing that the event is in the hand of God”.