The Anchoress
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad.
…ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
This is the biggest fish that needs frying. If you don’t have free speech, you don’t have free anything else.
“Remaking America” should be called “The Fog of Obama.” Except, it’s not just Obama, or his assorted rights-eroding, speech-silencing, sovereignty-surrendering, cognitive-dissonance-embracing, and utterly hypocritical elitist pals.
We are living in an era of sublime phoniness – phoniness such as Holden Caulfield never imagined or articulated – and the one tool that can penetrate through that increasingly dense and lingering fog of fakery, the internet, is being seriously imperiled.
We need to call out, “unmask, unmask, unmask,” and solidly reject the hypocrisy we have too long acquiesced to in our government and our leadership, within both parties.
Don’t be fooled into thinking anyone is inherently evil because they have a D after their name, or that anyone is pristine because of the R or the C after their name. The fog wants you to believe that a person’s depths can be so easily ascertained, but that is a lie.
Things can look very different, in a fog, and much can be hidden, which is why aggressors love them so.
All of our “public servants” are imperfect; all fall short, of course, but in each party the majority seem to serve nothing but their own ambitions, their own interests and their own pocketbook. They serve nothing but illusion, and right now our political class seems like a multi-floor convention of magicians; a million masters of misdirection, all deceiving their respective, and receptive crowds.
Much is being written about last night’s elections; the White House and the press are spinning two large GOP wins in New Jersey and Virginia as inconsequential. A small special-election for a congressional seat in upstate New York, in which a Democrat won, is being touted as the harbinger of “the end” of the civil-war-torn Republican party, and a solid statement of support for Democrat policies.
In that congressional race, the GOP put up a candidate who danced so far to the left that she won the endorsement of the internet’s most virulent “progressive” sites. Her Democrat opponent was a perfectly decent-seeming fellow, a veteran of our Armed Forces and -importantly- a man who lived, worked with and identified strongly as belonging to his area.
Conservatives within the GOP, unhappy with the left-leaning candidate they’d been given and uninterested in a man with a D after his name and “imperfect” social credentials, put their power behind the Conservative candidate, a rather goofy fellow who seemed a bit like Barney Fife in a decent suit. The conservatives lost and the Democrat won, and today we are being told what all of that means, by experts and gasbags who hardly ever get anything right.
The outcome of the NY-23 election does not mean anything that anyone is saying it means. NY-23 was not about candidates, which is why I haven’t even bothered naming any of them. NY-23 wasn’t even about ideologies, per se. It was about the noise and fog of war and the manner in which that fog obliterates the clarity needed to focus on the proper target, effecting the change necessary to, in the end, beat back the larger and encroaching evil.
The larger, encroaching evil is contained in the first link of this post. It is huge; it is not remotely connected, in theory, to NY-23, because it is a worldwide, global evil.
But in NY-23, after a great deal of political grasping and some mild hysterics, the best candidate actually won. He won after politicians of national prominence came in to work against him. He won, even though there was a momentum-gaining force at the back of his opponent.
He won because, despite all of that fog, voters -who now understand that they were nothing but grifter’s marks in 2008, victims of a shameful bait-and-switch that has left them distrustful of all political machination and all mainstream media- looked at who they trusted to represent their most pressing immediate interests. And while those interests may include social issues, right now the social issues take a backseat to a more immediate concern: how can I live my life as I choose, working as I wish, taking care of my family as we pursue our modest dreams? How do I do that with dignity, and with a sense of steadiness and personal autonomy?
NY-23 voters asked themselves those most fundamental of questions and then looked at their choices. They voted for the candidate who might be imperfect (as all candidates are, unless you’re deeply into the fog and willfully looking for the illusion) but who seemed to have the least connection to the machines, to the manic, to the momentums, to the media and to the entrenched and established whirlwinds.
So, for that matter, in different ways, did the voters in the Gubernatorial races of New Jersey and Virginia.
The small, unimportant elections of 2009 are evidence of something resilient in America, something that is going to have to be nurtured and grown and strengthened, if America is going to survive the relentless attacks against individualism and fundamental liberties to which she is currently being subjected by interests both foreign and domestic, and within every party.
NY-23, and the New Jersey and Virginia elections were won by Independent voters, by those who trust their own instincts and interests and put them before any party, in particular.
Just like our founders.
On twitter, last night, the world “revolution” was being thrown around a great deal. Last night was not a revolution. But it could be the beginnings of one, if people are willing to step out of the clinging fogs of their own allegiances to corrupt parties and the “movement” personalities who feed on them.
If we are going to defeat what is encroaching, we will have to free ourselves from the illusions and the illusion-masters. We will have to dissolve the parties and the political class -and all the heavy mists they lay upon us to distract, confuse and disorient- so that we may reclaim our exceptional nation and the exceptional nature of our ordinary lives.
In order to do that, we will have to first strengthen and support the most fundamental of freedoms: the right to say, to write, to sing, to shout whatever message we wish to. Our established parties, which want us back in the fog, where we can be corralled and controlled, will not help us with that.
Go back to that first link and re-read it. There is the battlefield on which we live or die, and it is a fight that should not involve party lines, at all. If we lose sight of it in the fog, we lose everything.
“The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disentrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. ”
— President Abraham Lincoln, Message to Congress, 1862
Perhaps we may only preserve our union is by ridding ourselves of our enthrallments, as Lincoln observed, including our enthrallments with political parties.
Welcome Instapundit readers, and thank you, Glenn, for the link. It was the indespensible Insty’s link to boingboing that helped me gather my thoughts
UPDATE: Election Reactions:
Nate Silver: What Happened and Why (must-read via JOM
Gateway Pundit: Who are you going to believe?. Believe what you know.
Bookworm Insight: If it’s not about Obama…
Ed Morrissey: Palin Empowered, Bloomberg, too, but maybe not the Prez
Peter Wehner: Comprehensive Analysis
Reynolds in NY Post: Obama Magic Fades
Conservative Energy: Michelle Malkin
Mark Steyn: Quietly musing
Drew @Ace:Elections a little something for everyone
Rick Moran: Die GOP, that ye may rise!
Sundries Shack: V-and Voting
Jennifer Rubin: Can Dems get serious?
Crittenden: He had a bad day…
Just One Minute: End of Health Care Reform?
Fausta: NJ Up close and personal
Protein Wisdom: Snort
Watcher of Weasels: If Dems are happy with Obama’s election night choice, so am I
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