“Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.”

~ Edmund Burke

As I see it, with every passing day America’s problem becomes more and more apparent. America’s problem is that it is governed by people who cannot govern themselves.

America was not founded in some pristine, Utopian era of human perfection, quite the contrary – perfidy, prevarication, dishonesty and dishonor were just as ample in supply in 1776 as it is in 2016. Rebellion and traitorous acts were the order of the day. The people who founder the country were acutely aware if the pervasive corruption in the way they were governed.

While America was not founded in an age of a common and particular honor, it was founded by men of uncommon and specific honor with ideals blessed by, as Jefferson put it, “Nature and Nature’s God.” Based on the words and phrases they used to craft the ideals enshrined in the Declaration and the Constitution, it is clear to me their anticipation was that they knew the survival of the Republic depended on people in governance asking themselves not what they could do, but what they SHOULD do.

Today, progressives in governments and in other entities with plenary power (i.e. university administrations) never ask the aforementioned question, their question seems to be “How far can I go and what can I get away with?” We have suffered through nearly 8 years of a president and party that immediately after his inauguration in 2009, adopted a “catch me if you can” attitude with respect to enacting their progressive agenda. Common sense tells me that even if there were no regulations regarding emails, Hillary Clinton knew what she was doing was a risk to national security. She made a calculation that the risk to her presidential run was greater if her government emails were transparent and discoverable than if they were held privately and that her ability to hide things from the American people was worth more to her than protecting sensitive information from our enemies around the globe.

But you can’t have a corrupt government without a corrupt people to prop it up.

Corruption is a choice, not an evolutionary certainty.

My grandfather had little formal education but was a very, very wise man. He used to say, “A liar condemns both himself and the lie and to accept the lie is to take part in it” meaning that not only should the person who tells the lie be suspect, what he lied about is to be treated with suspicion as well and if you don’t stand up for the truth, you are part of the lie. This is the very reason that the American court system has rules of evidence and will not accept evidence, regardless of its accuracy, if it was collected illegally. The fruit of a poisonous tree poisons all. Convictions are thrown out for one bad piece of evidence. Too bad this standard isn’t applied to our government.

I watch in anger as so many in the media and the political class who call honest people liars when they express opposition to the progressive agenda and yet simply refuse to call Obama or Hillary a liar when they so clearly and objectively is. Any charge of lying is met with “That’s a pretty serious charge” or deflected with euphemisms like they “over suggested” or they just issued “incorrect promises”. When I hear those, I think about what my Granddaddy and Edmund Burke said.

The inability to call a lie a lie and hold the teller accountable for the lie is an example of a corrupt society…and there appears to be a significant percentage of our population who are comfortable with abetting such a corrupt society as long as they believe they can get something “free” at the expense of others. My opinion is that if you don’t care if Hillary lies (or parses to the point of lying in effect), you are no better than she is.

There is so little honor left in Washington that no members of the President’s party are willing to stand up to him unless and until his actions were conflict with their sense of self-preservation.

It is 2016 qned hate to keep talking about Obamacare but it is a perfect example of a Marxist stake driven into an otherwise healthy capitalist heart. Obamacare is a massive Gruberist lie built, not on the single lie of, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. Period”, but on a full foundation of lies about reduced cost of healthcare, the extent of coverage, the overall cost of the program to the taxpayer and its functionality. The Supreme Court abetted this lie by redefining the mandate to become a “tax” even though taxes cannot originate in the Senate, which this one did…and years later after multiple implementation delays (often enacted immediately before an election day), the failure of the program is upon us and o

In commercial and contract law, one misrepresentation invalidates the contract, yet here we are engaging in a real life version of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride with a massive socialist-lite program that is crushing individual citizens. Rather than correcting the lie by rejecting it, the Democrats suborn the falsity by pushing forward with “the law” even as Obama changes it on a daily basis – even weak Republicans seek to assist by talking about a “replacement” instead of the real reforms necessary for the free market to correct this Marxist/corporatist aberration.

One has to wonder if the reason that we are facing the loss of liberty is that we are now the “generally corrupt” people as described by Burke.