This is a Time for Courage & Hope

Two words we need to remember today, Friday, August 7, 2009:

Courage, and hope.

Courage in the face of headlines like these

"White House to Dems: Punch back twice as hard"

"Obama: 'I don't want the people who created this mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way ...'"

President Obama and his thugs allies are misreading the mood of the American people, and apparently they do not understand who Americans really are. They know that they have a losing hand, as far as the polls are concerned, with health care reform and cap and trade, but they intend to play it anyway.

It's like those hold Western films where the guy who's holding a crappy hand keeps raising the stakes, and finally someone calls his bluff. Knowing he's going to lose, he pulls out his pistol. "I won!" he declares.

That may work once or twice, but eventually the word gets around and no one will let you play anymore.

The American people are demanding accountability from their elected representatives and for their trouble are being called "mobs" and "manufactured" and inauthentic because they are too well dressed. People are raising questions, and yes, their voices, wanting to know why Congress, in league with this president, wants to take away our freedom to choose our own health care? They are denounced for exercising their First Amendment rights under the Constitution. The White House even goes so far as to call for the creation of an "enemies list" of those who post "fishy" health care information on the internet or in e-mails. This would dwarf the effort of the Nixon White House.

Now there is word that unions are sending "representatives" to congressional town hall meetings, and already this is turning ugly.

This will not work because the American people are not serfs. We are not like the oppressed peoples of the Soviet Union in 1917 who knew only backbreaking toil under the rule of the Czars. Americans love freedom. That's why we love our automobiles so much (and is the real reason that "Cash for Clunkers" worked at all, if you call wealth transference from one set of taxpayers to another working). We love individual freedom of motion. We love individual freedom, period.

Americans will not be herded like cattle into "one size fits all" plans for our health care, our energy usage, or anything else. That might work for a certain mind-set of people who have grown used to dependency upon government handouts. It will not work for the majority of Americans.

Thus there will be pushback. We need to have Courage. The Courage to confront elected leaders who have forgotten that they are elected, not royalty. We have to have the Courage to do so calmly, with humility, and non-violently. This is incredibly important.

I would even add prayerfully. This nation, blessed so abundantly by Almighty God, needs to return to being a prayerful people. I think you can understand why.

That is why there is Hope!

Peggy Noonan explains it well in a column today entitled, "You are terrifying us".

We have entered uncharted territory in the fight over national health care. There’s a new tone in the debate, and it’s ugly. At the moment the Democrats are looking like something they haven’t looked like in years, and that is: desperate.

They must know at this point they should not have pushed a national health-care plan.

[SNIP]

What has been most unsettling is not the congressmen’s surprise but a hard new tone that emerged this week. The leftosphere and the liberal commentariat charged that the town hall meetings weren’t authentic, the crowds were ginned up by insurance companies, lobbyists and the Republican National Committee. But you can’t get people to leave their homes and go to a meeting with a congressman (of all people) unless they are engaged to the point of passion. And what tends to agitate people most is the idea of loss—loss of money hard earned, loss of autonomy, loss of the few things that work in a great sweeping away of those that don’t.

People are not automatons. They show up only if they care.

[SNIP]

The Democrats should not be attacking, they should be attempting to persuade, to argue for their case. After all, they have the big mic. Which is what the presidency is, the big mic.

And frankly they ought to think about backing off. The president should call in his troops and his Congress and announce a rethinking. There are too many different bills, they’re all a thousand pages long, no one has time to read them, no one knows what’s going to be in the final one, the public is agitated, the nation’s in crisis, the timing is wrong, we’ll turn to it again—but not now. We’ll take a little longer, ponder every aspect, and make clear every complication.

Ms. Noonan concludes by assuming that President Obama is not going to back off his push, and she hopes that things do not get out of hand. "It's going to be a long August," she writes.

Because even the biased mainstream media cannot ignore brutality and oppression from the government. Public support for the president and his policies is falling rapidly. Eventually even the media people have to notice that things are not going so well. All this "hopey, changey" stuff doesn't seem to working out as the people in charge of the "hopey, changey" are not playing nice.

Maybe it's that they are not nice people.

And that is the ugly secret that America is waking up to. We elected a "community organizer" who managed to put a smiley face on his hatred for what America has traditionally stood for. We fell for the rhetoric and didn't bother to investigate his background. Worse, the mainstream media failed to do the vetting it normally does for presidential candidates. All the information was there; he even told us some of what he planned. People decided it didn't fit the story line, so it was ignored, discarded.

Even worse, we sent people to Congress who want to transform America into a socialist "democracy" in which experts decide things and the people pay the bills. These are the fellow travelers of Barack Obama.

As long as America wakes up, we can survive this. Even learn from it.

If America wakes up soon, we can stall off on health care reform, as well as cap and trade, and begin setting things right in the elections of next year.

If you supported President Obama, surely you cannot be pleased at the "Punch back twice as hard" rhetoric coming from this White House. Surely, if you believe in social justice, that justice should be even-handed. It should be social justice for everyone, right? Surely you cannot condone police state attitudes at the highest levels of the administration?

My hope is that we wake up soon.

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UPDATE -- Got a better link for the Obama soundbite in line five of today's post.