The 'fiscal cliff'--the lie to mask all lies

By Alan Keyes

Hear this, you who trample on the needy and bring the poor of the land to an end,

saying, "When will the new moon be over, that we may sell grain?

And the Sabbath, that we may offer wheat for sale,

that we may make the ephah small and the shekel great

and deal deceitfully with false balances,

that we may buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals

and sell the chaff of the wheat? (Amos 8:4-6)

Politicians lie. God knows, expecting them to do so has been an aspect of plain old American common sense since well before the Great Flood; since honest Abel went into the field to help Cain with his harvest; since Rebekah made Jacob his goatskin bracelets; since David recommended Uriah the Hittite for a posthumous Medal of Honor; since...well, you know, a very long time ago. But until now, expecting politicians to lie didn't mean accepting the idea that it's okay for them to do it. No; in fact the whole point of politics was to get the liars to act like honest folk most of the time. So when some of them got caught in a lie, everybody had to act as if they were shocked, outraged, and moved by their hurt and anger to do them all manner of harm at ye old ballot box.

How times have changed! This morning I got a newsletter from some investment advisory group purporting to explain the "fiscal cliff" the Washington pols are brandishing to set us up for next phase of their economic assault on the America people. Simply put, it said that the "fiscal cliff" is the point at which events expose the truth: that all the tricks the lying incumbents used to create the impression that they would stop systematically pillaging the income and credit of the American people were lies — a series of incompetent prevarications destined to plunge the nation into an economic abyss. Of course, the notion that we're only now headed over the cliff is the biggest lie of all. The lying pols pushed us over the cliff several years ago, and we've been falling through the void ever since.

The "fiscal cliff" is just the lie they're using now to justify what they've been planning all along: steps that institutionalize America's abysmal fall. Their pillaging of America isn't an emergency response to crisis. It's the institutionalized crisis, intended permanently to subject Americans to the oppressive form of government our constitutional republic was intended to replace. Instead of forming a government that serves the people, we'll be a people coerced by government into providing the labor and other resources that contribute to the aggrandizement of the elitist clique that has thus far managed to secure permanent control of our politics.

Despite its populist rhetoric (all that stuff about the people's this and that), a regime of elitist control has been the inevitable result of socialism everywhere. In fact, the whole socialist ideology (from the Fascists and the Nazis on the right, through the supposed moderate beneficiaries of corporate socialism, to the liberals and communists on the left) has proven in fact to be little more than a strategy for restoring the age-old pattern of government that prevailed, in some form, everywhere in the world, before America's founder's steered the United States toward a different goal.

Everything that happens on the excuse and in the context of "avoiding the fiscal cliff" will contribute to and confirm this defeat of government of, by, and for the people — this signal restoration of government of, by, and for the elitist few. Left unchallenged, it will mark the cresting of the rising wave which Tocqueville saw, in the early 19th century, as the inexorable advancing tide of the democratic republican idea.

The elitist faction manipulators of our politics want Americans to focus at this point on everything that distracts them from this fundamental aspect of their situation. The deceitful, fabricated character of the "fiscal cliff" obsession ought to alert sensible Americans to the decidedly political origins of our whole economic mess. During the lame-duck session, the GOP/Democrats in Congress will formalize their prior agreement on the best way to field-dress the fresh corpse of America's economic liberty. Which of us will have the good sense to see through the antics of these partisan vultures, fluttering restlessly as they prepare to feed upon its carcass? In this respect, there is no contest between them. The real struggle is between those still loyal to America's decent liberty, and those who have in every way cooperated in its fall. People like John McCain are anxious for us to forget the issues of God-endowed right that tend to open our eyes to this fact. Like the workers of iniquity the Lord describes through Amos, they long for an end to America's Jubilee, its time under the auspices of the God-acknowledging standard of truth that was and still remains the accurate measure of its greatness.

Apart from such people, there is still hope for the resurrection of true liberty. But only if we part from them: boldly, clearly, unequivocally proclaiming our intention to replace their inherently corruptible politics of arrogant, manipulative deceit. For it is their politics that is presently destroying our country, not our unwillingness to support it. Instead, we must rebuild a politics of self-evident truth, constructed anew upon the foundation of God-endowed right from which our nation rose to true prosperity. Reclaiming an older and still more venerable name, we must wrest from unworthy hands the mantle of the original Republican Party's founder-President, who recognized, at a time almost as perilous for America as our own, what it takes to outface the peril. "The occasion is piled high with difficulty," he said, "and we must rise to the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

© Alan Keyes