Alan Keyes
Gideon's Army: a lesson for political action
'Pink slips' won't get Congress' attention
By Alan Keyes
This morning, I received an email about defunding Obamacare exhorting me to "Send Every Member of Congress a Pink Slip! You're the Boss!" As a way of dramatizing public feeling about an issue, the gesture called for in this campaign may have some impact. But at the same time, it illustrates the quality of prevarication that characterizes the whole apparatus of political activity built up around the current sham two-party political process.
The people do indeed have the power to fire their representatives in the U.S. Congress. But spending money sending them pink slips has little or nothing to do with the use of that power. The periodic elections provided for in the U.S. Constitution are the only way to employ it. But do the voters actually decide the elections? Or does the sham party system offer them choices ultimately determined by forces inimical to their views and common sense, as well as their continued self-government?
The present political process is predicated on the notion that the controlling money and media powers determine election outcomes. These powers manipulate public perception to hand victory to whomever they choose. Insofar as the politicians perceive this to be the case, they understand that their hold on power depends on pleasing these controlling powers. They can therefore dispense with listening to voters and concentrate on pleasing their real masters, the elitist forces that hold the keys to manipulating voters.
Consider issues like illegal immigration; Obamacare; so-called "marriage" for homosexuals; the murder of our nascent posterity; the banishment of God and faith from politics and public policy; the perversion and degradation of our children's education; the push to turn us into a nation of cowards (by way of suppressing our Second Amendment responsibility to defend ourselves and our community); the purposeful degradation of our international stature and national security; and the skyrocketing debt and spending policies that have destroyed our nation's credit and conjured the prospect of perpetual debt slavery for us and our posterity.
A significant number of Americans, in most cases amounting to a solid majority, oppose the elitist faction's surrender of our national sovereignty and our material, moral, and personal responsibility with regard to these issues. Yet the push to coerce the nation into accepting this surrender continues unabated, with support from both political parties. Their collusion in this regard belies their supposed opposition to one another. Which is why Jeb Bush can happily join in bestowing an award on Hilary Clinton (called, with trenchant irony, the Liberty Medal) that, among other things, ignores her part in the Benghazi debacle and honors her role in promoting the destruction of liberty involved in the socialist takeover of healthcare most of his party's purported "constituents" abhor.
Pink slips, gatherings at overpasses, and other demonstrations of anger and frustration will do nothing to interfere with this elitist faction hijack of American politics – until and unless they contribute to a political uprising (in the American electoral sense, not the mobocratic Egyptian sense) that convincingly and dramatically demonstrates that voters still have the ability to organize election outcomes that decisively upset the elitist faction's collaborative effort to gut and overthrow the constitutional self-government established to respect the God-endowed unalienable rights (and precedent responsibilities) of the American people.
When the Israelites were being oppressed by the Midianites, God raised up a judge named Gideon to be the instrument of their deliverance (Judges 7:1-8). To make sure there would be no mistake about the source of that deliverance, the Lord directed Gideon to reduce his forces from 32,000 to 300. So, there are times when being clear about the cause of an achievement is even more important (in terms of a people's overall well-being) than the achievement itself. Right now, America's liberty is embattled on many fronts. Americans determined to restore and perpetuate their liberty will not win the war that spawns those battles except by effectively re-establishing true representation as the basis for our political process.
But there can be no true representation without accountability – which means that elected representatives must be clearly bound by oath to represent the views, common sense, and moral conscience of their constituents, and clearly impressed with the fact that if they do not, they will be removed from office at the earliest opportunity. Allegiance to their sworn commitment to their constituents must take the place of party allegiances driven by no commitment except the ambition for money and power.
The reconstitution of a political process based on this commitment to do what they have pledged to do is the strategic goal of the impeachment strategy I am convinced grass-roots conservatives must implement in the 2014 election. They must organize themselves to demand that any candidates they support pledge to initiate and support the impeachment and removal of all the civil officers who have colluded, or are colluding in the Obama faction's multi-pronged attack on the U.S. Constitution. They must make an effort to rally millions of voters around the standard of allegiance to liberty and the Constitution that this pledge represents.
Instead of gestures aimed at changing the minds of people in Congress presently controlled by the forces opposed to their self-government, Americans loyal to liberty need to concentrate on organizing themselves to get results in the 2014 election that prove they can still wield the power to change Congress itself, by electing people pledged to repel the attack on constitutional liberty at its source.
Will you help build the network of active, self-actuated citizens the impeachment strategy demands? If so, let your yes be yes. Answer the challenge with a simple action: Reply to me at alan@loyaltoliberty.com. A simple "yes" will do. Then demonstrate your resolve by sharing this challenge with as many people as you can.
September 23, 2013
This morning, I received an email about defunding Obamacare exhorting me to "Send Every Member of Congress a Pink Slip! You're the Boss!" As a way of dramatizing public feeling about an issue, the gesture called for in this campaign may have some impact. But at the same time, it illustrates the quality of prevarication that characterizes the whole apparatus of political activity built up around the current sham two-party political process.
The people do indeed have the power to fire their representatives in the U.S. Congress. But spending money sending them pink slips has little or nothing to do with the use of that power. The periodic elections provided for in the U.S. Constitution are the only way to employ it. But do the voters actually decide the elections? Or does the sham party system offer them choices ultimately determined by forces inimical to their views and common sense, as well as their continued self-government?
The present political process is predicated on the notion that the controlling money and media powers determine election outcomes. These powers manipulate public perception to hand victory to whomever they choose. Insofar as the politicians perceive this to be the case, they understand that their hold on power depends on pleasing these controlling powers. They can therefore dispense with listening to voters and concentrate on pleasing their real masters, the elitist forces that hold the keys to manipulating voters.
Consider issues like illegal immigration; Obamacare; so-called "marriage" for homosexuals; the murder of our nascent posterity; the banishment of God and faith from politics and public policy; the perversion and degradation of our children's education; the push to turn us into a nation of cowards (by way of suppressing our Second Amendment responsibility to defend ourselves and our community); the purposeful degradation of our international stature and national security; and the skyrocketing debt and spending policies that have destroyed our nation's credit and conjured the prospect of perpetual debt slavery for us and our posterity.
A significant number of Americans, in most cases amounting to a solid majority, oppose the elitist faction's surrender of our national sovereignty and our material, moral, and personal responsibility with regard to these issues. Yet the push to coerce the nation into accepting this surrender continues unabated, with support from both political parties. Their collusion in this regard belies their supposed opposition to one another. Which is why Jeb Bush can happily join in bestowing an award on Hilary Clinton (called, with trenchant irony, the Liberty Medal) that, among other things, ignores her part in the Benghazi debacle and honors her role in promoting the destruction of liberty involved in the socialist takeover of healthcare most of his party's purported "constituents" abhor.
Pink slips, gatherings at overpasses, and other demonstrations of anger and frustration will do nothing to interfere with this elitist faction hijack of American politics – until and unless they contribute to a political uprising (in the American electoral sense, not the mobocratic Egyptian sense) that convincingly and dramatically demonstrates that voters still have the ability to organize election outcomes that decisively upset the elitist faction's collaborative effort to gut and overthrow the constitutional self-government established to respect the God-endowed unalienable rights (and precedent responsibilities) of the American people.
When the Israelites were being oppressed by the Midianites, God raised up a judge named Gideon to be the instrument of their deliverance (Judges 7:1-8). To make sure there would be no mistake about the source of that deliverance, the Lord directed Gideon to reduce his forces from 32,000 to 300. So, there are times when being clear about the cause of an achievement is even more important (in terms of a people's overall well-being) than the achievement itself. Right now, America's liberty is embattled on many fronts. Americans determined to restore and perpetuate their liberty will not win the war that spawns those battles except by effectively re-establishing true representation as the basis for our political process.
But there can be no true representation without accountability – which means that elected representatives must be clearly bound by oath to represent the views, common sense, and moral conscience of their constituents, and clearly impressed with the fact that if they do not, they will be removed from office at the earliest opportunity. Allegiance to their sworn commitment to their constituents must take the place of party allegiances driven by no commitment except the ambition for money and power.
The reconstitution of a political process based on this commitment to do what they have pledged to do is the strategic goal of the impeachment strategy I am convinced grass-roots conservatives must implement in the 2014 election. They must organize themselves to demand that any candidates they support pledge to initiate and support the impeachment and removal of all the civil officers who have colluded, or are colluding in the Obama faction's multi-pronged attack on the U.S. Constitution. They must make an effort to rally millions of voters around the standard of allegiance to liberty and the Constitution that this pledge represents.
Instead of gestures aimed at changing the minds of people in Congress presently controlled by the forces opposed to their self-government, Americans loyal to liberty need to concentrate on organizing themselves to get results in the 2014 election that prove they can still wield the power to change Congress itself, by electing people pledged to repel the attack on constitutional liberty at its source.
Will you help build the network of active, self-actuated citizens the impeachment strategy demands? If so, let your yes be yes. Answer the challenge with a simple action: Reply to me at alan@loyaltoliberty.com. A simple "yes" will do. Then demonstrate your resolve by sharing this challenge with as many people as you can.
To see more articles by Dr. Keyes, visit his blog at LoyalToLiberty.com and his commentary at WND.com and BarbWire.com.
© Alan KeyesThe views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
