Been meaning to write this for a while. Just haven't had time.
In a clip from a Town Hall for Rep. Phil Hare (D-IL, the gerrymandered 17th District), the gentleman was asked how he could vote for socialized medicine. Doesn't he understand it's unconstitutional?
He responded by saying he doesn't care about the Constitution. Apparently some citizen gave him a sob story about medical bills and Hare-brain collapsed into a sloppy mass of blubbering pity and voted "yes" for socialized medicine. He says, therefore, his vote had nothing to do with the Constitution.
Well, I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure congresscritters take an oath when they enter office to protect and defend the US Constitution. I think that's their very first responsibility. I do believe that's their #1 task. I don't recall -- and again, I could be wrong -- that the oath says anything about an obligation to bail out citizens who have problems paying their bills.
Thomas Jefferson may be instructive on this point. Yeah, the same Thomas Jefferson who dems claim as "the father of the democrat party." Poor TJ, he must be rolling in his grave. I really could cry. Jefferson was truly so dedicated to individual liberty and worked so hard to devise a means to preserve and promote it. He saw such good things in America's future. I really want to cry. I'm glad he's dead and doesn't have to see this.
Anyway, in a book of letters that were written to Jefferson as president, including his responses, we find a letter from a citizen who had this absolutely brilliant idea for some kind of cutting edge technology. He wanted the government to invest in it and sponsor it. TJ wrote back something to the effect of: "Perhaps you're mistaking the USA for someplace else. We don't do things like that in the USA. We believe in keeping commerce and industry private in order to preserve liberty for all and to grant every citizen free and equal opportunity."
And TJ also got his share of weepy and pathetic pleas from citizens in one kind trouble or another. One very notable case involved TJ's mentor from William & Mary, where TJ got his education in law.
George Wythe was a very well-known and highly respected jurist in the colonies and the early republic. Both TJ and Patrick Henry "read the law" under Wythe's tutelage, and by all accounts, TJ loved him dearly.
Well, Wythe might have been an intellectual giant in legal matters, but in his senior years, he was completely taken in by a young and apparently very fetching woman from England, who was supposedly traveling in the wilderness of the North America with her brother. She flattered and flirted with Wythe. He eventually married her.
Not too long afterward, Wythe died of poisoning. Wythe's loyal housekeeper -- let's call her Harriet, though I'm not sure that was her name -- was also poisoned, but she survived, although she went blind. And apparently the young wife and her "brother" absconded with whatever worldly goods Wythe had accumulated over his lifetime. Wythe, by the way, is buried at St. John's Presbyterian in Richmond, the same church where Patrick Henry gave the "Liberty or Death" speech.
Anyway, when Jefferson was president, he got this pathetic letter from Harriet. I mean, look at her situation. She must have been in her 60's or 70's, a slave without a master (in a slave society, that means "unprotected"), and blind -- useless to do any work at the time. She asked Jefferson if the government made any provision for people in her situation.
Jefferson didn't propose some social security scheme for aging slaves. He didn't suggest seizing control of the medical industry to take care of Harriet's medical problems. He didn't begin a campaign for "social justice" and prey upon the (admittedly non-existent) guilt of slave owners and/or English con artists.
Jefferson gave Harriet money from his own pocket.
If Phil Hare-brain was so moved by the awful plight of his constituent, why didn't Phil Hare-brain pay this person's medical bills out of his own pocket? I mean, the guy makes six figures as a congresscritter, and that doesn't count what he might have amassed before he ran for office. No, instead, he prefers to impose an onerous tax burden and unintelligible socialized medicine scheme upon the rest of the nation.
By privately funding his own personal charitable sympathies, Hare-brain could have avoided: 1.) destroying the nation; and 2.) violating his oath as an office as a rep in the US Congress.
Just easier to spend other peoples' money than your own, right, Congressman Hare-brain? The only trouble with that is I'm one of the "other people" and I got bills of my own, butthead. I can't afford to take up the slack for your constituents.
With people like Hare-brain in positions of authority, it's really no wonder the US is pretty much done for.
And now I'll be thinking about Jefferson all day and getting more and more depressed. Do you know, when he was young, he ran everywhere and he sang all the time. All the time, running around, singing. He was a strange, very shy person, but very happy and optimistic. He learned to fiddle so he'd get invited to social events and wouldn't let anyone call him a "violinist." He took about six years to get his law degree -- or to be admitted to the bar at the time -- because his dad was dead and he hated his mother's family -- the Randolphs. TJ stayed at school in Williamsburg so long because he didn't want to go home. John Randolph, TJ's uncle and patriarch of the Virginia family, went back to England at the time of the Revolution. John Randolph was so rich, he had his own gold coins minted with his image on them. Everyone else just used Spanish dubloons. TJ hated the stiff formality and the bowing and scraping attached to these people.
I'm so sorry about the USA, TJ. We let you down. Hopefully, we'll get some of it back.
Save the republic.
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