printThe pathology of an overreaching federal government is fueling the fever of freedom, and all hail to that. And to the Lone Star State.
Glenn Beck has been scathing about the fact that, as the Daily Caller has it, “By 6:00 a.m. EST Wednesday, more than 675,000 digital signatures appeared on 69 separate secession petitions covering all 50 states, according to [an] … analysis of requests lodged with the White House’s ‘We the People’ online petition system.”
Sean Hannity is more patient. He interviewed “the president of the Texas Nationalist Movement, Daniel Miller, who [brilliantly] explained their cause — and just why they feel Texas needs [its] independence”:
“The fact of the matter is, that there cannot be a union between those that esteem the principles of Karl Marx over the principles of Thomas Jefferson. Here in Texas, we esteem those principles of Thomas Jefferson — that all political power’s inherent in the people. What we have seen given on Tuesday was that a majority of the people in the United States, and the states in which they reside, esteem the principles of Karl Marx over those principles.”
You’d think that as the party that professes freedom, Republicans would have embraced the peaceful political divorce that is secession as the quintessentially American response to untrammeled tyranny.
But no. The truth is that Republicans are vested in Abe Lincoln’s legacy of brute, centralized power. Falling back on the Party of Lincoln bona fides (and on the “glory” of Reconstruction) serves as a political buffer against the racism libel.
That’s the mundane, garden-variety argument advanced in Ann Coulter’s new book, to counter the perennial Democrat accusations of racism. After all, what other argument can one muster if you consider Barry Goldwater’s defense of private property an extreme libertarian aberration, as Ms. Coulter does?
UPDATE: Wonderful analysis of the nature of the GOP beast by Dr. Clyde Wilson (via Facebook Friend and pal Jerry Lynn Ward): “The American Revolution was a revolt of the country against the court. Jeffersonians understood that every political system divides between the great mass of unorganized folks who mind their own business — that, is, the country party — and the minority who hang around the court to manipulate the government finances and engineer government favours. It is much easier and quicker to get rich by finding a way into the treasury than by hard work. That is mostly what politics is about. Of course, schemes to plunder society through the government must never be seen as such. They must be powdered and perfumed to look like a public good.”
MORE.