By Kyle-Anne Shiver
A nation holds its collective breath. America's pivotal election is today. We will either put the brakes on the Democrat-socialists' drive to transform us into a failing European-style social democracy or we continue to hurtle toward the cliff of no return.
Voters have waited through long, suffering months to make their voices heard at last.
Democrats have made an unprecedented mockery of representative government, ignoring the will of the people with arrogant disdain. Elitist hypocrites who campaigned on "love" for the poor party hearty on the hard-earned money of America's producers, jet to debauchery-ridden Europe to scorn our good name, and come back home only to spend our children into serfdom. The words "public servant" have almost become synonymous with "tax cheat." American companies are threatened with open thuggery by a power-mad administration of academics who wouldn't know how to actually produce a single cent if their very lives depended upon it.
The Democrats and their president line up in bowing and scraping infamy before the Islamists, throwing America under the bus of cowardly appeasement. A Democrat president still sends America's finest young people to war and ties their hands with hideous rules of engagement and withdrawal timetables, which inevitably make our bravest into cannon fodder. Democrat foreign policy has emboldened every evil actor on the world stage and made whole regions into powder kegs set to blow at the slightest provocation. Peace with genuine justice is an alien concept to the cowards in charge. These so-called peacemakers have been revealed as nothing but doormat-enablers.
And all around the land, media elites fumble the ball. These dimwitted media scalawags have twiddled their thumbs while 1776 redux has mounted a vociferous challenge to the ruling class of both parties (a class that the media themselves have for decades joined and empowered). The economy stands at the precipice of full-blown depression, the inevitable outcome of discredited Keynesian theory and a president who has bitten the small-business hand that feeds us enough to leave it bleeding and traumatized. Since our media elites are nothing more than materialist fat-cats themselves, they can see nothing in the Tea Parties but economic angst.
What a bunch of ninnies these people are. All of them. From the ivory-towered elitists in charge of the government to those in charge of the airwaves.
They forgot something.
This is America, stupid! And it's not just the economy.
It's the disrespect for the wishes of the electorate, who pay for everything.
What's the fundamental difference between American elitists today and those very well-educated, wealthy colonial elites who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution?
It comes down to one word: R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
Respect for God, our Creator. That's the fountain of American wisdom from which all else flows.
From respect for God, our Creator, comes respect for each individual that God has made. The foundational principle of American government is that human souls come in only one color, in one type, and at one value. In God's sight, we are all created equal. And since our very founding, good Americans of all stripes have worked to further this principle.
As if to highlight this fundamental loss of respect for our Creator as the source of citizens' unalienable rights, our big-government elitist in chief feels perfectly free to simply remove God from the American equal-rights paradigm, as he did when speaking to the Hispanic Caucus last month.
From respect for each individual flows the idea that liberty is a fundamental -- unalienable by government -- human right. Just as God has given free will to each person, in perfectly equitable manner, respecting man's ability to choose his own path, so a government made in the image of God's plan must permit the freedom to succeed or to fail, to prosper or to flounder, and to account for his own life when he faces God at the end of his earthly journey.
If the majority of American citizens want to change our Constitution, if they wish to banish the word "Creator" from our public display of the Declaration of Independence, they have legal ways in which to do this. The states can call a Constitutional Convention to take such steps democratically. Or our elected representatives can propose legal amendments to our Constitution which transform America into a socialist democracy. This is respect for the people's will.
But Democrats have decided to transform America from the top-down position of tyrants, boldly challenging the people to resist. Our founders were brilliant men who put into our Constitution the legal means to transform this country by purely democratic means. But Barack Obama is not legally empowered to make America into what he thinks it ought to be.
What we have in America today isn't just a feckless bunch of big spenders running our economy off a cliff. We have a cadre of power-mad folks who have no respect for the rule of law or the Constitution they are sworn to protect.
Respect for the will of the people is the very soul of democracy. Without it, liberty is nothing but a sham.
I've spent a great amount of time over the past year among Tea Party activists, interviewing many. I've talked to Americans from different regions of the country, old and young, rich and poor, black and white, union and non-union. To be sure, there is among Tea Partiers a mountain of economic angst and disgust for both parties' profligate ways.
But the real glue that holds all these disparate folks together -- and the reason they will not just go away after 2010 -- is bedrock respect for the U.S. Constitution.
It has not been lost on this monumental grassroots movement that lawmakers of both political parties have either ignored or defied constitutional limits on their powers for going on a century now. And for those now taking to the streets in protest, citizen revolution against growing tyranny is the primary driver of disgust.
When a United States congressman who has sworn to uphold, protect, and defend our Constitution is so smug that he can face a constituent and declare that "the federal government can do most anything it wants in this country," he has already proclaimed himself a traitor waiting for his due. When a Speaker of the people's House of Representatives mocks a reporter's question about the constitutionality of the health care bill she just railroaded through, asking "Are you serious?," she has already broken her own oath. When a president does not ask whether a power can be found within the U.S. Constitution, but rather steams ahead with nothing more than a might-makes-right, Yes-We-Can attitude, he has already trashed his own office in the sight of the people.
So as ballots are counted this week and every pundit goes into overdrive trying to pin the whole Democrat rousting on the economy, let me be perfectly clear in advance.
This is America, honey! And it's not just the economy.
It's the Constitution, stupid.
Lawmakers, judges, bureaucrats, and even presidents ignore it to their grave peril.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She welcomes your comments at www.kyleanneshiver.com.
