Captive Voters

By Alan Caruba

Americans are beginning to learn what it is like to be governed by a Congress that doesn’t care what they think or want. All over the world there are legislatures in nations that exist for no other purpose than to rubber stamp what the local despot or monarch wants to do.

Those like myself who live in New Jersey have become so accustomed to the indifference of those we elect that it took one of the most obtuse and incompetent governors in recent times in order to get a Republican elected.

Jon Corzine, multi-millionaire, tool of the civil service and teacher’s unions, and serial perpetrator of some of the highest State taxes in the nation was replaced by Chris Christie whose campaign promised nothing specific beyond the fact that he was not Jon Corzine.

Christie faces a hostile, Democrat-controlled legislature. He joins the rest of the vast majority of Americans in facing a hostile Democrat-controlled Congress led by two of the most vile, demented politicians in modern times, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

We can blame Pelosi for a two-thousand page so-called healthcare reform bill pegged at a cost exceeding a trillion dollars. Reid is likely to have a harder time getting the Senate version passed, but if the Democrats remain united it will, barring a filibuster.

Nobody likes the healthcare reform bill except people who are determined to “transform” America into a socialist workers paradise comparable to failed European and Russian governments. In Europe, ten percent unemployment has been the norm for years. Americans regard that with horror, but if they keep electing Democrats to office, it too will become the norm.

The odds are pretty good that our military will be incrementally reduced in size and that offensive war, regime change operations, and occupations will become a thing of the past. An all-volunteer military, such as we have had since the 1970s, is simply not capable of sustaining such efforts without severe human cost to our service personnel. The military suicide rate is testimony to that.

The Army is so worn out and so politically correct it could not spot something seriously amiss in a major who dressed like an Arab on base even though he was American-born and bred. His openly expressed opposition to American policy in the Middle East should have gotten him cashiered, but didn’t. So he killed thirteen servicemen and wounded another thirty or more in a now classic case of “Sudden Jihad Syndrome.”

Despite calls to “Drill here, drill now” Americans who want to tap abundant reserves of oil have been ignored for decades. It is nothing less than obscene that a patch no bigger than a few football fields in the massive Alaska National Wildlife Reserve cannot be permitted to tap millions of barrels of oil. Or that more than a hundred coal-fired plants to generate electricity have been cancelled in recent years because of an utterly bogus limit on “greenhouse gas emissions” that might “cause” a “global warming” that is not happening.

A similar grievance regarding the protection of our southern border against further illegal aliens has been ignored by Congress and, no doubt, given the opportunity, they will extend another amnesty to the estimated twelve million illegal aliens living in our midst. This will automatically double their population as extended family members of the new citizens join them. Apparently Mexicans cannot leave Mexico fast enough.

The most astonishing aspect of the House Democrat vote for healthcare takeover, not reform, is the way it totally ignored nearly a million people who came to Washington on September 12 to oppose it, the earlier “town hall meetings” that opposed it, and the even earlier coast to coast tea parties that opposed it.

When the Republicans didn’t listen, they lost ground in both the 2006 and 2008 elections. The zeal to impose more Big Government, Big Spending, and Big Borrowing, along with bailouts and takeovers, has blinded the Democrats.

We the People voted for the current members of Congress (or insufficiently for their opposition) and, unless we vote them out and replace them with legislators that will actually listen to and act upon our grievances, all the rallies, tea parties, and protests will be meaningless.

If we fail, we will be looking at an incipient, authoritarian dictatorship.