As they once would have put it on New York City's lower east side, "enough already with the change."
This idiot mantra embraced by just about every candidate in the current presidential nomination contest remains just that — a byword meant to be interpreted by the voters according to their own hopes and desires. One person's idea of what needs changing can be the exact opposite of somebody else's idea.
It's a one-size-fits-all slogan, a con man's sales pitch. As long as you don't specify the nature of the change, it is left up to the imagination of members of your audience to determine what you mean. And each will see it as they want to see it.
Ronald Reagan's great reliance on the ability of the American people to make the right choices once given the facts is now being challenged by the public's demand for an unspecified kind of change. Change for the sake of change without any idea what the facts might be.
When Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards talk about change, they are really talking about adopting a lot of socialist programs — the kind that buy votes with the voter's tax dollars and eventually bleed the treasury and their own pocketbooks dry. They just don't tell the voters what they really mean to change.
Must there be change if America is to remain the world's wealthiest and most powerful nation? Sure. But we don't have to go scratching around in the Marxist mire to make needed changes. The kind we need are readily available to anyone willing to look at our history. It can be found in the Constitution of the United States.
Over 230 years ago, a group of thoughtful men with a keen sense of history and human nature put into practice their then-revolutionary idea that a nation's citizenry was capable of governing themselves. Up to then, when most of the world was governed by kings, various potentates, pashas, sultans, and tsars, this was an unheard-of idea.
That idea depended on the crafting of a set of rules designed to set limits on both the government they were establishing on the passions of the governed. Among its provisions were safeguards against raids on the public treasury by lawmakers and citizens alike, strict limits on the powers of the federal government vis-a-vis the states, and a line between the roles of the three branches of the government.
The result was a document based on their understanding that while circumstances would continue to change as time went by, the nature of mankind would remain what it has been since Adam and Eve ate that damned apple. That is, mankind's nature is flawed and corrupt yet capable under God's guiding hand of being good, wise, compassionate and decent with a tendency when given the facts to act under the influence of the better angels of their nature, as Lincoln would later put it.
What the founders failed to understand was the iron-bound determination of future demagogic politicians, academicians, and jurists to undermine and misinterpret the Constitution whenever it stood in the way of their plans to effect the kind of change they desired to implement to obtain and guarantee their tenure of office.
Using the false notion that the Constitution is a "living document" subject to change when circumstances change — an idea that the Constitution was designed to govern circumstances and not men — the change agents are able to have the document say what they want it to say, rather than what is says.
Their rallying cry is always that circumstances have changed and the rules must therefore be changed to meet the demands thus imposed. They ignore the fact that mankind's nature remains unchanged and fiddling around with a document rooted in that fact results in eating away at the very foundations of a republic that under that document grew from a group of largely agrarian colonies into the world's mightiest state in just two centuries.
Americans are uncomfortable with the decline of public morals readily accepted by the change agents as progress, with courts that tell them that God may not be worshipped in public and that butchering the unborn is a legally sanctioned women's right. They are uncomfortable with a government that will not secure our borders, with a Congress that spends their hard-earned dollars on bridges to nowhere and hides their prolificacies by allowing members to use the earmark process to tap the treasury.
They're also uncomfortable with spending money we don't have, with courts and legislatures that support the outlandish idea that men can legally marry men and women can wed women, with a burdensome income tax enforced by an IRS with almost unlimited power, and with politicians who routinely ignore their wishes.
All that needs to be changed. The change is there to be grasped. Look to the Constitution for the answers. They are all there. Ignore them and watch America continue to go down the drain.
Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist and World War II Marine who writes for Newsmax.com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s.
He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska.
He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association For Intelligence Officers.
He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com.
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