Brutally Honest Rant - 06/27/07

Brutally Honest Audio Rant: Step Two?
Audio Transcripts
06/27/07

[Start Program]

(Computer – Introduction)
(Music intro – “American Idiot Remix” – by Green Day and David Matthews 2)

Good evening and welcome to this week’s Brutally Honest Rant. I’m David Matthews 2, writer of the weekly online column Brutally Honest.

You know what’s really frustrating for me? When you build something and you forget a certain step in the instructions, and then you realize that you screwed up and at that point it’s too late to do anything about it.

Back when I was building model spaceships, I got really frustrated because I spent all of this time and effort getting the pieces together, shaving off the extra plastic junk, then putting it all together according to the instructions, only to find out that I skipped step four, and then step ten makes reference to it and that’s after all the parts are full of glue and decals and some of it is already hardening. So now I have to either try to make do without it or else find some way to backtrack enough to get that step done, and either way it really doesn’t come out right.

It reminds me of an episode of “South Park”, where the boys are trying to figure out about corporations. In the process of finding out, they come across these gnomes who steal underwear from people’s dressers. They follow the gnomes to their hideout and discover that they have a whole cavern full of stolen underwear.

You see, what the gnomes were doing was following their business plan. This was all an orchestrated plan for them to get rich.

Step one was to steal underwear.

Step two was… well it was step two.

And then step three was PROFIT!

But when the boys asked what step two was, nobody had an answer for that… although they DID know that it came AFTER step one, which was to steal the underwear… and it came BEFORE step three, which was profit. They didn’t know why they had to steal the underwear, or what to do with it, except that it was the integral part of step one, which would lead to step two, and then to step three, which was profit.

That joke carried on for about five minutes, but I think you get the point. They had a poor plan, and because of that poor plan, they just had a huge cavern full of underwear and no profit.

Unfortunately, that pretty much parallels both foreign and domestic policies for the past few years. Certainly it is the case in recent years, and quite possibly goes back through much of the Cold War.

You see, for many years now we’ve been promoting this idea that DEMOCRACY is the cure to the world’s problems. Religious extremism? Bring in DEMOCRACY! Mideast thugs? Bring in DEMOCRACY? South American thugs? Bring in DEMOCRACY! You do that, and you create FREE SOCIETY and all of these other problems just go away.

The Bush Imperium certainly adheres to this mindset! This is what they continually preach to the dwindling choir. They continually preach that DEMOCRACY will bring about a free society. They point to Iraq and they point to the Palestinian territories as proof.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t really WORK that way!

Here is the plan as laid out by our White House…

Step one… set up a democracy.

And then step three is a free society!

You see, here’s the problem: democracy in and of itself is NOT ENOUGH to bring a free society. It is not enough because democracy by its very nature CANNOT bring a free society!

Democracy is nothing more than a formalized version of mob rule! It is whatever the MAJORITY wants to do. If the majority says that you should be forced to give up your house for them, then the majority wins. Israel was doing that all through the West Bank for many years. Democratic government… majority rules… majority wants to expand, so it sucked to be a Palestinian in those areas.

Look at Venezuela. Free elections? Sure… and the people elected Hugo Chavez, and now they’re losing their choices. They lost their choice of TV stations. They’re taking over the oil companies and chasing out businesses that don’t adhere to Chavez’s socialist standards. You have plenty of people over there who are pissed and there’s nothing they can do about it. And remember: he was elected in a DEMOCRACY!

Look at Iraq. One of the biggest problems with Iraq is that you have three factions… two of them are Shiites, and one of them is Sunni. Two-to-one… it sucks to be Sunni. And of course under Saddam Hussein, it was the other way around… the Sunnis got everything and the Shiites got screwed over. Obviously they can’t have Saddam back in power… THANKFULLY… so the only thing left to do is to rebel against the democracy that is simply screwing them over.

Look at the Palestinian areas. They had elections, and guess who they elected? The terrorist group Hamas! Hey, Democracy rules, right? Especially after “the majority” decided that it was best to not just put Hamas in power, but then to exterminate the minority Fatah party. And I mean exterminate as in KILL them!

Hey, that’s DEMOCRACY for you right there! It is majority rule. If the leaders elected by the majority say that you should be dead, then you’re dead. It sucks to be a Fatah supporter in the Gaza strip right now.

Obviously, democracy DOES NOT instantly lead to a free society. So what does? What is that missing Step Two?

Let’s get brutally honest here… that missing step to a free society is to PROMOTE and to ADVANCE FREEDOM!

Democracy in and of itself cannot bring a free society because it enslaves you, the individual, the ultimate of minority groups, to the will of the masses. That’s something that America’s founding fathers knew way back when they were rebelling against the British Empire and they were looking to come up with a better way.

They realized that democracy, in and of itself, would not work, so they restrained it with something else. And contrary to the babblings of conservatives and neo-conservatives and everyone else in the Christian Coalition, that “something else” WAS NOT CHRISTIANITY! It was FREEDOM! They restrained democracy with a framework that said that FREEDOM was more important than majority rule! And to make sure that it STAYS that way, they knew that we would have to actively exercise it and to defend it… and to PROMOTE it!

THAT, my friends, is what is missing in the equation in Iraq! They just have a government and they have a constitution and they have elections… they have democracy, but they don’t have FREEDOM. They just have majority rule. And if majority rule decides to change in five years… well then they may be back to square one.

The real problem, though, is not that we are forgetting this step when we encourage other countries to adopt democracy-style governments… the real problem is that we as Americans are forgetting this step ourselves!

We have various levels of government full of people who are not only full of themselves and full of crap, but also believe that just because they were elected into office by “the majority” that they can pretty much do whatever they want to! They can tax the crap out of the masses. They can stifle certain businesses just on their PERSONAL likes and dislikes. They can steal private property and turn it over to developers at any time, and for any reason whatsoever. They can do all this because THEY WERE ELECTED by “the majority”!

You want a law passed? Crank out a poll that says that “the majority” supports it and they’ll get it passed! Even if the poll is rigged worse than professional wrestling, it doesn’t matter! You grease enough palms and spread that poll around enough and your law will be made real. It doesn’t matter how many freedoms it infringes on! It doesn’t matter if it violates either the spirit or the letter of the US Constitution! There are plenty of politicians out there today who will tell you with a straight face and with an arrogance that has not been seen since Napoleon Bonaparte that their law is Constitutional simply because THEY HAVE SAID SO!

We have a judicial system that is suffering from Constitutional amnesia. They have FORGOTTEN about freedom and have instead defaulted to protecting the government, saying through various rulings that anything the government does is good because they were “elected by the majority”.

Don’t like a law? Tough! You’ll get no satisfaction from the courts now! They’ll tell you to simply vote the bastards out, and then HOPE… desperately HOPE… sometimes hope in VAIN… that the next batch of bastards you bring in will actually care one whit about freedom! You look at the Democrats in Congress now… after replacing years of GOP kelptocracy… and you have to wonder if they really learned from the lessons of this past November.

We are forgetting about that second step. We are forgetting about FREEDOM! We are giving lip-service to it, but most of us have absolutely NO IDEA WHATSOEVER what freedom REALLY is or REALLY means!

Freedom is more than just a bumper sticker. It is more than just a political buzzword for politicians to banter about. It is a concept, it is an idea, and it is the guiding FOUNDATION for a FREE SOCIETY.

If we do not practice it, then we have no idea what it really means.

If we do not practice it, then we cannot teach others about it.

If we do not practice it, then we cannot expect other nations to know what it is.

If we do not practice it, then we cannot encourage other nations to do the same.

And if we do not practice freedom ourselves, not only do we NOT have a free society, but all of our efforts to encourage one in other nations will be for NOTHING! And we will have nobody to blame for that but ourselves, because these other nations will just be following our lead.

(Computer – some stuff, but you’re probably too busy to care)
(Fade Music In – “Mythodea” by Vangelis)

Okay, three things really quick…

First, this Friday… I want you to go to www.shocknetradio.com around 9:15pm Eastern Time and listen to the debut of my weekly segment about news and politics. This will be a regular ongoing series, and, no, there WILL NOT be any transcripts for this. Also this is the online radio station that we are working with to bring back the full Brutally Honest show, so once we get that kicked off, you’re going to see a some serious changes here.

Second… there’s someplace else that I want you folks to check out. It’s called SaveNetRadio.org, and it involves Internet Radio and the orchestrated shakedown being carried out by the federal government on behalf of the recording oligarchy. There’s a bill that’s in the works to fix this problem, but it needs your support. So please go to SaveNetRadio.org and find out what needs to be done.

And third, next week will be the Fourth of July. And since it does fall on a Wednesday this year, I DO have something planned for next week’s rant, but it will be something very special and I’m planning on spending all of my time on that day to do it. So I hope you will check it out next week and let me know what you think about it.

(Pause)

Brutally Honest is a Get Brutal production; all opinions expressed are those of the commentator, and may or may not be shared by the online provider. This is David Matthews 2 saying good night, and I’ll speak with you soon!

(Fade out)
(Computer – Ending/“End of Recording”)

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