Brutally Honest Rant - 08/01/07

Brutally Honest Audio Rant: Political Failures – Part 4
Audio Transcripts
08/01/07

[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.

Well my friends we’ve come to the last of the four-part look at political failures. I’ve trashed the White House, I’ve trashed the Democrats in Congress and I’ve trashed the Republicans in Congress. There’s only one group left. Any guesses who’s left to trash?

Some folks might think that my last pot shot in this series would be at the air-fluffed ego-driven media. I’m sorry, but, no they’re not on the list. Not that they don’t deserve to be trashed, mind you, for some of the crap that they pull… but just not on THIS subject.

Some might think that lobbyists should be trashed worse than the others, because they buy and sell their political connections to our corrupt grifters and shysters in government. You can’t have political prostitutes without the johns, right? And the lobbyists are supposedly the johns in that they’re paying for the services. And that is true…

But in the same vein, they themselves are also just political prostitutes as well. They buy and sell their own services to the special interest groups that pay them. Most lobbyists are nothing more than slick overpaid middlemen, selling their connection between government and the special interests. So they’re really more pimps than johns.

So really I can’t blame them for what they are! In fact, I would use their very existence as an argument that prostitution itself should be legalized! After all, these guys are whoring themselves and their services and their connections out to the highest bidder and then screwing over the whole United States of America. You can’t get any more screwed over than that!

But I digress here…

Let’s put some thought behind this. Part 1 I trashed the Executive branch of government. In Parts 2 and 3 I trashed the Legislative branch of government. There’s only one branch of government left to go after, folks… and that is the JUDICIAL branch!

Okay, so here goes… judicial branch of government. Judges who for the most part are appointed for life… unless they do something REALLY stupid.

Now I’ve got one simple and easy gripe with the judiciary and it is this: when given the choice between the law and the Constitution, more often then naught, and especially in recent years, they default to the law.

You see… part of that whole checks and balances deal that really pisses off both the White House and the Congress is the fact that the judicial system not only has to judge people in accordance to the law, but they also have to judge THE LAW in accordance to the US Constitution! Congress and the White House cannot just enact any which law they damn well feel like.

Contrary to the crap being spewed by theo-conservatives, there is a higher authority when it comes to the judicial branch, but that authority is not God or the Christian Bible; it is the US Constitution. That’s specifically mentioned in Article Six, second paragraph… in case you were wondering. THAT is the standard by which all laws and regulations must conform to.

Now it is true that once upon a time the judicial system didn’t get so involved with whether or not something was constitutional. But that’s partly because they didn’t have to! We didn’t have a federal government obsessed with federalizing and criminalizing every social misstep just to appease moralist special interest groups.

We also didn’t have a full appreciation of what freedom REALLY means in society until recent decades. There are plenty of places where blatantly unconstitutional laws against things such as blasphemy are still on the books because nobody had the courage to challenge those laws and get them ruled unconstitutional. They were enacted by ignorant pricks and back then they were allowed to stay on the books because the judges then were like-minded ignorant pricks who had ZERO understanding about freedom and equally ZERO willingness to take a stand for what was truly right in society.

So now judges have to clean up the messes left by these pricks in government and by the pricks who were their predacessors. And unfortunately part of doing their job means that they have to take all of this crap from arrogant politicians about “activist judiciary” and “legislating from the bench”. They have been continually attacked – specifically by conservative Republicans – for simply doing THEIR JOBS. They have been hounded and harassed by conservatives for ruling on the side of the Constitution. And that’s really the crime here, because here you have the supreme law of the land – the Constitution – and there is absolutely NO PUNISHEMNT for violating it!

And so our judicial system has apparently come to the conclusion that it is much easier for them to simply let a blatantly unconstitutional law or rule stand than to do what is right.

Case in point: eminent domain.

The Fifth Amendment is pretty clear here in that the government can only seize private property – land – for public use and that they must give just compensation. We’re talking for road expansion, for parks, for jails, for bridges, and so on. But unfortunately over the years the definition of “public use” has been so badly bastardized by the politicians – like they bastardize just about every other concept in the English language – that now it basically means anything that the government WANTS it to be.

“Public use” now has become “public benefit”. So if some rich developer wants to take a 90-year old’s family home so they can build a fifty-story condominium in it, they just have to show how much more in tax revenue they could generate for the local government, and that government will eagerly SEIZE that old family home and turn it over to the developer so he or she can make their fortune off it.

Is it wrong? ABOLUTELY! But the courts allowed it!

Yes they did! They said that as long as the government can come up with any kind of excuse to justify the “public use” condition, they can steal your property and turn it over to another private entity to use as they feel like. And if you don’t like it… well then you have to turn to that same gang of thieves to get them to write laws to change it. And you have a better chance of surviving do-it-yourself open-heart surgery than in getting the local governments to clean up their act.

Or you can have your stuff stolen from you by the government if they even THINK that it was from criminal activity. This used to be just reserved for mobsters and drug kingpins, but now it’s whenever the police feel the need for greed. Got a nice iPod? Then it must be stolen. Nice new sports car? Must be dealing drugs. Carrying large sums of money: You’re up to no good, then; we’ll take all that off your hands.

Again, the courts have allowed this! “Public safety” is their preferred excuse to carve away the Fourth Amendment.

The Second Amendment gets carved as well. The standing argument is that the reference to the “militia” is really in reference to the National Guard, or to the police, so you don’t need a gun to defend yourself.

But the First Amendment is the one that gets carved up the worst. “Free Speech” takes a back seat to “decency” and “family values”. “Free Speech” can be shuffled away to some obscure location in the middle of nowhere, or relegated between 10pm and 6am, and even then only SELECT material is allowed. “Free Speech” can be whittled down in the name of politics and political correctness and political reform. “Free Speech” can be taken away from you if you live in a neighborhood with some dictatorial communist “homeowners association” policy.

And all of this is ALLOWED by the judicial system! Why? Because of “public safety” and “public decency”. Because of “the children”. Because somewhere in the United States a self-important minister believes that his fictional “right” to not be offended by anything should trump the established and codified actual RIGHTS as spelled out in the US Constitution. In short… because THE GOVERNMENT says so!

You see, what happened is that the judicial branch of our government has turned into the convenient “bad parent”. They get to make the unpopular decisions while the so-called “good parents” in government, namely the executive and legislative branches, get to appease and spoil the special interest groups. They get to pass bad laws and unconstitutional laws and anti-American laws knowing full well that the courts will simply overturn them. They get to ignore and completely abscond from their oaths of office and then expect the courts to do what’s right so they can turn to their special interest masters and say “well, we tried, but those dammed courts won’t let us have our fun!”

In fact this was something that I started to get into back in part 2 of this mini-series, with members of Congress actually saying – even on the record – that they may have some “constitutional questions” about certain bills before them… but they will simply let the COURTS answer them.

Well guess what? The courts have stopped doing that!

The courts have instead been defaulting on the side of THE GOVERNMENT! They have stopped doing what is right by the Constitution and have instead been siding with the government and declaring THAT to be constitutional.

You know why? Part of it has to do with that whole crap about “activist judiciary” and “legislating by the bench”. Another part of it is that the legislative and executive branches have been systematically sabotaging the judicial process by bringing in judges that THEY KNOW would side with them in their agendas.

And then another part of is, quite simply, they’re TIRED of being the bad guys! They’re TIRED of being the only ones to uphold the US Constitution! The late Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, went so far as to address the members of Congress repeatedly and told them year in and year out NOT to federalize and criminalize every problem. But the Congress, obviously, ignored him, and Rehnquist didn’t follow through by tossing out whole laws like he should have. The judges want the legislative and the executive branches to do their part. So they’re passing the buck back to them… and consequentially down to US.

The whole bit about eminent domain NEEDS to be resolved in the courts, but our court system has absconded from their responsibility. They have instead told US that WE now have to go to every level of government and put those limits in at each and every level. WE, US citizens, now have to fight against the deep pockets of the developers and the deep pockets of the lobbyists and the deep pockets of the politicians for something that should have been resolved once and for all in the courts.

And let’s get brutally honest here… if there is any one of the three branches of government that have rightly earned my ire and my disgust at their actions of late more than the other two, it is the judiciary! These guys are supposed to be the LAST bastion for freedom and liberty. They are SUPPOSED to make the hard choices. They are SUPPOSED to come down on the side of the US Constitution! They are SUPPOSED to make the just but unpopular decisions! THAT’S WHY most of them have lifetime appointments in the first place!

The judicial system is the final stop between freedom and tyranny. It is supposed to be that final barrier, that last circuit breaker, the final firewall. There is no slippery slope after that. If they don’t step in to curtail the abuses of government, then there is nothing else that can be done peacefully. After that point you can only HOPE that people will come to their senses before something serious and permanent and very tragic happens.

We constantly hear this complaint that the US Constitution was never meant to be a suicide pact. Well guess what? It was never meant to be a rubber stamp to tyranny either. If the Constitution really is the supreme law of the land then it is the responsibility of those in ALL branches of government to respect it and to actually live up to their oaths of office… and to be HELD to them.

(Computer – some stuff)
(Fade Music In – “Skylight” by Overseer)

The purpose of this four-part miniseries at political failures has been to show you the full scope of the problem we face with our government.

For far too long we have been conditioned to believe that the problem can be easily remedied by simply voting for the other dominant political party come Election Day. Just change parties and everything will be okay again.

But as I’ve been pointing out for the past month or so, that trick no longer works. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans will make the system work the way it needs to! There are just way too many inept, incompetent, and corrupt people in both parties to allow it to be fixed the way we want it to be.

We need to start thinking outside of the 2-party ballot box. The people are clearly pissed off at the system and we want CHANGE. And we can’t rely on others to make these changes for us anymore. Those days are gone. If we want change, then WE have to do 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”)

[End of program]
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