Tuesday, June 13, 2017

At A Perilous Moment: History Beckons Us Anew!

Think about this for a moment.
Over the past 70 years, only five presidencies have been fortunate enough to hold the White House for two full consecutive terms, or eight years.
Only five: Eisenhower, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama.
Truman served the remaining term of FDR and then one-term of his own (via a miraculous upset win) before declining to seek a second full term at a time when his poll numbers were very low.
JFK's first term was cut short at the hands of hate and violence -- an assassination with unanswered questions and an event that plunged America into decades of upheaval.
Johnson was forced out of office by massive protests over the Vietnam war. He declined to seek a second full term.
Nixon, on the brink of impeachment, was forced to resign.
Ford finished Nixon's term but could not even get elected to a single full term himself.
Carter completed one term and then was soundly rejected by the voters.
George H. W. Bush suffered pretty much the exact same fate.
And, while Clinton did serve two full terms he became the first elected president ever to be impeached -- a stain on his presidency that will never go away.
Take away the three years of JFK because his presidency ended in an horrific act of fate and we will never know whether he would have achieved a second full term. That leaves 67 years of presidencies, 27 of which ended without achieving the maximum two full terms. That's roughly 40 percent!
America has been through a tremendous amount of instability -- especially from the mid 1960s onward.
The Kennedy assassination sent shock waves through our system. The Vietnam war tore us apart and left us scorned and dishonored. The Watergate scandal and subsequent events racked our faith in government. The failed presidencies of Ford, Carter (those were back-to-back) and George H. W. Bush further eroded confidence at critical moments in our history. The Clinton scandals and eventual impeachment cheapened the White House amidst a tawdry atmosphere that hastened the coarsening of the culture. And one can certainly not count the Obama years as a time that brought us together as Obama was barely able to crack 50 percent of the vote in 2008 and 2012 and his party lost thousands of elected offices during his time as president. Plus, those eight years were followed by a veritable electoral revolution and one of the most sweeping upsets in history.
You'd think we'd want a bit of time to catch our breaths, wouldn't you?
You'd think that reasonable people would want to give our new, duly-elected government a chance to succeed, yes?
You'd think that some people would be so weary after the last campaign that they would proceed cautiously and avoid, at all costs, spitefulness, vindictiveness and the sort of petty shenanigans that threaten the very fiber of our democracy.
Looking back on the last 70 years, you'd think all that because you'd know by now how fragile democracy really is and how dangerous all this can be. You'd want to give stability a chance, or so one would assume.
But that's not the case. That's not what we're facing today.
Because now, incomprehensible as it may seem, we have in our midst some of the most condescending, selfist, vituperative and destructive forces I've ever witnessed -- and I've seen a lot, an awful lot.
These people and the forces they've unleashed are driven by their own mean-spirited and ruinous agenda -- an agenda that seeks nothing less than total chaos, if not actual civil unrest.
They have no plan, no solution -- only a calamitous scheme to bring down the government.
And what's really scary is this: Some of the most powerful elements in our society (big media, academia, much of the Washington establishment, the popular culture, the deep state, etc.) seem to be behind it all.
This is a perilous time for America. Perilous!
But that only summons us, all the more, to our duty as patriots.
We have one option and one option only: The vigorous, diligent, thorough, unrelenting defense of our duly-elected government and the Constitution it serves -- and that starts with defending our President. The alternative is a democratic system torn asunder and a nation in tatters.
For ourselves, for our children and grandchildren, for America, we must stand together against the enemy within and say: "Enough! You will not get away with this. You will not take our country from us -- not now, not tomorrow, not ever!"
Our nation is too great and our democracy is too grand to be torn apart like this.
Avanti!

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