Say what you will about American exceptionalism, one thing we don’t do well is tyranny. There have been some fantastic tyrants throughout history, the pharaohs, the Caesars, some of the British monarchs, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung; but where is the great American tyrant? The best we’ve been able to produce are Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, and now Barack Obama. All sad substitutes for super tyrants like Idi Amin, or the Ayatollah Khomeini.
I guess you could blame our inadequacy in the tyrant department on our founding fathers. That pesky Constitution they developed makes it difficult for a tyrant to make it big in this country… almost like they did it on purpose. You could say that it has something to do with the people who shoot for tyranny in our country. It’s seldom the military men who occasionally rise to power; having fought for freedom, they are generally loathe to annihilate it. No, it’s generally the self exalted elitists who see liberty as a poor excuse for allowing their “inferiors” to run their own lives. These are those too privileged to go to regular schools, hold normal jobs, or live quiet lives in middle class neighborhoods. Lives of privilege provide no toughness, and no understanding of the struggles and fears of the common man; key ingredients for the successful tyrant!
Ultimately, tyranny fails when people prefer death to the loss of liberty. Americans are peculiar when it comes to being subjects instead of citizens. When commanded to get in line and follow orders, we don’t. We have a rebel spirit that reacts poorly to cages and restrictions. Order national monuments closed, and we will travel to Washington to tear down the barricades. Tell us we can’t have guns, and we will go buy one, just because you told us we can’t! Going along to get along is not in the national DNA; for us, rebellion is a form of recreation. These nerdy little megalomaniacs that occasionally arise have generally found little success in fomenting their ordering of a society that thrives in disorder, and sustains itself in chaos.
IMHO: Incompetence seems to be a bipartisan attribute in Washington these days. If the opposition and the courts that are supposed to protect us from tyranny have proven incompetent, we can be thankful at the least that tyranny itself has failed. How ironic will it be if after all the battling over the Affordable Care Act, it simply falls from its architects’ inability to provide something as simple as a working website? Having won every legal battle and passed every legislative hurdle; what if, as with Prohibition, the People refuse to be bound? A few legislators have called this anarchy… I call it America.
Really good Kevin!
Excellent thoughts, Kevin. You should send this one to all the dems and to those hypocrite elitists in the republican party! They just can’t get us to agree to their tyranny! This article is uplifting — makes me think we will get out of this mess.
Equating the roll out of an e-commerce site as involved as the national health exchange to “something as simple as a working website” demonstrates a lack of understanding of the complexity of the task which, by the way, has been taken on by private IT companies, not the federal government. This blog post on the Washington Post site covers some of the details, if you are interested. Following the charade over the Affordable Care Act from a safe distance, I find it revealing how little informed, or should I say ignorant, its fiercest critics appear to be. It must be fear of the law’s imminent success which will go into history as President Obama’s greatest accomplishment and virtually guarantee that a Democratic contender will win the 2016 presidential election.
@tsc444: I am sorry if I created the impression that I thought government bureaucrats were actually writing the code for this website. Without having read the link you provided I intuitively knew that the task had been outsourced; that’s how we do government here. In listening to the reviews from other IT professionals, I also understand that the task was done poorly, and really had no chance of working from the beginning. Assuming pure motives and allowing for the monumental task, the fact remains that the rollout was a disaster, and all but the most partisan apologists will admit to that. Explaining the failure doesn’t excuse it; indeed the complexity of the system was one of the chief warnings the critics of Obamacare warned us about. This large a bureaucracy may not even be able to work smoothly; and this is our health and well being we are talking about.
“But the exchange may have deeper design flaws. As discussed above, the site needs to interact with a large number of databases operated by various federal and state agencies. If these back-end systems are poorly designed, it could take months or even years to straighten out the mess.” (from the cited Washington Post link)
Thank-you for that comforting thought! I was happier in my ignorance.
It is not my intention to defend the rollout (or Obamacare, for that matter) but let’s not forget that the health exchange serves as a platform mostly for those who have not been able to purchase affordable coverage in the past. If you are covered by your employer or are in a position to buy your own insurance plan you can still do so. Nobody is forcing you to purchase a health plan through the exchange so your argument that everybody’s health and well-being are at stake does not hold. And for the uninsured things couldn’t get any worse as it is, so the health exchange can only make things better.