... tyranny was not overcome by protracted negotiations that ceded to the tyranny of the crown in incremental measures and granted the rule of tyranny over the colonies as legitimate.
The Left, yes - the Left is at war - their Glorious Peoples Revolution. They are willing to lie, cheat, steal, swindle, deceive, burn, riot, kill and subjugate whomever they need to in order to achieve their ends. Your side - the GOP - they are busy playing 'politics' and vying for the largest piece of the pie that the Left is able to achieve for them. They cannot and will not even call evil, tyranny, Marxism, Communism or sin what they are. They are too busy learning to get along with it and coercing their constituents to accept it.
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But you, like so many others refuse to even call this abomination foisted on us via corruption as tyranny. We can argue whether or not this is a soft or hard tyranny - but it is tyranny nonetheless. This post- Constitutional democracy has made such tyranny legitimate and that is the starting point for all these 'compromises' we are told we have to make.
In a 'democracy' a people will always vote themselves into slavery by empowering tyranny. As such, this "democracy" that we have devolved ourselves into was only ever going to last as long as the plundered national treasury, was solvent. Imposing tyranny therefore is the object necessary to continue that plunder even after it has been completely depleted.
You are arguing from a point of politics as if the ACA is not tyranny - but just another random piece of legal legislation that is unpopular. I consider that idea ceding the entire cause of liberty itself by accepting the premise that this particular imposition of tyranny is legal. With the precedent now standing - more overt forms of tyranny that you will end up actually recognizing and feeling will also be made 'legal', making any resistance to such tyranny declared to be treason. A little leaven, leavens the entire lump.
Corruption and lies, forged to pass tyranny in the middle of the night - or without consent upon a people is not something that is overturned by the rules that tyrants have usurped and corrupted for themselves in order to evince the designs to subjugate the people under absolute despotism.
Resisting them and refusing to bend is our duty. Otherwise we are just going along with tyranny to eek out what liberty remains until the next time we are told to compromise.
That is exactly what your position demands. Your strategy is to surrender principles and promises for the sake of supposedly advancing them in small increments against a people and party who hate our principles with every fiber of their being and are at war with those principles for the purpose of eradicating them.
If as you assert, the Liberals, Democrats and Moderates who want Obamacare to remain are the largest bloc and the FC has no voice or power to engender repeal - then there is nothing lost with them standing their ground and refusing to be seen as reneging on their promise to repeal. Let them come to the FC to compromise their positions.
But no. All the talk of compromise is aimed at the FC, which tells me all I need to know.
We have spent the last 30 years following the advice of surrender, retreat, regroup and negotiate with the Left. I'm done supporting olive branch petitions.
We have already lost the entire culture of the country by following that advice and watched the Federal Beast grow beyond the constraints of the rule of law. The foundational principles that once united us as a people are hated and rejected by more than half the population and they want a government that is their god.
We lost because we would not fight. We lost the culture because we refused to call things what they were and no longer recognized that the very ideas anathema to the existence of liberty and the civil society were being embraced by our own people under the lies we bought from the enemy about tolerance and compromise. We willfully ignored it, laughed at it and then compromised with it in 'good faith'.
If the GOP and Trump do not repeal ObamaCare - then they simply sign their names to the entire Obamination and own Government-Run Healthcare as their own. Single Payer will indeed be imposed by the necessity of the entire system collapsing as a result of what ObamaCare has done, and is doing to healthcare itself - by design. The AHCA was never going to stop what ObamaCare started and making health insurance an inviolable 'right' to have is absurd. I imagine the 'right' to food, a job, housing and free internet for everyone is next on the agenda.
Repeal in full. Sunset it. Work to empower the private sector to take up the mantle and educate the people about the personal responsibility they need to take for themselves.
People are comparing this to the land war of the Revolution. It had those who were content to live in servitude to the Crown, to continue in chains, and it had its Benedict Arnold, too.
While terrain was ceded in delaying battles, and in some the Colonial Armies prevailed, the army survived to fight another day, and eventually prevail. That war was not one of real estate so much as one of attrition, and a matter of surviving to gain the support of the skeptics in Europe who could assist with the war for their own motives. Why send assistance to a force that might not exist by the time the ships arrived?
Franklin, et. al. achieved much through diplomacy to gain the necessary implements of war and the blocking force which kept Cornwallis' forces from evacuating by sea, but in the meantime, Washington, Marion, and others had to keep the dream alive by not surrendering their principles, even as they ceded territory and only won occasional victories.
Had they not stood fast upon those principles, the military actions would have been moot.
This is a war of principles, which unlike terrain are far more difficult to retake, because they do not occupy a fixed point on the globe, but reside within the hearts and minds of every individual. Such 'terrain' once surrendered, once rationalized to the enemy side, is difficult to regain indeed, where the first ramparts to be overcome are the rationalizations of those who have accepted even a little bondage rather than fight.
It is far tougher to retake than mere real estate, and is lost or gained often without firing a shot, fought over with little fear for life or limb.
The time is long past, but those of us who have long warned of this situation find ourselves once again trying to dissuade those who claim they oppose creeping statism, this time, the ACA (who would never have argued before that this legislation should even have existed as law) from keeping it--any of it.
There are no bombs bursting, no wrecked towns, burned crops, slaughtered livestock or displaced multitudes as a result of this legislation. Instead that battlefield of principles is littered with the withered spiritual husks of patriots who have become something less, who demand less than the full measure of Liberty which is their birthright and should be their goal.
For those who remain, and those who wish to join us in fighting this and other usurpations of our rights and powers, that spiritual battlefield cannot be ceded. There can be no retreat from the principles we hold, any more than the Colonial Army's leaders whom we revere retreated from their principles and their ultimate goal, even as they maneuvered on the map.
The one who sold out and turned coat is recalled with revulsion, and has been mentioned here, his name carved from the wall of the chapel at West Point, despite his great generalship in the Colonial cause (and shabby treatment at the hands of politicians, likely a factor in his defection).
The comparison is not with Washington, not even with Lee, but with more Chamberlain and Churchill.
Will we be remembered as those who stood and fought? or those who proclaimed "Peace in our time", even as they were betrayed.
The choice, the battlefield, the hearts and minds are individually ours first, to be retained at all costs without compromise of principle, to be recaptured when the ability to reason and the spirit of freedom can be revived, but never lightly surrendered.
If people will give in and submit in such a war of words, what hope for a future when even more may be required?