Left-Wing Tyranny: Here's What It Looks Like

It’s chilling. As the curtain lifts, a little here, a little there, we see the tyrannical left cementing itself in big government - and it gives me shivers. The most leftist administration in American history has been using the Internal Revenue Service to harass conservatives. It’s been lying about radical Muslim terrorism, and spying on the press. What else is it doing? Based just on what we know already, there are bound to be serious consequences. As more is learned, we may be looking at a sea change.

What kinds of consequences? Drastically-increasing polarization of left and right at all levels is a given, and that could take many forms. In government, Republicans will push for a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS and that has the most serious implications for the Obama Administration. Nixon talked about it using the IRS to harass enemies, but didn’t do it. The Obama Administration has been actually doing it for at least two years, but there's no evidence yet that he talked about it. It’s too early to speculate about impeachment, but if evidence of White House involvement pops up, it’s not unthinkable. What’s concerning now is reaction at the grass roots. Americans are rapidly losing faith in government.

Gun and ammunition purchases rose when Obama was elected and have been absolutely skyrocketing with his renewed gun control push. Legislation has been stopped so far, but there aren’t enough guns or ammunition anymore for people who want them. That raises suspicion for Americans who increasingly fear government. They see a president who slandered them as “bitterly clinging to their guns and religion," then rammed Obamacare down their throats. Obamacare spawned the Tea Party which elected a group of representatives to Congress in 2010 to block Obama’s left-wing agenda. And now they’ve been singled out for harassment by the by the enormous powers of the IRS? This is serious - very serious. They’re convinced Obama violated their rights to get himself reelected.

Labeled “racist” and “bigoted” by Democrats, the Tea Party staged peaceful, law-abiding demonstrations and even cleaned up after themselves, unlike their “Occupy” counterparts on the left which trashed cities around the country, conspired to blow up a bridge in Ohio, then rioted in Seattle, San Francisco and elsewhere on May 1st of 2012 and 2013. Obama officials and their allies in Congress have made clear which side they support - and it’s not the Tea Party. Now we’re expected to believe that nobody in the White House knew anything about IRS harassment. How stupid do they think we are?

Occupy suspects arrested planning to blow up bridge

When Bloomberg News’ Juliana Goldman asked him last Thursday afternoon: “Can you assure the American people that nobody in the White House knew about the [IRS] agency’s actions before your White House’s counsel’s office found out on April 22?”

Last Thursday's press conference

“Let me make sure I answer your specific question,” Obama said - and then he dodged it: “I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the IG report before the IG report had been leaked through the press,” he answered, saying nothing about any White House knowledge about which is what she asked.

He thinks we’re all fools out here.

At Thanksgiving dinners and Fourth of July picnics, have you heard relatives say they distrust government so much that they stock up on guns and ammunition? Maybe you thought they were over-reacting. Did they complain that the Department of Homeland Security was buying up more than a billion rounds of ammunition and thousands of light-armored tanks? Maybe you thought they were paranoid, but they were your relatives and so you tried to change the subject or you turned on a football game.

After the admission by the IRS about Tea Party groups, after accusations that they harassed pro-life Catholics, harassed groups opposing homosexual “marriage” or teaching the Constitution, harassed pro-Israel Jews, harassed Evangelical Protestants, harassed journalists who ask Obama tough questions, searched phone records and emails of other journalists and harassed many other conservatives with audits and intrusive, voluminous questionnaires - do you still think they’re over-reacting? Maybe you’re starting to wonder: Did the IRS really ask conservatives what candidates they support? What books they read? What they said in their prayers? Did they actually require pro-life groups to promote abortion? Yes, they did.

Now consider this: Sarah Ingram, the IRS lady who oversaw the harassment of conservatives got over $100,000 in bonuses, and now she’s been promoted and charged with implementing Obamacare. Who will she put in charge of determining how much medical care conservatives get? Michael Moore? Bill Ayers? Will they be on her death panels?

Philadelphia Eagles lineman says "Audit this!"

This trio of scandals offers an ugly view of left-wing tyranny perpetrated by the Democrats running our federal government. It’s the biggest threat to freedom Americans have faced since I can’t remember when. It must be stopped.

As Peggy Noonan put it: “If it’s not stopped now, it will never stop.”

Riding High In April, Shot Down In May

Somebody in our high command let two former Navy SEALs die fighting off eighty radical Muslims. They fought bravely for seven hours and they could have been saved, but someone made a political decision that they should be left to die. Was that our commander-in-chief? Looks to me that it was, but soon we’ll have a full-scale investigation to answer that forty-year-old question: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” This isn’t what I started writing about for my weekly column but after watching our indignant president’s arrogant performance at the press conference Monday, my blood was boiling.

Uh-oh. We're screwed

We know he’s a political animal. All presidents are. A huge ego is necessary to even go after the job, but most maintain basic human values and decency while functioning in the Oval Office. Did President Obama? He was running for a second term and election day was six weeks away. He’d been bragging about killing Osama Bin Laden and putting al Qaida on the run. Then, on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks, an al Qaida group murdered an American Ambassador the president himself had appointed. Ambassador Stevens’ body was photographed being dragged through the streets, and there are unconfirmed reports that it was degraded in other ways before and after death.

It can’t be proven yet, but it’s obvious to millions of Americans that President Obama made a political decision that it was bad for his campaign for al Qaida to draw American blood again on the anniversary of September 11th, and on his watch. So, he tried to make it seem like it was something other than a terrorist attack, and hoped to ride it out until after election day. With the cooperation of our lapdog Mainstream Media, who either believed or pretended to believe his lies, he did.

This writer is not foreign policy expert or a White House correspondent. I’m a retired history teacher, but I knew right away it wasn’t a “demonstration” against a Youtube video. It was a full-scale terrorist attack by radical Muslims bent on killing Americans. People don’t bring rocket-propelled grenade launchers to demonstrations. So, when I watched as President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lied to the families of the slain Americans next to their coffins at the airport, I was enraged. When I watched UN Ambassador Susan Rice go around the Sunday morning talk shows, I knew she was lying too. Right away I got on my laptop and started typing to give vent to my anger. The next day, September 17th, I posted it on my web site and it ran in the newspapers the following Thursday, the 20th.

For weeks afterward, I had to listen to President Obama tell the same lie on several television programs and at the United Nations. I vented my increasing rage again in a web post September 25th, which ran as another column the following Thursday in various newspapers. I watched as the Mainstream Media jumped all over Mitt Romney for even commenting on the attack. I watched as CNN’s Candy Crowley helped President Obama keep the lid on his lies during the second presidential debate which she moderated. Then I watched Romney wimp out on Benghazi in the third debate - and Obama cruised to victory.

Now, finally, it’s unraveling. The Mainstream Media is being shamed into covering the emerging scandal they’ve studiously ignored for eight months. They know they can’t ignore the testimony of the three, brave whistleblowers last week. Monday I watched their faces at the press conference as their hero embarrassed himself with his continued, arrogant stonewalling. They weren’t going to be his lapdogs anymore, but he hasn’t realized it yet.

The president also denied knowing anything about his Internal Revenue Service officials targeting conservative groups and pro-Israel Jewish groups for harassment until it was reported as a Friday-afternoon story three days before. I don’t believe that, and, as I watched their faces during the press conference, it looked like those reporters didn’t believe it either. They knew that history was about to repeat itself as members of the House of Representatives - controlled by the opposite party - will soon form up and ask the same question over and over: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” According to our Constitution, the House has sole power of impeachment.

The worst part of this, however, is the brave soldiers who died at their posts because someone twice gave the order for their rescuers to “stand down.” Then there’s Sean Smith, the State Department computer expert who died with Ambassador Stevens. His mother commented Sunday: “I want to wish Hillary a happy Mother's Day,” she said. “She has her child. I don't have mine because of her.”

Academia As Humpty Dumpty

How can so many college kids afford to party during spring break? Plane tickets, hotel rooms, alcohol, food, marijuana, all cost a lot of money. Do their parent’s pay for it? Do they use their government Pell Grants? Their taxpayer-subsidized loans? And where do they get the time? Don’t they have to study? Don’t they have to write papers? Don’t they have work-study jobs?

Coed Dorm Life

Millions of our young people believe they’re entitled to party - not just for a week in spring, but every weekend or even every night - for years. Most take five or six years to complete a four-year degree and then graduate with six-figure debt and few if any job prospects in this “new-normal economy.”

Remember the “Occupy” demonstrations? Many participants were students who spent lots of time protesting capitalism and holding up signs demanding their student loans be forgiven, not to mention trashing up whatever city they were “occupying.” How did they find time for that?

Occupy Wall Street

College is hugely expensive now, and too few of us ask why. In the late sixties and early seventies I was able to pay my own way through undergraduate and graduate school at state universities working part-time and full-time jobs that weren’t particularly high-paying. I was a hospital orderly on the second shift while an undergrad. I went to classes in the morning and worked the 3pm-11:30pm shift and scrounged for study time. After that I taught school all day and attended classes nights and summers for graduate school. I got no help from parents or from government for any of it other than the subsidies Massachusetts paid directly to its state universities. I got no grants and no loans - and graduated with no debt.

Studying for Anatomy Class in the dorm

It is this writer’s considered opinion that the discipline and time-management skills learned by juggling work and school will be more instructive than whatever is learned partying in Fort Lauderdale, Virginia Beach or in dormitories. Keeping a foot in the real world of work helps a young person maintain some realistic perspective while immersed in the liberal/political/social, grade-inflated cocoon of the 21st-century college campus. Much of what is learned there must be unlearned anyway to succeed outside the bacchanalian dormitories and frat houses of academia, where serious students are impeded in their study by the non-stop partying all around them.

Harry Crosby

The late Harry Crosby, an acquaintance from the WWII generation, told me he got his undergraduate degree from the University of Iowa in the late thirties and he was able to pay for a whole year’s tuition, books and fees by working six weeks in summer. Then he became a navigator on a B-17 and got his graduate degrees on the GI Bill after the war. What has happened in the past four decades to drive up costs so much? Has a college education gotten so much better? I don’t think so. There’s plenty of evidence that it’s become much less rigorous. Students pay more these days - to learn less - as for decades, tuition and fees have risen an average of 7.5% annually - far in excess of the cost of living and with little or no justification from the so-called intellectuals on our campuses. Some of those geniuses at Duke University, for example, where it costs more than $50,000 in tuition and fees for one year already, are raising the fees still more to cover sex-change operations for students.

If you can’t figure out whether you’re a man or a woman, it wouldn’t seem likely you’re going to learn too much at a university no matter how expensive it may be. Many economists predict a trillion-dollar education bubble about to burst when millions stop making payments on their student loans. Will the academic establishment come tumbling down like Humpty Dumpty? Looks like a real possibility. As economist Herb Klein put it, "Trends that can't continue, won’t." But what will replace it? Expansion of community colleges teaching real-world skills and online courses away from the La-La Land of the modern college campus would be my guess.

If you’re graduating from high school and you don’t have a firm idea about what you want to do, my advice would be: don’t go to college. Join the military or get a job until you know what you want for a career. If college will help you get there faster, fine - then go. You may learn, however, that on-the-job training will get you there more quickly and much less expensively.

Talk Is Cheap

Things ordinary people learn growing up in the neighborhood help to understand international relations. It’s obvious now that President Obama was bluffing when he warned Syria not to use chemical weapons, and the world knows it too. Syria called his bluff - crossed his red line. As the late Margaret Thatcher would put it - the president is going wobbly - and in doing so, making the world more dangerous. It would have been better if he’d kept his mouth shut, but talking is all he knows how to do.

Growing up we learned the toughest people didn’t talk much, whereas those who talked a lot tended to be the ones who wimped out at crunch time. Talkers lacked inner strength and were afraid others would detect that, so they chattered on about how tough they were. These are basic lessons men learn about other men. Those who come to power apply them.

Can you remember a president who talks as much as Obama does? When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail. Early in his presidency, Obama want on an apology tour of Europe and the Middle East making speeches about how he was different from other presidents. His foreign policy was to show Muslims how nice he was, that he wasn’t like those other guys. Then he really expected Muslim leaders would all want to make nice. It hasn’t worked out that way of course, and now our president doesn’t know what to do next. He has no other tools in his toolbox.

When a bully goes into a bar, he’s not going to pick on the toughest-looking guy in the place. But if he suspects the toughest-looking guy is really a wuss, the bully will definitely poke at him to see what reaction he gets. When he discovers the guy has a jelly spine he’ll pile on the humiliation. Just so, when the bullies and crazies of the world think superpower America has a wimp in command, they’ll keep pushing to see what they can get away with. It’s their nature. North Korea is doing it. Iran is doing it. The radicals in Benghazi were doing it. Now Syria is doing it.

It’s not going to stop.

A connection ties Benghazi, Syria and Iran and Obama together. First, Obama denied the Benghazi attack was terrorism, made up a story about it being caused by a mysterious movie few ever heard of, and ordered his officials to push the lie. His Mainstream Media lapdogs went with it and refused to look into it any further. Other sources offer explanations for what Ambassador Stevens was really doing in Benghazi: running weapons from radical Muslim rebels there to other radical Muslim rebels in Syria via Turkey. We know Iran has boots on the ground in Syria to support fellow dictator Bashir Assad and they knew what Ambassador Stevens was doing.

Now back to Obama’s bluffing: The day after the Benghazi attack Obama said: “And make no mistake, we will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people.” On October 26th, he said: “[M]y biggest priority now is bringing those folks to justice and I think the American people have seen that’s a commitment I'll always keep.”

Umm, no, Mr. President, we haven’t seen that. It’s been seven months and nobody has been arrested or captured or “brought to justice” as you keep promising. All we’ve seen are lies, cover-ups, and evasions by you and others in your administration.

Regarding Iran’s efforts to build nuclear weapons he told the world: “Make no mistake . . .” the US will “do what we must” to prevent it, and “all options are on the table.” But was Iran dissuaded? Obviously not. They continue on their merry way with assistance from North Korea, China, and Russia - none of whom take Obama seriously either.

He’s commander-in-chief of the strongest military the world has ever seen, but he has little idea how to use it. It’s as if Obama is the remote control device for an awesome military machine but he has no batteries inside him - no courage - and now the world knows it.

And don’t tell me about how “brave” Obama was to authorize the hit on Osama Bin Laden. The SEALS who carried out the mission were the brave ones. Insider accounts describe the president as indecisive and dithering until then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta took control of the situation because the Obama and his closest confidant,Valerie Jarrett, kept postponing the decision.

And the “tough” drone strikes? To community organizer president, watching intelligence videos of al Qaeda leaders hiding in Pakistan or Yemen and then shooting them with Hellfire Missiles is like playing video games with the "Choom Gang" back in Hawaii.

The worst thing is, truly brave American soldiers under his command know all this too. Why can’t the president tell us what really happened in Benghazi? “The FBI is investigating,” he says. Of course, the FBI investigated Major Hasan the Fort Hood shooter and the Boston Marathon bombers too and cleared them both. Will Obama do something about Syrians using chemical weapons? Nope. Monday he told us he wants more investigation. As the LA Times put it: “Obama’s Red Line on Syria Grows Softer.”

It's The Religion, Stupid

It amazes me what lengths to which the left will go to avoid mentioning terrorism and Islam in the same sentence. During the days between the bombing Monday and identifying the two bombers early Thursday, the left desperately wished they would be American white guys. Leftist Salon.com ran the headline: “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon Bomber is a white American.” Writer David Sirotta invoked the leftist creed of so-called White Privilege “There is a double standard: White terrorists are dealt with as lone wolves, Islamists are existential threats.”

Caucasian Terrorists

US Representative Peter King (R-NY) has tried to investigate links between Radical Islamists in the US and terrorism, but he’s accused of bigotry for his efforts. He proposed it again on Fox News Sunday with Senator Diane Feinstein (D-Cal) when she said: “I — I don’t think all of this is very helpful.  . . . I don’t think we need to go and develop some real disdain and hatred on television about it.”

Would this help?

Three years ago, Radical Muslim Major Nidal Hasan shot forty-five soldiers and killed thirteen at Fort Hood while chanting “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great), but our officials in Washington still refuse to call the incident terrorism. The Pentagon’s 86-page report on the shooting refused to mention Islam as a motive! Texas Congressman John Carter whose district includes Fort Hood was appalled. “People are afraid to speak out and label someone because they’ll be accused of being a racist or accused of profiling or being prejudiced against a certain religion or race of people,” Carter told POLITICO. “But in a time of national crisis, which I believe we are in, all identifiers must be discussed.”

How about this?

An officer in the US Army, Hasan publicly identified himself as a “Soldier of Allah” on Army documents, yet the army’s top officer - General George Casey said of the mass murder: “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse."

So General, political correctness is more important than the very lives of soldiers under your command?

Unbelievable.

Uh-duh!

Our leftist commander-in-chief suffers from the same willful blindness. “Why did young men who grew up and studied here as part of our communities and country resort to such violence?” asked President Obama last Saturday.

It’s the religion, stupid.

Obama’s Mini-Me - Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick - said on Good Morning America last Sunday that he had no idea why the Tsarnaev brothers would do such a thing.

Uh-duh!

It’s the religion, stupid.

Former Maine Governor John Baldacci, a very liberal Democrat, played down Muslim association when he hosted a Saturday morning “Inside Maine” radio talk show last Saturday. He claimed poverty was the major factor in motivating the Tsarnaev brothers to bomb the Boston Marathon. Fellow liberal Ken Altshuler was Baldacci’s obsequious parrot and strongly supported this foolish contention.

They drove BMWs Governor

It's the religion, stupid.

MSNBC has been trying desperately to disassociate Islam from the Boston bombings. Before the Tsarnaev brothers were identified, its guests tried to blame the Tea Party. After they were identified as Muslims, another MSNBC guest insisted the Chechen Muslim backgrounds of the brothers “had nothing to do” with the bombings.

So, why does the left so desperately want to portray the Tsarnaev brothers as domestic terrorists? Because it would play into their world view of conservatives as redneck, cretin Neanderthals who “get bitter [and] cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them” as President Obama described them.

Bitter clingers won’t vote for progressive elitists and they have guns. Progressive elitists would disarm them by ramping up gun control and dilute their influence during elections by granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens who’ll vote Democrat. Gun control and amnesty were before Congress when the bombs went off. That riveted America’s attention and unraveled carefully-crafted, progressive spin. Already skyrocketing, gun and ammunition sales increased even more as more Americans were suspected their elected leaders were either fools or worse - they were covering up something.

They’re wondering, as I am:

*If the Tsarnaevs needed asylum from Chechnya, why did the parents move back?

*If they all feared for their lives, why did Tamerlan Tsarnaev go back to visit for six months?

*What were the chances that a Saudi national with relatives in Gitmo being at the finish line and close enough to be wounded by the blast?

*Why did President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry have emergency meetings with the Saudi Foreign Minister while the Saudi national was held in the hospital as a “person of interest”?

*Why was the Wednesday FBI press conference postponed again and again during all this?

*Why was the Saudi national living in Revere, Mass. when his student visa was for a college in Ohio?

*Why does Janet Napolitano profile terrorists as pro-life demonstrators, pro-gun activists, and Iraq veterans - but not radical Muslims?

How Will Leftist Loons in Cambridge and Boston Reconcile This?

Watching this unfold in the locked-down city of Boston, it makes me wonder if this is just one of many sleeper cells ready to activate when given orders to do so by whomsoever in Teheran, Pakistan, Gaza, Lebanon, some cave in Afghanistan or wherever jihadists hang out.

Who activated them? They've been in the country for a decade or more. They blend in easily. Were they recently recruited? Were they groomed by their parents? How connected are Hezbollah, al Qaida, Chechen radical Muslims? We'll know more in the coming hours and days.

Do the FBI and Dept of Homeland Security, etc. know there are scores or even hundreds of sleeper cells ready to disrupt our day-to-day life when activated? I suspect so, even as they simultaneously play down references to Islam in their anti-terrorist training and instead play up Pro-life demonstrators, pro-gun activists, and recently - Catholics.

How does leftist loon and Salon writer David Sirota feel now? He wished the Boston Marathon bomber would be a white American, and it seems like he got his wish, but then he wasn't expecting these heterosexual white Americans to be radical Muslims was he? He's dismayed I'm sure. I'm not. My hope is that at least some leftist loons in that very loony leftist region of Massachusetts will realize who the bigger enemy is. They've felt an affinity for Radical Muslims because they hate what America has traditionally stood for just as the jihadists do, under the concept of "The enemy or my enemy is my friend." It's an unlikely alliance, but it's very real. Will they wake up now that their lives have been disrupted?

Or, if not, what rationales will they concoct to reconcile these events in their liberal La-La-Land?

Zeitgeist

Can you remember the last time you looked up something on the internet and didn’t find it? I can’t. There were times I had to approach my search using different key words, but I’ve always been able to find something, and usually way more than I thought there would be. Often I’d consume hours and hours drinking in what other had learned before me. It’s a great time to be alive.

We live in an age when we can learn nearly anything and we don’t have to even leave our favorite chair to do so. With smart phones, we can do it in the dentist’s office waiting for our appointment. We can do it while sitting on a park bench or on the beach. When I say anything, I mean facts and figures concerning that part of the world subject to the laws of physics. Learning in the spiritual realm is different. The internet can help with that too but silence, meditation, and contemplation are better methods. Many find that using the internet can impede those time-tested paths, and about this time last year I wrote about those impediments in a piece called “Electronic Distraction.”

Learning in the 21st century can be decentralized because all that’s needed is an internet hookup and a mentor willing to guide one along a path of “Cultural Literacy” in the tradition of E. D. Hirsch’s book of that title published in 1987. There is a body of content knowledge with which any educated person must be familiar in order to interact with other educated persons around the globe. Call it “Liberal Arts” if you will - with the understanding of “liberal” in the classic sense of being broad-minded and wide-ranging in our acquisition of knowledge.

The best example of what happens when one lacks grounding in cultural literacy or the liberal arts would be a young person who, when in the company of his elders a double entendre or pun is made and those who get it laugh appreciatively. The young person realizes he doesn’t understand something others do, and, after a delay, awkwardly forces a laugh as though he does.

The American education establishment is moving steadily away from classic liberal arts education but pretends it isn’t - and that’s what prompted Hirsch to write his book. Unfortunately, that trend continues and it’s best measured today by something called Google Zeitgeist. We all know Google, but for culturally illiterate readers, “Zeitgeist” means “the spirit of the times.”

Beginning in 2001, Google began publishing data on what sorts of knowledge for which its users were searching the web. Given the World Trade Center attacks in September, it’s not surprising that the top five were:
1. Nostradamus
2. CNN
3. World Trade Center
4. Harry Potter
5. Anthrax

However, 2002’s results indicated abrupt decline in what people most wanted to learn about:

1. Spiderman
2. Shakira
3. Winter Olympics
4. World Cup
5. Avril Lavigne

Spiderman is frivolous in my opinion and I was ignorant of who Shakira and Avril Lavigne were until I clicked on them to discover they looked alike and were two blondes who sang. It seemed appropriate that Lavigne was famous for singing: “Here’s To Never Growing Up.” Was that the eponymous slogan for a generation of Americans? Maybe I’m the one who is culturally illiterate here, but I don’t think so.

Decline continued in 2003 with:
1. Britney Spears
2. Harry Potter
3. Matrix
4. Shakira
5. David Beckham

Could any of those be at all edifying in the furtherance of Cultural Literacy? Well, maybe. At least Harry Potter is a character in a book.

Britney Spears

2004 results are even worse:
1. Britney Spears
2. Paris Hilton
3. Christina Aquilera
4. Pamela Anderson
5. Chat

The first four are dumb blondes famous for being dumb blondes. That’s the “spirit of the times”? Dumb blonde obsession? Number five is “chat” - about dumb blondes, I would guess. You can Google subsequent years if you want to depress yourself further, but it doesn’t get any better. Remember, we 21st century Americans can learn virtually anything we want to just by reaching in our pocket for our smart phone, but most of us only want to know more about dumb blondes. Then consider that about 30% of all internet sites are pornographic, and that’s probably a low estimate. I’m not sure Google Zeitgeist included information on porn sites when compiling their most-searched data.

A recent question by columnist Mark Steyn is haunting me at this point: “Can a country be too stupid to survive?” he asked. There’s evidence to back up Steyn’s pessimism, certainly, but I must remain optimistic about America’s future, in the inherent goodness of the American people and their tendency to do the right thing - even if that should happen only after all else fails.