Writing On The Wall Dept.

"If you're not yet paranoid, you haven't been paying attention." -- Originator unknown

No scrying is necessary to discern the pattern in these stories:

• New York State is attacking conservative activist James O'Keefe
• The IRS is going after the Friends Of Abe
• Conservative author and producer Dinesh D'Souza indicted for campaign finance violations
• Chuck Schumer wants to silence the TEA Party
• "John Doe" subpoenas and gag orders ruled abusive in Wisconsin
• Bill De Blasio left the Upper East Side snowbound on purpose
• De Blasio echoes Andrew Cuomo's "get out" message to conservatives

Do they make a pattern to you, Gentle Reader?

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"The State...is merely an organized band of predators with a veneer of legitimacy derived either from tradition or from a manufactured appearance of the consent of its subjects." -- Which Art In Hope

Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they have been resisted with either words or blows, or with both. -- Frederic Douglass

The Founding Fathers, as is well known to anyone educated before 1970, distrusted democracy as they understood it: unrestricted majority rule. They saw it as the source of innumerable evils, especially the "tyranny of the majority:" the use of a preponderance in numbers to deprive those in the minority of their rights, especially their rights to their honestly acquired property. The structure they gave the Republic in the Constitution was intended to dilute the power inherent in a majority, that sober reflection and respect for rights might prevail over the passions that can arise from anger and avarice.

Unfortunately, they didn't address a related problem: the tyrannous impulses that can animate a faction which, though it has lost majority support, is still in power and intends to remain there indefinitely.

The United States has apparently had enough of Barack Hussein Obama and his sort. His legislative agenda has frozen solid, and will probably remain so. His foreign-policy stance has been revealed as a fatuous failure, a triumph of wishes over objectivity. His approval / disapproval ratings are at historic lows for a president at this point in an eight-year tenure. The term "lame duck" applies well to him, despite the ten months yet to elapse before the midterm elections.

But Obama doesn't like being balked. There's that "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone" stuff to think about. He's likely to try a lot of rule-by-decree. Republicans on Capitol Hill and nominal conservatives on the Supreme Court appear disinclined to take exception.

To make government-by-ukase work, Obama and his allies, of which there are many at both the federal and the state levels, must suppress dissent and intimidate opponents. The stories linked in the previous section provide examples of the suppressive tactics that have already been put in play. No doubt there are others yet to be deployed.

I see a tyranny of the minority taking shape. No matter how I squint, I find it difficult to see anything else. A tyranny of that sort is unstable. Under the pressure of the dynamic of power-seeking and the swelling resentments of the oppressed, it will devolve into either a self-perpetuating oligarchy or a violent revolution. Sometimes the former outcome is only a precursor to the latter.

How are your civil-disorder and economic-upheaval preparations looking just now?

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"When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places, and by different workmen...and when we see those timbers joined together, and see that they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few...in such a case we find it impossible not to believe that...all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft, drawn up before the first blow was struck."— Abraham Lincoln, deducing from objective evidence the blueprint of a political plot to save the institution of slavery. [From Garet Garrett's essay "The Revolution Was"]

When the writing on the wall is as bold and unambiguous as it's become in recent weeks, there's little excuse for not bracing oneself against what's likely to come. The minority in power won't give up easily. Adverse action by Congress won't daunt it. Adverse rulings from federal courts won't dissuade it. Massive public demonstrations are more likely than not merely to harden its resolve and intensify its suppressive measures.

Historically, a regime bent upon securing its power in perpetuity would mount an initiative to disarm and disperse its subjects, in the name of "public safety." Confiscation of privately owned firearms on any quasi-plausible pretext. Heavily armed and armored patrols on city streets. Curfews and ordinances against unlicensed public gatherings of more than a handful of persons. You know, the way the Feds guaranteed the safety of Bostonians.

The window of opportunity in which Americans could still defang our vampiric overlords is steadily closing. If we repose our hopes in the midterm elections, it's likely to slam shut on our fingers. Remember how adept the Left is at electoral fraud and voter intimidation.

Read Clark's article at Popehat one more time. Ponder his assessment of our circumstances, and his diagnosis of the "connected / not connected" divide. You don't have to endorse the remedy he advocates. Can anyone sincerely believe, given all that's transpired and all that impends, that "the system" as it stands can be reformed by written criticism, public protests, and elections?

But if not those things, then what? The minoritarians who ride roughshod over us control all the most intimidating mechanisms and instruments of force. Absent a nationwide uprising, forcibly evicting them from their perches seems next to impossible -- and revolution is a dangerous game; it nearly always eventuates in more oppression, not less, albeit at the hands of a different set of masters.

The regime atop the Soviet Union fell because it had lost confidence in itself. Accordingly, the Russians were able to displace that tyranny without a great deal of bloodshed; their former masters were half-relieved at no longer having the responsibility for correcting the debacle the USSR's economy had become. Do we have any comparable prospect?

Please forgive me if I've frightened you, Gentle Reader. Fear is contagious, and this morning I find that I'm rather frightened myself.