The purpose of representative democracy is to assess the responsibility of government to particular individuals while allowing the people governed to have ultimate control over who those people are. In most common form of representative democracies – parliamentary democracies – the national legislature can hire and fire the people who actually run the government.
The American system of government is different. The separation of powers means that the chief of government and his chosen advisors cannot be thrown out of office by a vote of no confidence by the lower house of the national legislature. Our American system grants president grants an extraordinary amount of political independence.
Marvel Comic’s Peter Parker, when he was bitten with a radioactive spider gained incredible abilities, succinctly described the moral consequences of this: “With great power comes great responsibility.” Harry Truman, a flawed man, a flawed president, who nonetheless a grownup in a way that no leftists today are, put it this way: “The buck stops here.”
It is hardly to imagine a phrase which is less appropriate to the preadolescent children running the White House today. When the signature policy achievement Obama even claims to have achieved after almost six years in the White House (other than having spent trillions of tax dollars for no clear objective) is ObamaCare, then even the dullest mind can grasp that the rollout of this program needs to run smoothly.
Yet very dumb president and his equally dull advisors cannot move beyond blaming companies they hired to construct the ObamaCare enrollment websites or Republicans whose moral duty to the voters is to hold Obama’s feet to the fire when his administration engages in either outrageous stupidity or outrageous duplicity or, in seems more and more likely, both.
What is most remarkable about this worst presidency in our nation’s history is that the buck stops no where in the entire Executive Branch of our government. Has Obama ever acknowledged a single failure of judgment of a decision which he alone made? Has he ever admitted lying to the American people or at least misleading it? Have Obama or his lieutenants ever apologized to Congressional committees for withholding vital facts, declining to answer questions which Congress has a duty to ask or responding to proper investigations with feigned indignance?
In the Oval Office on Obama’s desk, there ought to be a large sign proclaiming that “The buck passes here.” This man-child who clearly physically, though not psychologically, reached adulthood seems never his entire life to have actually faced anything for which the rest of us – “Grownups,” I suspect, in Obama’s immature mind, face situations all the time in which we either made genuine mistakes or did things which required an honest apology.
The left, of course, has raised whole generations of Americans who often have no father and no paternal substitute for a father, who have a huge assortment of afflictions from “gender” and “race” to “sexual preference” and “disability” intended to take the place of merit and ethics, and which view government and its spawn like public education and college systems as the answers to everything. The Democrats, as I have noted in past articles, are the Lawyers’ Party as well, which means that arguing, pleading and excusing rather than sweating, risking and creating are the apex of human effort to most Democrat leaders.
Cobbled on to this Frankenstein Party are various other vestigial organs. Labor unions are complexes of bureaucrats and bosses who produce nothing, account for nothing, and whose unneeded “function” is to blame businesses. That grotesque Leviathan called “Education” never explains why our kids are so dumb except for our stinginess in funding public schools and colleges. The capon national media struts and crows but can do nothing to inhibit the abuses of government or obtain for us answers to questions in politics that matter.
Among these allies of entrenched leftism there is also no place where the buck ever stops…it simply passes from one place to another, from one office to another, from one part of government to another, with no one, but those outside looking in, ever responsible for any problems at all. It is all beyond even surreal these days. It makes Kafka sound sane and Orwell seem hopeful.
Bruce Walker has been a published author in print and in electronic media since 1990. His first book, Sinisterism:// Secular Religion of the Lie, has been revised and re-released. The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity, has recently been published, and his most recent book, Poor Lenin’s Almanac: Perverse Leftist Proverbs for Modern Life can be viewed here: outskirtspress.com.
