Unraveling America

By Jim Killebrew

[January 14, 2014]  ^"On the attempts of government to disarm law-abiding Americans: Listen closely, the drums are beating, the march is on. An army of people are encircling the Constitution with the intent of removing all its relevance. Ever so slowly, one drumbeat at a time, inching forward, making the changes in such incremental fashion nobody notices."

"Sophisticated military fighter planes to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, weapons they want to ban in the U.S. sent to the drug cartels in Mexico, U.S. citizens left behind in Benghazi, continued spending to unsustainable levels, inflation creeping upward, elitists making policy in Washington, military generals being dismissed by civilian power, military resources being slashed, Middle East countries being established as Al Qaeda launch platforms, destruction of terms like 'global terror,' 'war on terror' or 'terrorist.' With the country reaching a majority of citizens dependently sustained on the public dole, the politicians are moving slowly, but surely, toward a European-type economy of collectivism to the destruction of the U.S. Constitution."

I wrote the above in February 2013, looking back over some of the major issues of 2012. The politicians promised that 2013 would be a much better year politically, and those issues would be resolved and the American people would move forward in 2013. Looking back now, did the politicians resolve those issues, make things better and move forward during the first year of the administration's second term?

2013 brought a new set of issues that seemingly left those in charge with the wide-eyed expression of a deer in the headlights. The hearings on Benghazi, Libya, brought little more than the former secretary of state exclaiming, "What difference now does it make?" By the end of the year, answers regarding why those citizens lost their lives were still unanswered. The administration continued to drag their feet on getting requested documents to the congressional oversight groups, and relatives of those dead citizens continued to wonder what happened.

Then the revelation came of the United States government agencies spying on world leaders and its own citizens. The National Security Agency was collecting "metadata" by tracking all telephone calls in the nation. The Internal Revenue Service was looking at selected "unfriendly toward the administration" organizations that contained words like "patriot" or "tea party" in their name to hamper their request for nonprofit status. This was done prior to the re-election of the president for a second term.

Of course the blockbuster was the initiation of the  Obamacare, or Affordable Care Act, government requirements on health insurance. The rollout was a disaster with software being inoperable. With a cost of over $600 million sent to a non-bid Canadian company, the administration struggled to make the website work for the millions who needed to get enrolled. As the rollout continued, it was discovered the president and several high-level officials in the administration had repeatedly lied about citizens being able to keep their current policies if they liked them. Citizens were told they could keep their physicians if they like them. Both of those promises proved to be untrue when millions of people had their policies canceled and found that new ones would cost two or three times more money than the current one they couldn't keep. Consequently, tens of thousands of citizens entered the new year not knowing if they had health insurance or not. Finally, that ended with the president trying to administratively change the law under his own authority without returning the law to Congress for changing. That ended with at least 11 state attorneys general filing suit against the administration for circumventing the separation of powers between the branches of government.

If it is true that the past is the best predictor of future events, what do you believe are the best predictions for 2014? Just for starters we are seeing the resurgence of Al Qaeda re-establishing itself in Iraq; the "Arab Spring" has now been described as the "Arab Winter." This is a midterm election year; let's hope the conditions will be better.

[By JIM KILLEBREW]