No problem with term limits…
But I think the excuse “the MSM won’t listen” is an “easy” excuse, but not one strong enough to give up on an effective strategy.
If it is well executed, and aggressive, enough would leak out. Right now the MSM can be passive about reporting conservative views, because we don’t follow through on attacks.
The MSM may be controlled, but not 100% controlled, and enough would spill out to have an effect.
Sitting back and letting them have free reign is not a good idea…just like letting them know they can never lose their job is a bad idea.

right2bright on April 17, 2009 at 3:41 PM

I always thought it was fascinating to listen to Beltway insiders sit at a round-table discussion and talk about how “impossible” every dramatic idea to reform government was. Term limits? Never happen. Flat tax? Fun to talk about, but utterly impossible to implement – our ridiculously complex tax code is eternal, and “dramatic reform” would be trimming a thousand pages out of its vast bulk. Privatizing education? Not a chance – you would think the Department of Education was created by Thomas Jefferson, rather than Jimmy Carter. Cynical Washington reporters assured us that every feature of the titanic federal government was untouchable, and no one could ever do anything that would make much of a difference.

Then Obama comes along, and suddenly a young man with no experience and 53% of the vote tucked under his belt is “transformational.” As it turns out, “transformational” means “making the titanic government even bigger and more complicated.” He’s transformational in the sense that the vine growing on the wall of your house is “transformed” when it reaches the second-story windows. We’ve spent decades kicking deficits down the road for future Americans to deal with, and now we’re supposed to get breathlessly excited about a guy whose big idea is kicking a really HUGE deficit down the road. As awful as Obama has been so far, nothing he’s done is really new. He presides over a weary socialist system that has never wanted anything different than what he’s giving it: more power and money. The only novel twist he’s introduced is direct state ownership of private companies, which is really just government slipping a ring on the finger of Big Business, after years of living together.

All of this happens only because we, the people, tolerate it. We really could transform America in a single year. We could demand they burn the bulging tax codes, dismantle the mazes of office cubicles in Washington, impose term limits on Congress and rotate the senators-for-life out of their safe seats. Even at this late hour, we could make them defuse the Social Security bomb before it detonates. We could seal the border with Mexico in a matter of weeks. We could stimulate the economy by removing its shackles, and start talking about taking risks to gain rewards, instead of fretting over the latest detailed plan to socialize everyone’s losses. A united country could force a lame-duck Barack Obama to preside over the dismantling of the state he dreamed he would grow into a singularity.

It wouldn’t even take all of us – only most of us. A few million voters in the right places represents a tectonic shift in politics. All those things that used to be “unthinkable” would start happening, and fast, when Congressmen looked out their windows and saw sixty or seventy percent of their constituents demanding them. Many of the chains that bind our energy and creativity are really cobwebs, so fragile that the Left protects them by trying to prevent people from thinking about them.

I think term limits have to be one of the first items on the agenda, because a government composed of untouchable lifetime feudal lords from gerrymandered seats will never be responsive. 200,000 people in the 4th District of Massachusetts have kept Barney Frank in office since 1981, and given him the power to crash the financial system of the United States to suit his ideology, with absolutely zero fear that he would ever be held to account for his deeds. The centralized power of the modern Congress makes the idea of representatives who serve thirty or forty years, and amass incredible amounts of political influence, abhorrent. Of course, many of those districts would simply return hand-picked successors to Congress after the lifetime potentates are voted out… but at least the Saudi princes, multi-national executives, U.N. functionaries, and cable news anchors wouldn’t be able to get along with the same twenty cards in their Rolodex for half a century.

Doctor Zero on April 17, 2009 at 6:15 PM