Honest Choices

posted at 1:24 am on June 25, 2009 by Doctor Zero

Nothing makes you appreciate the value of democracy like watching other people fight for it. Even if the democratic choice offered to Iranians was a largely meaningless selection between two “candidates” pre-selected for them by the theocracy, it was still an outrage to watch even that much liberty be stolen from them. To the surprise of many, obviously including Iran’s dictators, the people felt outraged about it, too. Anger over the corruption of democracy is a healthy impulse, even when the democracy in question is so diluted as to be nearly unrecognizable to those of us who live in Western republics. It’s an anger born of betrayal, which challenges the legitimacy of the ruling elite, by accusing the regime of breaking a promise to the Iranian people – a promise that they would have candidates to choose from, that their votes would have some meaning, even if the mullahs, Revolutionary Guard officers, and Supreme Leaders still held all the real power. In order to believe someone has broken a promise, you must believe they owe you the minimal respect necessary to make a promise in the first place. The people rising up in Iran are saying that their government has a duty to them, while a completely totalitarian state is based on the belief that only the people’s duty to the government matters.

Americans place a great deal of value on their own democracy, and the sacred right to vote. However, the vote is only a truly meaningful exercise of citizen power when the government meets a minimal standard of honesty to its people. A false choice is not a free choice. Voters blindfolded by lies, and confused by a lack of vital information, are not free people charting their destiny.

For example, consider the angry and hurt supporters of Mark Sanford. He was elected by voters who believed in the image of conservative values he projected. Many thoughtful people had become excited about him as a possible presidential candidate for 2012. He betrayed those people and made them feel foolish. How many Sanford-boosting bloggers are staring at their archives tonight, angry that they invested so much effort in promoting a man whose public image turned out to be an illusion… and whose judgement was so poor that he detonated a promising career, turning himself and his family into fodder for astonished headlines, to satisfy his libido? He didn’t just break some campaign promises. He lied about his true nature, and the quality of his judgement. If he’d kept his affair secret, and his marriage together, until well into the 2012 presidential campaign, he could have done irreparable damage to a country desperately in need of rescue from the Obama nightmare.

That nightmare, of course, is the outstanding example of lies and deception diluting the theoretical power of the republic’s voters. Far more than usual – more than even the notoriously slippery Bill Clinton – Obama’s presidency is based on lies, deceptions, and media manipulation strategies that nullify democracy by turning supposedly “impartial” reporters into political operatives. The planted questioner at Tuesday’s press conference was the kind of clumsy totalitarian fraud that would have set the news networks on fire if any Republican had ever tried it. Ordinary people watching the widely televised event were led to believe they were watching a question-and-answer session between reporters and the President. The obvious willingness of so many “reporters” to do whatever is necessary to help Obama enact his agenda is bad enough, but literal, prearranged collusion between the Huffington Post and the Administration is like the Iranian government’s nullification of its farcical “election” – the moment when the last vestige of honesty and respect is stripped away from an already corrupt process.

Likewise, the absurdity of a “news network” running a one-hour infomercial for Obama’s health-care agenda, with opposing viewpoints pointedly excluded, attempts to nullify democracy by selling a fundamental lie to the voters: that there is no opposing viewpoint. It’s like those infamous shrieks of “the science is settled!” from the totalitarian environmentalist lobby – back when they were peddling global warming theories, before all their “settled science” stopped passing the laugh test. A robust democracy is prepared to ask if any given issue is truly a “crisis” that demands government intervention, not merely debate how much government intervention is needed.

Americans should insist on the right to make informed choices, not merely accept a few pre-selected options determined by the mullahs of Big Government, with all dissenting information classified as heresy and suppressed. We should also demand every piece of legislation be carefully studied, and fully understood, by our legislators. We must never again allow a travesty like Obama’s “stimulus” bill, pushed through Congress without debate, passed by politicians who never bothered to read all the details, and administered by a woefully incompetent Vice President who cheerfully admits the end result of the bill was opening the already worse-than-empty Treasury to thieves and con artists… with not a bit of economic “stimulus” to show for it.

We must also stop allowing the political class to use loaded language to market their agendas, and insist on an adversarial press that will ask skeptical questions to keep the voters informed. Until we have such a press corps, the best bet for freedom-loving Americans is to do the exact opposite of what our deeply compromised media tells us to do. A plan that cannot survive honest questioning from a basically friendly press corps is not a plan that deserves one moment of consideration from responsible voters. False choices are no more valuable to Americans than they are to Iranians.

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