An Ugly Parallel.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." I won't be the first or the last to make a comparison between the decline of America and the decline and fall of Rome.
That said we are entering into new and extremely dangerous phase of politics.

Never before in American history has an outgoing administration sought to use the institutions of government to harass discredit and disrupt the incoming one. Seeking to make of themselves a Praetorian Guard that creates and implimentation policy as it sees fit, the will of the voters and the long established constitutional procedures be damned.

This is indeed potentially the most dangerous crisis we have faced since the Civil War. We as a people have to ask ourselves do we want to remain a nation of the rule of law, governed by our elected representatives, or will we succumb to the rule of men, governed by faceless bureaucrats who suppose to supplant their own selfish and self serving decisions for the electoral decisions of the people. Will we actively support this coup d'etat or simple acquiesce because we didn't like the outcome of an election? How many of us have actually thought about or realize that going down such a dark and foreboding path may be a one way street with no exits. A street, that if history teaches us anything, leads only to tyranny, repression and death on an industrial scale.

Octavian did not finally secure the destruction of the Roman Republic by his victory over Anthony and Cleopatra but rather by his assassination of Cicero, the last remaining voice of the citizens and Senate of Rome.

President Eisenhower tried to warn us that if not controlled the "military industrial complex" and its tentacles in the intelligence community would eventually swallow us and the nation as we knew it would be no more. Well here we are 57 years hence and his dark predictions don't just stand at our very doorstep, they are bang and kicking demanding to be let in!

Do we stand fast, raise our voices and if necessary our fists and block the door? Or do we, either by some contrived hatred or simple complacency unlock the door and invite them in? We have to understand that as was warned not just a couple of generations ago that "to not choose is to choose" and that  "God will not hold us unaccountable for or choices."

Men who operate in secret do so for no one's benefit but their own. Just as Octavian became Augustus and turned the Roman Senate into a toothless lap dog, our right to choose our leaders will be gone. We well be presented with the choice between nothing more than designated lapdogs, bought and paid for and as spineless as the worms they will be. Then our grandchildren will ask us what it was like to live in a country where men were free, and why we let their freedoms be stolen?