I had a very interesting experience this past weekend.  Once a month, on Saturdays, I meet up with a writers group, mainly creative fiction.  One of the authors has a character in his story who is an SS Trooper during World War II, and has a lot of vicious moments of shooting Jews, Germans, or any other sort of person.  What is so crazy is that the character is an actor and he backwards rationalizes the terrible things he does by treating it like a “movie role”.  Just such an interesting mentality.

While I was telling the group that I find the mentality of a megalomaniac fascinating, the conversation jumps to politics and they say, “look at our politicians, they use that mentality all the time.”

Well, far be it from me to back down from an essential point of libertarian beliefs, and I tell the group, “for me that’s an essential reason I believe in libertarianism.”

Here’s the part that kills me the most.  One of the women responds, “you’re never going to get a libertarian in office, you shouldn’t throw away your vote and vote for Barack Obama, the things he says are so great and he’ll really make a difference.”

God, I nearly vomited on myself.

I have such a hard time understanding the logical disconnect here.  It seems like the logical process goes, ‘Yes, I can admit that all Politicians are power hungry megalomaniacs EXCEPT for the ones named Barack Obama.’

When I was telling the story to Cedric, he quoted The Usual Suspects, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

And that is the danger of Barack Obama.

Actually this issue runs much deeper than what its culminated in Barack Obama - this is a fundamental issue of the general breakdown of questioning politicians, politics, and people in power.

I think it has become very easy recently for people to hero worship their political leaders.  Its been several years seen we’ve seen the likes of a Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or Mao Tse Tung.  You know a truly evil man in the helm of a great nation (even though we still have plenty of examples in the Middle East, Turkmenistan, and several African nations).  

Also, there is a strong mentality for people to “root for their own team” within the political realm.  I imagine people who are political hobbyist wearing the official team jersey: The Donkeys versus The Elephants.  Within political commentary you see the categorization of opposing view points and how easily swept away they are when people feel as if the person roots for the “wrong” team.

And don’t think this only exists in political commentary, it’s easily seen on the floor as congress as well:

So apparently this scientist is unqualified to be taken seriously because he’s appeared on the Rush Limbaugh program.  And the problem is that this isn’t some wahoo sitting behind a computer blogging, then I could honestly care less what she has to say.  But this person will make policies that affect your life.

Let’s take this even further down to the essentials.

And it would be so incredibly nice to believe that a politician’s job is to “take care of the people.”  Who knows, maybe at some point in history politicians and leaders honestly believed in helping the “little guy” or “people in need” or ”doing the right thing” (which by the way has its own problems in itself – but that’s for another post).

Then kicks in reality.  People who ”do the right thing”, at times, have to do things that are unpopular.  That lets the true nature of the Politician’s job appear.

A Politician’s job is to get elected.  Solely.  Nothing more, nothing less.  This isn’t even a villainization of Politicians, it’s the reality of the situation.  Just like the SS Trooper Actor in my colleagues story, who would commit horrendous acts against people and others and backwards rationalize it, a Politician will backwards rationalize getting elected in the same manner.  The end point being power, the rationalization of empty promises circling around solving all ”the people’s problems”.

So now you have two Politician’s running for office.  Politician 1 is trying to do the right thing, even though it is not that popular, then there’s Politician 2 who is willing to do anything it takes to get elected to office.

Politician 2, assuming he understands the electorate (or as is best seen in the ”Foreclosure Crisis”, the “Gas Price Increase Crisis”, the “Unemployment Crisis”) is naturally going to have a leg up on Politician 1, because “wow, it sounds so nice what Politician 2 is saying.”

Inevitably the person with slippery morals and a need (for whatever twisted reason) to have power is going to be the one who wins the election.  The worst part, is that he’s going to do it by making the public really believe in him, really get behind the things he’s saying, really make you feel like he’s going to solve all your problems, etc.

I hope the parallels are obvious.

In the meantime, this Politician is flushing the fundamental principals of the Constitution down the toilet because of Cult of Personality.  We need to really cast doubt on any Politician who is concerned “taking care of the public” rather than letting a person take care of themselves.  Whether Democrats and Republicans want to acknowledge it or not, when the Government takes care of people, it really mean ”we’re going to control you (of course with the guise of “for the greater good”, or even better “because we know what’s best for you)”, and when you don’t follow those controls… well, I think we all know where that leads.