Were the Founding Fathers proponents of small government? Not so says guest writer John Liming.

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Some of the more vocal of the radicals on the far right fringes of nutter-topia like to blather on about how “this country” ( The United States ) was founded on “freedom” and not on the idea of ” big government. “

There is some truth to that if you look at it a certain way but if you are any student of “Real” History – not the revisionist kind that you might find in some Bible Belt  school textbooks since their great revisions took place some months ago – you might run across the fact that the original “government” of the U.S., ( the one that based operations on things called ‘The Federalist Papers’ ) – before the writing of the present-day Constitution was seen by the Founding Fathers as “Too Small” and weak and inefficient to be up to the task of seeing to the best interests of the nation – and it was because of this fear of small government’s disadvantages that led to the adoption of the Constitution which was written to ensure a large Central Government that would actually be big enough and powerful enough to get the job done.

Some of the big-government-hating fanatics who like to  call themselves “modern-day patriots” are either going to spin those facts and embellish them or they are going to do what a lot of them do anyway which is simply to ignore or deny them.

So I hate to break Rightie’s bubble this morning, but The Founders, being very wise, very Liberal in their views, somewhat adventurous and possessed of great faith ( If not necessarily a whole lot of virtue) created a large central government, came up with a Constitution by which to govern and persuaded the various states to give great amounts of what had previously been powers reserved exclusively to the individual states over to the Fed so that the new nation could truly be “Of the People, By the People and For the People” in every possible aspect.

That is how the nation was started and that is how She ran for at least a couple of centuries before today’s radical rightists came along with what I believe to be a power grab as their primary motivation and started inventing all the propaganda and changing all the history to suit their own purposes so that a relatively small group of dissidents, sore heads and born losers might somehow bulls**t  their way into a power and prominence they had never known because of their regressive ways, their materialistic greed, their selfishness and their lack of respect for anyone but their own ilk.

Once the age of electronic communications dawned, this bunch finally had the ultimate weapon and believe me when I say they know how to use it – and they do use it 24-hours-a-day and you know what the sad thing about some of this is?

The sad thing about what I believe to be some of the most prominent of the Right Wing propaganda myth media machines is that some of the biggest and the loudest of these did not originate in America and are not totally controlled by truly American interests.

That fact does not seem to faze some of the “true believer” bubbas however, because at least 6 or 8 million of them worship at these blaring altars and soak up every word they spew out as if it were Gospel Itself . . . getting their daily dose of mis-information and created facts – and they have been doing this for more than 40 years now.

Is it any coincidence that so many of them seem to be so dumbed down?

Yes, America was founded on “Freedom” and “Big Government” because the Founders knew full well that “small” government could never protect and preserve the degree of freedoms they envisioned for their generations.

Imagine what it would be like in America right now  if the Righties who always try to run the government down today had lived in the small government America they seem to relish having so much when the Second World War broke out?

If the Righties had their cherished “small” government back then, there is every possibility that we might all be speaking another primary language right now.  I don’t think the Right Wing idea of small militias could have held back the tide of terror and carnage that was raging all over Europe and Asia’s Pacific Theater.

This horrific war machine threatened our own existence and I think it is a damned good thing we intervened with our “Massively large” and efficient fighting machines when we did.

I do not think that Rightie’s idea of muskets and bayonets would have helped much in the face of those kinds of odds.

So try to remember why I am firmly convinced  there is every possibility that when some Right Winger starts preaching against our”Big Central Government” and proposing that we all regress to the days of plowshares, log cabins and muskets, what they are really proposing is a weakening of the government to the point where they can swoop in, take control and run things from their own twisted views of a world that was but can never be again.

Something to think about isn’t it?

John Liming publishes American Liberal Times.

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