Politics -- like religion and science -- is the sort of thing that ought to be subject to rational discussion, logical analysis, and the canons of evidence, so that people can protect themselves from manipulation by slick PR and snake-oil salesmen dressed up with Ivy League degrees, the politically correct skin color of the week, and ample amounts of meaningless "god-talk." And meaningless "living Constitution-talk," too.
So let us apply the law of noncontradiction (A cannot be non-A) to the political statements of community organizer Barack Obama, currently occupying the White House.
In 2003, reports CNSNews.com, "Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama received a big round of applause for telling a gathering of the AFL-CIO, 'I happen to be a proponent of single-payer, universal health care plan'." (emphasis added)
In 2009 -- this week, in fact -- "speaking at a town hall gathering in Portsmouth, N.H., President Obama said, 'I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter because, frankly, we historically have had a employer-based system in this country with private insurers, and for us to transition to a system like that I believe would be too disruptive'." (emphasis added)
Therefore, in 2003 we have Obama asserting "A," and in 2009 we have Obama asserting "non-A." It's not good, to say the least, to have in office a person who speaks with "forked tongue." Power people who speak with forked tonque are public manipulators not public servants.
But it gets worse: Note that Obama's contradictory assertions contain a presupposition that reveals a deeper contradiction. For both assume the federal government has a Constitutional mandate to run the U.S. healthcare industry.
But there is no such Constitutional mandate -- and if someone would like to argue there is, please cite chapter and verse. Free-thinkers are open to new evidence, to wider considerations, based on additional information.
Barack Obama took an oath to protect the Constitution, but his own attempts to impose a government-controlled healthcare regime are a direct attack on the Constitution. He is assaulting what by oath he is supposed to protect. That's a contradiction.
A cannot be non-A, even if the snake-oil salesman uttering the contradiction smiles big and wide while insulting your intelligience. But here we're talking about very bad political "medicine," the sort that enlivens tyranny but eviserates liberty.
As some have noted, neither kingdoms, nations, nor houses divided against themselves can stand. See Matthew 12:25. Antithetical, contradictory, snake-oil politics is a leading indicator of failure on the way. The preachers of a national, societal, and spiritual self-destruction are already in our midst.
What really needs an overhaul is not healthcare, but U.S. politics. What is really needed is a reformation based on a return to the Declaration, the Constitution, and to verifiable information from the Creator, which expresses a rational and humane basis for freedom and dignity in the first place.
Such a reformation is logically consistent, evidentially supported, and yields a politics of conviction-based liberty. It's a shame that the stated contradictory views of some in Washington, D.C., take Americans in a totally opposite direction.
The good news is we need not follow the contradictions of today's tyrants, just as the Founding Fathers did not have to follow the impositions of yesteryear's tyrants. Let freedom ring.