Louis Roney: The Alexander solution

• Remind you of anything?

“Macedonian, ‘Alexander the Great’ asked his advisors prior to attacking Persia: ‘How do I govern the people who understand more than we?’

His advisor said: 1. ‘Burn their books, 2. Kill the powerful, influential, and the wise, 3. Order the rape of their women and children.’ But another advisor said: ‘Instead of this expensive act that requires much effort and brings a bad name: 1. Assign their least knowledgeable to powerful positions 2. Give the most knowledgeable qualified the most menial jobs 3. Imprison their most influential, wise, and powerful. In this way: 1. The least knowledgeable will have high positions; will be grateful and obedient; and will belittle their fellow citizens, 2. The knowledgeable and wise will either migrate to other lands or become tired and discouraged, will go to a remote corner of the land, and will live there until they die, and 3. Since there will be no knowledgeable, influential, wise and powerful leader to guide them, they will become tame and succumb to your wishes.’”

And that is what Alexander did.

Fact or fiction?

I don’t know and haven’t researched lately, but it sure sounds like a leader I know of recent vintage.

What would Alexander think of Obama’s motley group of inept doers: Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Eric Holder, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, etc.? Even after low these many millennia, it’s still the same: mediocrity and less – but still, remember, we voted them in!

• If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress? Just asking.

• The little war that is all too often being waged between our ears mercifully comes to a pause at times, in what we welcome as “moments of tranquility.” A great deal of the human race seems from afar to be as busy as a swarm of bees in what is strangely a longing for escape from the “madding throng.”

“Tis peace of mind, lad, we must find, and have a witch come nigh. To sit for us and spit for us and bid all ill go by.” – Theocritus (third century B.C.)

And so it is that mankind, seeking peace often employs conflict.

• I find myself trying to “lighten up” my utterances these days, a reaction, I believe, to the grim seriousness of the news coming in from all over the world, even from our great country. My nature has never been to cave in to the things that cannot be bettered. And there is a time when we all must face the facts as they are—the time that we call “reality.” In a democracy, where the people are supposed to govern, the mass of voters should take full responsibility.

But, is it the inclination of the “mob” to follow a leader who exerts an attractive compulsory aura? The honest “reality” is that we have now voted emotionally for a man who was not prepared for the awesome job he purported to covet. Obama did not tell us that he wanted to “help America” – he said plainly enough that he wanted to “transform America.”

To achieve power, hasn’t Obama wantonly decimated our national treasury? Has he turned our country's history into a tragedy? Americans who are vulnerable to Obama's spiel about “transforming our birthright” are like the guy married to the smartest, most beautiful woman in town, and still is looking around.

What treasure did Obama lure us with that we didn't already have tenfold? Didn’t Obama look citizens right in the eye and tell them unbroken cock-and-bull that the cognoscenti swallowed as whole truth?

Dishonest, dangerous politicians are nothing new on our shores. But when we recognize them and still give them the reins to lead us, we get what we deserve, and the dénouement of this story ain't pretty.

I long thought that the United States could not stand more than one term of Obama's arrogant mendacity, but here we are in the ebb of his second term hanging on by our fingernails. Let us be truly thankful for the blessings that are ours – and beware of “disingenuous pigs in a Socialist poke.”

Shouldn’t we go back and rethink our “reality”?