Baking cake is normally a glorious affair because the eating of cake is a bit of ecstasy that can civilize the palate while soothing the suffering in one’s soul. It is a pleasure that can force a smile from even the cruelest of dictators apparently causing them to forget, at least momentarily, their despotic duties and oppressive obsessions. It should be somewhat difficult to harm oneself, or one’s nation, with cake unless possibly due to recent economic changes one has to choose between heating one’s home or baking a cake and, understandably, chooses the latter but subsequently freezes to death while in a #CakeComa. But for the record, even if the candidate being inaugurated in January 2025 is not the one that you chose with either your voice or your vote, you should still celebrate this momentous occasion with #InaugurationCake because our nation still actually gets to select a new President every four years. And on an especially despotic planet like the third one from this sun, which is referred to colloquially as #Earth, a peaceful election followed by a peaceful transition is almost always cause for celebration. Therefore, we should all enjoy some #InaugurationCakewhile America transitions executive teams because the very tenets of totalitarianism and despotism are being usurped by this model, even though it is not perfect, election process. But if you are, in fact, a loathsome and delusional creature who celebrates #Totalitarian regimes and the tyrants whom run them, then you can skip the cake but please, do not ruin the celebration for the rest of us.
And because election outcomes can sometimes feel unfair, we must be careful to continually provide ample coverage for all citizens under a cloak of #Justice if there is to be any #LibertyCake for all of the people to enjoy. In order for #Justice to cover us evenly the founders constitutionally positioned our judges to be free from political intrigue by appointing some of them for life and, in a few cases, apparently even longer. However, once our political beliefs became a de facto religion a class of believers was created that apparently have neither the faith in #Democracy nor the fortitude to abstain from becoming extremists, political cronies, and profiteers. When our system of justice is poisoned by political intrigue and subverted, oppression is introduced and this can be seen in the now plainly visible political weaponization of governmental agencies. When political opponents and opposition view holders can be persecuted by those in power, eventually ballot control will be used as one of the tools to procure more power by those to whom providing for fair voting is anathema: the #Despots, #Dictators, #Oligarchs and their legions of brigands whose only true loyalty is to the opportunity to profiteer in order to gain more power.
In this past election it was even postulated by individual states, in a union of states that is to be ruled by one executive person whom must be elected by all of the states, that a state could dictate to all of the states that one individual could not be included on the national ballot. This conjecture is so patently partisan that only delusional minions and rabid extremists could possibly believe that it has either any basis in law or any place in this objective reality.1 Notwithstanding that some candidates are more appealing than others in certain locales, and that some locales will have strong preferences for certain perceptions of policy positions regardless to their relevance in the election outcome and subsequent governance scope of the elected, these preferences are often turned into #Orwellian - like slogans to be used when any aspect of a utopic election outcome fantasy is challenged. But #LibertyCake in a #Republic is the just reward for an involved citizenry committed to adhering to the #RuleOfLaw and attempting to usurp unwanted outcomes of any election with rioting and/or violence undermines the #Republic and every single #Freedom guaranteed by its structure.
Fair voting is cause for celebration in any society, but this is especially true after an actual dictatorship is dissolved and the people are given the luxuriant freedom of participating in their own governance. I say ‘actual dictatorship’ in order to differentiate between actual and imagined by referring to the one that ended in Iraq in this era, where an actual dictator practiced throwing some enemies off of buildings while feeding others to lions until he was eventually hung from the neck until dead by his own people. When this actual dictator is juxtaposed against an imaginary one, whom oddly enough actually transitioned power to the next party peaceably after the last election and whom is to be inaugurated to the office of President after this one, the difference should be clear. The actions of the citizenry of Iraq after their Dictators removal in voting on how their own #Liberty would be adjudicated, demonstrated a desire for freedom from actual oppression that was so great that they were willing to line up and vote even though the ink used to mark them as having voted stained their hands and made them targets of violence. And do not forget that many #Iraqis, #Afghanis, and other persons whom were recently liberated from actual oppression have given their lives to help make a cake that they knew they might not live to consume and that our short attention spans and stupid ideas may have actually ruined. We should therefore be careful with the amount of #Discord that we sow by using either our positions (e.g. buffoonery from the bench) or our platforms (e.g. malignancy-minded media forays into projecting outcomes rather than reporting them) to derail the very democratic functions that serve us all. To borrow a line of thinking but not an exact quote from Mr. Albert Camus, whom I am reading at the moment and whom I will cite here in an attempt to avoid the degradation of being nominated to serve as President of an Ivy-League University once I have borrowed enough from everyone else’s efforts and honest intellectual pursuits to over-aggrandize myself into acceptance as a leader of those with whom I failed to participate properly as a peer, I believe that it is appropriate to surmise that:
A society that sows discord should expect to reap anarchy.2
The cake we are preparing must be inclusive in ways that are representative of our democracy and must ensure that any citizen, including me or even, perhaps, my dead body after I am lynched for speaking truth since life is not necessarily a co-requisite for either ruling or for voting, could run for the office of President of these United States. It stands to reason that a #ConstitutionalRepublic ruled by all through the process of an #ElectoralCollege system is more to be desired than governance by individual States that weaponize the very instruments of statehood, especially the #Judiciary, to pursue the punishment of political rivals. As desirable as it may seem to keep one person or another off of the ballot, or in court on countless charges in as many states as possible, or as the subject of one front page derogatory story after another all manufactured for the express purpose of conducting propaganda campaigns, in order to sway the vote is devilishly despotic, anti-democratic, and downright fascist. To quote a writer whose words were consequential to Western thought (i.e. #Rousseau) for both better and for worse, and to take the attribution away from the regent upon whom it was improperly bestowed (i.e. #MarieAntionette), as it seems that either some revisionist media mogul sought to further justify the French Revolution ex post facto, or possibly yet another academic glory hound failed to properly attribute a weighty quote to the former source and illicitly placed it upon the unlikely crowned head of the latter, someone apparently once quipped: “Let them eat cake”3 in reference to the disdain some political leaders had and can have for their constituents. But I propose that we can should be civil enough of a society to peacefully bake and eat some #LibertyCake together regardless of whomever won whatever election.
Notwithstanding that, particularly in a #Republic, the cake of liberty is designed to be eaten by all but will, undoubtedly, be enjoyed by some more than others during any period of time. Of importance to the pursuit of happiness element engrained into our national psyche, voting is not an activity that is meant to ensure that your personal enjoyment and pleasure will be constantly maintained by those whom are elected in the voting process. It is, however, an activity that ensures our essential liberties and freedoms will continue to exist so please, let everyone contribute to making the cake we will eat in 2025 a #Peaceful and #Gracious one. The making of our national #LibertyCake must be allowed to include ingredients that may be preferred by some while being disliked, and even possibly abhorred, by others. Some cakes may very well be, either subjectively or objectively, better and more enjoyable than other cakes depending upon your own personal preferences. But our national cake is by design meant to be a collective #LibertyCake and therefore #WeThePeople must demand the peace and stability to bake and eat our own piece of cake within the structure of fair elections regardless of the outcome. Sowing discord from either the bench or from a state government position by attempting to eliminate a presidential candidate or cancel presidential policies based on partisan politics is simply not within a state’s rights. In fact, the attempts by some states to dictate to the entire union whom can participate in a national election are egregious errors in judgment and this line of thinking is the antithesis of America because it would “sever the direct link . . . between the National Government and the people of the United States” (U.S. Term Limits, 514 U.S., 822).4 And, therefore, #WeThePeople should demand that the only thing served by our #Judges is #Justice within their specific scope of authority and that our national ballot is constructed without interference from an unrestrained #Judiciary from any state in our Union. And finally, we must always demand that our media report #OnlyTheFacts as #News and to be 100% accountable when they either misrepresent or manipulate the objective facts in a matter. After all, the process of voting produces a cake that we all must certainly eat, whether we like it or not. ________________________________________________________________________
1. Primarily the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment made it illegal for a state to pass laws "which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of the citizens of the United States... [or] deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, [or] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." And while Section 3 does provide for the barring of certain persons with regard to insurrectionary activities by stating that no one can hold office that “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof;” it also clearly states in Section 5 that “[t]he Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” So even if the law were interpreted so as to make Mr. Trump an insurrectionist against himself, oddly, as the President and Chief Executive at the time of the alleged insurrection, it must be the Congress of the United States that enacts legislation to remove any person from a national ballot and clearly could not possibly be a power given to individual states of this Union. Also, the argument to remove a candidate from the national ballot by an individual state would be negated by the same 14th Amendment cited for justification of the removal of Mr. Trump, in that a state level removal would be without due process if done without the involvement of Congress and it would also subsequently violate the equal protection clause if this was not made to be uniform in all of the states, once again, by Congress.
2. This quote is attributed to the author of this article as far as I know, but I cite a work by Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, And Death (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 208 in order to credit him in some way due to the similarities of our individual quips. What Mr. Camus actually wrote, that I was reading again recently and that made me feel that I should mention Mr. Camus and his work even if what I quipped in this blog is not so closely related to his topic and his work other than they both involve politics, was that “[t]he State that sows alcohol cannot be surprised to reap crime.” Even if the similarity does not warrant a citation perhaps it will inspire one reader to pick up a book by Mr. Camus (in particular this author recommends The Stranger), or any other book by almost any author in any time period and actually read it, then the citation is more than worth my time and effort. Because while I do not often agree with either the political ideas or the individual beliefs of Mr. Camus, I always agree that his writing is especially excellent and should be read, and subsequently discussed, by all persons whom believe in liberty and freedom enough to actually discuss alternative views without vilifying the person from whence they came.
3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, (1782). Mr. Rousseau made this comment some years before the French Revolution actually began in 1789: “At length I remembered the last resort of a great princess who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: "Then let them eat brioches." The quote seems out of place to attribute to Marie Antionette because of the concern she demonstrated for the poor in spite of the extravagances of the royal family. According to Wikipedia the first mention of this being attributed to Marie Antionette was by Alphonse Karr, a French Journalist, writing in Les Guêpes of March 1843 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake). It is therefore not known who actually said it first, but it is doubtful that Marie Antionette ever said it in the context of the revolution as Mr. Karr described.
4. Add on: Since the 14th Amendment was framed with the intent of limiting state powers rather than expanding them, as some seemed to believe based on the litigation attempts to kick a national candidate off a national ballot in places such as Colorado and Maine, in all of the preceding litigation it is crystal clear that allowing the state’s to determine whom could be a national candidate would “sever the direct link that the Framers found so critical between the National Government and the people of the United States.” (U.S. Term Limits, 514 U.S., 822) Interested parties can read the succinct and unanimous 9-0 verdict by the U.S. Supreme Court on the Colorado effort to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot in Trump v. Anderson, 601 U.S. ___ (2024), here:
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