Audio: Rick Perry flirts with secession at tea-party presser
On HotAir.com:
I snarked yesterday that the left would get hysterical and treat his statement on the Tenth Amendment as a veiled call for secession, so I’m obliged to eat my words today. Simply awful, whether as a convenient distraction for the media from the tea parties or as a brush for them to tar the protests as motivated by crackpot neo-confederate sentiments. Even Drudge, who’s obviously sympathetic to the rallies, is leading with the story right now. In the red scare font, no less.
For the sake of the ... conscience of the right, I hope this is just a bit of overzealous fervor on the part of a few—a few who would regret saying anything implying that secession from the union would be a good idea some days from now.
The conservatives (and libertarians) shouldn't go the anti-American way that the left and the liberals did when they lost power. It's one thing to hold anti-government, anti-tax rallies (this, I support wholeheartedly). It's quite another to lightly suggest an ... action that, when it was tried last time, not only failed but was one of the bloodiest chapters of American history (I might argue, even more bloody than the two world wars; those two wars, unless you count Pearl Harbor, weren't even fought on the American soil). A secession doesn't simply go against the federal government, it goes against the American people.
Granted, that may not be true for-ever. After all, the American Revolution was, in a matter of speaking, a secession from the British empire. There may be a time when such violence and bloodshed may become necessary to rectify the mistakes made by the statists and liberals in the federal government. That time has not come yet, and until such time comes, if for nothing else but to maintain the moral high ground, the right, including the conservatives and libertarians, should never suggest that such thing is even a possibility.
Support for secession is nothing dissimilar from the support for the cop-killer in Oakland. Dissent is good, but only when you are trying to work within the system. Secession isn't working within the American system of government.