Once again, we have a situation with Obama and company playing elitist. Obama got in front of an audience and said America needs to drop driving SUVs and using so much air conditioning. Of course, right after the speech, he jumped into an SUV with the air conditioner blowing full blast.

To any sane individual, this is hypocrisy at its height. But see, that's the problem with many on both the right and left...for them it is not.

Once again I go back to the book I loathe so much, Plato's Republic, to explain the situation that is going on with things like this, or Al Gore's ranch able to power a small town while he whines about global warming.

In Republic, Plato envisions what he considers the perfect society. Three layers comprise this society - the Intellectuals, the Soldiers, and everyone else. The Intellectuals make the rules. The only voting that occurs involves those selected for this elite group. The common folk and the soldiers do not vote on anything. They just sit there and realize, gee...these Intellectuals are so smart, they know what's best for us moreso than we do. So, they sit there and take it. This means the Intellectuals are immune to their own pronouncements, if the want to be, as they 'know better'.

This is exactly the mentality of the liberal elite running the Democratic party. They seem to think they know what is best for the masses, but the elite, being the Intellectuals above, can exempt themselves from the rules. Many in the Republican party hierarchy think this same way these days.

I'm sure you can see the obvious problems with this, but I'll spell them out anyways. Freedom is surpressed, if the Intellectuals want it to be. Only they have the freedom to think and act, everyone else must obey their orders. This is not a free society that Plato envisions, and is why Aristotle challenged this view.

There is no room for capitalism, religion, or other things that promote diversity in this kind of society. It is a command-driven economy and society. For most of us, this is totalitarian, and some would call it Marxist or Naziism.

Well, surprise...Marx based Marxism on Plato's Republic, or a variant thereof. Surprise, so did Adolf Hitler base his Mein Kampf off of Plato's Republic. The only difference between the two was the forces of internationalism vs nationalism. Read Marx and read Hitler, and you see how much the two parallel with the exception of this one factor.

We conservatives and libertarians must reject this supposed 'perfect society', because it isn't perfect. This is a society envisioned by a philosopher before weapons were made of steel, let alone things like gunpowder, or technology existing today like telephones and computers. This is a society where ignorance was assumed, and thus why the Intellectuals were isolated and led because they were the only ones informed.

That is not the society of today. With cell phones, the internet, the media, and other avenues to get at the facts, we are all Intellectuals if we so desire. We are not preselected, like Plato envisioned, to become an Intellectual. We make it happen ourselves.

We cannot keep putting into power people who think like Plato on either side of the aisle. Unfortunately, because too many people are buying into the Republic's false premises, we end up like we are today, on the verge of destroying our working society trying to emulate a 2,200 year old philosopher's vision. A vision that, when attempted previously over those years, has failed miserably time and time again.