Congress: Grow a Fucking Spine

Maybe some day they ought to pay attention to the various oath of offices, including the one used by the armed forces: The very first promise is to protect and defend the Constitution. When Bush does things like trash the various provisions of the Bill of Rights, when he thinks that he can detain people without trial and execute searches without a warrant, he is attacking the Constitution.

The Constitution is not just a yellowing piece of parchment in the National Archives. The Constitution is the very soul, the foundation of our nation. The rule of law is the structure that rests on the foundation. Everyone in this country derives his or her rights from that. And pivotal to all that working is the concept that the power of the government is limited by the Constitution, that the government derives its legitimacy from the Constitution and that the government must operate within the Constitution and the rule of law.

We do not have a sovereign in this country. The President does not have unchecked powers to do whatever he or she wants to, just because the President says so. Countries that operate that way are called "monarchies" or "dictatorships." We as a people decided 230 years ago that we would no longer be subject to such a form of government and our forefathers shed a lot of blood bringing that about.

Every time that we, as a nation, have strayed from that, from the Alien and Sedition Act through Woodrow Wilson's incarceration of opponents to the First World War, Roosevelt's internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry, the Red Scare to the use of the FBI and the IRS to suppress political dissent, after the fact, we regret it and realize that was was done was unnecessary. Our democracy is not threatened by a bunch of bomb-wielding terrorists. Compared to past threats faced by both our ancestors and our elders, Islamic terrorists are noisy mosquitoes.

Our democracy, however, is threatened more by those who would claim to be protecting it by straying from the Constitution. When we stray from the rights and liberties set forth in the Constitution, we spit on the graves of the Founding Fathers, the graves of the thousands of Americans who died in the Revolutionary War to win our freedom, and the hundreds of thousands of graves of those who died to keep our freedoms.

(And those who are in favor of trashing civil liberties would do well to consider this: The precedent for unchecked power by the Executive that you set today could well be used against you tomorrow.)

Let's be frank about this: George Bush is, in a large measure, doing the same things that so outraged our forefathers that they took up arms and kicked the British Crown out of the colonies. But now, it seems as though the Loyalists have returned and have taken over our government, aided and abetted by those spineless weasels in the Democratic Party.

George Bush and the rest of his henchmen are traitors to the Constitution. He truly has shown himself to be the intellectual heir to King George III. He will go down in history as such.