by Executive Odor
Sat Jun 21, 2008 at 07:25:04 PM PDT
A little over 200 years ago, a cabal of radicals, liberals, libertarians, freedom fighters, Christians, Atheists, and independent thinkers, declared their right to sever ties to their homeland. Although this coalition was underfunded, malnourished, and poorly armed compared to the awesome might of the British Empire, together, they fought and died to establish their independence, and to form a new nation.
Over the next few years, these rogues, these imperfect champions, these terrorists in the eyes of the Crown, these extraordinary mortals who would likely spit in the faces of our current "leaders", managed to hammer out a Constitution which acknowledged (for they did not "grant" us anything) the rights and principles of liberty inherent in all enlightened human existence.
Executive Odor's diary :: ::
Ladies and Gentlemen of the United States Congress, Mr. President, and members of the Judiciary, hear this: these rights do not belong to you any more than they belong to me. They are not yours to abolish or give away! They are what made America unique, and strong, and respected in the world for more than two centuries, and they belong to all of us!
These rights are inalienable, which means they are non-negotiable. You are not free to use them as chips on some political poker table. It is your responsibility -- your sworn duty! -- to protect and preserve these rights for our children, just as our fathers and mothers preserved them for us. They are not to be compromised, even if you deem it to be for our "own good", a concept I reject outright. They are not to be weakened in order to protect the mythical "rights" of corporate entities created by lawyers and bankers. They are not to be undermined for the sake of protecting any property, or life, including yours, and mine. These rights and liberties are born with us, and live inside us, and they will live on in our descendants unless weak and self-interested public servants bargain them away. No foreign "terrorist" is capable of that; in this respect, our only real enemy is within our own borders, wielding stolen power, brandishing presumed authority, whether by misguided noble intent, incompetence, or calculated malice, as they quietly "protect" this country to death.
I ask you to recall that only a few short years ago, we lost virtually an entire Gulf Coast city to a hurricane; yet America, as a whole, lives on. Today, we see billions of dollars in property damage due to flooding, loss of life, destruction of our highways, bridges, and rails; and, yet, America lives on. In the end, the results are much the same, whether these disasters are acts of nature, acts of war, or acts of terrorism: America lives on, and we will recover from these tragedies as we recovered from Civil War, World War, and Great Depression. We should not, and cannot, ruin the foundation on which this nation was built. We cannot give away our independence, our privacy, our rights to fair trials, our commitments to international pacts, our humane treatment of prisoners, nor our higher principles of fairness and human decency, out of an irrational and exaggerated fear of perhaps a few thousand foreign extremists.
Like so many others, I am disgusted and ashamed that people we trust with great power, and great sums of our money, have allowed the crimes of the Bush administration to go unpunished, and largely unexposed. But I will not be intimidated, nor will I become a slave to the State. I flatly refuse to be the subject of any imaginary "Unitary Executive" in the land of government that exists only by the consent of the governed. I hereby revoke my consent to be governed by such a pathetic lot, and I will not acknowledge or respect the legitimacy of such a corrupt establishment. Until such time as legitimacy can be restored, from the White House to the State House, I will regard you as a despicable assembly of thugs and accomplices, whose only purpose is to steal my money, monitor my life, and claim the inexplicable authority to imprison my body for completely fabricated reasons. I vow to fight to see that those of you who would sacrifice our Bill of Rights are drummed out of office, and held up in historical effigy as the shameful plutocrats who almost accomplished what no terrorist ever could: killing America as we know her.
Do not sleep well, my compromised public servants. Elections are coming soon. If we're not able to fire you this time, we'll get another chance later. If I see you in the gas lines, and if I happen to be so fortunate, maybe I'll flip you a hemp seed -- Benjamin Franklin would nod his sage approval.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/6/21/212533/443/45/540000:applause:
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