Letters to the Editor
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This Country is Based Upon Distrust of Government
I'm sure some of you have actually read the Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, but it's always worthwhile to understand what was going on. The French and Indian Wars had left Britain with a huge debt, and it was decided in Parliament that the best way to deal with it was to tax those who had, in the government's opinion, benefited from it: the American colonists. All of this was done, of course, for our protection, having got rid of the French, it was now necessary to keep out the Indians. This cost money. So taxes were imposed, troops were required to be quartered in people's houses, and when people protested, more troops were needed for our own protection. When people protested more, additional steps were taken, like empowering commissioners to ferret out the truth about who had committed terrorist acts (like burning the revenue cutter Gaspee), and allowing them to arrest people and take them to England for trial. And when that didn't work, they tried the trick (to benefit the East India Company, the Halliburton of the time) of lowering a tax on tea just to prove it would be paid if the tea were cheap enough. When that didn't work, they shut down the Port of Boston and sent some troops to go arrest the terrorists who were training to fight the authorities militarily.
We call that the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
If you read the Declaration of Independence (the boring parts in middle), that's what they're talking about. If you read the Bill of Rights, that's what they're protecting against. The right of the people to peaceably assemble. To petition for redress of grievances. To not have to quarter troops in their homes. To be safe in their persons, property and houses. To not be searched without a warrant, and warrants not be issued without probable cause. To have a jury of their own peers. To have due process of law. To not have cruel and unusual punishment.
If you asked a Founding Father about this stuff, it wasn't theoretical. It wasn't remote. And even if it didn't happen to them personally (I don't think anyone was quartering troops in Mount Vernon), they understood that those it did happen to were their fellow citizens.
This is the country that was created by our Founders. This is the country that is currently being disassembled, bit by bit, by this administration, with the active participation of the most activist, least text-bound judges and justices in American History. And all under the smokescreen that they are the "serious" and "grown up" leaders who follow the Constitution as it is written.
Thank God for the small cadre, like Glenn Greenwald and Chris Dodd, who call bullshit on all this. It is unAmerican to support these clowns, because this Administration and its runnin dogs are as opposed to the principles on which this country was founded as Osama bin-Laden himself. And everytime they ask us to give up our civil liberties in the name of security, they do his bidding.