A Eulogy for America

[MisterGamut]

Run time: 02:54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5zM-hsMyCY   Posted on YouTube: December 23, 2011 By YouTube Member: gamutman Views on YouTube: 11   Posted on DU: December 23, 2011 By DU Member: MisterGamut Views on DU: 1027

 
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I'm 49 years old and a lifelong patriot. I remember as a child learning about the cold war, and being taught that we in the west had the moral high ground because the Soviets detained people without benefit of trial or charge in secret prisons called "gulags." I remember hearing about how Soviet citizens were sometimes "disappeared." I remember being told about our Constitution and it's protections including the sixth amendment right to a speedy and public trial. I remember how police dramas always showed prisoners (no matter how heinous) being read their rights under the Miranda decision.

I remember coming to respect the founders for having the foresight to include such a basic right and I understood how perfectly it encapsulated the notion of "innocent until proven guilty" which was the hallmark of a civilized society. Tyrants - I understood - imprisoned people on speculation. Democracies erred on the side of caution, as a person's freedom was the most sacred thing a republic could defend.

Then came the Bush years, and 9/11, and rendition, and Guantanamo, and the "war" on terror. I mourned for the Constitution and feared for the future. Then came Obama and "hope" and "change."

Hope? Change? Congress has just passed the 2012 Defense Authorization Act, an annual budgeting bill which this time holds a surprise. Basically it declares the Sixth Amendment no longer valid in the US. It states that the president now has the legal right to continue doing what Bush did illegally for years. It gives the president the privilege of being unfettered by jurisprudence purely on his say so. It throws out habeus corpus and the right to trial and the right to a defense, and by ignoring the fourth and sixth amendments (not to mention the seventh, eighth and ninth) it (by virtue of ignoring it) fundamentally throws out Article five of the Constitution.

Allow me to be blunt. We no longer have a Constitution the minute the president signs this bill into law.

We already have martial law in the streets of Boston, LA, New York and several other major US cities. We already have a police state in our airports where deputized thugs have been given carte blanche to detain you without cause. We already have a subjugated proletariat and a protected class of nobles. But now, as of the passage of this trash legislation, we no longer have a Constitution that's worth the vellum it's printed on.

This was our government who did this, Democrats and Republicans both. While we were busy protecting our guns on the right and defending our voice on the left, they sneaked in and stripped away everything else from the middle.

The United States of America: 1776, to 2011. RIP and Merry Christmas.