Constitution on Parade

Read these two posts on HuffPo for a good view of what's wrong with BushCo and it's view of the (increasingly tattered) Constitution.

Karen Kwiatkowski:

Our beloved commander in chief recently blasted the Constitution as "just a goddamned piece of paper." This may be the first true thing -- perhaps the only true thing -- that George W. Bush has ever said.

...

But George gets it right on the Constitution. The guy who penned the constitution had little direct participation in its construction. That guy believed "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" and that "Our liberty depends upon the freedom of the press."

Bush's contempt for the constitution as a restraint on rapacious state power was typical of many of the founding fathers. When Bush denounces the "piece of paper," particularly those troublesome first ten amendments, he is reflecting the views held by Madison and Hamilton and others who felt it more correct and useful to establish a strong and powerful central state and an even stronger executive. Jefferson, from his position overseas as the United States minister to France, pushed hard for the Bill of Rights and the idea of securing private property, and persons, from a hungry central state.

...

The Constitution really is just a piece of paper, designed by those who wanted a centralized state with a strong leader. It was only mildly amended in its design for central power by Jefferson, and Jefferson understood how weak those amendments would prove to be. To naively expect the state to voluntarily constrain itself, to expect a Congress to actually balance or control a President who values the same centralized ideal, would be to naively expect Congress to hear its constitutents and overwhelmingly reject any renewal of the Patriot Act.

We would do well to study Jefferson. When we are ready to set off on another bloody rebellion against a power mad tyrant, perhaps next time we can have the party within our own borders.

Larisa Alexandrovna: (A 'letter' to Bill O'Reilly)

I suggest you turn to the actual document that this nation is built on, the Constitution (not the Bible), which starts with something called the Bill of Rights.

Now, while you have managed to make racial slurs against anyone who simply prefers to use one word over another to refer to a specific holiday, you may have missed something key in this particular document, the Constitution, that is. You may have missed that allegiance to and defense of the Constitution is the first responsibility of a patriot, followed by allegiance to and defense of the nation. Note: The country as a whole is second to the Constitution on the loyalty scale. Against this backdrop, the real stage of history, you, Mr. O’Reilly, would fall very much on the wrong side of the good fight.

Consider your incessant rage against the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), for example, an organization that you call “traitors” on a regular basis. You call so many people and organizations traitors that it is hard to choose just one, but the ACLU does provide the easiest of arguments.

Do you know what the ACLU really is or what it is for? I suspect that you must have spent oodles of hours researching this particular organization to be able to so thoroughly and consistently refer to them as traitors, right?

Bill Learns Reality, 101

The ACLU has one and only one client, a non-partisan, wholly American client: The Bill of Rights.

Now, given that patriotism must first demand the defense of the Constitution before anything else (see my column on being an American), one could argue quite easily that the ACLU is the patriot in this argument and you, Mr. O’Reilly, are the traitor. No?