At What Point?
Now that Congress has repealed the Fifth Amendment, can you please join me in recognizing that this country is on a rocket-sled to totalitarianism?
Some senators think that indefinite detention without due process of Americans arrested in America was allowed before the passage of the NDAA (and that's just their interpretation of the law that they allow us to know about).
Do you trust the government with such power? You shouldn't.
If you trust Obama not to abuse the discretion to detain Americans at home ("part of the battlefield") until the end of the Endless Global War on Terror, you probably don't trust Perry or Gingrich or Romney. (If you trust all of them, your amygdala is damaged; if you trust none of them, you're perfectly healthy.)
Tyranny doesn't always arrive on metal treads. Sometimes it just grows quietly in place, unnoticed until its tendrils. The Germans thought they were free.
You might think, it could never happen here. Why? Once the legislative branch has given the executive branch the power, what's to stop the executive from using it?
We like to pretend that we're better than that, that our form of government makes us free, but our elected representatives have, by and large, done fuck all to preserve the very freedoms that made America.
We like to pretend that our freedom to speak our minds makes us free, but that freedom is under attack by the federal government.
We like to pretend that we, as Americans, are somehow immune to tyranny-that we'll rise up, Red Dawn style, to defeat those who would take away our freedom. Horseshit. We're corn-fed consumers, eager to hand over our basic rights to those who promise to make us safe-whatever it takes-as long as we are kept heavily fed and well-supplied with toys and can take that vacation to Disneyland.
If you agree with my assessment-that the prognosis for America's freedom is bleaker than it has ever been and is, thanks to the war with Eurasia, getting bleaker every day-what are you doing about it now?
And if you won't concede now that we have left freedom behind, then when will you?
Do you propose to wait until hearing the 3 a.m. boots on your own front steps, or only until your friends and neighbors start disappearing in the middle of the night?
And what do you think you are you going to do about it then?