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By David Williams, Editor The Letter
In truth, such suspicions predate the Constitution by two hundred years. It's why the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the political rebels and the prisoners fled Europe to build a new Athens on these shores. The heavy hand of monarchs, the intolerant glare of religious leaders proved indefensible to the immigrants who would become Americans. Liberty is in our blood.
We fully understand the wartime necessity of rooting out international thugs who seek to pound this wonderful country to its knees. Vile acts, like cancer, need drastic surgery to stem them. We're not dealing with Manuel Noriega here. Osama bin Laden is Hitler-class. But like the general who gradually takes on the characteristics of the enemy he hopes to destroy, Bush is already showing signs of becoming Osamanized. At one point during the Vietnam War, an American major told a reporter his unit had to destroy a village in order to save it. These days it's Bush and his paranoid attorney general John Ashcroft using the Bill of Rights to set a backfire they hope will smother the flames licking at the rest of the Constitution. The America they and their corporate sponsors envision isn't the one we've come to know and love but some banana republic more appropriately called Amerika. If this new law defines what Bush and Ashcroft call patriotism, Americans have a patriotic duty to rise up boldly against it. And if our government tries to use it, we proudly stand with Anthony Romero, the ACLU's new executive director, who told a Louisville audience last month that his organization will "sue the pants off of them." Bravo! That's the kind of American spirit Bush and his cronies seem to have forgotten in their pell-mell frenzy to feed the never-sated military-industrial machine.
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There were many good reasons why our Founding Fathers developed the kind of
government we Americans have until now enjoyed. Having seen what unbridled
power can do under a king like George, they'd grown to distrust government
immensely.
David Williams 