American Politics Journal -- Common Sense Redux

Guest Editorial
Common Sense Redux
By Christian Livemore

Monday, March 19, 2001 (APJP) -- A lot of folks have been asking me why I haven't written anything in a while.

I haven't been talking politics, either.

Lately, whenever somebody brings up George W. Bush or Florida politics in general, I say the same thing: "I don't want to talk about it." I haven't been watching TV news, either -- or listening to NPR, or even reading the newspaper.

To be honest, it scares me.

What happened in this election was never supposed to happen in this country, and it really shook me up. I needed to shut down for a little while to come to grips with it all, and it's just now that I can really start thinking about it again.

Trouble is, now that I'm thinking about it again…

…I'm twice as pissed.

In 1775, Thomas Paine wrote a manifesto that would turn out to be a chief rallying document of the American Revolution: "Common Sense: The Call to Independence." It began like this:

"As a long and violent abuse of power is generally the Means of calling the right of it in question (and in Matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the Sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry) and as the King of England hath undertaken in his own Right to support the Parliament in what he calls Theirs, and as the good people of this country are grievously oppressed by the combination, they have an undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of both, and equally to reject the usurpation of either."

Well!

Substitute " 'President' Bush" for "the King of England" and the "U.S. Congress" for the "Parliament" and we got ourselves a parallel! It's almost as if Thomas Paine was in Florida on November 7th.

The Republicans have been out of hand for a long time now. Let's forget for a moment everything going back from Watergate and just focus on the last twenty years. That's the great thing about Republicans: they're always committing a new crime we can be mad about.

Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. manipulated the 1980 elections by promising weapons to Iranian terrorists if they would hold our hostages until after the election. It worked. It made Jimmy Carter look weak and Reagan won in a landslide.

Reagan and Bush Sr. then proceeded to sink this country into the worst economy since the Great Depression.

But then Bill Clinton came along and kicked them out of the White House. The Republicans didn't like that. They needed their power. When President Clinton started to clean up the mess they made, it made the Republicans look bad. They liked that even less. So they abused the power of the Independent Counsel's office and investigated the man for six years. And when they couldn't find any real crimes, they made some up and impeached him.

But that didn't work.

So they stole a presidential election.

They violated our most basic and cherished right as Americans, our right to vote. The American Revolution was begun over less.

"How came the king by a power which the people are afraid to trust, and always obliged to check?"

Well, let's see: He rigged voting booths in Georgia. He had minorities kept from voting in Tennessee. And he had his brother, who as luck would have it was the governor of Florida, make sure that blacks – the ones who had not been falsely "identified" as felons and disenfranchised -- detained so they couldn't vote, had boxes of ballots thrown out, and give old Jewish people a ballot so confusing that it made them vote for a Nazi instead of Al Gore.

But none of that quite did the job. So like a demented Russian chess champion, George W. Bush shifted pieces around the board.

His next move was to have the Florida Secretary of State, who as luck would have it was his brother's lover, certify an incomplete result in his favor.

And when that wasn't enough, he had James Baker, who as luck would have it was his Poppy's best friend and advisor, go down to Florida and manipulate the legal system to keep thousands of votes from being counted.

But that pesky Florida Supreme Court just would not cooperate, so he sent mobs of Republican staffers and operatives to physically assault elections officials to scare them into not counting the votes.

But durnit, democracy just wouldn't roll over, so he had the United States Supreme Court, who as luck would have it were in his pocket, rule that Florida could not count its votes because it would do irreparable damage to George W. Bush's candidacy.

Checkmate.

"By what means is such a corrupt and faithless court to be kept to its engagements?"

If one good thing has come out of this car wreck of an election, it is that it may now be openly said that the Supreme Court is partisan.

The Republican majority on the Court -- or the Gang of Five, as they now henceforth should be known -- ignored the law, disregarded the Constitution, and threw out their cherished principle of States' Rights to install the man they wanted in the White House.

The Supreme Court is a vital point in the triangle of checks and balances. When the other branches abuse their power, the Court is supposed to step in, uncorrupted by politics and guided only by the law, to set things right. They are the keepers of the Constitution, the guardians of the rights our Founding Fathers gave to us.

Once they have laid bare the ugly truth that their allegiance is not to the Constitution and the law but to their own interests, what good are they to us?

"Until we consent that the sect of government in America be legally and authoritatively occupied, we shall be in danger of having it filled by some fortune ruffian, who may treat us in the same manner (as William the Conqueror), and then where will be our freedom?"

Well, that horse has pretty well left the barn. This has now come to pass, folks.

One of the chief causes of the American Revolution was taxation without representation. Considering how King George came by his office, isn't that what we have now? We have a President who was not elected, but in fact appointed by the U.S. Supreme Court, and we have a Congress that refused to fulfill its Constitutional obligation to question the legitimacy of this President.

Taxpayers have been ignored and suppressed at every turn, first by the Governor and Secretary of State of Florida, then by "President" Bush, so-called, then by the Supreme Court, and finally by the Congress.

This Congress has confirmed every one of Bush's extremist cabinet appointees, even though he was not elected and therefore has no mandate for such a conservative cabinet, passed a bankruptcy law to make it easier for a credit card company to get their money than a mother to collect child support, and now seems poised to pass Bush's wildly irresponsible tax cut proposal.

We have paid our taxes.

We have expressed our will.

Where, then, is our representation?

"As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully."

"What will I tell my kids?" How many times did we hear that phrase from the lips of Republicans lambasting President Clinton for his trysts with Monica Lewinsky?

What will we tell them about what happened in Florida? How will we explain the behavior of our current "President" and the Supreme Court? And how will we explain that not one senator would sign on to the Congressional Black Caucus's request to debate the validity of the Florida electors?

How will we explain raiding the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge to drill for what will be at maximum a six months' supply of oil?

How will we explain the billions of dollars of debt we leave them because it was more important to give a tax break to Steve Forbes and Ross Perot than to pay down the national debt?

And how will we explain if we don't fight to secure their right to vote?

"No man in his senses can say that their claim under William the Conqueror is a very honorable one. A French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself King of England against the consent of the natives is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original."

I just threw that one in so I could compare George W. Bush to a French bastard.

"Though I would carefully avoid giving unnecessary offence, yet I am inclined to believe that all those who espouse the doctrine of reconciliation may be included in the following descriptions. Interested men, who are not to be trusted; weak men, who cannot see; prejudiced men, who will not see; and a certain set of moderate men, who think better of the European world than it deserves; and this last class, by an ill-judged deliberation, will be the cause of more calamities to this continent than all the other three."

This Republican party -- the same party who sold arms to terrorists, impeached an innocent President to try to reverse the results of an election, and now has suppressed the will of 48,000,000 Americans to put their puppet king in the White House -- this same Republican party now talks of reconciliation, of a "new tone" in Washington, of "healing the wounds of this election."

Milton said, "Never can true reconcilement grow, where wounds of deadly hate have pierc'd so deep."

In other words: hey, GOP, if you want to heal the wounds, pull the knife out of our backs, stitch up the gashes, and apply a lot of ointment, will ya? Geez, any first-year med student will tell you that.

As BartCop so often points out, let us give tax breaks to a bunch of our friends regardless of the damage it does to the country. Let us spend 50 million dollars and six years investigating your boy, then trump up a lot of phony charges and impeach him. THEN we can talk about letting bygones be bygones.

Any Democrat who pursues reconciliation at this point is either worried about their own re-election, and therefore cannot be trusted to fight for us; or they are weak, and therefore incapable of fighting for us; or they actually believe the Republican rhetoric of healing the wounds, in which case they're stupid, and too naïve to be of any use to us. Pardon the expression, but how many times do you have to get screwed before you learn not to bend that way?

"There are three different ways by which an independence may hereafter be effected; and that one of those three will one day or other be the fate of America, viz. By the legal voice of the people in Congress; by a military power; or by a mob."

Let me be very clear (and I hope the Secret Service pays special attention to this): I am not -- repeat NOT -- advocating violence in any form. But if the present gang-raping of the Constitution continues, how long do y'all think it will be before somebody else does? What did they do in Haiti and Congo and Chechnya when their rights are threatened? They organized and took up arms.

This is supposed to be a nation of laws. But when our elections officials fail us, when the U.S. Supreme Court fails us, and when the Congress fails us, what options are we left with? How long will it be before some People's Democratic Army of America pops up, drilling in the woods of Montana and conducting raids on Federal buildings?

And don't think it's not already on some peoples' minds, as the following excerpt of an article that appeared on Salon.com on January 4th shows:

Arson suspected in Bush boat blaze

Jan. 4, 2001 | AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- A blaze that destroyed a motor boat owned in part by President-elect George W. Bush resulted from arson, fire investigators said.

Last month's blaze, previously considered an accident, was set on board the 22-foot Harris Kayot cabin cruiser, the state fire marshal's office said Wednesday.

Fire marshal spokesman Mark Hanna said whoever set the fire knew the boat belonged to the president-elect.

I know one thing -- under the present circumstances, Thomas Jefferson's words come to mind: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is a natural manure."

But I hope like hell it doesn't come to that.

"We have it in our power to begin the world over again."

When he wrote those words, Paine referred to casting off the tyranny of a King, to creating a new form of government the world had never known, government by the people, of the people, for the people.

They had to take up arms in 1776. They had no alternative. They had no rights as Americans, no Constitution, no Voting Rights Act.

But we have the means of redress our forefathers dreamed of. We have by birthright what they secured for us with their blood. Let us not be so ungrateful of that debt and unmindful of its precious value as to let it slip away by degrees through laziness and inaction.

I've written my representatives several times now. I'm going to a Democratic organization meeting next week. I'm going to donate money to any Democrat who shows me he's standing up to the Republicans in a meaningful way.

And I protested the Inauguration. I even flipped the bastard off.

What are you going to do?



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