The Bill of Rights under attack

All I can say to the liberals who think the Bill of Rights is being shredded
- "You reap what you sow."

You all asked for a much bigger government to "take care of those who
can't take care of themselves." What did you think was going to happen
when the government was given such an incredible amount of money? Yeah, it
feels all warm and fuzzy when you send in your 30+% because it goes to help the
poor - but it also goes to increase the power of the federal government.

Furthermore, my last nerve is getting frayed when liberals, leftists,
whatever you want to call yourselves point only to the Bush administration as
the only ones at fault. Do you all have no sense of history? JFk had MLK Jr.'s
phone tapped and mail during WWII was searched. Nixon actively controlled
prices in our economy and Bill Clinton got us into Bosnia without Congressional
approval and no one can argue that Bosnia holds any special interest for us.

And yet you support candidates who want to expand the powers of the
government. You want the government to have power over your health, your
education, your environment, and even your death. All of that is cool with you
but when a president robustly works to protect you from enemies abroad (as Bush
does now, as Reagan did against communist encroachment, and as FDR and Truman
did against totalitarianism) you gleefully make cups with a vanishing Bill of
Rights and call for the impeachment of men who are vigorously doing what they
think is right and constitutional.

Maybe I'm being too tough on you all. It has been almost six and a half
years since the last attack on American soil and you think that we're safe.
Maybe it was just a freak occurrence that they actually were able to hit us on
9/11. Is it really worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year to fight in a
land that hardly any of us will ever see?

You bet it is. Iraq was not responsible for 9/11 but it did support
terrorist organizations and probably even al Qaeda. Saddam Hussein gave
thousands of dollars to the families of homicide bombers and used terrorism to
keep his own people in line. But even if the reasons for going into Iraq were
flawed there is absolutely every reason to make sure the Iraqi people win now.

Al Qaeda has made it clear they need to defeat us in Iraq. If we surrender
in Iraq the terrorists will sweep in and realize a greater victory than they
could ever hope for. Right now they are losing and everyone in the Middle East
knows it. They have lost support from a majority of the people and they are
bleeding members. If you want to say the recruitment numbers for our military
is bad you would definitely have to say that the recruitment numbers for our
enemy is one hundred times worse.

Don't forget, Congress did give Bush the authority to use force in Iraq.
Sure, duplicitous liberal politicians have said that they agreed to it because
they thought it was only meant as a threat - but do you, all of you who hate
Bush, really believe that? I doubt it.

Many things have changed since the founding of our country. The world then
was a place where the most powerful weapon was a cannon, travel times were
measured in months, and we were not a world power.

Now we have weapons that can kill tens of thousands and they cost less than
some cars, you can be anywhere in the world in a day, and we are the world's
greatest power. Not only that, we have the biggest bull's eye on our back ever
in history. Islamists want to chop off our heads and neo-communist nations
(Russia and China mainly) want to take us down a couple of pegs.

How is a president supposed to respond to these extremely complicated
threats? Is he/she supposed to fire some cruise missiles at a mountainside and
say "enough"? No. The president needs to work to eliminate the
Islamist threat and mitigate the neo-communist one.

To succeed in defeating the Islamist threat means we have to fight an all-new
type of war. A war where the greatest weapon is not a missile but is
information. And how shall we get that information? Tapping terrorist phone
lines is one great way. Forceful interrogations are another way.

But no, that won't do. A lot of people think that our enemies should get our
rights. What rights? Well the right to an attorney of course. The right to due
process. The right to a speedy trial and all that good stuff that American
citizens get to enjoy by living in a free country.

I have only one question: When in our history did we give these rights to
the enemy? We didn't stop General Patton's progress so we could try a couple of
Krauts in a court of law. We didn't stop Sherman's march on Atlanta so we could
give a rebel his day in court. But for some reason we should give Islamic
fanatics their day in court. Not just any court, mind you, but the same justice
system that you and I use.

There's a chance I can just be a calloused bastard. Maybe I am. But after
three thousand of our citizens were incinerated I think every American has the
right to not blink an eye when a terrorist doesn't get his day in court.
Unfortunately, the treatment they receive is not as horrible as the left makes
it out to seem. The men who want to kill you, your family, and everyone else in
America get such good care that a lefty demigod, Michael Moore, admitted in his
movie Sicko that they get better care than those men and women who
dropped everything to do whatever they could to help the victims of 9/11.

My final point I have to make with a very heavy heart and much sadness. When
people say that America is doomed I have to admit that I think they are
possibly right. For the foreseeable future I see America getting much more
centralized and the government gaining more power over the people. I think Bush
shares some of the blame with his grandiose domestic spending programs but the
die was cast many years ago.

I can't really tell you when America started sliding away from rugged
individualism to statism but the movement is undeniable. Just look at the
current euphoria surrounding Barack Obama. The euphoria is what worries me
because no politician, even the president, should have the ability to make
anyone's life materially better. No one should have that power.

Unfortunately, this is the country we live in now. Long ago we started
trading in our inalienable rights for the warm embrace of a seemingly
benevolent parent - our government. Sometimes we gave up our rights for safety,
other times for financial security, and all too often we gave up our rights to
make things fairer.

We shouldn't even be in the position we are in, but here we are. The ball
was set in motion a long time ago and now all we do is play games of gotcha
politics. God save us.