On We Sweep With Threshing Oar

While everyone was busy getting their underpants in a twist over health care reform these past several months, our Supreme Leader Barry O'Bummer and his Demobots quietly approved the Patriot Act for another year, all without the provisions that would have protected we the people against its more Draconian measures.

Don't get me wrong. There is no doubt in my mind that there are plenty of yippee skippy jihadists who will stop at nothing to serve our collective heads on a platter with an ice cold glass of goat's milk. Of all this planet's fundamental religions, I find Islam to be the most egregious, although I guess you'd have to give its leaders brownie points for at least being honest and upfront about their brutalities.

That being said, I also believe that there is no way we or our government can protect for every possible horror or tragedy that comes down the pike, whether that be tragedy be a hurricane, sudden onset of cancer, or a terrorist act. I'd rather pay my money, keep my liberties, and take my chances that the laws under our Constitution will do their best.

The Patriot Act is, quite simply, not only unnecessary, it is breathtakingly, shamefully, anti-civil libertarian. And I blame its existence squarely on George "Not a Conservative" Bush. For there hasn't been a president in recent decades more gleeful to clothe the demon of Big Government in the filmy garment of the all caring, ever protective Nanny State. Only this nanny also wears jack boots and waves a bible.

Then came Barry O, with his sharp suited sexy swagger antidote to white male corporate oppression and, golly gee, you could almost hear the collective sigh of relief ring from sea to shining sea: Yes, we can all be free at last.

Except there's just one problem. I have long suspected that our democratic leaders never have been, certainly are not now, and most likely never will be, truly concerned with protecting civil liberties. Recently, I read a very astute article confirming that suspicion.

Civil Liberties in Obama's America, outlines why, historically, democrats have been more than happy to sell our civil liberties down the river just as much as the republicans. Because their agendas are the same: advancing a police state of one form or another.

The article is a little long, but if you're truly tired of cringing in the corner with your thumb in your mouth, while all around you Sieg Heil-ed chants of, "Yes we can," chip away at what remains of your sanity, grab a cup of something and dig in.

Here are a couple highlights:

. . . most of the left does not see conscription as slavery, nor taxation as theft, nor aggressive war as murderous. And this cuts to the core of the problem with leftist civil libertarianism. It is almost always based on a tissue of incoherencies. This is what we must explain to those genuinely disappointed with Obama, who authentically believe that the right to a trial or a right to free speech is more important than a right to a free lunch. . . . leftism cannot sustain and defend civil liberties, since true civil liberties are bound up with the ethics and logic of private property.

When a left-liberal friend expresses disappoint with Obama's war on the Bill of Rights, just note that it was inevitable . . . Leftists will have to make a choice -- bail on their civil libertarianism, as most did under FDR, defending Japanese Internment and national command economics, or bailing on their dream of creating social paradise, or even fostering society, through the violent means of central planning.

. . . and although I am pessimistic we will break most of Obama's groupies out of the hypnotic delusions of his professorial and literate American Idol authoritarianism, we will convince some, even many, one by one, to abandon the rot of soft socialism that has plagued the American left since World War I, and instead embrace the only ethic that can morally transcend Bush's and Obama's dungeons, wiretaps and crackdowns on dissent: The ethic of anti-state libertarianism grounded in private property. And as they come in, one by one, let us welcome them with open arms as we do our slow and uphill work to bring the police state down.