Confession is Good for the Soul

...It’s also a REAL Patriot Act

I stand before you this day to declare that I, your obedient servant, to confess that I could be in violation of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. That’s the part of the Patriot Act that allows the President to arbitrarily declare that someone… anyone… is an enemy combatant and than take them into custody. As in no lawyer, no notifying next-of-kin… no nothing. You are just gone.

Taken into custody. Just like the Nazis. Just like the Commies.

We’re half way around the world, bombing people who have done nothing to us. (If we really attacked people because of 9/11, we’d have bombed the crap outta Saudi Arabia) This administration seeks to influence policies and elections in other countries, and threatens intervention if they do not toe our political line.

Isn’t that what we fought against during the cold war? Didn’t we stand against the Communists to keep them from venturing into other countries? I am way past offended that this administration sees their job as remaking the United States of America in the image of the late UNlamented Soviet Union. Democracy at gunpoint… if that isn’t an oxymoron, then President Bush can pronounce ‘nuclear’.

Keeping quiet simply isn’t an option anymore.

I cannot and will not be silenced by toadies like Dick Cheney, who has never risked his overweight, coronary-prone backside for his country, but presumes to tell ‘the faithful’ that he knows what will make us victorious in war. What he ‘knows’ is how to profit from corporate involvement in war, and how to make a few bucks for his friends in the bargain.

I shan’t be deterred by the religious right, put off by the neocondescending disinformation machine, or undermined by the unfair, unbalanced, untrue and unprincipled Fox News Network (The Political Sci Fi Channel).

I will not be haunted the Coultergeist, shadowed by the government, governed by the incompetent or overruled by the supposed rulers of what was, until the laughably misnamed “Patriot Act”, a country both democratic and free.

Calling this law wrong is the understatement of the century. I am, as all Americans should be, ashamed for my nation and for the Great American Experiment, whose demise this law may very well portend.

Why is it that when half the world was under the control of the Nazis, we didn’t need to curtail freedoms as much as our government says we need to now, to fight a ragged band of outlaws? If we sell out our freedom and our liberty in an alleged ‘war on terror’, there will be nothing left to defend.

With that, a final word…

I have a house that’s paid for, a really cool motorcycle and a life I like…… if I disappear, I sure as hell didn’t run away and not tell anybody.