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Independence? Day
It is hard to think of a reason to celebrate this Fourth of July. King George IV has begun to override the decisions of public juries, in addition to gutting the regulatory system that provided increasingly safe food and transparent markets for the past century—to name just a few of his crimes. Viscount Cheney has declared himself a separate extra-Constitutional branch of government. Congress is a gutted body, while the Supreme Court's activist conservatives are taking steps back to the jurisprudence of the 1870s. American men and women are dying in a war with no discernible goal other than keeping Americans afraid that terrorists will come lurching ashore in landing craft if thousands of lives are not sacrificed in "heathen" lands to stop them. </p> <p>We are not an independent people this July 4. We have been returned to a form of government in which the people cannot petition for relief or expect to see into and understand the decisions of government. <a href="http://www.ratcliffeblog.com/archives/2004/07/happy_fourth_of.html">A few years ago, I wrote</a> about how one of my neighbors, freshly returned from Iraq, was forced to hide in his house while fireworks went off all over the neighborhood. This year, we're not shooting off any fireworks, because we're in mourning for America the home of the free. </p> <p>I'd feel better if the candidates for president circling this Fourth of July celebration would actually lead fights for our freedom in Congress, instead of worrying about fund-raising and straw polls 16 months before the election. Momentum for change should be built on debates between representatives of the people and the President's courtiers, not among the people who hope to succeed him in power (if it is even allowed to happen, given the recent <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070509-12.html">National Security Presidential Directive 51</a>, which allows Bush to appoint himself protector of our Constitutional government. </p> <p>It is a dark Fourth, in every sense. <br />
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