Happy Birthday, USA

[catsittingstill]

Dear Country,

I am writing to wish you a happy birthday. I wish I could offer you a present, but the one thing I expect you would want most of all, I haven't been able to obtain yet. I will try to do more to get it for you.

To that end, I promise I will contact 1) my local paper, 2) my Representative in Congress, and 3) both my Senators about restoring the checks and balances inherent in the Constitution and limiting the unchecked and untrammeled exectutive power that has been turning you from a democracy in which basic human rights are upheld and respected into a dictatorship in which we only have rights as long as they don't inconvenience the executive branch. I also promise I will stay abreast of current events so as to be able to recognize scoundrels in the future, and that I will vote in all state and national elections for which I am eligible to vote.

It is little enough to offer.

Love, Cat

P.S. I thought this article was awesome. Go Olberman!

Comments

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Whoo-hoo! Cat's been radicalized! :-) It's said our side has all the good songs, at least.

"'For myself, I would see the White Tree in flower again in the courts of the kings, and the Silver Crown return, and Minas Tirith in peace: Minas Anor again as of old, full of light, high and fair, beautiful as a queen among other queens; not as a mistress of many slaves, nay, not even a kind mistress of willing slaves.'"

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't feel radical. I just want to put things back the way they were before Bush, when America didn't commit torture, didn't "disappear" people, didn't spy on her own citizens without a warrant, when the president had to adhere to the laws.

I don't really see anything radical about that--that's actually conservative, in the old sense of the word. Not that I'm conservative, or anything.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Yet the fight for human freedom is on-going, longer than human lives, and we are only the latest warriors into the fray. All of those things, you list, every one of them, are radical dreams, that people have fought for, not just once, but over and over, over generations. They seem conservative because the time we grew up in a golden age, and the ethics and laws of a golden age are the radical dreams of harder times. So, then, "Let America Be America Again". (There was an illustrated book of that title, which has recently been reprinted, but I've never seen it, sigh.)

[thymidinekinase.livejournal.com]

Brava! "... when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government" and impeach the smirking, corrupt traitors.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

NPR read the Declaration of Independence on the air this morning during Morning Edition. It reminded me of that 4th of July party we had at your house a couple of years ago.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

You've just described the reason why I'm supporting a con law professor for president.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Hmm? Which one is that?

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Barack Obama. Taught my husband's Constitutional Law course at the University of Chicago Law School. Damn fine teacher, and knew his stuff.

[dan-ad-nauseam.livejournal.com]

Er -- Chicago hired a liberal?!?

REN YAO GOU

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Chicago has quite a number of them, they just aren't mostly the famous ones.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Cool. I didn't know that about him.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

I might support him even if we didn't know him personally, and I certainly would not support him if we knew him personally in a context which suggested he couldn't handle the job. In this instance, several lawyers I know studied the constitution with him for a couple of quarters and say he's both brilliant and committed on the topic. This is a really useful thing to know about someone running for president. :)