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Coerce, force (verbs) to cause to do through pressure or necessity, by physical, moral or intellectual means. Guilty as charged, I guess. It is certainly my purpose to morally and intellectually pressure my government in furtherance of a political and social objective.
What I find unacceptable is twofold; 1) that Harman has removed that definition (upon which my fate depends) from the Constitution and given it to agents of the state, and 2) that mainstream American media apparently hasn’t even noticed.
Ideological (adjective) of or pertaining to or characteristic of an orientation that characterizes the thinking of a group or nation. Violence (noun) an act of aggression, as one against a person who resists. Well, then you have to go further and define aggression; (noun) a feeling of hostility that arouses thoughts of attack. Again, carry me off in cuffs, ‘cause I hope I characterize the thinking of a group, my hostility is against an administration that resists its own laws and, although I never have (nor would) advocate a physical attack against my government, I surely and repeatedly attack it verbally. That is my right as a citizen. The great James Madison, our fourth president, said “If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” Certainly terrorism’s false definition by the Bush administration as a foreign enemy confirms that warning by Madison with heartbreaking accuracy. Jane Harmon, we can only presume, has never read nor paid much notice to our greatest presidents. If she had, her ears would ring with Lincoln’s admonition that “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves,” adding that “to sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” Jane apparently sees terrorism behind every palm tree in her homegrown California climate and finds her neighbors radicalized, some of them violently. Her bill makes certain ‘findings’ with which she arms the nation against the terrible destructive power of its own citizenry.
No Jane, your Congress is incorrect. What is and always has been critical to our freedoms (including the freedom from terrorism) is the restriction of methods and processes within constitutional law.
You bet it does and that promotion (as I have described and confessed to it) is elemental to the freedoms within a homeland that make it worthy of preserving.
Jim Freeman's op-ed pieces and commentaries have appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, International Herald-Tribune, CNN, The New York Review, The Jon Stewart Daily Show and a number of magazines.
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