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Madison and other Founders pledged -- and honored their pledge -- to incorporate a Bill of Rights as the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution. They did so by riding through the towns and villages of the young country, making the case for a Bill of Rights, which was approved by Congress and ratified in 1791.
Can you visualize that in your mind's eye? How many of us can envisage riding horseback far and wide to persuade Carolinians and Vermonters alike that their liberty could not be assured without those Ten Amendments to the Constitution?
What about us? Can we not get up from our armchairs and do what we can to insist that those liberties be protected? How have we reached such a pass? Have we grown so inured to the repetition from our leaders, including both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, that keeping us "safe" is their first priority, that we have forgotten that the Founders risked everything for liberty, not for "safety"?
Madison already knew far too well what could pose the greatest danger to the Constitution. He recognized the inevitable effects on our liberties of "continual warfare" of the kind we have been waging for more than a decade now:
"A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.""Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few." [Or put in today's parlance, the 99 percent under the boot of the one percent.]
"The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
Speaking Out
While horses and sailing ships of the 18th Century are slower than today's newspaper delivery trucks and electronic news outlets, those riders and ship captains who delivered Thomas Paine's pamphlets up and down the colonies encountered a much less distracted, much more engaged and eager readership.
There was no competition from faux-news on TV, or in what pass for newspapers these days. There was not even any football. And for the Founders and their families, freedom and politics were not spectator sports. They knew all too well how tyranny could be ushered in not only from overseas but also from behind closed doors.
Who has exposed Congress's latest poaching on our liberties -- and President Obama's hand-wringing decision to compromise those liberties? In fact some have, but you won't find them on U.S. network TV or even on most American cable channels.
You either have to know your way around the Internet, or purchase the kind of service that will permit you to see foreign-sponsored channels like PressTV, Aljazeera, and RT. Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has admitted that by watching Aljazeera and RT when she travels abroad, she has gotten used to better news coverage than she gets in Washington.
I have been keeping track: CNN domestic has been punctual in interviewing me every three and a half years. I have flunked out of Fox News altogether, although there have been a few rare occasions when a local Fox station invites me on to comment on a fast-breaking event. And forget the rest of the FCM.
So when someone from, say, PressTV, which is run by Iran, asks to interview me on a subject I know something about, I normally say yes if a convenient time can be arranged. On Monday, PressTV invited me to join two others (Dave Lindorff in Philadelphia and Don DeBar in New York) in a panel discussion of the implications of the President's signing of the NDAA.
I haven't a clue how many Americans might have been able to watch such a program on their TVs. But it is usually possible to access such programs on the Web, where many more may have already seen it, or can see it now. The interview touched on many things that I would have welcomed a chance to say on CNN.
It will be necessary to keep informed as we face down this resurgence of tyranny. Sunshine patriots will deceive themselves into thinking they can do that, while staying malnourished by the Fawning Corporate Media. You readers know better, right?
Cross-posted from Consortium News
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