An Angry American
Seeking the restoration of the Constitution

By Dorothy Anne Seese
[email protected]

Someone might say, "you had a delightful breakfast at your favorite cafe this morning, the sun is shining in the Phoenix Arizona metroplex, the temperatures are delightful, you're still able to live independently even with your handicaps, and while your income is limited, you aren't actually in need. Why are you angry?  Why don't you just sit back and enjoy the roses?"

I , Me, My ... what has that got to do with my anger?  Is it not obvious that beyond my personal life, it's ups and downs, the pains and the medications, the money or lack of it, the conveniences I enjoy, that I'm watching my nation go to Hell in a handbasket?  Yes I am an Angry American.  I'm a Constitutionalist, one who believes in the visions of the Founding Fathers, in liberty, in the FULL Bill of Rights, and all these are being trashed.  So just because I can go buy some red flame grapes from whatever country is sending them to us these days (probably Chile) there's nothing in America about which I can feel righteously angry?  Friend, you are what is wrong with this country if that's your line of thinking, so go to the temple of the great "god" SELF and offer your incense.

I want to enumerate and elaborate on a few of my complaints, the sources of my anger.

*  American Media.  Darned if they didn't label everyone who opposed Bush's War as a leftist or a liberal, totally ignoring the entire Libertarian and Paleoconservative Republican opposition!  We are neither leftists nor liberals, we are people who insist on following the Constitution and never allowing our representatives to delegate to the Executive Branch those powers granted exclusively to the Legislative Branch.  As far as I am concerned, the "war" against Iraq, or more properly just the invasion of a sovereign nation (regardless of how brutal, stinky and bloodthirsty Saddam & Company were) was an illegal incursion into Iraq for a purpose that was never proven to be in our national security interests, and when we invaded, we never found any weapons of mass destruction.  But we invaded, we have taken over, and we are promising the Iraqis their own government as long as it meets with US approval.  Am I supposed to applaud this administration for that kind of unconstitutional action?  Well, I won't, and Teddy Roosevelt would agree with my anger, because he said this:

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
-- Theodore Roosevelt [1918]
Yet the White House, their media cronies and a lot of flag-waving Americans who believed all the trash and disinformation on television thought our "liberation" of Iraq was an act of courage and military genius on the part of George W. Bush, new American emperor.  

I am angry with the media, the Rush Limbaugh blabbing mouths, bobbleheaded Sean Hannitys and other talking brainless heads who are paid millions to "hannitize" or "limbaughize" the American public into rallying around the president and his imperialist staff.  In September 2001, this nation had the world's sympathy and we could have used that opportunity to illuminate the world on holding fast to freedom even in the face of a horrific attack by someone.  Instead, our government took over Afghanistan in search of an old turbaned lunatic we haven't found  yet ... but American troops are still in Afghanistan, will be there until Hell freezes over and they're still dying there from hostile fire.  Bring our military home, I will thank you. So will their families and friends.  So will the Afghanis who are capable of establishing their government in their own way, according to their own culture, which is not western, United States culture and never will be.  If we're so interested in tolerance in our own country, why aren't we tolerant of the right of other nations to have their own cultures, as objectionable as they may seem to our western way of thinking?  Generally we are very tolerant of other cultures when they either have nuclear weapons to use against us, or they have no oil or other resources we want.  But I should go watch the bunny wabbits and not be angry?  I refuse.

*  American Imperialism.  There is a quote by Thomas Jefferson that sums up in a few words my whole foreign policy and what was intended to be America's foreign policy:
"Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations -- entangling
alliances with none." --Thomas Jefferson
Please tell me why I should not be angry that America has engaged in "entangling alliances" all over the world, at the cost of hundreds of billions of American taxpayer dollars, only to become the most hated (but not the most feared) nation on earth? We have not fought an honest war since World War II.  I know there are many who do not believe either World War I or II were honest wars.  Whether the Kaiser would ever have been a threat to us or not, and the sinking of the Lusitania proved to be an honest act of war because of its military cargo, did we really have a national security interest in World War I?  Or just the monetary interests of the elitists who still form the "shadow government" that turns the legislative wheels in Washington D.C.?

I do recall World War II as a child, and I am certain that Hitler's ambitions would never have stopped at the conquest of Europe.  Madmen never conquer enough.  Alexander the Great's conquests proved that.  If he had not died, he probably would have traversed India and gone into China.  There were indeed U-boats off our Atlantic coast, and Japanese subs off our Pacific coast.  So I will categorize World War II as necessary to our national security interests and thus a "just" war, one legitimately declared by Congress.  However, the fact that we still maintain military presence in all of the countries we either defeated or aided is ridiculous.  Those bases should have been closed and the US should have brought all its military personnel home.  What, in our Constitution, gives us the right to forever occupy a vanquished foe?  Nothing!  

Since World War II we have not engaged in a single war with the intent to win, nor have we brought our military home. We merely rotate the troops, but the bases remain.  Hence we have created endless "entangling alliances" all over the flippin' world and then wonder why we're the target of such terrorism.  They're jealous of our freedom?  That is absurd.  They are angry at our hegemony, our imperialist ambitions and multinational corporate interests.  That's why they hate us.  And that's why this nation can never feel the safety it felt before World War II.  Or perhaps prior to the Korean Conflict when our intent to meddle became obvious to the world.

* American Anti-Constitutionalism.  Someone asked me the other day what I thought of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. This person is an internet friend whose views closely parallel my own, so I facetiously replied, "Nice documents, should be preserved in some national museum as relics of a great experiment in liberty that failed."  Yet underneath the flippant reply was this anger aimed at those who take the oaths of office to uphold the Constitution (which includes the Bill of Rights and further amendments) and think nothing of overriding, ignoring, twisting, or judicially perverting the original wording and intent of the Constitution itself.

One of my Christian lady friends, during the height of the airline fiascos, said to me on the phone, "well we have to give up some liberties in order to have more safety and security."  She claims to be a Republican, but she is a twit.  Since she is 73 and not a well woman, I did not get into an argument with her.  But I heard echoes of her statement all over the nation, blaring out of the propaganda machines we call "the media" (whether radio or television).  She bought into the notion promulgated by an imperialist, Constitution-ignoring administration that it is perfectly all right, in fact necessary, for citizens to surrender their liberty to the government in exchange for "security" -- as if national security demanded any surrender of our constitutional guarantees. If I had wanted to be nasty, I would have told her that Hitler would have loved her attitude in 1933 Germany.  I didn't.  It isn't easy for me to hold my tongue, but after all, she isn't the only stupid American to buy into that hogwash and call it prime rib.  I wish she were!

Do Americans learn the Constitution any more?  Do they know their Bill of Rights?  Do they understand the meaning of liberty and the intent of the Founding Fathers in establishing a nation where the representatives are to represent the people and not the special interest groups, the shadow rulers comprised of the filthy rich globalists, and the giant bureaucracy that the people cannot possibly monitor and control?  Worse yet, does anyone care?  After all, I had my choice of restaurants this morning, all that was required of me was to be able to pay the tab.  Am I not therefore "free?"  God help us!

* Neocon Centrists and RINOS. Neocons and RINOS (Republicans in Name Only and generally one and the same individuals) are anti-Constitutionalists.  They are imperialists, and differ from their liberal counterparts only in strategy to arrive at the same result:  a new world order or global governance.   They do not give a confederate dollar about the Constitution or the Bill of Rights as long as they can display the documents, take the oaths and do as they please, fooling some of the people all of the time.  As a long-time Republican (I voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960, largely because I detested Richard Nixon) it pains me to see Bush-campers believing one of the most dishonest presidents we have had, and one of the most imperialist.  He is openly imperialist, and his followers adore and follow him for things that would have turned them into a raging lynch mob if Bubba Clinton had tried to pull that junk.  Now Clinton was a scuzz, but he was a public scuzz, and we loved to tear him to pieces.  We also had no equivalent of John Ashcroft to fear, or his jackboots who listen to our every keystroke if we do not agree with the plans, programs and actions of George W. Bush, the New American Emperor.

In 1964, with Kennedy assassinated, my head a bit clearer (although I still detested Nixon), I voted for Arizona's Barry Goldwater and became what was then known as a "Goldwater" Republican.  That stood for small central government, small taxes to support it, few federal "programs" that Reagan correctly described as being the closest thing to immortality on earth, and Tenth Amendment states' rights (exclusive of forced segregation).  History records that Lyndon B. Johnson won the election, pushed his "Great Society" onto a confused public and began a program of federal expansion so heavy that America and its economy are about to implode under the weight of our own bureaucracy.

Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) stands nearly as a lone voice against the evils of the neocons and RINOS.  If he were to run for president, he would meet with the same fate as Bobby Kennedy ... some "lone gunman" set up to take the blame for the work of expert snipers with friends in very high places.

Other than Ron Paul and the true members of his Liberty Caucus, the Lew Rockwell crowd and the free, thinking Patriots of America, will anyone stand up for what is right ...a return to a Constitution and Bill of Rights?  Are there enough thinking people in this nation to realize that with the entire world against us, we're all lemmings headed for the precipice and into the sea?  That our great nation and its wonderful resources will belong to someone else after the rubble is scraped away?

If only it were our "freedom" of which the world was jealous, they would not have the kind of hatred they do toward the United States.  They might consider us ugly Americans, or gluttonous eaters and selfish, indulgent fools, but they would not be firm in their determination to obliterate us.  It is our hegemony, imperialism, and insistence on being the dominant force in the world, imposing our culture and our corporate interests on everyone in the world, that makes us the nation in the crosshairs.

So I am angry.  To support the reasons for this further, this essay can be ended with two quotes from our founders that we should really take seriously.
"...no free government, or the blessing of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles."
George Mason, Virginia Declaration of Rights [1776]


"When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Charles Hammond [1821]

Return to column

Home