Government is not wisdom. It is not eloquence. It is not about honor or truth. It is force!
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To offer up our Liberties on the altar of tyranny is blasphemy … just say “NO”!
Restore the U. S. Constitution & Bill of Rights. Oath of Off.: Preserve, protect & defend them.
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“If we don’t take better care of our Constitution, we will find ourselves one
day living in a very unfree society….” –Charley Reese

http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese26.html

December 29, 2003

Don’t Throw Away Liberty by Charley Reese

Probably one of the most chilling statements ever made by a tyrant was
Caligula’s warning: “Remember, I can do anything to anybody.”

Few tyrants have ever had such total power. Even in Caligula’s case, he
wielded such power for a relatively short time before he was killed. The
only tyrants in our time who could have made such a statement were Joe
Stalin and his admiring fan, Saddam Hussein. In both cases, they literally
could do anything to anybody, provided, of course, they could get their
hands on them.

Stalin was by far the greater monster, probably the greatest monster in the
20th century. His victims numbered in the millions. He exerted total control
over a vast nation, and he was feared by all who knew him. Just how afraid
people were of Stalin is illustrated by his death.

Sometime during the night, Stalin suffered a stroke. He lay on the floor of
his bedroom, alive but unable to speak or move, half the night and nearly
all of the next day. Personal servants who had been in his employ for years
were so scared of him that they dared not even knock on his bedroom door
when he failed to appear in the morning. They waited late into the
afternoon, and even then did not dare go into the room. They called the
secret police instead.

Saddam obviously did not inspire that kind of fear, but plenty of people
were afraid of him, and with good reason. I’ve often said that the worst
possible job in the world would have been to be Saddam’s public-relations
adviser. He had a nasty habit of greeting advice he didn’t like with gunfire
or the torture chamber. I was amused by the statement of one of the Iraqis
who was allowed to meet with Saddam after his capture. He complained that
Saddam showed no remorse. Well, of course, he didn’t. Psychopaths are
incapable of remorse. He will go to his grave believing everything he did
was the “right thing to do.”

We in America need not fear someone assuming absolute power. But we should
remember that just as absolute power corrupts absolutely, relative power can
corrupt relatively speaking. Anybody with power over someone else can become
a tyrant – a schoolteacher, a policeman, a parent, a military drill
instructor or a schoolyard bully. To be a tyrant is simply to impose your
will on another by force or threat of force without lawful authority.

To borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill, the abuse of power is something
up with which no American citizen should ever put. We should ever be on our
guard that people with authority over others never abuse that authority. It
is one of the continuing duties of citizenship. And it’s not easy.

My main objections to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are that both were
undertaken without a formal declaration of war by Congress, as the
Constitution requires. President Bush didn’t ask for a formal declaration,
and Congress gave him a resolution. Both branches of our government
disregarded the Constitution. Congress conceded a grant of power to the
president that the Constitution does not authorize. This is an abuse of
power.

The Constitution is a fragile thing. It can protect our liberties only so
long as we the people firmly insist that all elected officials obey it. If
we allow parts of it to be disregarded, then we invite the disregard of all
of it. As all of the wise men in our nation’s past have warned, the main
threat to our liberty will never be a foreign conqueror but our own apathy
coupled with the unbridled ambition of our own politicians.

I wish Americans took their Constitution more seriously. It is not a
historical document. It is as binding today on every federal official as it
was the day it was ratified. Americans should consider violating the
Constitution as being the unforgivable public sin and vote against every
single person who does it.

There is everything right with saying to a congressional representative, a
senator or a president, “You know, I like you, and I agree with a lot of the
things you’ve done, but you’ve violated your oath of office, and I can no
longer support you.” That’s putting the Constitution where it belongs, ahead
of public-opinion polls, partisan politics or even personal feelings.

If we don’t take better care of our Constitution, we will find ourselves one
day living in a very unfree society, and the result of more than 200 years
of blood, sweat and tears by better people will go into the trash can of
history. It’s bad enough to lose one’s liberty; it’s even worse to throw it
away.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years, reporting on everything
from sports to politics. From 1969-71, he worked as a campaign staffer for
gubernatorial, senatorial and congressional races in several states. He was
an editor, assistant to the publisher, and columnist for the Orlando
Sentinel from 1971 to 2001. He now writes a syndicated column which is
carried on LewRockwell.com. Reese served two years active duty in the U.S.
Army as a tank gunner.