"The Founders who crafted our Constitution and Bill of Rights were careful to draft a Constitution of limited powers – one that would protect Americans’ liberty at all times – both in war and in peace.” Sen. Al Franken (D-MN)
February 11, 2015
By: Linda Case Gibbons
You can go on and on about how great our forefathers were, but there are some things we just don’t talk about, like how pushy they were!
Freedom this, freedom that. Rights, rights, rights! Those guys wouldn’t budge!
Tax us without a representative in Parliament? Nope! Confiscate our muskets, our ammunition? Uh, uh. Close down Boston Harbor? No way, dude!
The colonists knew what tyranny looked like. They had looked it in the eye and decided they wanted no part of it.
"We’ve had it,” they told the king.
"There’s been a long train of abuses and usurpations evincing a design to reduce us under absolute Despotism,” they wrote the king, expressing their dissatisfaction with his miserable ways.
When the king made it clear he didn’t care what they thought, they went out and won a war against him.
And they said all kinds of brave things, like, "Give me Liberty or give me death,” and "I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” and really meant it.
It was a fortunate time for our country, to have extraordinary, courageous men, with exceptional vision, all present at the same time, all at that particular place.
They were willing to put aside their differences and crafted the 4,400-Word-Four-Page Constitution to make sure that what King George III did to them, never happened to them again.
It was 19,996 pages fewer than the Obamacare regs and they didn’t even have to hire anyone from M.I.T. to put the thing together.
Now, more than 200 years after our Constitution came into being, we find ourselves devoid of leaders who will lead and protect our country with the valor of our forebears.
At this time in our history, we have leaders who are not extraordinary and not gifted.
Remember Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas)? Last March, speaking from the House floor, during a discussion of the Constitution, she told her colleagues that the Constitution was 400 years old.
It isn’t.
I don’t know if she was even embarrassed. But, regardless, it provided an excellent example of the caliber of our leaders today.
They don’t check facts, they know next to nothing about the history of America and they don’t seem to care much about changing any of that.
So, for kicks, let’s assume things had been different back in Washington’s day. Suppose it was like today.
Imagine if Gen. George Washington had told the Continental Congress, "We don’t need a Continental Army to kill the Redcoats and the Hessians, gents. What we need to do is find them jobs.”
Or suppose, in response to a lantern hung in the Old North Church, a call rang out from a horse and rider speeding through the night, "The people from across the sea are coming! The people from across the sea are coming!” because they were told not to say "British?”
Unfortunately, that’s not too far off the mark from what we are seeing today.
As Christians are beheaded and Jews are killed and persecuted around the world, the blatant threat to freedom of religion everywhere is ignored by our leaders.
While King Abdullah of Jordan, King el Sisi and Prime Minister Netanyahu confront the threat posed by ISIS head on, our "leaders” choose to feign ignorance about the true nature of ISIS, acting indecisively, inconsistently and with no clear strategy.
And while ISIS kills its way toward its goal of a worldwide caliphate and imposition of Sharia law, our leaders engage in a war of semantics.
It is what our Founding Fathers feared the most, the destruction of our country from within.
But why think about all that? Everyone likes a good laugh, right? That’s why it is fortunate that we have the president we have! It’s been nothing but one guffaw after another, watching his wacky antics!
His latest was taking to YouTube again, this time starring in a BuzzFeed video, winking at himself in a mirror, trying on aviator "shades” to show he’s "all that” to the kids in the audience, and dunking cookies in a glass of milk. He was a riot!
We kinda’ noticed his "people” didn’t bother to clean the smudgy mirror he used, but not to worry. That’s the lack of prep we’ve come to know and love from this prankster!
Now it’s true that around the time he was filming, there were Coptic Christians being beheaded in Libya and ISIS was forming plans to burn more victims alive.