Republicans: The New Tyrants

I am angry.

No, I am incensed.

I hate it when people are disingenuous with me.

And while I can't stand liberals, I'll take a liberal who claims to be a liberal any day over a liberal who claims to be a conservative.

Remember Robert Bork? Remember how the righteous Republicans were positively indignant over the borking of Bork? Remember how upset the right was over the left because--underneath it all--Bork was a strict constructionist?

In his book The 5,000 Year Leap, author W. Cleon Skousen writes that the Founding Fathers were intent on finding the balanced center, not between republican and democratic thought but between anarchy on the right and tyranny on the left.

We've always known that communism is tyranny. It is economic tyranny that always leads to religious and political tyranny because to achieve their mythological Utopia, they must be rid of private property, and to be rid of private property they must be rid of family, and to be rid of family they must be rid of God. It doesn't work, and it never will. Ronald Reagan once quipped, "How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. How do you tell an anti-communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."

But by no means does Communism have a monopoly on tyranny. Today, there is another tyranny, and it can be found on both sides of the aisle: fascism. Yes, fascism is that word that Hollywood elite, a la Streisand and Moore, fling at the right so much it has lost much of its punch. But even they, who were assuredly dropped on their heads at birth, can every once in a while get it right.

What is fascism? Jonah Goldberg, in Liberal Fascism, asserts that there's no tight definition for fascism, and it's difficult to boil down. (He then proceeds to write a whole book trying to boil it down.) But Richard Maybury says that, in its simplest definition, fascism is a government doing whatever it takes to achieve its agenda, and backing it up with what only a government can use to back it up: chains and guns. So, in our constitutional republic, fascism is the government achieving its agenda at the cost of its citizens' constitutional rights and its government's constitutional responsibilities.

There's nothing like a catastrophe to reduce us to knee-jerk reactions. And in the aftermath of 9-11, Congress passed the queen mother of knee-jerk reactions: The Patriot Act. But we've had nine years to rethink this unconstitutional monstrosity. And there is now NO excuse. Despite that, on February 14, 2011, 275 fascists in our Congress voted to extend it, 275 fascists who cloak themselves in a Republican label. Clearly, 275 fascists have unwadded their panties from the good old Bork days. Now they, too, are as eager to trample our Constitution as the deconstructionists were. Hypocrites.

We don't need no stinkin' Patriot Act. We need the Constitution. We need the Fourth Amendment. And we need statesmen, not tyrants.

How can you tell a tyrant? They vote for the Patriot Act. How can you tell a patriot? They understand the Patriot Act.