Tom the Tinker Few and Far Between
by Kurt Nimmo
In the video here, Rush Holt (D-NJ) stands on the floor of the House and denounces the neocon plan to trounce a moribund Fourth Amendment, although Mr. Holt, a statist, is little more than namby-pamby about it all.

Nobody laughs when Holt mentions the popular myth — popular that is with Congress critters, starry-eyed grade school teachers, and clueless flag-wavers who have never read a paragraph of history — that in America the government is the servant of the people.

 

In fact, from the very beginning, even before the ink was dry on the Bill of Rights, the government was running roughshod over the people. In 1798, the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts and the latter was used shut down Republican newspapers, arrest editors and writers, including Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the Philadelphia Democrat-Republican Aurora, who was accused of libeling President Adams.

 

Back in the day, Bache’s arrest erupted in a public outcry against all of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Opposition to the Sedition Act resulted in the election of Thomas Jefferson, a Republican, to the presidency in 1800. Jefferson pardoned all those convicted under the Sedition Act, while Congress restored all fines paid with interest.

Now? We get milquetoast Democrats afraid to call out Bush and his neocon handlers, instead citing platitudes and ruminating upon broken down myths. Holt is correct when he declares Bush’s “Protect America Act” casts suspicion on all Americans — but then that is precisely what it is intended to do, as our rulers consider the public at large the enemy, or those who speak out, anyway.

 

 

 

 

If Holt had a spine intact, he would have denounced Congress as a whole, that ignoble whore house bought and paid for by corporatists – call them right, fascists – and the global elite. The neocon bill passed both the House and Senate with bipartisan support, that is to say our “representatives” are traitors to the Fourth Amendment and thus the Constitution at large. Not that it matters, not any more.

How many of our idiot politicians recall the reason the Fourth Amendment was devised in the first place? Precious few. How many understand the Fourth was included because the framers remembered well the King’s broad warrants and Red Coats kicking in doors, rifling through papers and personal effects, and confiscating guns.

“The colonists’ experience with King George III’s Red Coats was a schoolroom full of reasons why government must be strictly controlled,” writes Larry Pratt, Executive Director Gun Owners of America. “The king’s troops, using the unconstitutional power of Writs of Assistance, thought nothing of violating the English common law tradition of ‘a man’s home is his castle.’ Warrantless searches were the order of the day in the years leading up to the War for American Independence.”

No longer do we have a Tom the Tinker ready to lead a rebellion. Tom held, during the Whiskey Rebellion, that it was not enough to attack tax collectors — one had to put pressure on those who complied with taxation. Of course, Tom wasn’t a real person, not a nom de guerre, but rather the collective essence of the movement against unfair and punitive taxation.

Now most of us can’t be bothered with such, far too many of us expect others to speak for us. Tom the Tinker would be disgusted because obviously Pogo was spot-on: we have seen the enemy he is us.

How pathetic. Now we will get the neocon police state in spades. And Democrats will support it. Tyranny enjoys “bipartisan support.” Come November of this year, we will get Hillary, Obama, or the Manchurian candidate, John McCain. All support the drive toward a police state and the destruction of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, although of course they parrot the myth of freedom as they drape themselves in the flag (made by slaves in China).

But then, naturally, as history demonstrates over and over, we only get what’s coming to us, even those of us dragged kicking and screaming to the closest KBR detention camp.

 

 

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