Sunday, July 02, 2006

Tyranny Gets a New Face

You’ve gotta read this to believe it. See if you agree with these statements and if you can identify their (modified) source.

  • President Bush has refused his assent to laws, which are essential to the public good.

  • The President’s attorney general and the Supreme Court has forbidden state legislatures to pass certain laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless they were held from being put in efffect until their assent should be obtained.

  • President Bush and Congressional Republicans have endeavored to finely control the composition of the population of the United States by making more stringent or nearly impossible the laws for naturalization of foreigner immigrants. They have refused to pass new laws to encourage their immigration into our country.

  • President Bush has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing to follow and enforce laws that establish proper judiciary review and schemes of jurisdiction.

  • President Bush has erected a multitude of new departments and roles in the federal government, sending across the country swarms of officers that do not help the people but rather hinder them.

  • President Bush has declared a national defense operation a “war” and has used that as an excuse to keep among us, in a time of peace, standing armies without the consent of local legislatures.

  • President Bush has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the power and will of the people.

  • President Bush has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, the overreaching of the executive branch of the federal government. The power he claims as his own is unacknowledged by our laws; he has given his assent to his administration’s acts of pretended legislation:

    • For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us,

    • For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders, rapes, and war crimes which they should commit on the inhabitants of the world,

    • For imposing taxes on us without our consent,

    • For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of seeing white-collar and political criminals face trial by jury,

    • For transporting foreign nationals overseas to be tried or tortured for made-up offences.

  • Through inaction in the face of corporate crime and natural disaster, President Bush has effectively plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of many of our fellow citizens.

  • Presient Bush and his administration is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to Iraq to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny to the President’s will there. He has already begun with circumstances of cruelty, torture, and imprisonment scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally inappropriate behavior for the head of a civilized nation.

  • He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A President whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.


You’ve probably figured it out by now: it’s a lightly modified selection from the United States’ Declaration of Independence, the document we celebrate this weekend.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

This is super smart. I only wish you had managed to include:

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

Manly firmness.

3:03 PM  
Blogger danielklotz said...

God, I was so tempted.

What this country needs now is less manly firmness as ever it has.

Happy Fourth, all!

10:49 PM  

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