It does not surprise me that the most powerful politicians and their appointees feel impervious to the constraints of the Constitution. Those that seek power, ferociously guard the power they've attained, while seeking more to obtain. They'll do whatever they can get away with to obtain and retain power. It's as a natural a characteristic as a lion eating a gazelle. In recognition of that, the Founders constrained the government and politicians, and emplaced protections and rights for the People.
What astounds me is that the American People are not outraged by the abuses of power exposed in recent weeks and months. It has been one scandal after another, each more comprehensive and abusive than the one before it. It is more surprising that some of the media has condemned some of the scandals than that they've worked overtime to condone the scandals.
This cycle began with Benghazi, and an obvious lie by the Administration that it was 'just a protest turned violent.' It took months, but Congress was beginning to get to the heart of the matter, that the Administration wasn't just asleep at the wheel, but willfully turned the lights and phones off. It ignored months' worth of pleas from diplomats for more security, including on the day of the attack. It ordered re-inforcements to not assist. Those who work for the State Department should have been upset. Those with a military background are and were angry.
More recently, we learned that the IRS was targeting the ruling party's opponents. The IRS has become a tool and force to paralyze the effectiveness of groups that support the US Constitution, and call for smaller government. Supporters of the party in power were less apt to be upset than those that were affected by the un-Constitutional targeting by an arm of the Government.
Then we learned that the Justice Department had seized the phone records of AP employees and a Fox news journalist. The MSM was finally mad. True Americans of every stripe condemned the seizures as unlawful, and against the 4th Amendment.
More recently, we learned that a Judge had ordered Verizon to provide the data of every single one of it's customers to the NSA. The information collected is so enormous that the data is updated every single day. Then we learned the NSA was also collecting information via Google, Facebook, and other web based programs, with a program called "Prism." The internet giants deny they accepted their role in it, but that doesn't mean much. The government may have worked with or without the permission of the corporations. Nor can we reasonably expect honesty from those corporations, particularly since they are already snooping on their users.
The worst part about that is not that leaders of both parties knew about it, and defend it, but that so few Americans find anything wrong with it. The Politician in Chief has confirmed that the programs exist, and defends the "necessity" of it. The Speaker of the House defends the program. The Senate Minority Leader condemns not the program, but the individual that leaked evidence of it. There's no one truly denying that the government is spying on every single American, on either side of the aisle, and very few that say there's anything wrong with it.
Sure, there are a few Americans out there screaming bloody murder about the obvious and serious abuses of the Bill of Rights by the government, and they are the same ones that have been trying to wake up Americans for years. At a time like this, those that have been noting the abuses for years, should be sitting back and thanking newcomers to reality. The public outrage should be deafening.
So, why isn't it? The fact that leaders of both parties support this infringement of the 4th Amendment, of the Right to Privacy, silences the partisan loyalists of both parties. The fact that so many Americans have no idea what the 4th Amendment is, or what it says, or why it says it, means that too many Americans are too ignorant to know why this action is un-Constitutional, and as such, inherently illegal. Because too many are too ignorant of the differnce between the powers of Congress versus powers of the Judiciary, they don't understand why a FISA court was a necessity, or why a judge's order does not make an illegal act, legal.
In recent years, Americans have come to accept that a court ruling is sufficient to amend the US Constitution. Not even the Supreme Court has the Constitutional Authority to change the Constitution. In fact, the process of amending the Constitution does not have any judicial component at all.
The bottom line is this: If the events and scandals of 2013 have not awoken the People, it will take the kind of door to door searches the Boston Police executed on a Million subjects of Massachusetts, but then again, they willingly accepted that as well. And if the voice of Veterans and Patriots cannot wake up the American People, then I am wasting my time. If the American People cannot be pried away from American Idol, the Voice, and Survivor long enough to give a shit about their own Freedoms, and those of their neighbors, If they are more concerned with forcing their neighbor to pay for things they don't want, and preventing their neighbors from doing what they do want, on their own property, to understand that their own neighbors will curtail their own rights on their own property, then I am wasting my time.
It does not matter how many terrorists are killed abroad, if we enact a tyranny across the board at home. But let me remind those out there, that believe the rising tyranny at home means a call to revolution: If you can't wake the People up with words, violence will not return us to a Constitutional Republic. If the People themselves prefer giving up their Rights in order to lull themselves to sleep with a false belief that they've attained some security, committing further violence will only entrench them more into calls for greater incursions of Freedom.
Since the people have accepted their road to serfdom, they will only be awoken by the chains and whips of their master. That may come too late. But the time nears, that I become more selfish, that I look only to my own Freedoms. My own dependency on technologies is small in comparison to most. When the self-absorbed awaken to their guard towers abandoned, it's on them, not those that guarded Freedom for half their lives.