a boys' and girls' history of the future

Paging Senator McCarthy

I hate to be a downer (although, it does seem to be one of my main skill sets), but sh*t just got a lot more Orwellian here in the good ol’ U.S.A.

Our sweetie-pies in the United States Senate just voted against a provision that would have kept our military from arresting and detaining U.S. citizens on American soil indefinitely and without charge so long as they are suspected of terrorism. Which means that unless President Obama vetoes the whole thang (and it’s a part of the Defense Spending bill for the next year—not an easy veto, politically-speaking), we can all be snatched up and scooted away so long as we’re “suspected”—forever. Habeas Corpus be damned. All that crazyareyoukiddingmewhatabouttheconstitution havoc that’s been wreaked in Guantanamo and in our countless secret prisons is now beginning to stink up our own sections of town. It’s like the folks in charge are trying to prove that the greatest oppressor and danger to a people is it’s own government.

James Madison said, “Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.” Our real power (just ask the rest of the world) is in our ginormous standing army/navy/air force/special ops/marines/drones/Patriot Act/pepper-spraying-peaceful-protestors-police/moolah. Regardless of whether you think he’s Hitler or Muslim or an atheist or the Second-Coming of Christ, this bill is an unprecedented undoing of Constitutional rights, and Mr. Obama is our last line of defense. Write the President. Tell him to veto the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012.

You can read more about the hot water we’re in here, here, and here.

(And if you’re up for it, see how your senators voted on the provision here. If they voted yea, it means they were trying to take the indefinite detention provision out (and we should applaud their stance). If they voted nay, it means they wanted it left in, and you and i and all of us should write them, and tell them in no uncertain terms that they will never get another vote out of us.)