On September 17, 1787 the Continental Congress put the finishing touches on the legal framework that binds these united sovereign states together. That charter creates and simultaneously limits the federal government in its powers toward the states and the American citizen. Drawing from the 1776 Declaration of Independence, the Constitution enshrines our rights as having come from beyond the auspices of government, and therefore inalienable.
Depending on your perspective, the US Constitution is either the most significant product of the Enlightenment and the most ingeniously designed body of laws in human history, or it is a “charter of negative liberties” that fails to enshrine “social justice” because it does not accomplish the redistribution of wealth.
That latter viewpoint is the one held by President Barack Obama. He said so publicly in 2001, and his recent actions make it plain that he still holds the US Constitution in low regard.
The Obama government insists that the attacks in Cairo and Benghazi, which have now spread across the Muslim world and to London, were not pre-planned, but are a reaction to a movie. The Obama government is wrong. The attacks in Cairo and Benghazi were clearly pre-planned, and warnings were public as much as 72 hours ahead of time. The Obama government has a history of dishonestly characterizing Islamist terrorist attacks after the fact, always insisting on a proximate cause and the isolation of the particular perpetrator rather than identifying the jihad or factoring attacks and those who carry them out into the broader war against the West. Nidal Hassan et al are always lone nuts rather than foot soldiers for an enemy that has a purpose. Obama and his lieutenants subscribe to a narrative that facts cannot penetrate: Barack Obama’s election would make Islamists like America because Obama grew up Muslim and spent much of his life abroad, and that killing Obama bin Laden would end the war…because.
The fact that these two narratives contradict each other never seems to have bothered Obama or anyone in his administration. If Obama’s inauguration made or enemies like us more, then why did Osama bin Laden keep fighting and why do Afghan soldiers and police keep turning on and murdering American troops?
The possibility of alternate interpretations of these narratives also never seems to have entered the picture. It’s possible, for instance, that Obama’s unusual upbringing including spending formative years in an Indonesian madrassah and at the knee of communist Frank Marshall Davis causes him to have less appreciation of the American story than someone who grew up in American towns, attending Fourth of July parades and reciting the American Pledge of Allegiance unironically. It’s also possible that killing Osama bin Laden and then making that killing a centerpiece of his re-election has given our enemies a bloody shirt to wave in front of its troops. The president who frequently takes advantage of the divided Congress to push his own agenda does not publicly allow that America’s enemies take advantage of a divided American political class and a biased media to push its agenda.
The fact that the Islamists even have an agenda never gets much attention from the Obama government.
The government Obama leads celebrated Constitution Day in an unusual way. Though the very first amendment to the Constitution guarantees Americans their rights to free speech and a free press, the Obama government scooped up a man in the middle of the night, and took him to a law enforcement office for questioning. The man’s crime was supposedly that he had violated the terms of his parole when he uploaded a video critical of Muhammad that the government insists has caused the latest mayhem in the Middle East. He was paraded before the media, his name identified publicly by Obama’s Department of Justice, and on the weekend leading up to today’s birthday of the Constitution, had his free speech rights trashed. The Obama government tried to get YouTube to “review” the man’s film, which is a way of asking the video uploading site to yank it off the Internet.
Which fits the enemy’s agenda of imposing sharia speech codes on the entire world very nicely.
The American people strongly back free speech rights over avoiding offending others. But Obama government, clearly, does not share that view.
Happy Constitution Day!
Update: Iran would also like to wish you a Happy Constitution Day.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member