A Vote for McCain is a Vote for Tyranny

If you want to know what Barack Obama thinks on the issues, go here, not to Sean Hannity and Karl Rove. Duh.

Speaking of Obama, count me among those who are furious about his FISA vote. I read his explanation today (available at HuffPo and the Barack site), and am not mollified. (Mollified? What a word!)

Here's why. If the Senate fails to strip the telecom immunity provision, so much for America's freedom from illegal domestic espionage. The signal will have been given that constitutional rights can be violated, even rescinded, at will. Obama's vote, hinged on a later Senate action, is too big a gamble with my rights.

Some say we're not holding McCain accountable in the same way. Nonsense. We're not voting for McCain. That's a pretty big statement in a two-person race. We KNOW he'd gut the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Not a question. But Obama promised that he would be unflaggingly opposed to giving retroactive immunity to the telecoms. We expected him to stand on that pledge, not to gamble on it.

The fundamental issue at stake in this FISA matter and in the recent Supreme Court on habeas corpus has changed in the last 7.5 years. Before George II, the issue was that these are among a handful of rights that define America. That remains the case. But now the issue at stake is how the next President will address George II's massive ursurpation of powers to the presidency. You see the dilemma. It is one thing to oppose these tyrannical powers outside the Oval Office. It is another to oppose them when you're their sole beneficiary.

This entire speculation might be an exercise in futility, I know. I remain uncertain that the Addingtons, Cheneys, Robertses, Bushes, Yoos, and Gateses and their military cronies will permit an orderly change of power should the Democrats outmanuver the entrapped black voting boxes and roadblocks to the polls. I'll believe it when I see it, because too much money is at stake. I don't expect the Halliburtons and Monsantos and GMs and Chevrons and Exxons and the rest to go quietly back into the relative poverty of pre-George II days. Which brings me to the probability that either Clinton or Obama will actually do anything about CAFTA and NAFTA: Nill. Anyway, I digress.

I can't see any president willingly unburden him- or herself of the powers that Cheney and Addington et al. have appropriated for the Executive--particularly not when we are supposedly living at the whim of Al Qaeda. Can you? Really?

The one--and I mean the sole, the sine qua non, the only--safeguard remaining is the US Supreme Court. We are now ONE VOTE away from losing everything except the by-god-sacred Second Amendment (that's sarcasm). I mean it. When interpretation is all, one vote is all that stands between us and totalitarianism.

This makes me sick, for obvious reasons. It makes me sicker because we got here for two reasons: As a people, we are more easily manipulated than sheep, and dumber.

Most who haven't yet demanded the rights that our ancestors died to bequeath us are selling us out because they are afraid of Al Qaeda. The rest are selling us out because they never understood those rights in the first place.

I may be furious at O, but there's no question who I'll vote for in November. A vote for Obama is a vote for the possibility that there's still time to restore the land of the free and the home of the brave.

A vote for McCain is a vote for tyranny.