Contrary to what many American patriots may try to tell you, the United States of America has never been a perfect country.  In fact, most ways, we have been about as far from perfect as any nation can get.  We have never held the moral "high ground."

Government schools teach today's schoolchildren that we fought World War II because Hitler was an evil dictator who invaded other countries without just cause and murdered six million Jews.  Although both statements and the adjective "evil" applied to old Adolph are certainly true, they ignore some vital historical facts.  To begin with, Hitler murdered a good deal more than six million Jews.  He also slaughtered millions of Gypsies, Poles, mentally retarded, and anyone else that didn't fit the Aryan model for the perfect race.  It would also be a good idea, while you are patting yourself on the back for stopping Hitler, not to forget about the 21 million of his own Russians slaughtered by our great "ally" in World War II, Joseph Stalin.

The truth is, in 1941, most Americans knew nothing of what was happening to the Jews in Germany.  Whispers and rumors abounded, but few facts.  Most Americans opposed involvement in something considered not to be "our" war.  The slogan "too proud to fight" was resurrected from pre-WWI days and dusted off for use.  In fact, the situation was so troublesome that Franklin Roosevelt learned of Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor at least three weeks in advance, yet allowed the attack to go forward in order to inflame American opinion about the war.  Lest you think that George W. Bush is the dumbest mental defective ever to occupy the Oval Office, allow me to point out that Roosevelt had nearly the entire Pacific fleet docked at Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941.  This allowed the Japanese to damage or destroy nearly our entire Navy, an act of outright treason on the part of Roosevelt – and one that very nearly resulted in American children learning to speak Japanese.  When our soldiers liberated Hitler's death camps near the end of the war, what they found shocked them so profoundly that many never got over the horror.  They didn't know - they couldn't have imagined - what they would find, so those camps had literally nothing to do with our motivations for entering the war.

Ending Hitler's reign of terror was a good thing - a very good thing.  I have no issues with that.  I do have many pointed questions about how we went about it.

In the First World War, the Lusitania was carrying munitions as well as passengers, in clear violation of international law, yet Woodrow Wilson (who had actually campaigned on keeping us out of the war) used the sinking of the Lusitania to inflame American opinion and propel us into the fighting.  And - let's say this very softly - it is very possible that our victory over the Kaiser in WWI set Germany up for the horror of Hitler and WWII a generation later.  It's a lesson in non-intervention and unintended consequences we would do well to take to heart.

In the 1950s, a CIA operation known as "Operation Ajax" was carried out to place the Shah of Iran on his throne.  In the first place, the government of Iran was none of our affair.  In the second place, the Shah racked up a truly impressive body count which is now - rightly - blamed on the United States.

In the early 1960s, the Pentagon drew up a plan - now declassified - called Operation Northwoods.  It was a plan for committing terrorist attacks - attacks that would kill American citizens - to persuade America that invading Cuba was a good idea.  Does anyone remember the rash of Cuban hijackings in the late 1960s?  Read Northwoods for a cold chill.  The documents are freely available.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident that ignited our involvement in Viet Nam simply never happened.

Just prior to Gulf War I, a young Kuwaiti girl testified before congressional leaders about seeing Saddam Hussein's soldiers snatch babies from incubators in Kuwait, seize the incubators and throw the babies on the cold floor to die.  In fact, this young girl had not even been within ten thousand miles of Kuwait when the alleged - and fictitious - incident was supposed to have taken place.  Her identity was supposedly protected at the time because her family was still in Kuwait.  In fact, her name was Nayirah al-Sabah.  Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, her family was safe on Embassy Row in Washington, and the incubator story was a complete fabrication.  Lauri Fitz-Pegado of Hill and Knowlton, a top public relations firm hired by the organization Citizens for a Free Kuwait to "sell" the war to this country, coached Nayirah for days before her speech.  She did a good job, too.  I was so impressed by this little girl that I even tried to re-enlist at the time.

More importantly, Hill and Knowlton also hired a man who called himself Dr. Ebrahim to testify before the U.S. Security Council that he had personally buried these dead babies.  After the war, he admitted his lie and admitted to the fact that he was a dentist, not a medical doctor.

Saddam Hussein is no saint.  I have no issues with living in a world without him.  However, the lies used to propel us into this current fiasco in Iraq, and our current treatment of Iraqi citizens - Saddam's own victims - are an abomination that will cost this country dearly.  Karma does not only apply to individuals.

The United States hasn't consisted of saints or angels from its very beginning.  We have a long history of giving smallpox laden blankets to Native Americans, importing hapless Africans as slaves, and long after such slaves were freed and given full rights as citizens (at least on paper), deliberately infecting them with syphilis.

Abraham Lincoln, long hailed as the saintly savior of the poor black slaves, only freed those slaves so they could fight and die for the Union Army.  Slavery was already collapsing in the old South, not for any just or moral reasons, but for economic reasons.  Lincoln just hurried the process along for his own purposes.  Furthermore, he suspended constitutional rights during the Civil War, much as Bush has done during the War on Terror.  When the Civil War ended, the Supreme Court ordered Lincoln to restore the Constitution.  He refused to do so, and wrote quite a nasty letter about it.  Five months later, he was dead.  Draw your own conclusions about justice here.  His successor obeyed the Supreme Court, and restored the Constitution, at least in all but the southern states.  The corruption and horror of the reconstruction of the South will live in southern memory forever, so there is no need to rehash all that here.

George W. Bush may actually be smarter than old Abe.  Dubya has managed to seize far more power than Lincoln ever did - and avoid Lincoln's inevitable fate by inventing a war without an ending.  Furthermore, his grandfather was a Nazi, his father was a Nazi, and Dubya is the legitimate successor to Hitler.

For decades now, the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning has been teaching torture techniques to the secret police of South American countries, right here in the U.S.  How dare we be shocked when we see the photographic evidence of these techniques actually used by Americans in Iraq?  Many of the civilian interrogators who have worked or are working in Iraq are themselves instructors from the School of the Americas!  (Note:  The School of the Americas was recently renamed the "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.")  We have created our own monsters, and we must own up to that crime now.

We are not saints - no, sir.  We never were.

What once made us different from any other country in the world was an idea we tried to bring to life here - an idea embodied in our Constitution.  It was a noble idea.  It was the idea that all men are created equal, limited solely by their willingness to work.  It was the idea that all men have certain rights that no government can ever touch.  It was the idea of limiting or chaining government - the idea that the American government is a servant of the people, rather than the other way around.  In its day, and even today, this idea was unique in the history of humankind.  Even the democracies of the early Greek city-states could not come close to the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States of America.  To ensure that these guarantees of freedom would always have real teeth, the founders added the most important article of all to our Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment.

We have never lived up to that idea.  Our founders fought, and in many cases died, to ensure that all Americans would have the guaranteed and untouchable right to bear arms, and a legal document they could use - along with the threat implied by an armed population - to defend their constitutional freedoms.  Any American who refuses to bear arms and to hold his or her leaders legally accountable for the document they swore publicly to uphold is as much a traitor to this country as are the leaders who are actively destroying the nation our founders tried to build.

The world has changed.  This is the 21st Century.  We have raised two generations of obedient sheep in this country, and that is coming back to haunt us now.  Our leaders no longer even bother to pretend to follow the Constitution - the truth is, they believe themselves so powerful now that they simply do not care what the American people know.  American sheep do not want to defend themselves, and they are delighted to try to destroy your own right to bear arms so that they will never have to stand up for themselves. 

Heroes are ordinary people who have done what they had to do.  Patriots are not terrorists.  They do not attack the innocent, but they will defend their own freedoms with their lives.  If such men and women are forced to fight in their own defense, it will only be because of those traitors who refused to stand together with them.  If this nation stands together as one, we can be free again without bloodshed.  How long will it take for today's American sheep to learn this?  A handful of wealthy and reasonably intelligent men - greedy men - oppress us today.  280 million Americans - with guns - who say with one voice, "Enough!" — well, even the village idiot would back down from that one.  Bloodshed should not and will not be necessary.  Our founding fathers gave us a system for peaceful change.  We can still settle this lawfully and at the ballot box if we will ensure the honesty of our elections, but we are rapidly running out of time.

We do have one new thing working for us.  The Internet is changing the entire world.  For the first time in the history of the U.S., we have fast and easy access to real facts, even those facts our government doesn't want us to have.  Of course, sifting through the nonsense on the Net to get the real story is a real challenge, but not beyond those of us who didn't fall out of the cabbage patch yesterday.

Fact:  There are Air Marshals on fewer than five percent of commercial flights.  Despite passing a provision for armed flight crews, Congress has placed so many obstacles in the way of pilots arming themselves that all but about one percent are still completely unarmed.  Yet Homeland Security refuses steadfastly to allow passengers - even those who have been through the illegal and extensive background checks to license themselves - to carry arms to protect those flights.

Fact:  Lists of known terrorists are still withheld from the no-fly lists for "security" reasons, while many decent and upright Americans are permanently barred from commercial flights for the heinous crime of peaceful political dissent.

Fact:  The provisions of the Patriot Act are used far more often to jail Americans than terrorists.

Fact:  You can be jailed today for the mere possession of $3,000 cash.  A mere $3,000 is considered evidence of money laundering!  Most families can't live a month on that amount!  This is deliberately intended to force you to obtain and use a bank account, and this is in a country that cannot even force you to learn to read.  It means that your every expenditure can be tracked.

Fact:  The Constitution is not even being given lip service any longer.  Free speech is a thing of the past.  Fanatics are trying to claim the right to establish Christianity — their particular brand of it — as a de-facto state religion.

Fact:  You can only bear arms freely in two states, Vermont and Alaska.  In 39 others, you can only do so at great expense and by jumping through massive government hoops — and in nine additional states, concealed permits are only issued at the capricious whim of local law enforcement.  There are actually cities in America where you cannot own arms, let alone carry them.  All of this has taken place in the face of the words "shall not be infringed" in the Second Amendment, which any village idiot can define.

Fact:  Political dissenters and peaceful anarchists are being labeled as "domestic terrorists" today, and the word "anarchy" is being deliberately used by the media to describe "nihilism."  If you are confused about the definitions here, please find a dictionary.  Do not let the media change your language.  I am an anarchist today, because I have seen enough to convince me for all time that power corrupts.  I am not, never have been, and never will be, a nihilist!

Fact:  Under the Patriot Act and subsequent legislation, government officials can search you or your belongings at any time, without having to swear out a warrant, or even tell you that you have been searched at all.  If you learn of it, and speak of it, you can be jailed.

Fact:  Those who object to the policies of our current administration are being harassed and threatened quite openly by government officials.

Fact:  You can be jailed indefinitely and in complete secrecy, without charge and without trial, at the whim of Homeland Security.  If they are able, Homeland Security will hide you even from judicial oversight of your imprisonment.  If you are allowed an attorney (many such prisoners are not), your conversations with legal counsel will be monitored and recorded.  Let's say this softly, you may even be tortured.  Anyone with the slightest knowledge of human psychology knows that people who take up such an occupation do not do it because of patriotism - they do it for their own sick sexual pleasure.  So - again, let's say this softly - it may not even be because someone thinks you might have real information.  It can happen to your neighbor, and it can happen to you. 

Am I afraid of terrorists?  Yes, of course I am, although I admit that I do not know who they are.  I have many very ugly suspicions that have little to do with Islam or the Middle East.  Am I willing to surrender my freedoms to assuage my fear?  No, I am not.  I've been afraid before, and I can handle it again.  Besides, if you have an IQ above that of an ant, you know that you can do a better job of defending your hide than any government ever can or will do - but you need the tools guaranteed by the Second Amendment to do so.  Given what I have learned about my "benevolent" government in the last six terrible years, I am frankly far more afraid of what it may do to hang onto power than of what some psychotic Muslim might do.

Is America a nation of sniveling cowards that is willing to do anything at all, suffer slavery and any hardship or humiliation whatsoever, just to feel a little bit safer?  Or are we a nation of patriots who will fire anyone in the White House or Congress who has made a clear attempt to destroy everything this country could and should have been?

I don't know.  You decide.  The 2008 elections are coming.  The only candidate actively running on the platform of restoring freedom is Ron Paul.  You know what to do.