Don Surber's lament (via Bill)

Don Surber, whom I generally like, writes the following lament (slightly edited for form). It's lament for most of its length, but it ends on a positive note.

The fairy tale is that a lady asked Benjamin Franklin what sort of government would the proposed Constitution create. The reply, allegedly, was, "A republic, if you can keep it."

Judging what has transpired over 233 years under a constitutional government, I can only conclude that he said nothing of the sort.

If he knew then what we are know, he would have foreseen a country that in many ways is just like the Great Britain the Founding Fathers complained about in the Declaration of Independence. Remember what they said about King George III?

"He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance."

The monarch was a piker compared to our 2.1 million bureaucrats.

The IRS is hiring and arming 87,000 agents who are willing to use deadly force to enforce whatever new regulations the bureaucracy promulgates. Every week, the federal bureaucracy publishes 1,500 pages of new regulations in the Federal Registry. You must obey each one.

30 years ago, the police state at Ruby Ridge shot and killed a man's wife, infant, and teen-aged son over the length of a shotgun barrel. The incident came 100 years after soldiers went to Wounded Knee on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and shot and killed 300 men, women, and children because one young Indian refused to turn in his new rifle without compensation.

This is despite a Constitution that preserves for the people the right to keep and bear arms. Those arms when the amendment was ratified included rifles, cannons, and other military-level weaponry. Six months after ratification, Congress passed a law requiring every able-bodied white man to own a rifle or musket to serve in a militia to protect the land. Lincoln added black men. The law stood for 111 years.

We live in a country where the FBI can overturn the re-election of the first president to carry 49 states. We call that travesty Watergate. The sanctimonious cry of no man is above the law masks the lies behind Fake Scandal. That president never spied on anyone.

44 years later, the FBI spied on a future president on behalf of a sitting one.

We live in a country where the FBI lies to judges to get warrants while arresting anyone who "lies" to the FBI.  

We live in a country where the press is allowed to regularly and routinely lie about people under a bizarre interpretation of free speech while the government pressures social-media companies to silence critics and label the truth as misinformation.

We live in a country where a judge ignores a presidential pardon for months on end just to harass a framed man.

We live in a country where the FBI raids a former president's home and has 30 agents spend 9 hours filling 15 boxes with documents it seized under a general warrant, and then go to court and claim it has not read all the documents. In a republic, police are not allowed to seize any damned thing they please.

We live in a country where protesters are thrown into solitary confinement for 20 months without charge or trial for parading in a public building.

We live in a country where actual criminals are released from jail without posting bond.

We live in a country where the FBI sends a SWAT team in a pre-dawn raid of a lobbyist while cable TV broadcasts the abomination live—as a warning to all.

Come to think of it, we live in a country that has SWAT teams. They Swatted Marjorie Taylor Greene in her home at 1 AM. Militarizing the police is a definition of a police state. For whom do the tanks roll? They roll for thee.

We live in a country where people are forced to take experimental vaccines in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

We live in a country that seizes yachts, other property, and cash from citizens in the name of fighting drugs.

I have no idea if Franklin actually said, "A republic, if you can keep it."

All I know is we haven't kept it.

I also know that we can take it back. Just 33 years ago, a 96-mile wall fell in Berlin.