CUT OF YOUR HEAD

By Dave Buhlman

In the 1960s we used to quip derisively to each other, "If you want to lose ten pounds of ugly fat, cut off your head."

It certainly is not Seinfeld-level humor, but it worked well enough for us a few times, just as long as it wasn't overused.

Of course, even fat guys who definitely needed to lose some serious ugly fat would not follow through on this suggestion because to do so would render them dead, and in a very messy way. So it just wasn't worth it. A little lighter, headless, but unable to appreciate the achievement. Not a good deal.

Another not so good deal that has actually come our way is the response by the President and Congress to the attacks of 9-11. They needed to react to a serious assault, but instead of hitting the real perps where it hurts, they began the process of cutting off the constitutional rights of a few hundred million innocent "fellow" Americans. This is not the right solution to address this problem, anymore than cutting off one's head to lose some weight is the right thing to do.

Since 9-11 our leaders have allowed government snoops and stooges to spy on innocent civilians, suspended habeas corpus (enshrined in the Magna Carta in the year 1215), allowed the military to be used within the United States, thereby gutting posse comitatus, run up the national debt to nearly $10 trillion, unleashed a torrent of unnecessary tasering of civilians, and created yet another useless mammoth bureaucracy in the form of der Homeland Security Department to protect der fatherland, but mainly to provide yet more public employment on the backs of beleaguered taxpayers.

For those paying attention to these frightening attacks on our civil liberties, the willy-nilly willingness of our elected federal politicians to infringe on our rights is a bad sign of things to come. It's as if all of these big, long bills were already sitting in a word processor somewhere in the bowels of the Capital just waiting for a reason to hit the print button and bring these bills directly to a vote without bothering to even read them. Such a string of usurpations, foisted upon us in a warm and fuzzy bipartisan spirit, one in which Bush, Pelosi, Kennedy and McCain could readily agree to the same script, means that there are no current roadblocks for further attacks on the liberty and privacy of ordinary Americans. The outsider, Bin Laden, could never have accomplished this deterioration in a million Ramadans. It had to be an inside job.

Dave Buhlman is a former two-term New Hampshire State Representative, published author, and avid supporter of returning our country to constitutional government. Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.