SORRY BEN, WE LOST IT.

By Phil Brennan

"What have you given us, Mr. Franklin?" a woman asked Benjamin Franklin as he emerged from the Constitutional convention. 

"A republic, madam, if you can keep it," Franklin said. 

Sorry Ben. We tried, and for a long time we succeeded. But we've lost it. That glorious Republic you and your colleagues gave us is gone. That incredible work of genius you people devised to protect Americans from government tyranny, the Constitution of the United States, is in tatters, torn to pieces by venal and cowardly politicians, power-hungry office holders, malefactors of great wealth and ideologues of the left, all of whose contempt for the people is exceeded only by their lust to control the world. 

It didn't happen overnight, Ben. For much of this century the enemies of liberty have been slowly razing the structure of the Constitution, dismantling it piece by piece, until all that is left is its facade before which its enemies pretend to genuflect while plotting new ways to demolish every last vestige of it. 

Having both the immediate experience of the tyranny of a remote government and the kind of grasp on the lessons of history nowadays scorned by our academics and intellectuals, you and Tom Jefferson, Al Hamilton and Jim Madison understood that the only real threat to human liberty is government. 

And understanding that fact led you to devise a constitution that limited the powers of the federal government and a Bill of Rights which put an iron- bound cordon of protection against tyranny around the individual. 

One of your more brilliant conceptions - the separation of powers created by three co-equal branches of government each granted specific powers and each restrained by the other two branches, was designed to prevent the emergence of an autocracy with one branch usurping the powers of the other two and becoming an absolute dictatorship. 

Ben, I guess you thought that this document would be enough to keep government - that entity George Washington recognized simply as "force" -- in line. You made the mistake of believing that the people elected to office would be of similar character to your contemporaries - honorable men with the strongest of moral sensibilities - and that such men would never tinker with the Constitution or attempt to manipulate it to serve their own ends. 

Moreover, you erroneously believed that the American people would continue to be the same hearty stock that took on the mightiest nation on the face of the earth - the only superpower of its day - and despite overwhelming odds and a series of disastrous defeats -- won. 

You thought future generations of Americans would continue to exhibit the same kind of common sense that allowed your generation to recognize political mountebanks and would-be dictators and scorn their ambitions. You thought they would demand that their leaders toe the moral line and be of good moral and ethical character. You never dreamed that the likes of William Jefferson Blythe a/k/a Clinton - a man who avoided serving his country in a war that killed tens of thousands of his generation - would win the highest office in the land, commit unspeakable offenses against all that is good and holy, and win overwhelming approval from the public for his official conduct of office. 

You wouldn't have believed it because the idea is, on the face of it, patently absurd. People cannot be that stupid, or morally depraved, or so caught up in the pursuit of affluence and pleasure that they would ignore the fact that their president is a liar, a serial philanderer, a rapist, and a man willing to sell his nation's security to a potential enemy government in return for huge financial contributions to his political campaigns. 

Well, old fellow, in this instance you were wrong. He sold us out without the least bit of hesitation. And the missiles he made possible are now pointed at America's cities. 

You were also wrong in believing that the Congress would always insist on maintaining their status as a co-equal branch of government and fight for their independence from the executive branch. Ben, I know you would never have dreamed that Congress would abandon their Constitutional duty to be the only branch of government to declare war and send American boys into harm's way. Or that Senators would betray their sworn oath to be impartial jurors in an impeachment trial and fail to conduct the kind of trial demanded by the Constitution. 

And Ben, in your worst nightmares could you ever have imagined that the Congress would sit idly by while the United States slowly surrendered our national sovereignty to international organizations whose ultimate aim is to strip all nations of their independence and rule the world ... a goal supported and advanced by powerful men and women in and out of our own government? Could you have conceived of an America where Washington's and Jefferson's warnings against getting involved in entangling foreign alliances would be so callously disregarded? 

Ben, I know its it's hard for you to believe, but as I write this, American armed forces are being used to bomb a sovereign nation in an attempt to force that nation to cede part of its own territory to the authority of a cabal of nations in defiance of that cabal's own charter. Ben, we are not only killing innocent civilians every day, but by our rash decision to resort to a war of terror from the air, we provoked a terrible holocaust and a heart-rending exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees uprooted from hearth and home. 

And Ben, I hesitate to tell you that this madman of a president is seriously considering sending Americans into a war that could last for a generations and kill thousands of our troops - troops by the way, both ill-equipped and badly trained as a result of the vindictive policies of a coward who loathes the military in which he shamefully refused to serve. 

Tom Jefferson thought that a free press would protect America and the Republic from dishonest politicians, keeping them in line by exposing their lies and distortions. He thought that the media was one of the strongest protections against tyranny. 

Well Ben, Tom was wrong too. I'm sure he never considered how craven and dishonest the media could become - how easily they could be corrupted and manipulated into covering up the very worst offenses of the rich and powerful. 

I could go on. But what's the use. I'm sure that wherever you are now, you know what we've done to your Republic. 

So all I can say is, Sorry Ben, it was great while it lasted, but we just couldn't keep it. 

Pray for us. We're going to need it.