I'm 54 years old.  I've been politically active at one level or another since I was a Junior in high school.  OK, I backed Nixon, but everyone deserves one or two mistakes.  Gimme a break!  I was fifteen.  The thing is, I can't recall seeing sequences of events quite like the ones we've experienced lately.

Oh, we were terribly upset by President Clinton.  We saw a similar run-up in the prices of firearms and even then, in the infancy of the Internet, the message boards were alive with "the sky is falling" traffic, much like today.  I participated in letter generation campaigns at gun shows and kept a small circle of friends informed about firearms related issues.

Well, that all worked out OK.  We picked up an assault rifle "ban" that was largely symbolic (Thank God liberals don't know anything about guns!) and a Brady waiting period bill that turned out to be a fairly minor irritant.  The point is, we survived it.  Clinton governed more-or-less from the center and he never told us directly that he intended to take the country to the left.

President Barack Obama has done, and said, many things that are, all by themselves, terribly worrisome.  He told us he would raise taxes.  He told us he would hasten the surrender in Iraq.  He told us he would be Caspar Milquetoast to Iraq and North Korea.  He's already hinting at getting involved in Darfur.  He told us he would be pro-abortion. He told us he intended to "revamp health care" in America.  All this, and more, he told us directly.

What worries me more are the clues—the little things, the single items that, taken by themselves are just the stuff of over-active imaginations and excessively paranoid mind-sets, put, like a murder mystery, together, point to murder most foul.

When he was asked about Second Amendment Rights during the campaign, he dithered about and eventually allowed as how further restrictions on gun rights could be subject to legal challenge.  That could be taken as the understatement of a trained lawyer.  Or it could be taken as the comments  of a person who isn't terribly constrained by the Constitution.

Toward the end of the campaign, he suddenly ejected several reporters from his airplane on the premise that he needed space for other reporters more favorable to his cause.  OK.  It was his airplane (in the sense of belonging to the campaign) and who got to ride it was certainly within his rights to determine.  But his willingness to make that change suggested another amendment in the Bill of Rights that he did seem to feel a need to support in spirit or by the letter.

There are still lingering doubts about President Barack Obama's citizenship despite constant attempts to marginalize the argument itself and bury the issue under loud cries of "Conspiracy!" as if the volume alone was enough to kill the issue.  Yet, if there is nothing to it, why not simply produce the document?  I have a difficult time imagining a matter of principle being worth this much argument.   It leaves one to wonder.  The solution would be so easy.

At the very end of the campaign, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into the campaign via the Internet, almost none of which could be traced to the donors and queries about which were met with a sort of snippy "we don't have to and you can't make us!" attitude.

We have relationships with a minister that hates America and a modern
ne're-do-well who's tried to blow up America, yet no one able to reach an American majority seems willing to discuss them.  While this is simmering, You-Tube acquires videos of school children singing the praises of the Great Barack Obama.  I actually got a phone call from my terrified in-laws—who lived through the early days of Adolf Hitler and who had electric chills running down their spines at the sight of innocent children chanting the praises of a nation's soon-to-be-leader.  My in-laws mentioned the words "appeasement" in the same sentences as North Korea and Iran.  They could see a parallel.

Then President Barack Obama sweeps into office with the biggest inaugural blow-out in history, a sort of liberal kegger the likes of which we've never seen before.  So begins the fabled one hundred days.  The troubling thing is that it's become the time of one hundred lies.  The promises of transparency and openness only apply when the President deems it advantageous to brag about.  In quick succession, we have a trillion dollar bailout bill that no one has read, possibly even now.  Presidential order follows Presidential order, a quasi-legal fiction that both parties have used since World War II, but still have the apparent force of law.  Have you seen a list?  I haven't.  

In the course of ramming through that stimulus bill, somehow huge bonuses to corporate executives were carefully protected, then damned in quick succession while Congress feigned shock and President Barack Obama held his counsel until confronted, responding with a snippy comment about wanting to know what he's talking about before commenting...on a bill written by his party.  In response to this arranged outrage, the House passes a bill that is blatantly unconstitutional as a bill of attainder and an ex poste' facto law to punish those evil executives, while no mention is made of the Congress that created the regulations over the last thirty years which precipitated the collapse in the first place.

The new budget, in an environment free of earmarks, contains thousands upon thousands of "investments" we somehow committed to during that "other man's" Presidency.  Another promise bites the dust, along with the one about not raising taxes on we wee folk at the other end of the scale, the ones whose retirements went down  the drain, when he raised taxes on tobacco by nearly sixty-two percent.  It doesn't matter how you feel about smoking, you can't possibly argue that only people making more than $150,000 annually are smokers.

Suddenly we have this plethora of czars.  You might remember that this is a Russian word for emperor or king, an autocratic ruler.  We've had drug czars and this czar and that czar for quite some time now.  I haven't much liked it, but it's never seemed so wide-spread, or ominous as it does these days.  Today we suddenly have a border czar to go with the car czar the bailout czar and the bank czar.  This isn't the People's Republic of anything.  It is a representative republic.  At least for the moment.

Finally, though I doubt if this is exhaustive, we have two reports released by agencies either hired or directly employed by the Department of Homeland Security.  One, at the state level, warns that conservatives who supported certain right-wing Presidential candidates might represent a source of terrorism concerns.  Better razor off that NRA sticker, my friends.  Then, today, we get a report that suggests that returning veterans, the one group of people for whom it's possible to argue have really earned the rights in that collection of ten, might be a source of terrorism concerns.  And the people marching in the tea parties. And folks who don't like President Barack Obama might be racists.  Soon, conservatism will be spelled with four letters.

It's all in the clues.  One at a time.  One little slice at a time.  One bank, one car maker, one hospital...

I, finally, come to my point.  You've all seen the "sky is falling, send this to everybody" emails that claim the US Marshals are about to bash down your door and confiscate your Daddy's M1911A1.  Do you know where those emails originate?  I don't either.  But if I wanted to demonize a class of people who might be willing to defend the Constitution, you know, like soldiers, passing about incendiary material like that might be a good way to do it.  We've all had those thoughts.  No...nightmares.  I suspect President Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi worry about it a good bit as well.  

But we must never, never, NEVER threaten anything even remotely like their fears.  Our system of government provides legitimate ways of battling out this conflict between capitalism and socialism.  We agreed to abide by those rules.  At least our word should mean something.  

We must never, never, NEVER participate in hysterical "sky-is-falling" emails.  These things, no matter where they originate, only provide the means by which conservatives will be hung.  We must not allow ourselves to be marginalized as kooks.

Already the liberal press is preparing to describe the tea parties as the actions of fringe groups and, maybe, a source for terrorism concerns.  After all, Tim McVeigh was a veteran. Many of these tea party participants will be veterans.  The tea parties are unfocused, satisfying, but ultimately a vulnerability.

We absolutely must get organized.  We absolutely must use our right to be heard.  We absolutely must keep our heads about us.