In 1967, one of my best friends was shipped off to Vietnam. And I, a child of the 60’s, stayed behind and protested. But today I repent. God how I repent. I am not a liberal, by God, not! At least not any more. The first born son of a hard core New Deal Democrat, factually descended from a family who fought in the Revolutionary War, and I've willfully given it all up to call myself conservative. This past year has taken on a positively Byzantine aura of almost classical proportion, as if we tramped the dusty streets outside Herod’s fortress at the time of the crucifixion. It's a time when the public would choose Barabbus over Christ. Still, I confess to my own character degradation, corrupt as the current self-serving American President.

At the invitation of my veteran friend, I recently attended a dinner at a very small local Church. A seven-year-old girl sat across from me and giggled as my wife teased her. But the mood swiftly shifted when my veteran friend got up and began to sing Amazing Grace. Then right in the middle he began to confess, then to weep, and finally to clutch his guitar and cry out loud. His eyes wandered the ceiling, as if he were studying something over a great vast distance. He brushed tears from his face with the back of the knuckles on one hand, while clenching his fist with his other. He began to share the details of two of his experiences, details he had never shared in front of me before, and I’ve known him on and off for 40 years. We played together as kids, you know. Fished, learned martial arts, went through school. He went to Nam, and I stayed home. He became an infantry sergeant. I found a way to dodge the draft. He rose to the heroic level, while I went to college to bury myself in liberal arts and communication. He wound up an A-Company soldier in the U.S. Army's 7^th Cavalry, the very one Custer once commanded, and came home with a chest full of medals. I wound up living one day at a time, without honor, a dumbed down civilian indoctrinated by the liberal left. And neither of us was ever the same.

And in that Church, in front of humble everyday people, he told us of a time when he was 20 years old and went into battle with 123 young men. At the end of the day, he was only able to bring 40 out alive. The other 83 were left behind virtually in bloody pieces. He agonized over it, tears streaming down his face. A white bearded old man got up from his dinner and handed him a handful of tissues. My friend continued by telling us that he was almost immediately ordered back into battle with another 123 men. "Green troops," he called them. That time he came back out with 50. A real life Platoon, unfettered by the self-serving political slant of Oliver Stone. They were his charge, you see. Their lives were his, while he was desperately trying to keep his own. And he cried there in front of us all, literally, to God, how he came out without a scratch. With odds approaching the magnitude of Utah Beach or Iwo Jima, fighting with life itself for what he at least thought was our liberty, yours and mine, he came out "without a scratch." Except of course the one inside him.

Then he pointed to me in the audience, and lovingly introduced me as his friend of 40 years. Quite unprepared, I shrank, nothing so spectacular to share, nothing so profound to give. Wiping the tears from his face, he gave thanks to God for his life, his wife, and his children. He’s a barber now. On the wall in his barber shop, yellow and slightly crumpled, not even framed, is an Army discharge document. Next to it, on a bare nail, hangs a handful of little ribboned medals he received for valor 30 years ago, medals he truly earned, medals he truly deserved.

As for me, well I quietly wept when I visited the Vietnam Memorial, alone and unseen. All those names on that bold, cold black monolith. Should mine have been there as well? I love the concept of liberty, but I didn’t know how to fight for it. I didn’t understand the real enemy. So I can’t help thinking about another fellow draft dodger, a certain impeached president by the name of William Jefferson Clinton. Even if only by circumstantial evidence, and in spite of high poll numbers and popular press, he appears at least to a remnant to be as corrupt as Capone, as ruthless as Stalin, and as twisted as Caligula. 

Only a generation had passed between the time that Julius Caesar defeated Pompey and marched across the Rubicon to effectively destroy the Republican tradition of Rome, than Augustus reorganized the constitution and instituted the large-scale public works that eventually became the bread (welfare) and circus (Jerry Springer). In scarcely one more generation Emperor Caligula married his own sister against her will, appointed his horse to a seat in the Senate, and demanded he be worshipped as a god. The only way they got him out was through assassination by his own Praetorians. One of the conspirators was insider Cornelius Sabinus whose wife had been forcefully debauched and then publicly humiliated by Caligula. Of course in our case, Ed Willey can't be counted on to challenge the current president for the same. Ed decided to shoot himself in the nearby woods at the very moment Clinton was accused of groping his wife, Kathleen Willey. But then no one can accuse Bill Clinton of being unlucky.

And if it were not for the foresight and the system passed to us by the blood sacrifice of a handful of "dead white guys," our very own impeached Imperial Leader, or someone future invincible very much like the person circumstances imply he is, could conceivably surpass history. One wonders what the world would be like today if the age of classical Rome had thermonuclear weapons at its disposal. 

I shudder at the smug denial by the phalanx of apologists virtually making up excuses why they, with their special brand of social "un-character" could keep someone like Bill Clinton in check. How they, in their infinite deception could deceive the master deceiver, that he would behave as they imagine, not as he does. How they’re so sure they can hand someone like him the total means to defend themselves, and still be confident they’ll never find themselves staring back into the dark regions of its deadly muzzle. Even the insiders who should know better, the "Best and the Brightest," stand up and applaud this man and the smarmy phenomenon surrounding him.

It is incomprehensible how the strangely deceased, the felony convictions, and the brutally injured all strewn around the battle field of the Clinton camp, even if entirely only an amazing set of unique coincidences, could have failed to even arouse, if nothing more, our serious collective curiosity. It's mind boggling how a naked king could be perceived in a fine new suit of clothes. How a sick and smelly southern sow’s ear could be spun by the witch doctors of deception into a fine silk purse. How the tabloids portrayed grossly overpaid Hollywood bimbos jumping up and down on the Lincoln Bed because they finally got a draft dodging, philandering, pot smoking president to validate their own self-destructive, debauched addictive instincts in the White House. Without compromise, without remorse, without repentance.

The American Founding Fathers must have rolled over in their graves, abandoning us in disgust now to our own demise. A demise that appears almost orchestrated by a political elite, with no holds barred. As if individuals up there so high as to be invisible to us could want this President to remain in place so desperately, that he or some future descendent might do their bidding, that no amount of psychological warfare could be too much to cover the stench. As if nothing were too brazen, nothing too obvious. I can’t seem to shake the haunting feeling, alive and crawling within me, that as a nation, our number may in fact be nearly up. I can clearly imagine the temple of the American dream razed to the ground, and her children scattered to the ends of the earth in a neo-Diaspora by an elite heathen compulsively worshipping at the feet of the totalitarian impulse. 

As we were ramrodded into a no-win war in Vietnam on one extreme, we’ve been herded like sheep into the slaughter of our culture, indeed our entire nation, on the other. By the polls, we truly no longer care about character, and that "character" we call the President, or someone very much like him, is eventually bound not to care about us.

We were warned, after all, in advance. But we paid no particular heed. Nobel laureate F.A. Heyek admonished us that the, "consequences of totalitarian propaganda … are destructive of all morals because they undermine … the sense for and respect for the truth." He went on to advise us that, "No doubt an American … Fascist system would greatly differ from the Italian or German models. Yet this does not mean our Fascist system would in the end prove … much less intolerable than its prototypes." And didn’t Eric Blairs write, "After the revolutionary Fifties and Sixties, society regrouped itself ... But the new High group, unlike all its forerunners ... knew what was needed to safeguard its position. It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism ... The so-called 'abolition of private property' ... meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before. At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother." Yeah, that’s a quote from the still prophetic 1984, written under the pseudonym George Orwell, by a person who for some reason, appeared fearful of using his real name. Given his premonition, and recent American revelations, one can certainly imagine why. 

What we saw in Arkansas, then in the White House, and the manner of our reaction, is very likely just a prelude to what is to come. Unless a spectacular miracle transpires to bring the authoritarian corruption and all of it’s apologists into account, then we may well drown in the cesspool of our own mire. Even an opinion piece such as this may well bring down the wrath of the purges to our own door, as it did to the venerable Solzhenitsyn.

Gary Johnson, Arkansas resident and next-door neighbor to Gennifer Flowers, had his collarbones busted, his elbows dislocated, his bladder ripped open, and his spleen kicked out. It was during the 1992 presidential campaign, and he still insists it occurred because he was in possession of surveillance tapes of Bill Clinton visiting Gennifer Flowers. Remember, when Clinton went on 60 Minutes and insisted he had no affair with her? Johnson gave the tapes to the roughnecks demanding them, and they beat him half to death anyway. In the Paula Jones deposition, Clinton finally admitted an interlude with Flowers. But our friends from the Fourth Estate never raised an eyebrow. After all, the near fatal beating of one man probably means little next to the grand cause of the Pratt House clique and the Boy President they hoped would further it. 

When I was younger, under a specialized contract to a communications corporation sponsored by General Motors, I had the liberty to wander the grounds of Mount Vernon in Virginia. I went through the Georgian home, largely unassisted, and leisurely sprawled on the grass under the afternoon sun in Washington's back yard. When we were in Philadelphia, I worked at Independence Hall while it was closed to the public. For two days and a night, and with a great deal of liberty, I was able to stand at the podium where Washington spoke, curl up on the floor and take a nap during nighttime breaks. At midnight in Independence Hall I listened to Dylan there on a Sony Discman, lying on the floor between the rows of seats where men like Patrick Henry sat. It’s a true story. For a moment I was literally a naive disciple at the feet of those who signed the Declaration of Independence and gave us the Bill of Rights. Not a payback night in the Lincoln Bedroom, but a humble rite of passage nonetheless.

So while a bunch of dead white men once put their lives at risk in the Green Dragon Tavern to show us the way to the First Amendment, we've squandered this endowment by snickering the year away at Gennifer Flowers attempting to reiterate her position on Politically Incorrect. We listened in awe to a pious Charles Grodin preaching that a man’s personal life was his own business, as if the Commander and Chief's interludes were no more vulnerable to potentially lethal intelligence damage than some flaky middle level media personality. We squirmed uncomfortably when Geraldo Rivera pathetically confided to us that he wanted to throw his arms around the poor misunderstood president and hug him. Under our dim cretin brow, we swallowed the spin that Monica Lewinski was just a 24-year-old who embellished her stories about her 37 unofficial visits to the White House for no apparent reason but to bring her platonic pal, the POTUS, a little pizza. All for one little kiss from Judas Iscariot. And the majority of us believed it until Clinton himself finally came clean. Well, at least until he admitted some sort of relationship with Lewinsky. Even his defenders can no longer delude themselves into imagining their hero ever being clean. But then cleanliness would not seem a particularly popular virtue among the public these days.

And then we were forced through that wretched period of House Hearings redefining the meaning of the word "is," arguing that lying under oath about sex really isn't perjury, and insisting that using official power to tamper with witnesses in a federal case isn't really obstruction of justice. And besides, even if it was perjury and obstruction, tight-lipped media anchors and red-faced Harvard apologists admonished us that these offenses didn't rise to the level of impeachment. An impeachable offense is something they would rather define at some past or future date. A date when the political opponent is someone they would actually want removed from office instead of the hapless icon of their entire agenda. We sat transfixed as we were solemnly instructed by the very people who assaulted Richard Nixon because they assumed he was conservative, that similarly attempting to hold a liberal president accountable for his actions according the Constitution would be nothing more than a "political witch hunt" motivated by "sexual McCarthyism." 

All along the apologists demanded we get over it. Kill Starr, shoot the messenger. Innocent until proven guilty! The president didn't really lie under oath, he just didn't tell the truth. Alec Baldwin would have us stone Henry Hyde and his entire family to death for even daring to go through the motions of doing his sworn duty. Look at the bright side. Children added the word fellatio to their vocabulary, and X-generation teen-age boys finally found a reason to want to be president. In a lock-step about face, feminists who would have reported a supervisor for a single smile at the office drinking fountain, then swore Kathleen Willey must have smeared her own lipstick and untucked her own blouse at the very moment her husband was committing suicide. Patricia Ireland and her merry band of NOW girls ducked off and hid behind the transparent shield of their hammer and sickle. They left Willey, Jones, and Flowers to float aimlessly in search of support. Those bitches were asking for it. And even when they finally learned by his own admission that their boy did it after all, well, he must have had a good reason. He's sooooo irresistible, you know. The quintessential American alpha male. He's replaced the traditional "I cannot tell a lie" myth about the man in the Oval Office with "I can't tell the truth. But who gives a flying f___ anyway!" But still we sit unmoved, unchanging in our denial, even applauding the President in spite of his blatant lack of veracity. He may be the First Prevaricator, but he's our First Prevaricator.

We suck up the slimy rhetoric surrounding an impeached President while two out of three still act as if we don’t care even if we have been lied to. Lied to by someone who virtually holds not only the fate of our entire heritage, but our very future in his hands. Two out of three insist the president is doing a good job, in spite of the fact that two out of three probably don't know precisely what the president's job actually is. Yet in our hearts we all know that the perverse sexual antics are only a symptom of the disease of abusive power. We intuitively know that the authoritarian methods inherent in the ideology are in fact the incarnate substance of our worst nightmare.

So we may still titillate with Leno at the joke of the day, the way young ill-mannered schoolboys compulsively spit out words describing private human body parts. But we all intuitively know that the libido angle is but a very small part of this political picture. Like the German intellectuals living it up in the Cabarets during the 1930’s, unconcerned with what was really happening around them, we expose ourselves to the wrath of a potentially imploding socio-political system. The stench of corruption and deceit reeks all through the beltway. The drip, drip, drip of slowly leaking sewage seeps down on the entire land. Something is dead or dying, but we can’t quite put our finger on the opprobrium. It's a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. No, no! It's a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy! Its astounding we don’t gag on this fiasco, unable to choke down the abusive mucus issue of public deception, and admit the truth. That mournful thing wrenching about near death is in fact our Constitutional Republic.

We may be witnessing the beginning of nothing less than the final transition of our governing system into the ultimate end of the egalitarian scheme. The untenable tolerance of blatant corruption is a probable dead giveaway. It's another grand step in the formalization of a long developing American Fascism. A Fascism plainly evident everywhere we look. From the proposed obligatory implantation of personal micro-identification chips in our bodies by the early Clinton team, to schemes restricting Internet journalism and encryption technology. From the theft of FBI files of political opposition for the "scorched earth policy," to the mass firing of high-ranking opponents to obstruct justice. From strong-arm assault and extremely suspicious deaths and assassinations, to storm troop military exercises violating the Second and Fourth Amendment as if they didn't exist. From proposals for Internet-traceable firmware chips over at Intel, to proposals for local banks to play Big Brother by "knowing their customers" and reporting that knowledge to the central government. From the attempted national monopolization of health care by those who own the HMO's, to the notion of the federal government investing Social Security funds in the securities market as announced in the recent State of the Union address. From masterfully disguised political bribery and brazen spin doctored propaganda deceptions, to attempting to nullify the state's rights provision of the Tenth Amendment by Executive Order. From the call to obligatory national public service, to the orchestrated outcry for "voluntary" euthanasia. From massive property forfeiture, to massive real estate confiscation. From a national identification system, to warrantless random searches at checkpoints along our highways. It’s really no small list. And these are just the facts. If we factor in the rumors about federal prison camps and Intelligence Agency drug running, it’s enough to bring even the faithful to cynicism. Even the bucket helmeted police themselves look more and more like storm troopers, armed with fully automatic weapons, dressed in flack-jacketed black, and patrolling with armored personnel carriers. The thing that ought to make every onlooker into a "Nervous Norvis" is the high level effort going into protecting the obtrusive corruption right in the middle of all this. If that doesn't put fear into your heart, you deserve the knock that will sooner or later come at your midnight door.

The National Socialists would have nodded with warm approval at the machinations of America, particularly under this administration. The political left of the 1960’s was so preoccupied with the notion that Fascism should necessarily come from what they viewed as the political right, they overlooked those very methods within their own ranks. But our denial is not so much about the sour taste of sordid sex in public life. What we deny is our own national orthodoxy. For anyone bothering to check it out, there's a Nobel Prize winning argument that Fascism in fact is the unavoidable end result of the collectivist dreams on the liberal socialist left. By necessity, socialism requires a powerful authoritarian central government to implement its strategy. In America it's grown by undermining of Constitutional checks that served as limitations, replacing them with layer after layer of centralized statutory regulation and executive intervention by an ongoing "national emergency." Its power has grown by feeding on the productive public, cannibalizing the common law restrictions put in place by the Founding Fathers as it crawls along, either consuming or discrediting meaningful dissent in its wake. It's well disguised to most, usually hidden behind worthy ends. But it's not the ends that should alarm us, but the wayward means. For much to the denial of those eagerly buying into the product of charismatic "tin siding-salesmen" on the ideological Left, if you can't trust power with the means, there's no logical historic reason to trust it with the ends. 

Hayek warned us. Orwell warned us. A myriad of other qualified thinkers warned us. Half of us know it’s true but understandably can’t summon up the courage to do anything about it. We dare not point to the corruption of the present perpetrators. No one wants to end up committing "Arkancide" like Vince Foster, Ron Brown, Bill Colby, Admiral Boorda, Luther Parks, Barry Seal, Ed Willey, Suzanne Coleman, Mary Mahoney, Kathy Ferguson, Barbara Wise, or any of the others on the almost endless list. Is it any wonder Susan McDougal would have smugly rotted in jail rather than testify? Were we surprised that Marcia Lewis became ill back when she was placed at the center of all this? Were we all shocked when we heard that Monica Lewinsky confided to Linda Tripp on one of the infamous tapes that she feared she could end up like the assassinated White House intern Mary Mahoney? Even Maxine Waters gasped over that one. And of course most of us care but just can’t believe it’s true. We follow along, hands in our pockets, whistling to the tune of fanciful denial. Nope. Couldn’t be. Not here, not me.

We’ve all heard that a fish stinks from the head down, and that one rotten apple destroys the entire barrel. Well here's another one. If the infection from Arkansas has in fact reached our brains, then it's to damn late for a change of heart. The blatant methodology we’re witnessing at the national level will sink down with the decaying culture into the states and the counties, and finally to the communities themselves. If that particular brand of criminal liberalism conjured up a century ago by global oligarchs finally gets to our own door, even ten thousand Bufford Pussors won’t be able to help us. It was tested in Russia in the 1920's, in Europe during the 1930's, and in China during the 1940's. It was seeded in America just after the turn of the 20^th Century, canonized with the New Deal, quietly fine-tuned in obscure Arkansas, and has been willfully attempting an end run through the Executive Office. 

A bold and risky word of suggestion to his Imperial Majesties handlers, for the benefit of all of us. No, not the appointed White House apologists, the National Media, or the Democratic National Committee. But to that all seeing clique before whom even the powerful individuals in those groups tremble when called to task.

It apparently isn't difficult to fool the American people. After all, our average IQ is only about 100. And within certain sensible parameters, even the "Best and the Brightest" submit and support. Out here in the nether regions, we know you'd love to rule the world, and are getting close enough to sink your teeth in and taste it. You, your trans-American lodge pals, your European Aunts and Uncles, your favorite Big Brother, your Seven Sisters, and your Asian Business Buddies. But even the outcasts and unprivied can see the logical downside limits of those sensible parameters rapidly approaching.

If you don't do something about the massive high level criminal corruption in the system you've engineered, at least here in America, then even those kept on choke chains are going to eventually turn and tear into the master. No not from misfits or the public largesse, but from within your very own praetorian ranks. Even a phalanx of taste testers, an army of bodyguards, or miles of razor wire won't be enough insulation. There will be little any of us can do to hold back the hounds. In less than three generations after the fall of Republican Rome, Nero murdered his own mother to get at the Imperial Throne. 

Of course character counts. You know it. We know it. We know that a man can be held in check by greed and fear. But we also know that he is never as reliable as one contained by his own integrity. So enough toying around with this sophomoric Luciferian diversion! Even a dog doesn't defecate where it eats. If you must have all this power, then at least handle it with some common sense and classical dignity. You're not the first to mount Bucephalus in search of Dominus Terra Firma. 

My friend, the Vietnam Vet, told me an anecdote. It seems a wealthy, powerful man was traveling down a road when he came upon a poisonous snake trapped beneath a stone. The snake implored the man to set him free. "I don’t think so," the man protested. "If I remove the stone, you’ll bite me. You’re a poisonous snake!" "No man, I won’t bite you," insisted the snake, "Please, just set me free. I tell you this truth. I possess the magic of unlimited power, and I'll give you more than you could ever imagine." The already powerful man thought on it, and questioned the probability of the snake’s assertions. But he thought on what he could do with unlimited power and was overcome by temptation. So he removed the stone, and with Old Testament predictability, the snake bit him. As he lay dying, he cried to the snake, "You promised not to bite me if I helped you. You promised me power unlimited, and instead you've given me death! I helped you and you bit me anyway! You LIED to me!" And the snake said, "Hey man, you knew what I was before you removed the stone."

Another year or two like the last one, and we may have to reevaluate our options. In spite of the fact that we've been convinced that the economy is "doing just fine," thank you very much, the outcome of our present situation may be much more important than the average John and Jane Q. Public can even imagine. And probably even more so for you who lurk behind the scenes pulling strings. Can’t you see the day coming when some puffed up praetorian autocrat you've stuck in the Oval Office is caught not merely receiving service from some pathetic power struck intern, but clutching the "Football," finger on the trigger, insisting that he will not go down alone? Who knows. Perhaps you can. Maybe it's all just part of your plan.

But a prophet has no honor in his own land. As we deserve our shame, we also deserve our fate. Dr. Strangelove, to be sure.