We, the People

There are a lot of things going on today in our government, especially dealing with this election, that are just plain wrong. They range from different standards for the two major political parties, attempts at stifling the voices of third-party candidates, voter fraud and intimidation, email spamming, vote-stealing, attempts at suppressing various forms of voting - especially military absentee ballots, and more. These are the traits one would expect of a third-world dictatorship, not the premier bastion of freedom and democracy.

It's also utterly disgusting.

Anyone engaged in this kind of behavior for ANY political party in the United States should be considered a felon, and denied the right to vote in the next ten elections in this nation. We live in a representative Republic. The right to choose who will represent us is one of the most fundamental rights we possess. Anyone infringing upon that right is attempting to suppress ALL our rights. In most cases, the reason is a desire for power - political power, financial power, and the power to control our military, our courts, our personal property, and our means of earning a livelihood. It means being able to suppress, or to selectively allow, the exercise of the rights we as Americans were guaranteed in our Bill of Rights. Especially, it means controlling the power of taxation, which can be used as the greatest weapon of all, against anyone considered to be an opponent. An attack on our elective process is an attack on the most basic principles of our Republic.

Hunting down those that engage in any type of election fraud should be one of our highest priorities as a nation. Unfortunately, it seems, instead, to be one of the lowest. This is a horrendous problem - this is the first step to the total destruction of our Republic. Unless those who wish to continue to live in the kind of nation our founding fathers envisioned, we, the people, must exercise control over government. That's mostly done through the ballot process. With that destroyed, there is no control, and we will be relegated to the role of serf. As Benjamin Franklin said, we were given "a Republic, if you can keep it".

Keeping it means fighting against fraud at the ballot box. It means holding people in power accountable to the laws of this nation. It means teaching our children the truth about our history, and about the establishment and growth of this nation - politically, socially, economically, culturally.

We're losing that war.

If we're not very careful, we'll lose our Republic, too.