July 4th, 2006

I didn't fly a flag today. Me, a military veteran, made the decision based on the fact that I'd have to fly it upside down. They're fighting for the symbol while trampling all over what it symbolizes and that distresses me. It should distress us all.

While North Korea launched four SCUD missile variants into the Sea of Japan, the MSM was babbling about someone eating 53 and a half hot dogs. I wouldn't care to be that guy's toilet in the morning and I don't care to hear about him now. Iraq, rightly so, wants some of our troops tried for war crimes. Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.... The MSM is still publishing Wingnut rants to defy the First Amendment to the Constitution vis-a-vis freedom of the press. We're still holding people in Guantanamo without access to a lawyer, without the right to confront their accusers and without even being charged with a crime. All that said, here's my Liberal scream for the day:

I could care less about the flag of the United States of America.

Some years ago I was sworn in as an Air Force officer. I swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. There wasn't and isn't in any oath of office sworn in the United States a reference to the flag. The Flag is a dish rag and in most cases not a particularly absorbent one. Without the Constitution, it's a meaningless piece of brightly colored cloth, something to bleed its colors on your laundry. There is no reason to defend the Flag, it guarantees no rights, it doesn't establish a system of checks and balances on power, it does nothing. The Constitution establishes our government, it outlines the basic freedoms we have, the responsibilities and limits of the three branches of Government, it is the basis for the great American experiment. The flag just kind of hangs there and flaps.

Given a choice what to defend from desecration, I'd pick the Constitution any day.

Happy Fourth, everyone.