I have studied politics and the comings and goings, the thoughts, the dreams, the speeches the gaffs, the policies, the every day events surrounding our political leaders all my life and I have recently come to the conclusion, by a preponderance of the evidence that I will cite here, that the Republicans certainly and the Democrats, perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, are  striving to return this country to a full blown monarchy.

I know this sounds like the insane ramblings of a kook from somewhere in a prison cell or out on a limb of his tree house.  I hope you will hear me out because nothing short of the fate of this great democracy is at stake and if the NY Times is anything near what they claim to be, you owe it to the citizens of this great nation to post the first real alert to the people of this dire situation. 

It came clearer to me when Justice Antonin Scalea was interviewed by Leslie Stahl on 60 minutes a few weeks ago.  In that Interview, when asked by Ms stahl about torture and if it might be classified as 'Cruel and Unusual Punlishment', something that is strictly forbidden in our Constitution, Scalea replied, "Torture is not punishment.  How can you call it punishment?"  And he stated quite clearly his view that torture by the Bush administration or any administration could not be classified as 'Punishment' under our laws and therefore the Constitution was silent on the subject.  He did not say it, but he implied by this statement that his judicial decisions in cases of this kind would be colored by his understanding of the Constitution.

This was curious to me and I wondered if he could be correct due to some misunderstanding that I might have about the Law or the United States Constitution or even the definition of the word 'Torture'.  So, I looked it up and according to Webster's Dictionary, 'Torture' is defined as follows, "1 a: anguish of body or mind : agony b: something that causes agony or pain2: the infliction of intense pain (as from burning, crushing, or wounding) to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure."  So, according to Webster's Dictionary at least, Torture is punishment and Scalea was wrong at least in the plain English Dictionary sense of the word.

So, next I turned to a Constitutional Attorney friend of mine who wishes to remain nameless and asked him if there was anything in Constitutional Law that Justice Scalea might be referring to that would preclude a legal definition of torture as punishment.  She thought about the question for some time and then she said, "No, there's nothing unless you want to start interpreting the Constitution to support some political theory."

Scalea, the 60 minutes piece went on to show is a scholar and never received anything less than an 'A' in all of his classes and finished law school at the top of his class, so we can't put this down to some minor ignorance and forgive him the way we are forced to forgive our President when he goofs.  The President is just a Dufus, and when he speaks without the aid of speech writer giving him something intelligent to say, he is just going to say stupid things.  We've all gotten used to that by now.  But here is a Supreme Court Justice, one of the most influential, a legal scholar who repeatedly got it wrong.  It made me wonder what other things he has gotten wrong in his legal decision making.

But, that was not the worst of the Scalea segment on 60 minutes for me.  It got much worse when they showed a clip of our Supreme Court Justice giving a speech in London, England, of all places wherein he stated, "The Constitution, (and I assumed he meant ours), is not a living document.  It's a dead document."

And then, Leslie Stahl explained how the honorable Mr. Scalea likes to call himself an "Originalist" and Scalea and Stahl managed to explain to us that an "Originalist" is a legal scholar who believes that the Constitution should be interpreted the way that the founding fathers wrote it.  This was why, presumably, Mr. Scalea could make the claim without fanfare or headlines in any newspaper that the Constitution was a "dead document".

The next morning, I awoke with a deep sense of dread and fear.  Why would a Supreme Court Justice call our greatest social contract, a 'dead document' in public, but in the public of a British audience?  And, what gave him the total effrontery to claim that torture was not a punishment, when by any common sense definition, torture is blatantly a punishment.  You don't torture someone you like or want to reward for good behavior.  Certainly, we only torture people we want to punish so badly for misbehavior and to such an extent that they will be forced to confess under torture, perhaps even to something they did not do, but under torture, would confess to in order to stop the torture, and perhaps in the bonus they might point to other people whom we could arrest and torture into false confessions as well, making the entire process a magnificent punishment of our political opposition on a grand scale.  No sane person can argue that torture is a reward for doing something good, and since torture is not a reward, it must be a punishment.  There is no middle ground on this one.

So, then something even worse started to dawn on me, if you want to call yourself an "Originalist" in regards to interpreting the Constitution, then you have to start by realizing that originally the United States Constitution made slavery the law of the land.  And therefore if you want to call yourself an 'Originalist', someone who believes that our Constitution is dead, frozen in time, expressing exactly what it is supposed to express, then you have to support slavery.  You also have to support the suppression of women as second-class citizens.  As an "Originalist', you also have to allow for no limit on the terms of the President.  And, that's when the fog all started to lift in my mind.  Scalea was giving us a clue to his and possibly the views of all the very Catholic and highly conservative Supreme Court Justices appointed through the years by Republicans like Nixon and Reagan and, oh my god, George W. Bush.

They want to go back to a time when we have a king or a queen, if not in name, at least in regards to their actual powers over the American people.  Why else would Scalea so arrogantly misquote the Constitution if not because he knows there is no longer anything we can do about it.  This is a conspiracy that is talked about only when Scalea goes on 'Fishing Trips' with Dick Cheney and other private little meetings like that.  They would never speak or write about this for the public to learn or their efforts could be squashed before full completion, but they are so close to getting their way that they are able to drop tiny little hints for us probably because their own conscience finds it so un-American, so distasteful, that it forces them to drop these Freudian slips.  And there have been many Freudian slips down through the years, but they are so subtle that no one has really connected the dots.  Not until now.

We can clearly put the evidence together to make a very strong, if not iron-clad, case that the Republicans in this country are struggling behind the scenes to reimpose a monarchy on this country.  And here is the more obvious evidence of my case in summary form.

1.  We have seen Presidents behaving like total despots ever since WW II.  Lyndon Johnson declared war on Viet Nam and lied about the causes.  Richard Nixon lied about how he was going to end the war to get elected and then escalated it all through his two terms.  Worse, both Presidents completely ignored the will of the people and continued to bomb and murder innocents all over the world in our names just as Kings and Queens have done all through history.  George W. Bush has done the same.

2.  The Supreme Court is now publicly on record as saying that slavery is a good thing and should be supported by the Supreme Court in all its decisions, at least that's the position of the 'Originalists' or 'Royalists' now in the majority of that austere institution.

3.  Torture is now constitutional, at least by their own definition.  We can only assume that if torture is constitutional then, spying on Americans is also. We can only guess that what is next is false imprisonment, if it has not begun already.  Free Speech must also be on their list because if we all learn about this through channels like the New York Times, the coming Monarchy would be much more difficult to enact.

4.  Congress does nothing to stop or prevent these events.  If this conspiracy has become obvious to me, it must be whispered about in the halls of Congress at the very least.  Some may even know about it and are supporting it secretly.  I would assume that most if not all Republicans know and perhaps even many Democrats.  Would Hillary Clinton know about it especially in light of the fact that her husband Bill Clinton took 15 Million dollars from the Sheik of Dubai.

5.  There is a growing trend to allow foreign despots more and more power over us.  They are currently supporting the sale of American assets to foreign kings and queens and despots.  There is only one reason to allow this to happen and that would be secret monarchical treaties that support the personal fortunes of our monarch and his or her courtiers.

6.  They let Osama Bin Laden escape justice and after seven years of this administration they show absolutely no intention of finding and arresting him.  This is certainly a policy that is unspoken and if it is unspoken, it is a secret treaty, something also forbidden by our Constitution.  It could only be the artifact of a secret treaty made by one monarch in deference to another.  There can be no other reason to let this master terrorist and his allies go scott free by redirecting our military might on an innocent nation, Iraq.  There is evidence to support this fact by another fact in that His majesty George W. Bush listened to the Ambassador from Saudi Arabia on the day of September 11th and allowed all Saudi Citizens to fly home to Saudi Arabia even though the questioning and detaining of at least some of them would seem to be the wiser decision under the circumstances.  Since we allowed all Saudi Citizens to escape any questions about the attack on this country even thought fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi, and we also allowed Osama Bin Laden a Saudi Citizen to escape, there must be a connection. 


In summary, our Constitution is in grave danger, indeed, and though it is certainly not dead yet, as Justice Scalea claims, it is in very serious condition, lying on its deathbed perhaps, but still breathing and I know the great soul of this country is still breathing because I am still breathing and as long as I have breath, I will defend our great living contract between the people and their government to the death.  The fact that it is living lies in the fact that it has been amended some 27 times and the fact that it was designed to be amended, changed from time to time as future generations of Americans came to be.  This was the intent of the founders of this country. They most certainly did not intend for our form of government to be a dead issue, a stale document that never meant to change or else we would still have slavery in this country and women would still be second class citizens.  Minorities would be forced to eat in separate restaurants and go to separate schools and live in separate neighborhoods.  All of these things have changed because we have a LIVING CONSTITUTION and it pains me to know that a Supreme Court Justice not only doesn't understand this, but is trying his best to tear up our beloved Constitution and replace it with something that only he and very few others would want.

And, to Mr. Scalea, I would like to say this.  You can torture me sir as much as you like.  Go ahead.  I will know that it's punishment and I know that my own torture is punishment for these words and others like them and that my Constitution, the basic foundation of my country that I believe in and many others like me believe in, would forbid it.  You sir, would relish the punishment of people like me and that disqualifies you as a jurist or legal mind on any scale.  You should resign after making these ridiculous and very dangerous comments in public.  You should resign and all other Bush appointees should resign because you have revealed their hidden agenda.  For that, I can only thank you.

To the rest of the country, I must say that we all have to get a little angry at this secret agenda of the Republicans and we must assume some Democrats as well for their ineptitude and inability to warn us, to say the least.  When someone steals your car, your wallet, your clothes, you get a little angry, but when someone attempts to steal your country, do you sit there and do nothing about it?

And to the NY Times, I want to say finally that I hope and pray to God that they haven't as of yet destroyed free speech and the free press.  If they have, I'm certain that this will not be published and will serve as a final wake up call for all Americans.  But, if they have not yet killed off freedom of the press, I beseech you to publicize these words, because they are a serious and credible indictment of our nation's political system and the conspiracy of that system to bury all future generations of American people in their march to total destruction of the American experiment in democracy.

And so therefore, I have published this letter to the NY Times on my web site:  www.realdemocracyinamerica.com  History will be the judge as to just how far this conspiracy has gone and how far it will go before it is stopped.

Mike Mathiesen
realdemocracyinamerica.com
Santa Cruz, CA 95060