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Walt Kelly, the late, great creator of Pogo Possum said it best, "we have met the enemy and he is us."

This nation first saw light as a grand and noble experiment in self-government. A bastion of freedom where each person enjoyed the blessings of equality and everyone could rise as far as his or her individual talent would allow. There were no hereditary leaders, no royal houses. The people governed and were governed through mutual consent.

A brave new world had dawned upon the American continent. And then came the dawn of the second day.

The founding fathers presented this new nation with a guiding document called the Constitution of the United States of America. Each elected official pledged by his sacred honor to uphold both the principles and the letter of law embodied in this document. And, without exception, every president, every administration beginning with that of George Washington, has sought to find ways to circumvent the provisions of the constitution in order to promote whatever pet project they had at hand.

Many will argue that the results of such deviation from the written will of the founding fathers resulted in great benefit to the nation as a whole. But the question must be asked, can a person do a wrong thing for a right reason?

Thomas Jefferson engineered the Louisiana Purchase and greatly increased the size of the United States while preventing Spanish occupation of that same territory. We can not imagine today what the country would look like had this not been done. Still it was done outside the constricts of the nation's guiding principles.

Treaties were made with the Native Americans and routinely broken in the name of eminent domain. There was no constitutional authority to so but that did not prevent it from happening. We can point to example after example of where the constitution has been bent and bruised over the years and each can be justified by the argument that the results were beneficial to the nation as a whole.

The downside is that these assaults on the constitution, added together, have had a cumulative effect on the overall health of our system of governance. Fast forward to the present time and we see a situation in which we are engaged in winless conflicts across the globe, our freedoms are being eroded in the name of security, our borders have been thrown open to accommodate the needs of industry for cheap labor and our elected officials no longer even pretend they are acting in the interest of their constituents.

Is America

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