I really wanted to spend this Fourth of July as I usually do here at The House; contemplating the past while trying to draw lessons from it that would resonate with Americans today. It’s one of the few days of the year that we explicitly celebrate our past and as a lover of history, I always find it invigorating to explore where we came from and try and connect it to where we are headed. We Americans tend to look to the future without giving much thought to events and people that preceded us. A price we pay, I suppose, for the raw dynamism of American society with its extraordinary pace and ability to turn on a dime, changing direction to suit the temper of the times in which we live.

I will allow myself the luxury of some of this today as I complete my series on Liveblogging the Second Continental Congress – July 2-4, 1776 (see here and here for the first two parts). I would highly recommend this kind of parlor game as a way to gain valuable insights – not just into yourself and your own attitudes toward history but also into how this country evolved into what it is today. For by placing yourself at the center of the action as a simple observer, you are forced to live a life not ordinarily contemplated today. If you’ve read Morrison, Page Smith, Zinn, Flexner, Trevelayan, Draper, and a few others and digest the letters and statements from ordinary folk about the revolution, you come away with a deep and abiding respect for those early Americans. Bigoted, prejudiced, ignorant in many ways and yet for all their faults, absolutely determined to to live in freedom.

The great military historian John Keegan believes that even if Washington’s little army had been destroyed outside of New York city in the summer of 1776 and members of Congress were arrested, tried, and executed, the war would have gone on until the British realized they no longer controlled the colonies and moved on. For in truth, the American people had willed the new nation into existence by the power of their imaginations and an abiding trust in what many of them called “Providence.” (For a great discussion of this theme, I recommend this podcast of my radio show where my brother, a life long English teacher and very smart fellow, holds forth at length on this purely American phenomena.)

But there is an intrusion into my reverie today – one so blatantly false and perfidious, that I feel a response is in order. The reaction by a large segment of the left to the commutation of Libby’s sentence has proved to be (as everyone predicted) an over the top extravaganza of hand wringing, bed wetting, spittle spewing and bile raising that is, at times, laughable while at other times has one concerned for the mental and emotional health of some of our liberal friends.

As an example of this truly frightening phenomena, here’s Taylor Marsh in what has to be the most hysterically overwrought post of the new millenia:

America wakes up in bondage today.

There’s no other way to see it. A president and vice president have taken hold of the helm of this country and are dictating by fiat the very freedom and air that people are allowed to breathe, while holding themselves and their own above the law. We are led by the most un-American of men. Let there be no doubt. But in the wake of inaction and a Congress only equipped to hurl words, the question remains what will be done about it?

[snip]

On this 4th of July, I. Scooter Libby may be free, but America is not. We the people are not. Most of the Senate certainly is not, tied down to some traditionalism that tacitly gives permission to the president’s lawlessness, because raising the Capitol dome is judged unseemly. House Democrats are at least standing up and shouting loudly, holding hearings and investigations, even if some can’t bring themselves to stand up and lose their jobs by doing their jobs, which is to preserve this republic at all costs, even your own. As for the Republicans in Congress, those Republicans, conservatives, as well as their right-wing pundits beyond who hail what Mr. Bush did in commuting Libby’s sentence as action of the good. They are now pariahs of The Patriots fighting to take this country back. People like you and me.

Wow.

I can’t fisk this or cover it in snark and ridicule. It is beyond my ability to explain, or even criticize.

For the record, we are still a free country – even the air we breathe is still free – and it was not “lawless” of the President to have commuted Libby’s sentence. It may have been stupid, or dumb, or even a wonderful thing. But it was entirely within the President’s purview to have done so. The Constitution, in one of its few clear and declarative moments, states that the President’s powers in this regard are absolute.

Liberals know this. They are fully aware of what the Constitution says. They even acknowledge it.

And then they go ahead like Marsh and ignore that salient fact and pretend that the Constitution doesn’t say what it says – that it either doesn’t say anything or that we should substitute their interpretation for what is one of the clearest sections in that 218 year old document.

To acknowledge the Constitution’s clarity in this matter would frankly, spoil the moment. Because as Keith Olbermann proved with his “Special Commentary” last night, this one event is the culmination of nearly seven years of effort by the left to prove to themselves and to the rest of us that, quite simply, they are a superior life form – that they can still mount the battlements and wave the bloody shirt, pleading with us peons to follow them while expecting us to worship their superior judgment and intelligence and gaze at them with a stuporous, doe eyed look of wonder. All because, by gum, they care! They really, really, really, really, care!

Were there any remaining lingering doubt otherwise, or any remaining lingering hope, it ended yesterday when Mr. Bush commuted the prison sentence of one of his own staffers.

Did so even before the appeals process was complete; did so without as much as a courtesy consultation with the Department of Justice; did so despite what James Madison—at the Constitutional Convention—said about impeaching any president who pardoned or sheltered those who had committed crimes “advised by” that president; did so without the slightest concern that even the most detached of citizens must look at the chain of events and wonder: To what degree was Mr. Libby told: break the law however you wish—the President will keep you out of prison?

In that moment, Mr. Bush, you broke that fundamental com-pact between yourself and the majority of this nation’s citizens—the ones who did not cast votes for you. In that moment, Mr. Bush, you ceased to be the President of the United States. In that moment, Mr. Bush, you became merely the President of a rabid and irresponsible corner of the Republican Party. And this is too important a time, Sir, to have a commander-in-chief who puts party over nation.

To paraphrase LBJ, when you’ve lost Olbermann, you’ve lost the middle of nowhere.

Sanctimony drips like tainted water from a toxic waste pipe in this entire, unhinged rant. I actually couldn’t watch the video and was forced to read a transcript, stifling my gag reflex to keep last night’s Jimmy John’s Italian Beef sandwich from making an encore appearance.

How truly heroic this former sports talking head sounds. The burden this man carries – saving us from total destruction at the hands of President Bush and his evil clique – must be getting awfully heavy. Is there no one in America who will help this magnificently valiant patriot carry the load? This doughty warrior for liberty whose herculean labors performed on behalf of the rest of us ignorant yip yips – we who are unable to grasp the monumental evil abroad in the land with Bush and his lawless gang running roughshod over the Constitution and the rule of law?

What are we to do? Tell us, ye who is so obviously our better:

It is nearly July 4th, Mr. Bush, the commemoration of the moment we Americans decided that rather than live under a King who made up the laws, or erased them, or ignored them—or commuted the sentences of those rightly convicted under them—we would force our independence, and regain our sacred freedoms.

We of this time—and our leaders in Congress, of both parties—must now live up to those standards which echo through our history: Pressure, negotiate, impeach—get you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, two men who are now perilous to our Democracy, away from its helm.

For you, Mr. Bush, and for Mr. Cheney, there is a lesser task. You need merely achieve a very low threshold indeed. Display just that iota of patriotism which Richard Nixon showed, on August 9th, 1974.

Resign.

And give us someone—anyone—about whom all of us might yet be able to quote John Wayne, and say, “I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.”

Watching Mr. Olbermann can certainly be eductional. I had no idea we fought a revolution for 8 years so that no one would be able to commute the sentences of criminals. Of course, those crazy, unpredictable Founding Fathers then went ahead and wrote into the Constitution those very same powers with a clarity and simplicity that all but a few delusional nitwits like Olbermann could grasp so I guess we have to say that we fought the revolution for nothing.

And do you notice that the more unhinged the left has become lately, the more they like to toss around the words “patriot” and “patriotism?” Not as a feeling, of course. Such silly sentiments are reserved for the great unwashed masses who are placed on this earth to worship the superior beings that liberals consider themselves. The left likes to use those words as clubs -as Olbermann proves with his riotously stupid statement about Nixon’s “patriotism” in resigning.

I hate to break the news to Mr. Olbermann, but Nixon resigned because if he didn’t he would have surely been impeached in the House and convicted in the Senate. He did it to spare himself a personal humiliation. And don’t you think it’s a little late for anyone on the left to ascribe any sort of decency to anything Nixon ever did? Hypocrisy is the least of Olbermann’s sins in this screed but considering how the left has seen and reacted to Richard Nixon since he came to Congress in 1948 through even today, 13 years after his death, it is perhaps the most outrageous part of this entire commentary.

Except perhaps the last sentence:

And give us someone—anyone—about whom all of us might yet be able to quote John Wayne, and say, “I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.”

Someone? Anyone? Well, let’s think about that for a second. If the President resigns, the Vice President would become President. But wait! We can’t have that. Besides, Cheney should resign too. Whatever shall we do? Are we condemned to go presidentless until January 20, 2009?

In the event both the president and vice president are incapacitated through death or illness, the office would fall to a someone/anyone by the name of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, second in the line of succession, and presumably someone we can all look up to a feel proud about being an American again.

Oh. Did I mention she’s a liberal Democrat?