Forbidden Documents 1: the Bill of Particulars

For the next four days I shall blog my "Forbidden Documents", a parody/tribute to America's founding documents. The next four posts shall be:

The Bill of Particulars
The Unconstitution
The Declaration of Wrongs
and a fictional Epilog: Pieing the Veep.


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      The Bill of Particulars


            When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a people to dissolve political bands which have restricted them, a decent respect for the opinions of humankind requires that they declare the causes which impel such a dissolution.

            We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all human beings are created equal; that we are endowed by nature with certain inalienable rights; that among these are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among the people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, founding it on such principles and organizing it in such form, as they deem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

            We the people have the right to revolution.

            Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience has shown that people are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

            But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce us to slavery under absolute despotism, it is our right, indeed it is our duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for our future security.

            Such has been the patient sufferance of this people; and such is now the necessity which constrains us to alter our former systems of government. The history of the Presidency of the United States is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having as direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over the American people. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. Here is the bill of particulars:

Presidents have refused assent to laws most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

Presidents have erected a multitude of new offices, and sent forth swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out our substance.

Presidents have imposed onerous debts upon us, and enforced their repayment by inequitable taxation.
 
Presidents have systematically abrogated individual liberty in the name of national security.

Presidents have instituted a secret government whose funds, deeds, and hirelings are unchecked by custom, law, or ethics. In their arrogance they hold reason itself in contempt.

Presidents have authorized agents and tribunals with arbitrary powers.

Presidents have sold dangerous drugs to the people, while hypocritically enforcing draconian penalties against their use, in order to increase profits and expand authority.

Presidents have obstructed the administration of justice, by classifying information, by subjecting judicial appointees to political tests, and by silencing witnesses.

Presidents have rendered the military independent of and superior to the civil power.

Presidents have conspired with foreign tyrants to fabricate deceptions injurious to us.

Presidents have abolished habeas corpus, and with it, the rule of law.

Presidents have lied to Congress to start wars of aggression; they have tortured; they have massacred; they have committed war crimes without number.

Presidents have waged wars and contracted alliances repugnant to the people, thereby founding an American empire unparalleled in its arrogance, brutality and stupidity.

Presidents have quartered among us in time of peace large standing armies, and protected their officers, by mock trial, from punishment for any crimes which they may commit.

Presidents have excited domestic and foreign insurgencies against us, and have endeavored to bring on the merciless fundamentalists, whose known rule of warfare is the indiscriminate destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.

Presidents have systematically protected the rich from the poor, the strong from the weak, and the guilty from the innocent.

Presidents have usurped the Congressional power to declare war, by means of blitzkriegs, blank checks, quagmires, mission creep, permanent emergencies, and unilateral aggression.

Presidents have usurped the Congressional power of the purse, by means of black budget items.

Presidents have usurped the Congressional power to levy taxes, by means of covert, stand-alone, off-the-shelf criminal enterprises.

Presidents have stolen elections, violated rights, looted the treasury, and stained the national honor.

Presidents have committed bribery, burglary, theft, fraud, perjury, extortion, sabotage, torture, murder, treason, and many other high crimes and misdemeanors, without fear of impeachment.

Presidents have enforced religious laws; silenced free speech; censored the press; violently dispersed peaceful popular assemblies; suppressed petitions for redress of grievances; authorized arbitrary searches and seizures; imposed double jeopardy; compelled self-incrimination; taken life, liberty and property without due process of law; indicted secret accusations; exacted excessive fines; inflicted cruel and unusual punishments; usurped powers not delegated to them by the Constitution; and otherwise abridged the people's constitutional rights.

Presidents have accumulated vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, thereby imperiling the entire human race.

            At every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. An officer, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

            Nor have we been wanting in our attention to our ruling brethren. We have warned their legislatures from time to time of attempts to extend unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our Immigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence.

            They have proven to be deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which requires our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of humankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

            THEREFORE WE, the PEOPLE of AMERICA, do solemnly declare that we Americans are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT PEOPLE; that we are absolved from all allegiance to the office of the Presidency, and that all political connection between us and the secret government is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that as a free and independent people we have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which INDEPENDENT people may of right do. AND for the support of this Declaration, we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.