"Land of the Free"

Everytime someone in a movie utters the words in my title, I scoff, laugh or mutter, "Yeah, right!"

Strangely enough, never heard anyone mention it outside of a movie - but then, Hollyweird is just one vast propaganda machine entirely staffed by Party-Faithful directors, producers and script writers who churn out screeds of "Greatest Nation on Earth", "Land of the Free", "The Whole World is Jealous of Us" crap despite all evidence to the contrary.

Jealous of the USA? I honestly pity its citizens. And articles like this one illustrate why.

Land of the Free? Wot a RIOT! Yorta be on stage, a routine like that!

The dust of the Twin Towers hadn't settled and the Bush Admin was saying "would You,The People, be willing to accept the loss of certain Constitutional Rights in order to prevent this happening again?"

And when the "temporary" post-Sept-11 licence to spy on the public runs out, a new law gets passed to allow them to continue to spy on the public. Oh, quelle surprise!

They rave about how great it is they have a Constitution and yet that document is completely ignored by The Powers That Be over and over again.

Honesty, they might as well burn it - it's been dead so long that cremation is the only respectful and honest thing to do.

As has been pointed out, the real terrorists are hardly likely to use any infrastructure that can be easily monitored so all this law does is enable the insanely huge number of spooks the USA has to spy on their *own citizens*.

And wouldn't it be handy to have everyone's dirty little secrets on tap if the need ever arose to apply pressure? "We know you've been evading taxes for years, only reason you're not in jail is because you might prove useful, now we need you so do what we want or it's off to federal prison..."

"Nothing to hide, nothing to fear?" yeah, right. Even if you aren't dodging taxes or organising a tryst with your secretary, who knows what might be deemed "subversive behaviour" by future administrations. Bear in mind that under McCarthy's regime, homosexuality was deemed to be a security risk. For all we know, some loony spook or future President might take it into his/her head to decide that all stamp collectors pose a significant security threat.

I see it as the duty of every honest and Constitution-loving US citizen to foul up the spooks' plans by randomly interjecting the words "bomb" and "jihad" into every telephone conversation they have - even if they're just ordering a pizza.

The more I read about the goings-on in the so-called "Land of the Free", the more I think that the average US citizen is probably becoming jealous of other countries like China (where at least the government is up-front and HONEST about being a dictatorship that grants no rights or liberties to its citizens)