I have a little extra time today at the library, which means I can spend more time than usual here at OMC.  And so I used the Senators' profile feature to make comments on the profiles of both New Mexico Senators (Bingaman and Udall, if you want to read what I said).

And I noticed that neither of them have any friends here.  Now it's not likely that liberal Senators are going to have friends on a conservative Web site.  But it does tell me something - those two men simply don't represent us.  We are Americans too; we have rights and liberties, just like anyone else; yet our Congress, as a whole, represents those who want to trample us underfoot.

This is not a good thing in a republic.

There are those who tell us that the first amendment prohibits the presence of the Christian faith in politics (as a side note, I find that Islam, Wicca, the Baha’i Faith, militant atheism, evangelistic homosexuality, and other faiths don’t seem to fall under this prohibition, nor does the sort of viciously anti-American “Christianity” that Barack Obama exemplifies).  Before I proceed, let me just quote the actual text of the first amendment to the Constitution; I shan’t comment on it here, but will leave the reader to search in vain for the prohibition of which I speak:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Okay, you’ve looked at the amendment, and we can move on.  With the mythical prohibition clearly non-existent, the question of whether Christians can be politically active pretty much vanishes; if there’s no constitutional prohibition, the only possible restraint would be within our own faith.

And while Christianity isn’t about political action, but about whether and how we relate to God, there certainly is nothing in the Bible which prohibits us from acting within our citizenship and our constitutional rights.  The apostle Paul presents us with an example of a Christian doing just that.

On two separate occasions Paul used his Roman citizenship to protect himself from unjust punishment.  In the 16^th chapter of Acts he demanded an official release from prison, and an apology, because the local authorities had violated his rights as a Roman citizen.  And in the 22^nd chapter of the same book, when a soldier was preparing to scourge him without trial, Paul claimed the protection of his Roman citizenship against punishment without due process of law.  Paul clearly saw no conflict between his legal, civil rights, and his position as a follower of the Lord Christ.

Indeed, in the 13^th chapter of Romans Paul pointed out that government exists to protect the weak and punish criminals, and that no government can exist without the direct will of God. (vv. 1-7)  This being the case, then, Christians have a right to expect the protection of their government, and to seek it if that protection is not immediately forthcoming.  And since government is a divine institution (though individual governments – for instance, the Muslim government of Sudan which has for years been engaged in persecution of Christians – may not meet with God’s approval), there can be no conflict between the faith of a Christian, and service in government office.

Certainly those who founded this country saw no such conflict.  George Washington was very devout in his faith.  Many others among the founding fathers expressed, at the very least, a confirmed belief that God exists, though not all were orthodox in their beliefs.  Further on, Abraham Lincoln was a committed Christian, and wasn’t so much concerned as to whether God was on his side or that of Jefferson Davis, as he was concerned whether he was on God’s side.  Even Franklin D. Roosevelt, who created today’s atmosphere of government-as-de-facto-god, appealed to the God of heaven in more than one of his speeches, and he explicitly and publicly called for divine aid in the invasion of Normandy in 1944.

As Christians, then, we have just as much right to be politically active, and to hold public office – up to and including the presidency – as anyone else.  We don’t have to shut our mouths and sit on the sidelines while those who do not believe as we do, and whose beliefs may in fact be antithetical to ours, decide what laws we shall live under.  We have an equal right to participate in the making of legislation on the city, county, state, and federal levels.  The Constitution, reason, and our own faith grant us the right to sit in Congress oir the Oval Office, and to write, vote on, and sign or veto bills in accordance with our faith, without fear or shame.

I am not promoting something like the Moral Majority.  I’m not talking about organized efforts to impose the church on the government.  Rather I’m talking about American citizens being able to fully participate in government, whether they’re atheists, Muslims, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Hindus…or Christians.  We have as much right to hold office, and to act in office according to our beliefs, as anyone else does.  And we ought to do so – without fuss, without spewing fire and brimstone all over the place, but equally without allowing the enemies of the faith to deny us what is our reasonable, religious, and constitutional right.

Barack Obama has made a big deal out of the fact that he wants to change the United States.  (Pardon me if I’m being too picky, but I don’t like the current tendency to avoid saying that name.  There’s nothing wrong, per se, with the word “America,” but when it becomes a mere meaningless sound for people to toss casually off their tongues, I become unhappy.  I primarily, therefore, speak of this country as the United States.)  And the changes he wants to make are away from what this country was at its beginning.

Of course the country’s been changing for a long time now.  It was, in many ways, Woodrow Wilson who embarked us on our present course.  Wilson, of course, was president from 1913 to 1921; in just four more years it’ll have been a century since his inauguration.  Liberalism didn’t really take off, however, until Franklin D. Roosevelt used the Depression as an excuse to grab power; his alphabet soup agencies didn’t end the Depression (it was World War II which solved that problem), but they did centralize power in DC as nothing else in history.

But el Vampiro wants to do more than every liberal president in history put together.  He wants to, in the four years of his term, go from what is still essentially a free, capitalistic nation to what will be, in its essentials, a communist state.  He wants to take power from the people, from cites and counties, and from the states, and centralize it in the District of Columbia.  Indeed, though the liberal Congress seems not to realize it yet, he wants to demote the national legislature to a Soviet-style rubber stamp body, while he rules by decree.  He’s already done some of that – his early flurry of executive orders was a clear short circuiting of the legislative process in order to get what he wanted.  And Congress has shown little inclination to deny him anything he’s asked them for – his “stimulus” bill, which will harm rather than hurt the economy (indeed, we’re seeing the effects of it already, as layoffs continue) sailed through as though Congress’ job was to approve it, rather than to debate it on the merits and, if necessary, stop it dead.

That is not the sort of country that emerged from the Constitutional Convention.  At the conclusion of that body’s work, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin, “Pray, Doctor, what have you given us?”  And he replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

A republic – not a “people’s republic,” which is about as much a republic, and answers about as much to the people, as the Holy Roman Empire lived up to its name – but a republic.  The Constitutional Convention didn’t give us a pure democracy, for it was impossible in the 18^th century for three million people to vote on every proposed piece of legislation.  (Indeed, it would be impractical at best, even with modern technology.  Can you imagine a legislature of even 500,000 passing urgent legislation – a declaration of war, for instance – in less than a couple of years?)  Instead we got a republic, a nation where elected representatives would govern as the people’s agents, and would answer to the people who chose them.

And for much of the nation’s history, that was exactly what happened.  Someone – a doctor, a merchant, a soldier, a farmer – would win election to Congress, would serve a term or three, and then return home.  And having passed laws, he would then live under those laws – and knowing that he would have to live under them, among the people who’d elected him, he was careful to ensure that he neither proposed, nor supported, nor voted for any bill which would be detrimental to the welfare of the citizens.  Even presidents followed this pattern – unlike today, when an ex-president does nothing in particular, former presidents of the past went on to legal careers, or service in “lower” public office.  William Howard Taft, for instance, became a justice of the Supreme Court, serving “under” his successors in the White House.

Further, the republic which the Constitutional Convention gave us had as its purpose the protection of individual liberties against encroachment by the state.  The Constitution’s primary purpose is to create a limited government – not merely to create a government, but to create a limited government.  If you read the Constitution (you have done so, right?), you’ll find that it very specifically states what powers the federal government has – and by doing so, it clearly indicates that any powers that it doesn’t give to the government, the government doesn’t have.  And beyond that there’s the Bill of Rights, which first names certain rights that the government may never encroach upon, and second – in the last two amendments – explicitly says that any power that the Constitution doesn’t plainly give to the government, remains in the hands of the states and the people.

We thus, from the beginning, had a limited government, with the lawmakers and executives coming from the people, and returning to the people when their service in DC was done.  We had a nation where the liberties of the citizens were the primary concern, where the rights of the people were more important than the powers of the government.  And Senators, Representatives, and presidents respected that.  Even Abraham Lincoln, who during the Civil War exercised power that no president before him had dared wield, did so only reluctantly, and with the aim of preserving the Constitution (whether Lincoln’s determination to keep the Union intact, by means of brute force if necessary, was valid is of course another question).

Thus, Barack Obama’s goal is not only very different from what the founding fathers gave us, but it is antithetical thereto.  Ayn Rand was fond of saying that A is not non-A.  By this she meant that a thing isn’t its opposite – good is not evil, black is not white, slavery is not liberty, a strong central government is not a limited government.  And under this principle, we can see that what Barack Obama wants is not what the founding fathers gave us.  It is both different, and opposite.

Where they gave us individual liberty, el Vampiro wants us to have mass dependency on government.  Where they limited federal authority, he wants to make it all-encompassing.  Where they feared the power of highly centralized government, he loves it.  Where they viewed the citizens as the highest authority in the nation, he views them as the lowest – indeed, not as an authority at all, but as mere subjects, whom he may order about as he pleases.  Where they conceived of the individual as having the best ability, and the most right, to make decisions about his life, Obama believes that only government has the wisdom or the right to determine what our retirement, our health care, our lives may be.

Obama wants to change the country, all right.  In a very real sense, he resents and disapproves of the American Revolution.  His vision of the United States is far more like that of the British government in 1776 than it is like that of the Continental Congress.  He would rather that we had stayed under the English yoke, than that we had created our own Constitution.  Indeed, what he wants to do is far more dictatorial than anything the 13 colonies endured, for he wants not merely to have the legislature pass repressive laws – he wants to issue them himself, without the necessity of trying to get congressional approval.

Barack Obama wants, in short, to undo what the colonies fought for.  He wants to nullify the work of Jefferson and Adams and Hancock, he wants to make the sufferings of the Continental Army irrelevant, he wants to reverse the surrender at Yorktown, he wants to return us to the servitude we threw off 233 years ago.  While he might never do so physically, spiritually he wants to tear down the Minuteman statue that guards the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, for the men who fought the British that day opposed tyranny, and a tyrant is what el Vampiro desires to be.

If Barack Obama is right, our founding fathers were wrong.  If his vision for the United States is the best one, then theirs was not.  If what he wants is what’s good for our country, then what they wanted, and got, was bad for the nation.  Barack Obama is saying to us, and to the whole world, that Washington, Knox, Franklin, Revere, Francis Marion, Daniel Morgan, Ethan Allan, and all the others who stood up on their hind legs and told the British where to get off at, were wrong.  All of them together, and all of them individually, were wrong if he’s right.

I would like to have the opportunity to ask him to his face just how he can have the chutzpah to believe that he’s so much smarter and wiser than they were.

I’ve often said – and it’s only half a joke – that my first loyalty is to California; if that state were to secede, I would make my way there, and claim my citizenship in the new California Republic. I have no difficulty at all in understanding why Robert E. Lee, rather than accept command of the Army of the Potomac, resigned his commission in the United States Army and returned to Virginia.

But if that statement is half true, it is also half a joke. The fact is that I love the United States. I don’t merely like the place. It’s not just that I haven’t yet found a better place to live. I wouldn’t mind living in the Republic of Korea, for instance – my year there in 1979 taught me that the scenery is magnificent, the language is beautiful, and the people are marvelous. But I don’t love the ROK, not the way I love the United States.

I have three great loves in my life. First there’s God. I didn’t always know Him; I was an atheist from my teens on, with time out for a fling with religion (I want to emphasize that this was a matter of religion; I joined an organization, but never came to know God). I didn’t come to the Lord until 1983. But having met God in Christ, I love no one and nothing more than I love Him. Quite literally, everything in my life since January of 83 has centered around God; even parts of my life that were in place before then have come to center on God, and are better as a result.

Then there’s my wife. I met her in Korea – in fact, the only reason she’s an American citizen today is that she married me, came to this country, and just as soon as the law would let her passed the test and took the oath of naturalization. Under God, I love no one more than I love her. The one person I know I would die to save is my wife; I hope I would die to save my children or my granddaughter, but I know I’d do it to save my wife. Of course, I don’t have to do that; my business is to live for her, and I think that may be, in some ways, the harder task.

And finally there’s my country. I loved the United States before I loved God or my wife. I joined the Air Force in 1978, and though it’s true that part of the reason was that I needed a job right out of high school and the Air Force would give me four years guaranteed employment, it was more than that. Before I made the decision – before I signed the contract, and before I raised my right hand and swore the enlistment oath – I thought things through. Was I willing, if it came to it, to go out and fight, and perhaps die, for the United States? And though I’d grown up terrified that I’d wind up in Vietnam (as it turned out, I was too young), and though the thought of suffering wounds or death terrified me equally, I concluded that for my country, yes I would be willing. So I put on the blue suit (though I seldom wore it once I graduated from basic training; the uniform of the day was almost always fatigues), and learned to salute, to march, to operate a teletype machine…oh yes, and I learned to fire an M-16 rifle too.

Was I likely to need to fire an M-16? No – my job was teletype operations specialist (a job that computer technology has made obsolete), and by the time any enemy came close enough for me to have to shoot at, I would have relocated elsewhere. Even while serving with the 3^rd Combat Communications Group I knew that, if war came, the chances of me ever having to defend myself against enemy soldiers was essentially nil (however, during the Gulf War elements of the Third Herd did wind up in Riyadh, and were in the city when a Scud missile fell on an American barracks).

But the point wasn’t that the only time I ever fired that rifle was on the range. I didn’t have to take up a rifle and defend myself, but if I’d had to, I was willing. And I was willing because I considered my country to be worth that price. Indeed, though I am not Nathan Hale, and can’t approach his simple eloquence, I agree with his last words: "I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country."

I’m no lawyer. I’m no politician. I am the last person who would ever – had I been alive then – have wound up in the Continental Congress. But if I had been, I might have pushed John Hancock aside in order to be the first to sign the Declaration of Independence. I love my country. If it came to it, I would, as those men did, pledge my life, my fortune (though it’s mostly bills), and my sacred honor.

One thing I can’t understand is a traitor. If you think some other country is better, go and live there (though Ken Hamblin made a good point – just try to find a better country). If you don’t care for the United States, then just leave – and don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out. Back when it was on numerous bumpers, people used to mock it, but I found it a very accurate bumper sticker: America – love it or leave it. If you’re unhappy here, then do the simple and obvious thing – move out. People move out of houses and apartments all the time because they don’t like them; they move to another city or state because they don’t like the one they’re in – and if they don’t care for this country, then let them move across the national borders.

Why anyone would betray his country is beyond me. Benedict Arnold doesn’t just anger me, he baffles me. How anyone could fight, and fight well, for American independence, and then make plans to deliver the fort at West Point, New York into British hands just because he didn’t get the recognition he thought he deserved, is far beyond me. How could he love his country so little? How could his love be so shallow – if indeed it ever existed in the first place?

I don’t understand people like Benedict Arnold, or John Walker, or Alger Hiss – or our current president. I can’t understand them. I love my country. I would, if I had to, die to preserve this country and its Constitution. I swore an oath to that effect in 1978, but I swore it because the sentiment, if not the words, was already in my heart.

I love my country. And as far as I’m concerned, everyone who doesn’t ought to pack his suitcase and move out. It wouldn’t be any great loss.

Back in 1992, I concluded that never in the history of the United States had there been such an incompetent, dishonest, disastrous president as the Clintons (as I called them, the president and her husband).  And I said that knowing something of the administrations of Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.

Someone has said that the reason Jimmy Carter voted for Barack Obama is that he didn’t want to be the worst president in US history.  I suspect that there may be a bit of truth in that.  Carter was a disaster.  Under his liberal guidance the American economy fell apart – we had lines at gas stations, only partly the result of the OPEC embargo; we had “stagflation,” where the only thing about the economy that wasn’t dead in the water was the prices we had to pay – they kept going up; we had what he termed a “national malaise,” which he not only couldn’t figure out how to fix, but didn’t even try very hard to fix.  It was under Carter’s administration that a band of thugs, calling themselves students, took over the United States embassy in Tehran  – since embassies are by international law the sovereign territory of the nation they represent, that was de facto an act of war by Iran against the United States – and held the staff hostage for over a year, while Carter dithered in the Rose Garden.  It would be hard to find a worse president, though in my opinion Hillary Clinton qualifies (her cat’s-paw wasn’t all that good either – it takes a real jerk to commit adultery literally in the Oval Office).

But I do not think that in all of American history there has been a president as flatly incompetent, corrupt, treasonous, venal, power-hungry, dictatorial, arrogant, ignorant, and just plain cretinous as the one we’ve got now.  Barack Obama, el Vampiro, is by far the worst thing ever to sit in the White House and suck the life out of a free nation.

The liberal media have been all aglow with what they consider to be el Vampiro’s successes in his first 100 days in office.  What successes have we seen?

     *A failed trillion dollar bailout of the banking industry, which led to the nationalization of at least one major bank

     *A failed bailout of the auto industry, leading to the president of the United States firing the CEO of a supposedly private sector corporation, and de facto nationalizing at least one auto manufacturer

     *A proposed nationalization of the health care industry, which has a far greater chance of passing Congress than the Hillary Healthcare Plot ever did, and which will turn the best health care system in the world into a carbon copy of failed systems like Britain’s National Health Service

     *Constant verbal attacks on anyone who actually produces wealth, actually contributes to the economy, actually earns his pay

     *Constant pandering to the laziest, most unproductive citizens of the United States

     *Repeated utterances and acts which tend to encourage and aid the terrorists who’ve been trying to kill us for nearly eight years

     *The palpable and utter failure to keep his promise of a “transparent” government (e.g. the text of the “stimulus” bill didn’t appear on the Web, despite multiple promises, until it was far too late for any citizen to read it before it passed)

     *The obstinate and arrogant refusal to simply produce his birth certificate so that everyone can see that he is, indeed, a natural born citizen of the United States and therefore qualified to serve as president

     *Complaints that the terrorists have it easier, because they don’t have to muck about with that pesky Constitution

     *An obvious dependence on a teleprompter for any semblance of coherent speech, which raises troubling questions about his ability to think and communicate in any situation which he does not absolutely control

     *The sycophantic butt-kissing of the media themselves, which makes it unlikely that the citizens who have to live with this president will ever gain from the media anything resembling an accurate picture of his goals, his views, his methods, and his failures

That is, in fact, just a partial list of the “successes” that el Vampiro has enjoyed thus far in his term as president.  It’s hard to find a leader anywhere in the world who is less competent, less intelligent, and less harmful to his nation, never mind a US president who’s less so.  Frankly, if this is success, then heaven help us if el Vampiro fails.

Of course, the problem is that he is succeeding where he wants to succeed.  He wants to wreck the economy, so that the federal government can take it over piecemeal.  He wants to devastate producers, because in his view they’re the most evil people in the country.  He wants to suck up to the terrorists, because he believe what they have to say and disbelieves the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  He wants to have people regard him as the messiah, who can with a word solve every problem and meet every need, because – though he knows that he can’t do those things – he wants as many people as possible to be dependent on him.  He is, in short, as egomaniacal and dictatorial a demagogue as the world has ever seen, and it’s only because he doesn’t have the apparatus of repression in hand that he hasn’t yet resorted to purges after the fashion of Stalin and Saddam Hussein.  If el Vampiro had an organization like the Gestapo at his beck and call, we would see an American Night of the Long Knives (for those who don’t recognize this historical event, I suggest you look it up; it’s most instructive).

Indeed, if el Vampiro ever gets in his hands the instruments of repression and terror – American equivalents of the Gestapo or KGB – we will see not merely an American version of the Night of the Long Knives, but our own Kristalnacht too, when not merely government functionaries who oppose him suffer, but citizens who don’t meet his standards endure persecution and death.  El Vampiro’s words and actions have made it clear that he has nothing but contempt for those who oppose him, and is impatient with legal restrictions on his ability to silence his opponents.  The “fairness doctrine” (which is one of the most unfair notions ever to proceed from the mouth of man) is merely a beginning; he would like to not merely silence “talk radio” (meaning, of course, talk radio hosts who criticize him), but any newspaper, any magazine, any TV program, any network or station, or any citizen, who dares to say that the emperor has no clothes.

Yes, I think we can say we’ve got the worst president in American history on our hands.  The only question is this: Will we, when the opportunity comes, do something about it?  Or will we do what we’ve been doing for 20 years, and let liberals retain control of the government?  The answer could, very literally, determine whether this blog can continue to exist, and whether I can continue to say things like this without fear of winding up buried in a dungeon because I say them.

As everyone remembers – well, not quite everyone, since the liberals have made it a point to forget – al-Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.  Using hijacked civilian airliners in defiance of all civilized behavior, and deliberately hitting civilian targets in defiance of the laws of war, these murderers barbarously slaughtered 3,000 innocent people (it would have been more, had not genuinely heroic efforts aboard United Flight 93 brought that attempt to a sudden halt).

On September 20, 2001, George W. Bush made his first speech on the War On Terror.  In the course of this speech, he uttered a simple philosophy for prosecuting the war: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”  The past seven years have shown just how many are with the terrorists, and how few are with us.  Aside from the United Kingdom, there has been almost no military support for our efforts to defend our nation; aside from the UK and Australia, there has been essentially no moral support (NATO’s immediate pledges of aid proved as reliable as a rubber check – which makes me glad that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization never had to do its real job, which was defending civilization against a Soviet onslaught).

What is truly tragic is that here in the United States there are so many who are not with us, but with the terrorists.  We’ve had protests – doubtless less important than the media have wished us to believe – against “the war in Iraq” (there is no such thing; Iraq is merely the most prominent theater in the War On Terror).  We’ve had a number of politicians show their yellow stripe by saying we have no business being in Iraq; some are even now speaking of the fighting in Afghanistan as separate from the War On Terror (if we follow their reasoning, that war is over – for outside of Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re not involved in combat operations).  We have journalists – something completely different from, and vastly inferior to, reporters – who in spite of their ostensible neutrality are busily lobbying in public for an end to any attempt to find and kill the terrorists.  And our president, and his entire administration, have been condemning the War On Terror for years, and seek even as you read this to find some politically safe way of surrendering to the barbarian hordes.

They are not with us.  They are with the terrorists.  The Bush Doctrine makes that emphatically clear.  What is less clear is why on earth President Bush spent the last seven years of his administration doing absolutely nothing about the matter.

I’m not saying that the federal government should shut down newspapers and cable networks and other media outlets.  Nor am I saying that the president should suspend civil rights and haul off to jail anyone who disagrees with him.  That would be thoroughly unconstitutional and patently un-American.

But when someone is for our enemies, and against us, that is a ­crime.  The Constitution says, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.  No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.” (Art. 3, Sec. 3)

Can we honestly and intelligently say that to repeatedly call for the United States to abandon the War On Terror, to denounce the efforts of the Bush administration to prosecute that war, to vote and speak against every act which would serve to further the war effort, to promise to end efforts in the War On Terror and to sign executive orders to that effect almost the minute the inauguration is over, and to voice sympathy for the terrorists who began the war, does not fit this definition?  No, we cannot.  And the constitutional provision for proof is not a problem – much of this giving of aid and comfort to the enemy has occurred right out in front of God and everybody, on TV, in the print media, on the floors of the House and Senate chambers, in public campaign speeches.  Never in history has treason been so public, and never has the government done so little to arrest, try, convict, and punish the traitors in question.

Though it’s doubtful that Vladimir I. Lenin originated the phrase, for decades the USSR referred to American liberals as “useful idiots.”  They were useful, because they served to further Soviet aims in this country.  And they were idiots, because if the Communist regime had succeeded in its goal of taking over the entire world, those who helped defeat their own country would have been the first to disappear into the gulag – for no one trusts a traitor, not even the one who benefits from the treason.

Osama bin Laden and the other terrorists (those who are left; in spite of liberal obstruction we’ve removed a lot of terrorists from the world) would be fully justified if they called today’s American traitors by that old Soviet term.  Those who oppose the War On Terror are useful to the terrorists, because they sap American will to fight and make it materially more difficult to do so.  And they’re idiots, because the first thing the terrorists will do if they win is to behead those “infidels” whom they cannot trust to be true to their sworn allegiance.

The Bush Doctrine is the only intelligent way of looking at this war.  Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.  And though it certainly won’t happen during the Obama administration, not after he’s publicly expressed his sympathy with the terrorists and his desire to sit down and talk with them as though they’re civilized men, it’s high time, and past time, that this country began to treat traitors as such.