American Thinker: Is Barack Obama Anti-American?

American Thinker: Is Barack Obama Anti-American?: "Everything has a fundamental essence, a quality that makes it uniquely itself. Take an orange, for example. It's not only a citrus fruit -- it's an orange-colored citrus fruit. Horticulturists can alter its size, its texture, its sweetness, and even (to a limited extent) its color, but as long as its color is orange, the fruit remains 'an orange' because that color is its definition. Change the color, however, and suddenly you have the un-orange, the anti-orange. You have something completely different that no longer contains the essence of the original fruit. Lose the essence and you lose the orange.

America has an essence too, and that essence is liberty. Since its inception, America has been defined by liberty -- both the liberty of the individual and the liberty of the nation. As the Declaration of Independence more elegantly states, 'Goverments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.' If we, the people make a social compact by which we consent to be governed, it means that government is our servant, not our master. Lincoln understood that ours is a nation boasting a 'government of the people, by the people[, and] for the people.'

This uniquely American precept, one that sees the power of government flowing from the people rather than controlling the people, ideally results in a situation in which citizens are subject to minimal government constraints. As the Founders envisioned American government, the state exists to optimize individual freedoms, not to control the individual.

To this end, once the Founders delineated our government's structure in the Constitution -- a structure that grants the government only specifically enumerated powers and ensures that no single branch of the government can become dominant -- the Founders immediately turned their attention to the individual freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Each of these rights is intended to optimize the citizen's power against his (or her) own government.

The First Amendment espouses the purest statement of individual rights ever set to paper and imposed against a government: American citizens can practice their religion without government interference, speak freely without government censorship, read papers untouched by government control, and gather openly and loudly to make their political views known.

Unlike citizens at all other times and in all other places, Americans can protect these broad rights with firepower, because the Second Amendment grants them the right to bear arms on their own soil, a right entirely separate from the military's obligation to protect American citizens from foreign enemies. Given that the Second Amendment was ratified on the heels of a successful revolution, the Founders manifestly intended that Americans, protected by the military abroad, were free to protect themselves from their own government at home. (To appreciate this right fully, remember that one of the first things the Nazis did was to make private arms illegal, especially for Jews.)"