The Constitution Forever by David Van Os

[Tamyrlin79]

This is a statement from David Van Os, a Democratic
candidate who ran for the Texas Supreme Court. He's
also a member of the Dean Dozen.

Yes, it is long, but VERY worth it. Make sure you read
the e-mail at the end. This guy knows what he's
talking about and how serious our situation is... a
situation that leading Dems just don't seem to
recognize.

Edit: Got this in an e-mail, thus no link... So, I'm posting the whole thing, rather than the traditional four paragraphs.
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The Constitution Forever
By David Van Os

My Statement

Democrats, this is what your recent nominee for the
Texas Supreme Court has to say in response to a lot of
caterwaling that has been going on in the email lists
and in the national media.

I implore you all to wake up and realize that the
theocratists now control every branch of the national
government and that their plans are much worse than
anything we envisioned 4 years ago. They are serious
and ruthless about it. We cannot beat them by trying
to appease them, placate them, or reason with them. To
them all such attempts by us simply prove to them that
we still under-estimate them and that we are still
therefore weak and easily rolled under. We must be a
resistance party, nothing less. A fierce
give-no-quarter resistance party. Anything less
betrays the millions of Americans who are feeling a
new cold chill run up their spines today.

Tell me one way, one single way, that the Bush regime
has done anything to sincerely compromise or seek
common ground with us over the last 4 years and I will
tell you that you are blind and deaf because there is
no such example. It is just going to be worse now. In
fact Bush and Cheney are both now proclaiming a
mandate. C'mon folks, you cannot be bipartisan with a
rattlesnake. C'mon folks, you cannot expect compromise
unless you are demanding it from a position of
strength. And we are not in a position of strength
because they own every branch of the federal
government and they intend to use their control to
seek their way or the highway. We have got to embrace
a resistance strategy. Meaning, that we fiercely
oppose everything they want to do and use every
possible maneuver and tactic to slow them down and
cost them as much time and grief as possible. That is
what the R's did to Bill Clinton, and look where they
are now and where we are now.

We don't have the luxury of any "we're better than
them" namby-pamby foolishness - they are out to gut
the Constitution, folks! Wake up and smell the roses!
Are we going to resist and fight them over their plan
to destroy the dreams of 1776 and 1787 and 1865, or
are we going to go quietly into the night with the
smug satisfaction that "we are better people than
them" while the Constitution dies after a too-short
217-year life span? It has got to be partisan guerilla
war now, folks. We didn't choose this, but it is
thrust upon us now, and no amount of wishful thinking
about being able to placate them with gracious
concession speeches is going to change things.

We have got to slow them down with unrelenting
partisan political resistance. Haven't you learned yet
folks that these people are deadly serious about
running the show and doing everything their way?
Haven't you learned yet that being nice and/or taking
the "high road" does not get us anywhere? Give me
liberty or give me death and I mean it in deadly
earnest, folks. I will live under the Constitution
that my daddy at age 19 fought to preserve in France
and in the Ardennes and in Germany in 1944-1945 or I
will not live. I will not compromise on the
preservation of that Constitution just to accomodate
its enemies in the hope of winning an election or two,
if in order to win an election or two I must give in
or pander to the enemies of the Constitution. If the
Democratic Party does not have the stomach to reject
compromise with this madness and stand and fight it
with ferocity and a backbone of steel, then the
Democratic Party will die and it will deserve to die.
And I for one will be ready to replace it with
whatever it takes to stand and fight for the
Constitution. WHATEVER it takes.

C'mon folks, we are the national descendants of
farmers and shopkeepers who stood up on Lexington
Green in 1775 and got mowed down by the Redcoat ranks
of the Empire, but who by damn did not flinch! And
whose courage inspired the birth of a revolution and a
new vision for all of humanity. We are the national
descendants of numberless individuals who sacrificed
in numberless ways for freedom of speech, for freedom
of dissent, for democracy, for the freedom to believe
and to NOT BELIEVE, for everything our fathers or
grandfathers willingly bled for in order to put an end
to Nazism and Fascism and totalitarianism forever.

If you don't think what is taking place in America
today has happened before with ghastly consequences,
go check a book out of the library and read in detail
about the National Socialist Party's maneuvering of
its way into unchecked power in Germany in 1933 and
1934. If you tell me that you don't see parallels in
the Bush Republican Party's strategies and actions
since 2000, I will tell you that you are a liar. Wake
up! We need Democratic leaders who will stop worrying
about their personal comfort zones and who will dammit
rediscover the steel fiber that built this nation and
dammit stand and fight and resist this madness. We
don't need Democratic leaders whose response to the
madness is to try to appease it by choosing an
anti-choice Senator as the next Senate Minority
Leader. Tom Daschle was such an appeaser that he made
Neville Chamberlain look like Winston Churchill - but
they went out and viciously brought him down anyway
didn't they! Did the appeasement strategy that Gore
and Daschle and Gephardt adopted in December-January
2000-2001 placate Bush? Hell no! Did the sell-out of
the Congressional Black Caucus (and of hundreds of
thousands of disenfranchised African-American citizens
of Florida) on January 6, 2001, gain any slowdown of
Bush's agenda? Hell no! Did the Daschle-Gephardt
mush-mouthed strategy win us anything in the 2002
elections? Did John Kerry's calculated sellout on Iraq
in the cynical construction of a scripted campaign
message win the election for him? Hell no! Did John
Kerry's concession-speech sellout of citizens who
waited in line for hours to vote in Ohio keep Bush or
Cheney from declaring a mandate for their drive for
theocracy? Hell no, they did it within 24 hours!
Haven't we tried appeasement enough? Folks, haven't
you read your history about Chamberlain's attempts to
appease Hitler? Haven't we learned over and over that
hunger for power cannot be appeased, but that attempts
to appease it only make it more hungry?

Wake up folks! Get out of your comfort zones. This is
for real. We have got to resist, resist, resist. It
will be hard, it will require sacrifice, it will
require the willingness to be a target for an
avalanche of right-wing hatred, but it is what the
times that we find ourselves in require of us. We did
not choose these times but we cannot wish them away.
We did not choose these times but dammit we can rise
to the challenge that is presented to us. Like it or
not, we have no choice.

We need political leaders who will resist, who will
fight, who know what is at stake and understand the
gravity. The world has been here before. In 1933 the
Christian Democrats tried to placate the new
Chancellor of Germany, whose National Socialist Party
still had less than a majority in the parliament, by
joining a coalition government with him. After their
accomodation with him gave him the majority government
that he needed, he rewarded them by easily exploiting
their demonstrated weakness and ploughing them under.
You know the rest of the story.

We must demand of our Democratic leaders that they
resist, not roll over; the fate of not only America
but the world may be hanging in the balance. We must
find Democratic leaders who will resist the madness,
and I don't mean Hillary Clinton, who has used her
every opportunity in the Senate to give Bush
everything he has demanded for his murderous and
criminal war on Iraq.

In the meantime we must demand that Democratic
office-holders resist, resist, and resist. And we must
ourselves resist at every opportunity. Below is an
email letter that I sent to a religious-right preacher
who emailed me through my campaign website demanding
to know if I was a Christian if I wanted his vote. A
few days later I used the same response as in my email
in a debate with Scott Brister on a Christian-right
talk radio show, in response to the moderator's and
Brister's demagoguery over my opposition to judges
putting the Ten Commandments on courtroom walls. This
is an example of resistance as opposed to appeasement.
In the debate with Brister, this little speech of
mine, the opposite of pandering, put an end to the
demagoguery. It surely did not gain me any votes from
the right-wing audience, but it damn sure left my
enemies speechless and it damn sure cheered up some
Democrats, whom I later learned had been listening to
the show to see how I would perform, with the
knowledge that we don't have to run and hide. This I
offer you as one small example of resistance as
opposed to appeasement. The subject happened to be
separation of church and state this time, but it might
be any subject. Regardless of the subject, the point
is to use every opportunity to resist and stop the
namby-pamby appeasement. We can all find opportunities
to do similarly, and we must take advantage of every
one.

I did this publicly on a radio show with a hostile
audience, just as I spoke ferociously in opposition to
the corporate takeover of our court system in
interviews with hostile newspaper editors. The
"Christian radio" moderator surely didn't like what I
had to say, and Scott Brister surely didn't like what
I had to say, and the newspaper editors who called me
unqualified for judicial office because I am a
"populist liberal" didn't like what I had to say, but
they all went away from the respective encounters with
just a little less confidence, just a little less
smugness, in the knowledge that they could not
intimidate me into pandering or equivocation. Guess
what, I didn't melt, but to the contrary grew stronger
with every such encounter. As we all will, if we will
dammit stand and fight and insist that our Democratic
Party and its representatives stand and fight and stop
the appeasement!

By the way, the recipient of my below email responded
by apologizing all over himself to try to assure me
that he didn't mean to offend me. It unnerved him to
get a resistant reply that he surely did not expect.
In my experience that is what schoolyard bullies
always did when they made fun of me for being about 3
feet tall in the first grade and I punched them in the
stomach in return. They turned and ran. Extrapolate to
the national scene. We are being intimidated by a
gigantic schoolyard bully in the form of the Bush
regime. If we try to appease him he will just keep
bullying. John Kerry's response to Bush's years of
lies and deceit and bullying was to stand up in front
of the Democratic Convention in Boston and refuse to
punch Bush in the stomach over any of it. John Kerry's
response to the SwiftBoat liars was to whine and beg
Bush to not be so mean. John Kerry's response to an
inappropriate question about faith from the repugnant
Bob Schieffer was to pander (instead of stand up for
the Constitution and demand that Schieffer withdraw
such an inappropriate question). John Kerry's response
to the disenfranchisement of Ohio and theft of another
election was to throw in the towel as quickly as
possible. The Senate Democratic caucus's apparent
response to the ghastly onset of theocracy in America
is to select an anti-choice Senator to be of all
things the leader of the Democratic Party in the U.S.
Senate. Come on, folks, the above are all examples of
pandering, appeasement, accomodationism, and other
synonymns of the same thing - none of which equates to
the spirit of resistance that is called for, and all
of which did and will lead to nothing but contempt
from Bush and Rove for the lily-livered weakness that
they represent. All of these are examples of actions
that simply feed the beast's lust for more power
because they all demonstrate to the beast that its
lies, deceit, tricks, bullying, and intimidation will
continue to get it whatever it wants. Here's my
real-life example of resistance instead of appeasement
--

Sir,

I decline to pander to your narrow-mindedness in
exchange for a vote. How dare you presume to judge
your fellow man on the basis of your own religious
preference? How dare you proclaim that in the United
States of America one religion (your own, naturally)
is the only worthy one? How dare you proclaim that you
will evaluate the candidacies of those offering
themselves for public service on the basis of a
religious test? How dare you flaunt the principle of
our Constitution that "there shall be no religious
test for public office"!

Sir, you and your kind seek to trample upon one of the
cardinal reasons for the creation of the United States
of America. You and your kind seek to establish a
theocracy based upon, naturally, your own religious
doctrine. Would you still be hostile to the concept of
separation of government and religion if you found
yourself living under the Taliban and required to obey
Islamic Sharia Law or die? I do not know why I ask the
latter question, because your mind will be unwilling
to explore what that could mean for you.

I oppose your efforts to destroy the American
Constitututional republic through the establishment of
theocracy. I oppose it now, tomorrow, the next day,
and every day after that. How is that for the answer
to your question?

This is a statement from David Van Os, a Democrat who
ran for the Texas Supreme Court.

[Vincardog]

1. Kick

Way to go David.

[ixion]

2. David is spot on

There is a group who thinks this America is less ours than theirs, and we need to stand up to them.

[tanyev]

3. Dayum!

I voted for him, but I had no idea he was so on top of things. Way to go!