NATO is coming to town and our media has managed to talk about protest permits, will reporters get handcuffed, armor-plated horses, snipers… frick-frackin’ snipers, black-bloc tactics, the shameful 59-45 defeat of the attempted amendment of the idiotic Illinois Eavesdropping Law and if it is a win or a loss that the Mayor didn’t get to keep the G8 meeting… what the hell is wrong with you people? All of this is about the Constitution. In the Constitution, in the First damn Amendment, it actually says: “… 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.” So shutting down cell towers, not giving protesting citizens permits to use the 1st Amendment and assemble and promising not to arrest reporters while having the powers to do so is not in keeping with any of the above. Rahm Emanuel promises not to be an abusive bully when his police are already arresting reporters and beating up protestors like they got a get out of jail free card is like trusting a rattle snake in a nursery. Someone is gonna get hurt… maybe even killed. Apparently the Constitution does not apply if you are under 5’ 5” tall and have the soul of an investment banker.

This is not about NATO or any other future gathering of warlike plutocrats; come to drink water you can’t afford and hide behind phalanxes of soldiers and police whose pension funds they’re raiding while they send them off to die for Satan only knows what. No, this is about the Constitution because a little further on it says: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons and things to be seized. So preventive detention, spying on people and deputizing private corporations to do so is like taking the 4th Amendment out behind a shed and shooting it in the head… which is something that could happen if the 4th Amendment were an American citizen the President didn’t like enough only the gun might be a drone… and they have to be overseas and unreachable otherwise… we think.

I don’t give a flying clusterf*#k about NATO or anyone else coming to town. I upset because when they show up the Mayor or some other executive branch clown, turns our civil rights into a sand castle at high tide! I’m worked up because they wayour angry little marmoset of a mayor is treating the Founding Fathers and our Constitution makes me want to paraphrase something Sam Jackson said in Pulp Fiction: “Does Thomas Jefferson look like a bi#%^h to you? Say what one more time Mr. Winnetka! I asked you is the 8th Amendment of the Constitution that says: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, or cruel or unusual punishments inflicted.” your  bi#%^h?” The truth of the matter is that what the Mayor doesn’t want to happen is for ordinary citizens to gather together in large public bodies and start discussing the Constitution or how he’s running the city or anything like that so he has to sew the idea that there will be lawless violence at a peaceful protest to keep people away and then engage in it with his police force to prove he was right. You want to know who starts a riot take a look at who’s dressed for one.

This is not to say that there aren’t at play here but we’re not even hearing about them. For example, did you know that NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is operating in Afghanistan, Libya, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, the Horn of Africa and Somalia and this might make you think that you have no idea where the damn NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN is! Our media friends and public officials might take this moment to explain why when CENTO, SEATO and for all intents and purposes, ANZUS have ceased to exist like the Cold War relics that they were that NATO still exists? Sure the world is a dangerous place, you run around overthrowing democracies, bombing people with impunity, kidnapping, torturing and killing their citizens at what seems like random to them and to us WHEN we hear about it and people are going to WANT to do you harm.

We are going to have another terrorist attack in this country on some day. Bank on it, bet on it, I’m sure someone on Wall Street in some insurance business already is. We could be talking about the link between NATO missions and how they may or may not be increasing the probability that the blowback incident is going to happen sooner than later. But are we talking about any of that? No, we’re not talking about any of that or how the massive illegal surveillance, lawless designation of American citizens as unlawful combatants and how the NDAA, MCA and PATRIOT ACT will be applied to all us with real intensity after the inevitable occurs. It would be great if we were talking about that and how NATO is little more than a manifestation of the constant state of war that has given us the war economy and the Military Industrial Complex that Eisenhower warned us about.

I think we should note here that the Military Industrial complex, militarized police and pretty much every anti-Constitutional thing the Mayor is doing to keep us “safe” is raising the odds that something terrible will happen to us and then what remains of our civil liberties will go the way of the dinosaur. Because it’s about the Constitution damn it and they may have forgotten this but we as citizens can’t and will not give it up without a fight.