The acrid smoke had barely cleared the Manhattan skyline when the facists who composed the American government began tightening the screws that would replace The Rule of Law with The Rule of the Unitarity Executive.

Not that the Executive acted alone. A Republican legislature passed the USAPATRIOT Act with full cooperation from its Democratic lackeys. Then it passed the Military Commissions Act. Then, as the Cheney Administration accelerated its campaign of political repression, a Democratic Congress voted to indemnify the corporate partners of the usurpers. In the meantime, habeas corpus was fatally wounded and personal privacy faded while government secrecy bloomed in darkness.

The current administration stands firmly in support of the new American political paradigm. Even its token gesture of closing the torture camp in Cuba shows signs of falling by the wayside. When this happens, President Obama will express his unhappiness, but he will do so with a smile on his face.

Most sadly, the whole anti-civil-liberties program has been accomplished with the active and overwhelming support of its victims. The American public, the modern counterparts of the Tories during the Revolution, loves the fact that people can be thrown in jail for life without charges -- provided of course that the prisoners' names have a Middle-Eastern sound to them. The people whose homes can now be broken into by government agents on a whim and without a writ are pleased to accept torture as an "effective" means of gathering information. They are happy to have their phones tapped, to have their protests restricted to the ironically-labed "free-speech zones," to have their "safety" enhanced through the process of exiling their fellow American citizens.

Fear of tiny groups of extremists is the factor that drives this seizure of power from the people and to the already-powerful. Fear is carefully nutured and tended by those who benefit from the power transfer, of course, but that is no excuse. The people need to put aside their fear and require their government to safeguard their ability to be politically free. But we are soft now, and unwilling to require our public "servants" to safeguard anything but our cozy, little, meaningless lives, our iPhones, and our 56-inch HDTVs.

If one needs a an amplifier to hear the sound of liberty's death-knell in the once-proud United States of America, one needs only listen to the stridency of self-proclaimed liberals and progressives right here on one of the most liberal and progressive blogs in the world. These defenders of freedom are in full voice pleading at the top of their lungs for their guardians to protect them by further eroding the right to free speech in America. "Make the right-winger talk shows stop being mean," they snivel. "Make the 'hate-speech' go away." Liberals. Ha! Progressives? Only in America.

The Bill of Rights is Dead. It died of neglect. Long live the Unitary Executive.