This is written in response to the following article:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/15/begala.taxes/index.html

The picture above is of our former President signing the Patriot Act - one of the most controversial and hastily-signed pieces of legislation ever to grace our nation's Capitol. If you opposed it, the Iraq War or nearly anything the Bush Administration was doing, you were immediately labelled anti-American and unpatriotic. Your support for the men and women of our military was even called into question. All of these instances of course aimed at stamping out dissent. Sound familiar?

Again we find ourselves having just passed a few very controversial and hastily-signed pieces of legislation that will affect our nation for years to come. We are asked by Mr. Begala just to sit back and shut up. Be a patriot and pay your taxes. He reminds us that while the protesters' battle cry is "no taxation without representation," that they were represented, and "they lost". (I guess our voice only matters so far as it's a vote to be won, and not a real voice with real concerns everyday - unless of course there's political capital to be drawn.)

Is that really the case here though? Congress is writing a series of post-dated checks, the longest stretching out at least ten years. The costs of these expenditures will have to be paid by voters ten years from now, with no say on it 10 years from now. What's more, a six year old today that gets a job ten years from now will also still be paying those taxes. And he won't even be able to vote until 2 years after that. It's what some refer to as "generational theft". Many people might immediately recognize a similar phenomena in the global warming debate. Some believe that we have a moral imperative to preserve our planet for the future generations, but why isn't the same logic used when it comes to our economic survival?

Mr. Begala dismissives the protesters' concerns by lumping them in with a handful of shameless politicians who used a national crisis to further their own agenda, one that would have lacked the support otherwise. Does that sound familiar to anyone else?

I find it deeply offensive that Mr. Begala would invoke the contributions and suffering of our veterans to try to end all debate on this specific issue. Sound familiar? We're almost expected to feel guilty that we ourselves were not given a similar opportunity to pick up a rifle and shoot anyone fooled into fighting for a completely different set of values than our own. It also reeks of fascism.

We're trading a farce of a "hundred-year war" for a poorly-negotiated,  hundred-year variable interest, home(land) equity loan. People are upset and their voices need to be heard, regardless of who also agrees with them or what you might hear. We ALL call this country home, and we are ALL afraid of losing our house.

"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."

- Howard Zinn