Check the Bore

True patriots are not myopic! They do not blindly follow the whims and fancy of politicians or tyrants or dictatorial leaders. They are able to think for themselves, and make up their own minds and don't narrow mindedly believe that America is always correct. It does not take a certified historian to point out all the times that America has been wrong in the past. That is the unfortunate truth, America has not always been led by patriots. Sometimes it is led by people who believe they are right simply because they were elected and they vehemently denounce anybody and everybody who has a different opinion. The primary reason for term limitation on the office of president was to prevent any one person or group of persons from establishing a monarchy in the United States. That was the exact form of government we rebelled against when we fought the American Revolution.

Probably the most repulsive episode in American history was the dichotomy that was created when the documents which established the United States and waved the banner of "freedom for all" at the very same time, the people who wrote them ordained and upheld the establishment of slavery in America.

Even today, pseudo-intellectuals, and pseudo-patriots will say strange things to defend America. One of the strangest I have ever heard is "the Civil War was not fought to free the slaves... it was to establish the rights of individual states, to conduct interstate commerce and self-government..." nothing could be further from the truth.

On the brink of the Civil War, on March 21, 1861, Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the U.S. Confederacy, gave his famous Cornerstone Speech , in which he declared that slavery was the natural condition of blacks and the reason for the foundation of the confederacy(Emphasis mine). It has been wrongly argued that Stevens made this speech merely to keep unsympathetic northerners from joining the Union Army. And while there may be some truth to it, that argument would not have kept true patriots from joining the Army and fighting against something as hideous and un-American as slavery. So a true patriot will always be at odds with a statement like "slavery was okay, because back then the law allowed it. " There is no wiggle room on this issue. Slavery was wrong, and America was wrong for allowing it.