by Rod D. Martin
February 21, 1999

The bad news is that the battle lines are now clearly drawn. The good news is that the battle lines are now clearly drawn.

The Senate’s resounding affirmation of our felon-President brings us to a new chapter in American history. There are no two ways about it; on this point one cannot be over-dramatic. The Rubicon has been crossed. The only remaining question is how we welcome Caesar once he arrives.

Now this is not to say that Bill Clinton is Caesar; not at all. It is not to say that he seeks to establish a dictatorship or anything of the sort.

It is simply to say that, now that an actual majority of our leaders, including every Senator of the minority party, are willing to trade the Rule of Law for craven political advantage, and now that the media elites and those among the people who follow them are content to abet such debasement, the Republic is at the mercy of any ambitious man who happens along.

Can anyone realistically doubt this? Property taxes already make us serfs in our own homes. Income taxes already require more of our produce than did feudal levies. The number of armed federal police agencies grows seemingly by the day, while the number of federal and state gun control laws increases at a similar pace. Every day more power accrues to Washington, and the only thing holding back tyranny is the benevolence of the rulers we select.

Assume the best of Clinton: can you trust the next President — can you trust every imaginable future President — to be so benevolent, now that it is clear a high approval rating allows every crime to go unpunished, perhaps even unreported?

This is now the witching hour. The acquittal is a benchmark, the point at which men supposedly of honor finally, irrevocably abandoned their oaths. That benchmark is the defining moment of the new American reality: from that point forward, one either stands openly for justice and for liberty, or openly for privilege and dishonor.

Yet despite everything, it is precisely this which ought give us hope, hope for lasting renewal. Ever since America’s “Cultural Revolution” in the sixties, men like Bill Clinton, women like Patty Ireland, have masked their disease of dishonor and depravity behind high-sounding rhetoric they can no longer credibly maintain. They brought us socialism in the name of compassion, political correctness in the name of free speech, censorship of religion in the name of the First Amendment. They taught men and women to abuse each other in the name of liberation, and minorities to be dependent in the name of “Affirmative Action”. They made the schools into union playgrounds in the name of higher-order thinking, and murder into an industry in the name of a woman’s “choice”.

And as their selfish promiscuity spread like their herpes, they destroyed half our families, compromised our churches, ruined our schools, tainted our media, corrupted our universities, burned down our inner-cities, addicted our children, and withered everything they touched. And everything they did, they did in the name of some higher cause, and millions followed them down to destruction.

Yet now the façade is gone. The Alec Baldwins have spoken, saying as he did on Conan O’Brian in December that they prefer an America in which the children of political opponents are dragged from their houses and killed. The Patty Irelands have spoken, saying that sexual harassment doesn’t matter if the criminal is a Democrat. The Robert Byrds have spoken, saying that Democratic felonies are maddening, but not impeachable. The network news bureaus have spoken, saying that a Matt Drudge — with a near-perfect accuracy rate — is not credible, but that Larry Flynt, First Pornographer, is. They have all taken their stand. They are all out in the open. Every one.

And standing opposed to them, a small army, from James Dobson to Newt Gingrich, are on the record for truth and justice and the integrity of the Republic.

Appropriately enough in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens wrote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” So it is today. We will save our nation by knowing who we are, by standing on principle, by endlessly drawing the contrast with our opponents, and by submitting ourselves to the God who gave us our nation in the first place. Apart from that, our nation will be lost. The hour of truth is here, the task is daunting, and the margin for error is nil. And yet for all of that, we rendezvous today with destiny, as we yet again commit ourselves to seeing “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

What a time to be alive.