I'm sitting here watching Dick Cheney speak about national security and defending the Bush Administration policies.  I also listened to Obama speak this morning.  Listening to both men talk I'm left with a few tough thoughts.  

Obama is a gifted speaker, teleprompter or not, if you listened just to his words, I could understand how you'd be in awe.  He stands upright, looks out to the crowd and seems to catch an eye with each turn of the head.  He's charismatic and he uses words that speak to America's heart and soul.  However, Obama is missing just one thing, facts.  His words are filled with lofty moral rhetoric and radical left wing ideology cloaked expertly in patriotic wording.  He uses the Constitution and the values of our founding fathers as proof that President Bush and his administration were evil and stupid little men and women.  He presumes to hold the moral stick of righteousness over the heads of the previous administration and to persecute them at every turn.  He never stands to take responsibility but instead reflects that he is cleaning up the shattered mess of America left by "the policies of the last 8 years".  President Obama, we get it, you don't like the policies of the past, please move on and take control of your own destiny.

Dick Cheney is not as gifted a speaker as Obama.  His eyes are often down on his paper and when he looks up it's less clear to whom he is speaking.  However, Cheney speaks with facts as his guide and in defense of the policies the Bush administration embarked upon.  Dick Cheney used substantive factual representations, such as the in depth answer given to the question of water boarding.  Former Vice President Cheney was able to name who was water boarded and when and for what reason.  Specifically he named Khalid Sheik Mohammad who was water boarded LEGALLY and who gave information that led to stopping other attacks on American soil.  He pointed out that the tactics used at the time were used specifically with national security in mind.  

From a Constitutional perspective, who was right and who was wrong?  The answer is both were right and both were wrong.  While I sympathize with Dick Cheney (I was a United States Marine stationed in Camp Lejeune, NC when the towers were hit and served in the Middle East) and the Bush Administration on their decision to authorize these techniques in order to protect America, I believe that our rights and liberties were taken away or eroded further by those steps.  Unfortunately, I can say that the Patriot Act and other Bush Administration policies, intended to protect Americans have led to our Constitutional freedoms being stolen.  On the other hand, how dare one President look back on another administration and blame it repeatedly for so many problems?  Isn't that better left to the pundits and the media? These techniques were legal under the former administration.  America can either like it, or not like it but it WAS LEGAL and we must accept it.  Going forward, we must strip our Executive officer of this power.  We ought to have a national referendum within each state to determine how America feels.  50 states, everyone gets a chance to vote on it and majority rules.  Not number of votes but states won/lost.  Up or down we go forward with the decision of the American people.  Either we torture or we don't.  We can work out the details based on PRINCIPLE and VALUES later.  You're not going to see this because the lofty rhetoric of Obama's "transparency" argument will never be fully upheld as intended by the Constitution.  Since Ronald Reagan and perhaps not since Jackson before him have we had a President that actually understood and upheld the Constitution.  Lincoln, for all his brilliance and study was not given the chance to truly uphold the Constitution.  The great war between the states that marred his Presidency demanded that he restrict rights and actually subvert the Constitution in order to preserve the union for which the document was intended to provide law.  

It's time to return to our Constitutional Values.  Hillary Clinton spoke of a reset button on a recent trip to Russia.  America DOES need a reset button.  We need to once again become the men and women our founders asked us to be.  In all of their writings the founding fathers pleaded with future generations to understand that government will necessarily try to expand at every turn and that it is OUR job as citizens to ensure they do not grow beyond the limits set forth in the founding documents lest our liberty be restricted.  In our last election 130 million of 303 million citizens voted.  If you consider that 24.5% of our population is under 18, that means that there are nearly 230 million Americans of voting age.  That means 100 million citizens of voting age are not upholding their part of the Constitutional deal.  Every American has a voice, but we must use it.