America, 2008

I've always been particularly proud to share a birthday with Thomas Jefferson. So I was a bit disturbed to have my morning blogosphere birthday present be this. To sum up: about 20 DC area libertarians got together at the Jefferson Memorial to celebrate the birthday of our nation's most anti-authoritarian Founding Father. In celebration of this, they were all wearing their iPods, dancing silently. For about 10 minutes. At midnight. When virtually no one was around.

Several minutes into this brief celebration, the Park Police showed up and ordered them to disperse. When one asked "why?" she was arrested. Welcome to life in the Bush Administration, when you can do something that disturbs absolutely no one at a memorial to a symbol of anti-authoritarianism and get arrested. The charge? "Interfering with an agency function," according to Radley Balko, who was actually there for some of it. In other words: if you dare to question an illegal order from the police, they can arrest you. Which means that the police are, quite literally, above the law.

Reading some of the comments to Megan McArdle's story on this, it's suddenly very easy to see how our President has managed to destroy the Constitution with very little objection from the American people. I do believe that T-Jeff himself is weeping a bit today at the blind obedience to authority that has overtaken much of the nation he helped found.

More reactions to this outrage at memeorandum.