IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Over at Vodkapundit, Stephen Green thinks Michael Kinsley has a sensible idea about marriage in this Brave New World.

I'm guessing he hasn't run this by the wife yet.

I actually agree with Dean on something. This story about Dean on Liberia was linked off of Drudge:

"I would urge the president to tie our commitment to assist in this multilateral effort to an appeal to the world to join us in the work that remains to be done in Iraq," Dean said.

That is actually a good idea. Basically, it is levelling with the rest of the world - you wanna play along, you gotta play along. I mean, we are probably going to end up with troops there anyway. Might as well twist some French arm while we are at it.

Of course all the rest he says is just blather. But this is a good idea.

They know that eventually, evidence of WMD will be found in Iraq. The argument that Hussein didn't have them is just not defensible. So they reached back to Camelot, and sent out Sir Schlesinger to lead this new war. Finding WMD in Iraq will not be enough he says.

And if a cache of WMD is found buried somewhere in Iraq, that is not sufficient to rescue the president. The bottom-line question is: Why were the WMD not deployed? When Saddam Hussein was fighting for his regime, his power and his life, why in the world did he not use his WMD against the U.S. invasion? Heaven knows, he had plenty of warning.

Unearthing buried WMD would not establish Iraq as a clear and present danger to the United States. Deployment of WMD would have come much closer to convincing people that Iraq was a mortal threat.

I think this is a sign that they know the evidence is coming.

Governor Dean, are you listening?

Reading all these pieces about Secretary Rumsfeld having to say there is no quagmire in Afghanistan shows that those cheering for American failure are still out there. He said something that should be self evident to those who ask the question, but apparently isn't:

"There are so many cartoons where people, press people, are saying, 'Is it Vietnam yet?' hoping it is and wondering if it is. And it isn't. It's a different time. It's a different era. It's a different place," he said.

And yet people do want this to be Vietnam, where the US lost a war. I guess because they were wrong about us losing the war, that now they want us to "lose the peace." The handwringing is going on in earnest. Like in this editorial from David Ignatius in the Washington Post today- he writes this:

The worst possible outcome in Iraq would be for the United States to cut and run, leaving behind a California-size version of Lebanon.

But spends most of the article worrying that a Syrian says:

America was about to make a mistake of historic dimensions, warned Sidawi, who made his fortune in the oil business and now runs Petroleum Intelligence Weekly and other industry publications. He likened the Bush administration's implacable march into Iraq to Britain's mobilization for the deadly morass of World War I and America's self-inflicted wounds in Vietnam.

Of course, Vietnam. I don't know Ignatius' politics. I mean, you don't have to be a liberal to editorialize for the Post, but it helps. But the problem with "cutting and running" from Iraq is not that it becomes a big Lebanon - which is ironically, and unmentioned by Ignatius, occupied by Syrian troops (that seems to have made things better!) - but that it proves to the terrorists and their nation-state supporters (like Syria!) that the United States will abandon its national defense in the face of a few casualties. On a utilitaritian basis, a Lebanon-like Iraq that spends all of its time fighting itself instead of nationalizing oil wealth to power its threat to its neighbors and the US is infinitely prefereable to Hussein's Ba'athist regime. But the message that America under President Bush is no different than America under President Clinton would be a huge mistake. "Cutting and running" from Somalia was bad for the US not because it left a country in a shambles, but because it emboldened our enemies.

So the "we cannot abandon Iraq the way we abandoned Afghanistan" crowd - which is in itself based on the false premise that we have walked away from Afghanistan, bound to be a surprise to the troops still on duty there and the Congress which has authorized hundreds of millions of dollars to be spent on reconstruction efforts - is busy beating the drums that we are failing, just like in Vietnam. Today, on the front page of the Washington Post, is the headline "U.S. Vehicles Attacked; Explosion Kills 5 in Fallujah." Of course the 5 killed were not Americans, but if you read no further than the headline, you wouldn't know that.

Overdramatizing the continued operations in Iraq as "Vietnam" shows the true agenda of those who do it. Opposition to Vietnam was never that we should "do it better," at least not from the Left. The opposition always was that we should never have been there in the first place, and that we should leave immediately. Even when people claim that the US will fail if it abandons Iraq, they continue to present reasons why we should do just that.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, they are turning on the TV....

Finally through recovering from the basement flood - that was tedious, but good to get the basement cleaned out. I can actually walk around in there now. The next event involves a two-year-old and a jar of vaseline. It was in his diaper basket, and instead of going to sleep tonight, he decided to get up, wander around, and open up the Vaseline. And spread it around. You'd really be amazed at how far one jar will go. I should have taken a picture - he looked like he had just been slimed by the green ghose in Ghostbusters. Kinda funny, but still. I was planning on other things this evening.