Last month you printed a letter I wrote in which I said that Obama ought to be impeached. I also said that what we need is to have a public airing of what is happening to our Constitution. Since then, we have the revelations of Edward Snowden and Russ Tice, whistleblowers who tell us that the government has recorded, for some time now, the contents of every email and phone call we’ve made.This means that any citizen or public official can now conceivably be blackmailed and/or shut down by the NSA or whoever it is that controls this information. So this revelation has convinced me that I was wrong to advocate for Obama’s impeachment. The truth is that we have no mechanism by which he could be impeached and have his impeachment make a difference. Most members of Congress, the Supreme Court, military leaders and captains of industry, particularly those who run the so-called fourth estate and the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower talked about, are now so corrupted that we no longer have what can legitimately be called in the United States, a true democracy. To restore the rights and freedoms the Constitution promises would require that the people who have had such a corrupting influence acknowledge their infidelity, tell the full truth about what they’ve done and what they know and then step aside so that we might try again to form a more perfect union. Frankly, I don’t believe this is going to happen  We live in a very special place here on Vashon, and yet I’m left to wonder if the citizens of every other town and city in the country care as much about protecting our rights and freedoms as most Vashon residents do, will our children and grandchildren ever know true freedom again?

— Mark A. Goldman