Lest there be any doubt as to why I have the utmost contempt for the left and its thought process, I present to you, fair reader, a good example of why I so vehemently despise the American left and all it stands for:

The justice makes the U.S. Constitution sound like a real estate lease or a last will and testament. Even some of those may be subject to different interpretations over the years.

Isn't it the genius of the Constitution that its principles are broad enough to meet the demands of changing times? Isn't that the great virtue of any basic law -- that it is broad enough to grow in response to different conditions? Isn't that why a country's constitution is sometimes called its organic law?

That would be the genius behind the United States Constitution. The wording is clear, crisp and relevant. There are no stipulations, limitations, exceptions, simply put, the document is utterly devoid of legalese. The average person, regardless of whether they agree with it or not, can actually read and understand it. The only people who find it to be so incredibly difficult to grok are those that really, really want to go against the Constitution without appearing to have absolutely no respect for it. Such people would include Paul Greenberg and a random sampling of the people who work in the Bush Administration.

Let's take the first amendment for example:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The only exception to the freedom of speech part is treasonous activity, and that's only because treason is included in the Constitution. The rest of the first amendment can be read as though it were its own context. Congress shall not do a damn thing to regulate any of the following except where they apply to people under the employment of the federal government. Now how hard is that text to understand? The founders did not leave a large number of exceptions, clauses, etc. They just simply wrote "the Congress shall not do X." A child could grasp the basic meaning of that, which says a lot about the people who find cryptic meanings in the Bill of Rights. They are in fact either incredibly subversive and dishonest or abysmally stupid. Take your pick, but anyone who gets fuzzy-headed over the meaning of the Bill of Rights is either not a good person or is incredibly mentally challenged because the text is so straight to the point without any equivocation.

As with a living organism, if law does not adapt, it dies. It becomes a dead letter -- instead of a living thing. The logical opposite of a living Constitution is a dead one.

The very reason that the Constitution has become a dead letter is because of the fact that idiots like Paul Greenberg cannot bring themselves to restrict the government to it. They have no desire to limit the federal government to the powers it gets from the U.S. Constitution. The Bill of Rights should be relevant today, but ideologues like Greenberg won't allow it to be because it interferes with their post-modernist agenda. The English language has not fundamentally changed in the past two hundred years; texts written in 1776 are quite easy for any modestly educated person to read.

It is invariably a sign that someone is dishonest when they twist such simple words around and say that just because they were written in one period, does not make them appropriate today. This is why socialism is still a powerful force around the world. It has been tried to the best of human ability, but the end result has always been carnage, but every generation insists that it is not inhibited by the primal defects that made the previous attempt fail. There is nothing intellectual about this approach to the Constitution, rather it is hubris that is thinly veiled in a layer of appeals to emotion and temporary fancy.

If the Constitution does not mean the same thing today that it meant two hundred years ago, then there is no point in even bothering with it anymore. Freedom of speech at the federal level may not have been as far in scope in the late eighteenth century, but it certainly was interpretted far more seriously than today. We have judges who cannot for the life of them imagine how placing spending limits on political advertising, or outright silencing all political speech for a period before an election, is a restriction on freedom of speech. What we have here is evolution, but devolution, from a very simple, but elegant design to a system so complex, ugly and dysfunctional that any engineer would wish violence upon the committee whose ad hoc idiocy spawned it.

"Idiot" indeed is the appropriate appellation for the people who think of the Constitution as a living document. Of what value is the first amendment if "Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of speech" changes in meaning from generation to generation? None, and same for all of the amendments. Those who believe it is a living document cannot be bothered to govern even by the principles of the tenth amendment which delegates the vast majority of powers to the states and the people. They rape the meaning of the interstate commerce clause until it is so stretched apart that it includes any action which has even the vaguest impact on interstate commerce. By saying it means whatever a new generation "needs," what they're really saying is that the words themselves have no inherent meaning, which in turn means that there are no inherent rights secured, nor is there any inherent limit on the power of the state.

The battle over the Constitution and its meaning is not about the Constitution itself, but about truth versus post-modern nihilism. There are few, if any, words in the Constitution that can be considered genuinely archaic. A few of them may be funny, but none of them are what one would call archaic, which is to say from a vernacular used before the time of modern English. Those who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the simple words and phrases of the U.S. Constitution are not decent people worthy of civility and respect for their ideas. Rather, they are hell-bent on tearing down the things that made this country great, including its culture of freedom. So, it's for that reason that I applaud Scalia for having the guts to openly call them idiots. Their actions and beliefs deserve words that are a lot worse than that.