Written in 1215. Needed today

[CHIMO]

Aside from their industriousness, Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown might seem to share little in common. Yet in his recent speech on Britishness, the chancellor revealed a mutual affection for Magna Carta as a cornerstone of our national identity. Famously, it was Mrs Thatcher who told François Mitterrand at the 1989 bicentenary of the French revolution that "we, of course, had the Magna Carta".
For, 800 years on, the messy constitutional compromise hammered out at Runnymede between King John and the barons manages to retain a profound emotional pull on the Anglo-American political psyche. But even as it is honoured in name, the principles of 1215 have rarely been more widely breached.

All of which makes the current judicial rough-riding of Magna Carta in Guatánamo Bay and elsewhere all the more startling. The much celebrated clauses 39 and 40, let alone the US fifth amendment, appear to have become redundant as habeas corpus and the rule of law are quietly abrogated under the Patriot Act. To the horror of Magna Carta-conscious lawyers, President Bush, like Charles I, has pleaded the exigencies of wartime to suspend the charter's terms. And the great virtue of the "war on terror" is that it is a war without end.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1268208,00.html

[aquart]

1. Yeah. It's nice.

[struggle4progress]

2. Unfortunately, Americans seem to have abandoned ...

... many wondrous ancient dicta, such as that famous old English legalism that "A man's home is his castle," which, taken seriously, should allow the ordinary garden-variety gonzo to puff away on a doobie in the privacy offered by his own hearth, without fretting the constabulary might crash through the window and drag him off to gaol.

[ixion]

3. yep... ye speaketh the olde truthe

The acceptance of the unPATRIOTic Act as anything other than an unconstitutional aberration simply proves that humans know nothing of their own history, which is sad. :-(

[Mrs. Overall]

4. Hmm.....does King John sound like anyone we know?

The story of King John is a story of failure. It is the tragedy of a flawed genius, crippled by his own inheritance...in a family so obsessed with its rights and possessions...

The popular image of King John is of a classically bad king: a scheming, untrustworthy coward consumed by greed, whose rapaciousness drove his subjects to impose their will upon him. His acts of apparent cruelty are well documented.

His brother, King Richard the Lionheart, would have been urging the citizens of Rouen to arms, parrying the first assault with blows of his great sword. King John stayed in England biting his nails.

John has been seen as a weedy little tick.

For More info on King John:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/state/monarchs_leaders/john_01.shtml