On this day we commemorate baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, Chevrolet, and, oh yeah, the brave actions of our forefathers n’ foremothers lo those 23 decades ago. They didn’t get it all right, not right away (slaves, women not voting, etc.). But they got us started on the path toward equality under the law. They stood their ground against the greatest global military power of their day. They sought not just autonomy from the monarchy, but a better way to run a country. They fought to replace the rule of monarchs with the rule of law. They got out from under the thumb of a capricious, incompetent, power-mad ruler, a king named, well, you know.

Among other people, Keith Olbermann suggests we desperately now need to get out from under our current mad monarch’s thumb–not to overthrow our current system of governance but to renew and reclaim it, to take it back from the despotic elite who would destroy it from within. I can’t think of a better wish for this day.

If the Democratic Congressional leaders are too bureaucratic (i.e., chicken) to act toward Bush/Cheney’s immediate removal, we all will have to put out the ol’ screws of public opinion to get ’em movin’. If they still won’t, we’ll have to “route around” the blockage, as they say in Internet jargon.

By this I don’t mean overthrowing the whole US government. That wouldn’t succeed; and even if it did, something even more brutal might emerge.

No, our task is both more subtle and more obscure. We have to make the current federal executive occupants irrelevant even if they remain for the duration of their term.