The option and the "right" to do something amount to exactly the same thing as far as I'm concerned. The rest is just rhetoric, and the USA has always been big on rhetoric when it comes to concepts like "liberty", "freedom", and the "right to bear arms", as if they invented all those things brand new for the very first time in 1776. They did not. I noticed when I moved to the USA at the age of 10...from a country that is just as free as the USA, if not a little more so...that the schools there were hammering it into all the kids 5 days a week that they were living in the one country in the world that had invented and apparently copyrighted things like freedom, liberty, and the right to bear arms. What total nonsense! But American kids are taught to believe it from Grade 1 on...so of course they believe it. It just isn't true. The reason I noticed it and it was so blatant to me was simple...I hadn't been born in the USA. I'd already seen an alternative.

Your constitution, however, is a pretty brilliant document and it's totally worth defending. No doubt about that. A great many other countries have used it as the inspiration to write their own constitutions.

"They've hijacked the American government and military to further goals that aren't in American interests or in the interest of ANY human."

Agreed! But it is still entirely possible that they fully believe they are doing what is "best" and that it IS in the interest of many human beings. It's my experience that such autocrats as these always imagine they are doing what is "best"...for the world, for the people in the world who really "matter" (meaning them and their friends and key associates)...and best for the future of the planet! I kid you not. I'd be amazed if they don't believe that to their core.

They're completely deluded if they think that...but I'm sure it is what they think. Very, very few people are consciously evil (they always think it's the other guy who is)...and even if they ARE consciously evil then they have convinced themselves that THAT is the "right" way to be...by some strange leap of faith all their own (this would be true in the case of a few people who are consciously serving, say, a so-called Satanic deity or some such obviously negative concept as that). They can always justify what they do in their own minds. They always imagine it serves some ultimate higher purpose that is justified.

That is true of Satanists, it was true of Nazis, it was true of Maoists, it was true of Pol Pot, it was true of the Spanish Inquistion, and I bet it's true of the neocons as well. I bet they think they are doing "the right thing". They wouldn't do it if they didn't think so.