In The Federalist No. 51 (one of a collection of papers written between 1787 and 1788 to promote the ratification of the U.S. Constitution and eventually published as a two-volume set in 1788), James Madison (the fourth president of the United States, known as the Father of the Constitution) described the constitutional protections as mere "auxiliary precautions."  The real protection against rogue government was always recognized as the people, empowered not only by the constitutional limitations imposed upon the state, but primarily by the constitutional authority bestowed upon them as liberty's custodians.

Having a good understanding of human nature, the ongoing threat to the Republic was well recognized by the founders.  This is evidenced by Benjamin Franklin's response to one Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia when, following the 1787 Constitutional Convention, she asked, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"  Franklin responded without hesitation "A republic, if you can keep it."

Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States, understood also and especially the natural tendency of government toward corruption.  In 1787 he said:

Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves.

Not much has changed in 229 years, because such lying by the state and its gazetteers (the establishment mainstream media) is today prosaic.  From the ongoing insistence by U.S. media over the past several months that Hillary Clinton's health has been fine aside from some mild seasonal allergies to this Orwellian example of cynical Newspeak wherein the British establishment press, and indeed an establishment British army general, celebrate "the first female frontline soldier in the history of the British army" (in actuality a 24-year-old man with prominent 5 o'clock shadow whose most feminine attributes are his "long, polished fingernails," his allegedly "feminine bob," and the silver studs in his ears).

This is how effectively we have been dumbed down.  This is what happens when we allow the state to assume the right to educate our children to think uncritically.  It is not merely an example of humor in bad taste; it is a corrupt, corporatized state gloating in the humiliation and disenfranchisement of its citizens as it goes openly about the business of surrendering their sovereignty because they are collectively too cowed or stupid to recognize even lipstick on a pig when it is thrust in their faces.

Of course, in the same discourse wherein he outed the British ministry (of truth), Jefferson (putting paid to any contemporary denial about the true intention of the Second Amendment) made clear the ultimate solution to tyranny with the famous quote:

What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them[.] ... The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

For too long have the roots of liberty's tree been polluted with the manure produced so effortlessly and without conscience by the tyrannical political and media establishment.  It is time, while the tree may still be nourished proverbially, for both to be held to account by patriot citizen arborists.