Our government is excellent. But by "our government" I mean the Constitution that defines it. Our politicians and federal bureaucracy? Sadly, sadly off track.

Now, a certain amount of dysfunction is by design, as any government that can become too effective will also soon come to exercise too much control over the populace (for those who have studied our official COIN doctrine, yes, I realize "effective" governments that have "control" over the populace are promoted as excellent things. They aren't. They are just as often the cause of insurgency as the cure.)

The design of the US government is to keep control over government in the hands of the people, but it is incumbent upon the people to exercise that control or risk losing it. Even a masterpiece of COIN such as the US Constitution can be defeated if the people and the government over generations of stability come to forget or misunderstand why it is the way it is.

Even those Tea Partiers who wave their pocket copies of the Constitution like Southern Evangelists wave their Bibles don't fully appreciate WHY the Constitution is important, but even so they are on the right track in their commitment to the fact that it is.

Liberal, Conservative; Republican, Democrat. Personally I could not care less about such things. As Americans we have the right to believe whatever we want, and to stand on the corner and proclaim those beliefs alone, assembled in groups, or published in the press. That I care about. I have no entitlements as an American citizen other than the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Anything else must be earned, and I am cool with that hard fact of life as well.

We are blessed with legal options to express our feelings and to shape our government. This was not something that was given to us, this is not something that was learned by smart people reading theoretical books on democracy and liberalism. This is the product of a group of men who grew to manhood under conditions of governance that they came to see as foreign, oppressive, and illegitimate in its claims to have the right to exercise such government over them. It came from their personal experience in dealing with the measures that oppressive regime applied to retain its control over them. It came from their decade long insurgency to throw off that hand that had grown oppressive and illegitimate over time. And it came from their realization just a couple years into "victory" that pure democracy was perhaps even more dangerous than effective oppression; and that securing the principles of good governance would have to occur first, to build the requisite trust to ever get to a degree of effectiveness that would allow a nation to grow and flourish.

But we forget the reasons behind the rules and rights laid out in our Constitution. We do so at our peril.

Insurgency does not happen when a government loses control of the populace; it happens when the populace loses control of the government. We are a long ways from that point, but we have been off track for a few generations, and it is never to early recognize that we are off azimuth and get back on track.

One mil of azimuth = one meter deviation at 1000 Meters. Anyone who has any experience in indirect fire or land nav appreciates that small azimuth errors compound quickly; whereas major location errors can be easily overcome. We may not know were we are, but that will sort out. Getting back on the right azimuth is the critical task.