Mr. Obama, stand up for us.

Just this once, cease your endless game of "balance," your wearisome two-step of "moderate" positioning, posing the way you constantly do as some sort of progressive—liberal, even—while predictably and unfailingly pandering to the siren call of a security state that drags us ever deeper into the inescapable maw that hungers to make a people with too much freedom into a docilized, unfree people.

We are not the terrorists you are looking for. We never were. It was the government—the government that you, sir, now head—that failed us on that awful day more than nine years ago. It was not we who destroyed those buildings; it was not we who killed our fellow countrymen; it was not we who conspired to let the blood of this wonder of constitutional democracy.

It was not we who hated this country.

Whatever war was to be waged against the vile maniacs who attacked us, it has now been nine long years, and that war continues unabated. Instead of having defeated that enemy, as we have defeated horrible and powerful foes in the past in far shorter order, this war against terrorism has not been won and has, in fact, become a war not just against hateful men and women who want to harm us, but also, with increasing aggression and disturbing escalation, against us.

That war now engorges itself with the despicable perpetuation that crafts us as the enemy waiting in every line, at every encounter with government, in every communication to strike. We have become the people of an occupied land, a populace that must be thoroughly demeaned, degraded, and diminished.

The war on terror is lost, Mr. Obama. If the goal were to protect our freedom, the war has been lost, sir.

The government "of the people, by the people, and for the people," in President Lincoln's magnificent words, now demands that we stand naked before its employees; it arrogates to itself the "right" to watch us in all our comings and goings in the commons; and it stands immune to retributive vengeance through law for anything it claims its enforcers do as "official duty."

Mr. Obama, cease your rhetoric. Set aside your thought that your policies are mature because you appease authoritarians. Dismiss those around you who tell you that anything is more important than the freedom of your nation's people to be left alone.

For once in your life, Mr. President, lead, and do so fearlessly. You are the only one who can set aside the chains of failed policies into which you have been brokered by those before you.

LEAD, Mr. Obama. Lead us back to freedom. If you cannot, then the consequence could very well be more terrible than you could imagine: we might have to find our own way back.