"Tom Kratman - A State of Disobedience" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kratman Tom)

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-7170-9

Cover art by Stephen Hickman

First printing, December 2003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Distributed by Simon & Schuster
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New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH
Printed in the United States of America


To Hillary, Janet, and Lon



Prologue:
From:Staring Into the Abyss: A History of the North American Republic in the First Quarter of the
21st Century, Copyright 2097, Professor Allan Richardson, Yale University Press
***

As we have seen in the preceding chapter, at no time since 1860 had the United States of America stood
as close to civil war as it did a mere eight years after the turn of the century. With unprecedented sharp
divisions in political, economic and social philosophy; with a near perfect balance in the electorate, the
Congress, and the utterly political Supreme Court; with the growing specter of political failure equating to
the levying of criminal charges, conviction and prison, politicsтАФAmerican politicsтАФhad become a very
dangerous game indeed.

This was brought home to all with the arrest, conviction and imprisonment of former President Thomas
Jefferson Gates on charges of corruption, bribe taking, rape, aggravated sexual assault, unnatural acts,
abuse of office, misappropriation of funds, and treason, the imprisonment itself leading to the former chief
of state's beating, homosexual rape and murder by strangulation after his Secret Service detail was
withdrawn by presidential order. It could well be said that no national-level politician could any longer
afford to lose an election; the consequences had simply become too dire.1

No more could one political party or the other afford losing its control of at least one body of the