Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
About 8 people emailed me a link to this article from the Onion: Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be. If you haven't seen it, it's worth a read. It's just barely a parody.
Spurred by an administration he believes to be guilty of numerous transgressions, self-described American patriot Kyle Mortensen, 47, is a vehement defender of ideas he seems to think are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and principles that brave men have fought and died for solely in his head."Our very way of life is under siege," said Mortensen, whose understanding of the Constitution derives not from a close reading of the document but from talk-show pundits, books by television personalities, and the limitless expanse of his own colorful imagination. "It's time for true Americans to stand up and protect the values that make us who we are."
My favorite part:
"Right there in the preamble, the authors make their priorities clear: 'one nation under God,'" said Mortensen, attributing to the Constitution a line from the Pledge of Allegiance, which itself did not include any reference to a deity until 1954. "Well, there's a reason they put that right at the top.""Men like Madison and Jefferson were moved by the ideals of Christianity, and wanted the United States to reflect those values as a Christian nation," continued Mortensen, referring to the "Father of the Constitution," James Madison, considered by many historians to be an atheist, and Thomas Jefferson, an Enlightenment-era thinker who rejected the divinity of Christ and was in France at the time the document was written. "The words on the page speak for themselves."
According to sources who have read the nation's charter, the U.S. Constitution and its 27 amendments do not contain the word "God" or "Christ."
Mortensen said his admiration for the loose assemblage of vague half-notions he calls the Constitution has only grown over time. He believes that each detail he has pulled from thin air--from prohibitions on sodomy and flag-burning, to mandatory crackdowns on immigrants, to the right of citizens not to have their hard-earned income confiscated in the form of taxes--has contributed to making it the best framework for governance "since the Ten Commandments."
It's not true, of course, that any serious historian considers Madison an atheist. But the rest of this is spot on satire.
Politics
Comments
It's rather scary that the only thing that identifies this as satire (besides its origin at the Onion) is the no-nonsense tone of the piece. I mean, any respectable media outlet would allow reams of nonsense to pass unchallenged.
Posted by: Ivan | November 21, 2009 9:21 AM
That article perfectly describes my brother.
Posted by: Dogbert | November 21, 2009 9:35 AM
Just change the name to Glen Beck & it becomes an authentic biography.
Except it omits the rumor of how Beck killed & raped a young boy in 1990, something Beck still refuses to deny.
Posted by: Rob Jase | November 21, 2009 9:59 AM
It's a strange irony that those who basically worship texts have rarely ever read those texts themselves. The Bible and the Constitution are two texts for which this observation seems to hold true.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | November 21, 2009 10:05 AM
Tyler: of course. It would demean the sanctity of those texts to do something so mundane as to read them.:-)
Posted by: Robin | November 21, 2009 10:31 AM
I thought Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. I didn't realize that Glenn Beck murdered then raped a young boy. Why hasn't he denied doing murdering and raping a boy and raping and murdering a girl in 1990? What has he got to hide?
Posted by: bybelknap, FCD | November 21, 2009 10:34 AM
Note, by the way, the best line is towards the middle end.
"Dad's great, but listening to all that talk radio has put some weird ideas into his head," said daughter Samantha, a freshman at Reed College in Portland, OR. "He believes the Constitution allows the government to torture people and ban gay marriage, yet he doesn't even know that it guarantees universal health care."
Just because you disagree with someone who's wrong doesn't make you right.
Posted by: e-sabbath | November 21, 2009 10:35 AM
I actually think that great articles like this one demonstrate exactly where the Onion's brilliant humor lies: just barely on the line between reality and satire. Our culture is fucked up enough that even the subtlest satire suffices.
Posted by: Sadie Morrison | November 21, 2009 11:30 AM
Pbbt! The Onion is clearly just a front for Big Humour, and one of the guys who use to work there was also a spy for the Soviets! Wake up, people!
Posted by: Modusoperandi | November 21, 2009 2:11 PM
Tyler DiPietro:
That's because reading something involves thinking about it and worship and thought are incompatible processes.
Oh, and I agree with e-sabbath.
Posted by: James K | November 21, 2009 2:15 PM
I regularly follow the Onion (actually get my sports news from there (since I don't care for sports unless there is reason for parody (see for example the Detroit Lions video))), and this article was just a bit redundant for me because I swear I've read it a thousand times before on the interwebs in totally serious debates.
Posted by: MarkusR | November 21, 2009 3:43 PM
Yeah, well, they left out the part where the Constitution says "All (white) men are created equal." (Maybe women and others not so much...) That means his ideas are just as good as those of some pointy-headed librul. So there!!
Posted by: Alexander the Good Enough | November 22, 2009 3:31 PM
It was a young boy Beck raped and murdered back in 1990. He conveniently fails to mention this on his TV and radio programs.
Posted by: Subject of Bozo | November 22, 2009 10:22 PM
OK, I need to get this cleared up. Did he allegedly rape the boy and then kill him, or kill the boy and then rape the dead body?
Posted by: Daniel Kim | November 22, 2009 10:37 PM
Tyler, it would seem that one the things Kyle Mortensen and his ilk imagine the US Constitution to uphold is a Catch-22 syle law written into the Constitution which forbids said document from being read.
Posted by: Mill | November 23, 2009 9:14 AM