Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Incomplete Instructions
I have much more ability at writing instructions than at following them. To watch me follow someone else’s instructions, is an experience for which I probably should be charging people. Anything that is open to mis-interpretation, I can mis-interpret without trying to. It’s a wonder to behold. You don’t have to wait very long at all to watch it happen. I’ll get hopelessly stuck…or, with great confidence, pick the wrong interpretation…while the guy who actually wrote the instructions, and hundreds of other people who successfully followed them, struggle with the epiphany that any part of it was open to interpretation at all.
To paraphrase Forrest Gump, Ah’m not a smart man, but I know when instructions are incomplete. And former President Clinton’s instructions to me, are incomplete.
Former President Bill Clinton told Iowa’s Democratic Party faithful on Saturday that the actions of “an extreme sliver” of the Republican Party have backfired and “profoundly divided” the country.
“We’ve got a big responsibility. Forget about 2008. Forget about the politics. Just go out and find somebody and look them dead in the eye and say ‘You know, this is not right’…This is America,” Clinton said. “We can do better and this year, it’s a job that Democrats have to do alone.” [emphasis mine]
The Reuters dispatch does not specify what “this” is. I guess I’m supposed to fill that in. What has America done, that is out of place in America.
To answer that, I have to figure out what America is.
Well, in 1797 Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Act and President Adams signed it into law. Was that American, or un-American?
During Andrew Jackson’s presidency, we had the Cherokee Trail of Tears. The Supreme Court declared the forced migration illegal, and President Jackson is associated with the apocryphal quote “Justice Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” If the President’s words did not comport with this, his actions certainly did; the Trail of Tears proceeded. Was that American?
Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus. Was that American?
Congress passed an income tax. Like any government, ours has always taxed people…it seems a little un-American for the government to make it their business how well each of us is doing in a given year. Or does it?
The states were denied representation in our nation’s capital when we passed the Seventeenth Amendment. President Wilson threw people in jail, for opposing his policies during World War I. American, or un-American?
Franklin Roosevelt, the “American Caesar” closed the banks, outlawed gold, imposed a 70% marginal tax rate on the highest earners, poured cream into ditches while babies starved, and threw tailors in prison for charging more than 35 cents to mend a shirt. American? The Supreme Court thought not; they tore his New Deal measures to shreds, but knuckled under when he threatened to pack it with six new justices. After that, it became a docile little lamb. So long, judicial oversight. American?
I’ll not even go into the Japanese Internment, everybody seems to agree about that. Not everybody seems willing to discuss it though. The people have been instructed to forget it, and they have complied. Is that American?
John Kennedy made his little brother Attorney General. Was that American? Decades later, Democrats running for office who had absolutely nothing to offer, campaigned on “bringing back Camelot.” American?
And out of that history full of contradictions and turmoil, we come to Things The Way They Are Today. And former President Clinton asks us to measure those things against a yardstick that has, by any reasonable measure, sustained sufficient abuse to permanently retire as a measuring device. What does he mean when he says something doesn’t belong in America? Against what does he make this measurement, other than his own selfish conceptualization of right and wrong.
And does anyone have a personal, moral compass subject to weightier and more devastating challenge, than our 42nd President?
Out of relative oblivion, arises this presumption that “American” is an adjective so conceptual and so pure, that one can harrumph about how it applies to this thing over here and doesn’t apply to that thing over there, without taking the slightest effort to define what it is. And that it’s perfectly valid to bitch and kibitz about what horrible things are “being done to the Constitution,” without even having taken the time to look at the Constitution since the sixth grade, let alone know what it says.
I know this to be true, because a lot of people have been following President Clinton’s advice. To the letter. He says “go out and find somebody” and I’ve been that somebody. Things are being done that are un-American…I subject this premise to the kind of inspection any rationally-thinking person should bring up. Nothing heavy, mind you. Just normal questions I would want to have answered if, hypothetically, I wanted to take their message and propagate it further, wishing to be sufficiently informed as I do so.
It’s too much scrutiny for them. This “look them dead in the eye” thing goes sailing out the window. They end up looking at their toes. Or off in the distance. Trying to extract, out of some ether, an answer they need that they do not have.
Once one inspects the Constitution, it appears it’s being followed; once one takes the time to actually read the Geneva Conventions, and measure them against what we’re doing — one struggles to assert, logically, how they even apply.
I think I know what President Clinton means by “America.” I think he envisions a utopia where there aren’t any Republicans. That definition — none other — supports what he has had to say lately. His words, and his actions, are consistent with a dictate that electing more Democrats is not an means to some other end, but an end in itself. Just…get them in.
If “America” has something to do with this, to the best of my knowledge he has yet to explain how.
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